For memes, it looked like the close to a particularly difficult week as confusion over how concerned markets should be about the omicron variant mixed with the very real fear that Federal Reserve Chair Jay Powell is getting ready to start tapering, ending an unprecedented period of central banking accommodation of capital markets.

AMC, more exposed to the concerns over a new COVID variant, felt the pain more acutely than its ur-meme partner, falling back almost 33% by 3 p.m. Friday. GameStop bottomed out at the same time but at a comparatively shallower 21.4%.

Generally, signs were popping up everywhere that the salad days of buying stocks for the sake of future growth might be coming to an end.

That pain was felt across meme names like Koss
KOSS,
-7.27%,
Tesla
TSLA,
-6.42%
and Nvidia
NVDA,
-4.46%
as the Nasdaq
COMP,
-1.92%
was openly flirting with a bear market, and even zeitgeist investor Cathie Wood found herself getting mauled by that waking bear as her flagship ARK Innovation ETF
ARKK,
-5.54%
dropped another 13.8% on the week.

For AMC, the two-week wait is on for the newest Spider-Man film, which AMC CEO/memelord Adam Aron is using to gauge Reddit Ape interest in nonfungible tokens and other cryptos. But for now, Aron has been reduced to trying to juice up retail fervor by taking to Twitter and inviting his followers to Aaron Sorkin’s new movie about Lucille Ball’s difficult marriage to Desi Arnaz.

Really.

Spider-Man cannot swing fast enough.

For GameStop, some of the week was taken up by some hot drama around retail investors seeing some incorrect data about the stock on Fidelity’s platform Tuesday morning.

That data appeared to show that there were more than 13 million shares of GameStop available to short when in reality there were only about 2 million, a number that GameStop’s Ape army knew was wrong thanks to their obsessive watching of short interest on the stock.

After Fidelity released a statement claiming “the root cause was an incorrect entry of the number of shares available to short by one of our external counterparties. The issue was fixed by 12:10 p.m. ET today.”

Reddit and Twitter were ablaze with conjecture over who could have been at fault for the discrepancy with many once again pointing the finger at short sellers that they see as their archenemies, with one theory alleging that a defunct market maker was to blame.

But in the end, the answer was a very boring one. On Wednesday evening, a spokesperson for Vanguard sent a statement to MarketWatch admitting that the house that Jack Bogle built was in fact the counterparty that made the error on GameStop data.

“Due to a clerical data entry error, yesterday we provided Fidelity with the incorrect “potential securities lending availability” data for Gamestop (GME),” read Vanguard’s statement. “The error was corrected shortly thereafter and before the markets opened. We regret this error occurred and apologize for any confusion this may have caused.”

According to insiders, the timing issue was a result of Fidelity taking its data feed from Vanguard and then updating later in the day. That time lapse accounted for Vanguard’s corrected data not hitting Fidelity’s trading tickets until just after noon EST.

And, like it or not, errors like this are not uncommon.

“Brokers receive incorrect data that gets displayed to the public all the time,” explained Anthony Denier, CEO of trading platform Webull Financial. “Once brokers are made aware or catch the error themselves, they rectify it as soon as possible, but because this error happened regarding short interest on GME it’s now a conspiracy against the Apes.”

But because of the scrutiny that eagle-eyed Apes are putting on meme stocks, even Denier sees a shift happening.

“This is the new world, but I will tell you this, the retail army has put everyone on notice to be better,” he said.

The retail army has also made it difficult for old school traders to get comfortable with any trend.

Another clear indicator of how retail Apes play by their own rules was the fact that between 3 p.m. and 4 p.m. EST Friday, GameStop soared 7.6% and AMC popped almost 13% in that time frame as social media was rife with users encouraging one another to BTFD, or buy the f@*$ing dip.

The major indexes also pared back losses in the final hour of the trading day, but GameStop and AMC have both managed to go on dramatic run-ups in the last hour of trading every day this week.

Some die-hard Apes will continue to believe that there’s more to bad data than simple errors by some of the most trusted and drama-free investment advisers around and that no one is selling in a massive selloff because everyone’s hands are as diamond as their own, but some might also be coming around to the notion that they started a movement in January and there are people on the fringes who see that movement as. a tradeable trend, and they aren’t as zealous…and they have much softer hands.

And we’re not talking about hedge funds…necessarily.

Now, what remains to be seen is if the dips created by those fringe players remain buyable as the world starts to shrug off COVID variants and gets back to normal as Jay Powell tightens the spigot and money gets a lot less cheap.

Diamond hands will start to feel heavy by then, but so will the cost of borrowing to short a videogame retailer stock that is up 900% in 2021.

And, oh, GameStop reports earnings on Dec. 8.

SolarEdge
SEDG,
-3.62%
stock rose nearly 3% in the extended session after the S&P 500 index
SPX,
-0.84%
news, while Signature Bank
SBNY,
-4.34%
and FactSet
FDS,
-0.86%
shares gained 0.6% a piece. The stocks to be removed were flat.

That rebalance ensures that each index is “more representative of its market capitalization range,” S&P Dow Jones said in a statement.

