Meta Information

As Virus Spread, Reports of Trump Administration’s Private Briefings Fueled Sell-Off (NY Times)

“Hours after he had boasted on CNBC that the virus was contained in the United States and “it’s pretty close to airtight,” Mr. Kudlow delivered a more ambiguous private message.

Mr. Callanan reported that numerous Trump administration officials — Mr. Kudlow, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and economists at the Council of Economic Advisers, who had given the presentation at the White House on Feb. 24 — expressed a greater degree of alarm about the coronavirus than the administration was saying publicly.

To many of the investors who received or heard about the memo, it was the first significant sign of skepticism among Trump administration officials about their ability to contain the virus. It also provided a hint of the fallout that was to come, said one major investor who was briefed on it: the upending of daily life for the entire country.

“Short everything,” was the reaction of the investor, using the Wall Street term for betting on the idea that the stock prices of companies would soon fall.“

We write a lot about the metagame at Epsilon Theory, which is ten-dollar word for seeing the forest rather than the trees. The metagame is the game of games. The metagame is the non-myopic repeated play of many individual games. The metagame is the long-term game of life or investing or business success or whatever you are playing a long game for.

This is an epic metagame fail, btw.

Every single bit of Facebook and Twitter’s response to the NY Post hatchet job on Hunter Biden has been a metagame fail of gigantic proportions. Whatever aspirations Rudy Giuliani and his insane clown posse might have had in the planting of this story … whatever dreams of political impact they might have had … well, they’ve been exceeded by a factor of ten through this bonkers effort by the crack Facebook and Twitter comms team to “fact check” the NY Post and “temporarily reduce distribution” as part of their “standard process”. LOL.

I’ve written a long piece on this, if you’re interested. The problem is not Facebook and Twitter’s “political bias”. The problem is Facebook and Twitter’s business model.

Facebook delenda est.

But the point of this note isn’t about the metagame fail we’re seeing play out right now in social media companies, but about a different sort of meta and the grifts it inspires: meta information.

When I tweeted about this NY Times article that lays out how White House insiders like Larry Kudlow were saying one thing about Coronavirus fears in public and quite another in private, and how – quelle surprise! – these private conversations were immediately funneled to hedge fund managers like David Tepper, I got a whole series of Twitter replies like this:

The grift here (in the lingo, tipping material non-public information) by Kudlow and his pals is not the statements that Kudlow et al made directly in these private conversations. It’s not the information within those private statements itself.

The material non-public information that Kudlow tipped was the knowledge that what the White House said in public about Covid’s impact on the American economy was not what the White House truly believed about Covid’s impact on the American economy.

The grift was the difference in the private statements and the public statements.

The grift was the information about the information.

THAT is meta information.

What is meta information?

Meta information is the wink.

Of course, meta information is also edge.

Meta information is also a legal source of alpha in public markets, maybe the only legal source of alpha left. Which leads me to the following rather important question:

Do you have to sell your soul … do you have to hobnob with the Larry Kudlows and Peter Navarros of the world and participate in their endless sea of grift and influence peddling in order to have ANY edge in investing today?

I think there’s another way. God, I hope there’s another way.

The Epsilon Theory narrative research program – where we try to identify the structure of market-moving narratives – is all about discovering the tells of Wall Street without being part of their wink-wink old boy’s club. It’s all about trying to identify novel information ABOUT information by being smarter instead of slimier. Is it as direct and certain as getting a briefing from the White House on what they really think about the world? Nope. But it sure is easier to sleep at night.

Yours in service to the pack – Ben

Epsilon Theory looks at markets and politics through the lenses of narrative, game theory, and history. Sign up for our free weekly email here, and never miss an article.

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