Taylor Swift, finance queen 👸

"I'm intimidated by the fear of being average."

— Taylor Swift

👋 GM, Rallie here. The crypto, finance, and tech newsletter that shakes off the bear market like our name is TSwift.

On the menu:

• 👸 Finance lessons from TSwift

• 🗞️ Headlines that hit

• 📈 Refresh: Buffett-isms

• 💯 Top tweets

The Rallie Recap

👸 This week, Taylor Swift proved that she's a due diligence queen, and that her financial acumen is just as good as her songwriting.

• Yesterday, news broke that last spring, TSwift was approached by Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of collapsed crypto exchange FTX, to ink a $100M USD sponsorship deal, but negotiations fell apart after she asked one question — was the company selling 'unregistered securities.'

• Adam Moskowitz, who is managing partner at Moskowitz Law, the firm that's leading a class-action lawsuit against 16 celebrity FTX ambassadors, noted that Taylor Swift was one of the only celebrities who did their due diligence on FTX, saying, “You know, the one person I found that did that was Taylor Swift. In our discovery, Taylor Swift actually asked them, 'Can you tell me that these are not unregistered securities?” ...Under state securities laws, if you promote an unregistered security for financial benefit, you are liable.

• FTX collapsed shortly afterwards in November 2022, and now many other celebs including NFL player Tom Brady, NBA star Steph Curry, and basketball hall-of-famer Shaquille O’Neal, are each accused of promoting the sale of unregistered securities.

• For the record, Swift's financial acumen runs in the family — her father is Scott Kingsley Swift, managing director at the Swift Group, a wealth manager that’s part of Bank of America. And last year, Forbes put Swift’s net worth at $570M USD.

📈 As if we needed another reason to love Taylor Swift!

Headlines That Hit

• 🚀 Crash and burn. SpaceX launched its Starship rocket for the first time this morning, but fell short of reaching space after exploding mid-flight.

• 🎵 This week, TikTok creator, Ghostwriter977, went viral for releasing an AI-generated song called "Heart On My Sleeve" that sounds exactly like Drake and The Weeknd... and the song set off a copyright infringement firestorm.

• 👀 Trump released his second NFT collection and it sold out again. Really though, who is buying these!?

• 🪓 That's enough, Zuck! Meta is back with another round of layoffs, and this time the technical employees are on the chopping block. 

• 🍚 Trigger warning for sushi lovers: We're at the start of the biggest global rice shortage in 20 years, and rice prices are the highest they've been in ten years.

• 🏦 First rule of finance: don't mess with Warren Buffett. Buffett offloaded his stake in several banks because their bosses were taking "dumb" risks and using deceptive accounting to flatter their earnings. 

Rallie Refresh: Buffett-isms

Today is a great day to take a stroll down financial freedom lane and send you into the weekend with some of the best financial advice from the Oracle of Omaha. Here's what Warren Buffett has to say about building wealth:

• 📈 Learn about money: Warren Buffett believes you should actively educate yourself about personal finance — the more you know, the more security you'll have as you minimize risks, saying, "risk comes from not knowing what you're doing."

• 📈 Invest in yourself: Buffett believes that you should invest in you own skills and education to improve you earning potential and financial stability, notably saying, "Invest in as much of yourself as you can. You are your own biggest asset by far."

• 📈 Keep it simple: Buffett favours simple investments and advises against complex financial products that are difficult to understand, often urging the average investor to purchase index funds.

• 📈 Focus on value: Buffett is known for his value investing approach, which involves identifying undervalued companies and investing in them for the long-term.

• 📈 Be patient: Buffett emphasizes the importance of having a long-term investment horizon. He believes that good investments take time to pay off, once saying, "Someone's sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago."

And finally, one of our all-time fav Buffett quotes: "Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1."

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That's all for today. Stay hungry & we'll catch you next time. ✌️

DISCLAIMER: This is not financial advice. This newsletter is strictly educational and is not investment advice or a solicitation to buy or sell any assets or to make any financial decisions.