The index provider also unveiled changes to its S&P SmallCap 600
SML,
-1.34%
and S&P MidCap 400 indexes.

S&P SmallCap 600 constituents Macy’s Inc.
M,
-3.25%,
Vicor Corp.
VICR,
-2.99%,
and Power
Integrations Inc.
POWI,
-1.45%
will move to the S&P MidCap 400.

They will replace S&P MidCap 400 constituents Tootsie Roll Industries Inc.
TR,
+0.68%,
Telephone &Data Systems Inc.
TDS,
+1.97%,
and Nektar Therapeutics
NKTR,
-5.08%,
which will move to the S&P SmallCap 600.

See also: A new study finds that most COVID-19 boosters strengthen immunity, though there is no winning shot

“Now all patients at high risk of severe COVID-19, including children and newborn babies, have an option for treatment and post-exposure prevention,” said Patrizia Cavazzoni, director of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation and Research.

Children under one year of age who are exposed to the virus that causes Covid-19 may be at particularly high risk of severe disease, said Cavazzoni. She emphasized, however, that antibody drug treatment isn’t a substitute for vaccination, which is authorized for children five years of age and up.

An expanded version of this report appears at WSJ.com.

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EH: Buyers don’t feel quite the same urgency as earlier in the pandemic, and sellers are wanting the high prices they saw their neighbors get. Thoughts on what’s to come here? 

We’re definitely not in the frenzied days of lockdown-induced homebuying anymore, says Issi Romem, economist and founder of MetroSight, a real-estate economics research firm. “…the big wave of adjustment to a new ‘pandemic state of the world’ has gone by. In other words, the big one-off bulk of people for whom it newly made sense to buy a second home because of the pandemic have acted on it,” he said. 

“Those left buying second homes now are a gradual flow of people reaching the conclusion they can and want to buy a second home, as opposed to the one-off mass whose circumstances shifted all of a sudden last year. And even if the pandemic state of the world means that the flow of second home buyers now is greater than it used to be pre-pandemic, it’s probably still a trickle compared to that initial wave that’s passed.”

EH: How do you think financing looks over the next year? We’ve been in an era of low interest rates for so long. And yet second-home markets feel like cash is king. 

Redfin CEO and president Glenn Kelman reminds us, “the second-home market depends more on the stock market than on interest rates, but rates usually affect the stock market. Rates are going up. Some buying is fueled by investors, but these folks are borrowing money too. An era of very low rates made it easy to cash-flow a house.” 

His colleague Taylor Marr, Redfin’s deputy chief economist, says: “Credit for second home purchases tightened in the spring and has recently been eased again, which at least in part explained the sudden dip in March and subsequent rebound in September.” 

A recent report from the National Association of Realtors had the all-cash share of second home purchases in February to March 2021 north of 60%, says MetroSight’s Romem: Because “those 60% are wealthy individuals buying all-cash, that means the second home market is probably less susceptible to seeing reduced demand following a potential rate hike (although squeezing the remaining 40% could still hurt it). On the other hand, inasmuch as those 60% are investors who appear to be paying all cash but are nevertheless using leverage (leverage that isn’t tied to mortgages on the individual properties they’re buying), they could be susceptible if rates go up (or at least, the pool of investors won’t replenish as fast if rates rise; existing investors may have fixed rates).”

EH: How much of home-buying is fueled by investors, whether serious or Airbnb superhost types? 

Through October, Redfin’s Marr says, “we are still seeing elevated rates of second home mortgages. This data excludes pure investment properties, but surely many of these second/vacation home buyers plan to utilize AirBnb or other services to offset the cost of ownership.” 

This article is reprinted by permission from The Escape Home, a newsletter for second homeowners and those who want to be. Subscribe here. © 2021. All rights reserved. 

His big news about the $4.5 million in Series A financing that was just approved…ready. The team would certainly be happy to hear about that.

What he didn’t count on, after all these months of remote working and COVID-19 lockdowns, when everyone was finally face-to-face in New York this week for the very first time, was how many tall people he had on the team. 

“You can tell a lot of things from a Zoom,”
ZM,
-4.08%
he said, “but someone’s height isn’t one of them. There are still some surprises when you finally meet in person, even if you’ve hired the people.”

Also see: Companies are upping their food game to lure back skittish employees

If the workforce includes a bunch of ex-athletes, apparently, some of them are going to be tall. Especially Charlie Emerson, chief commercial officer. 

It’s been a wild not-quite-two-years since Carey and his friend (and recidivist business partner), Matt Heiman, founded The Game Day, an online media and entertainment network focused on North American sports and sports betting. But even as the COO of the fast-growing startup, Carey had never met most of the people who are actually getting it done — unless you count all those phone calls and Zooms.

Yes, that’s what it means to launch a company in the age of COVID-19.

All that’s changed now for one company. On Nov. 30, The Game Day’s 50 New York-based employees cast off their sweatshirts and yoga pants, and emerged from their city apartments and suburban basements — and showed up in Manhattan’s Cooper Square at something called “the office.”

Remote work has been the norm for so long for so many people, even the idea may need some redefining. And there was Carey, shaking hands, working the room, then standing in front of all these people he had never met in person before and laying out the future.

“It’s great the way office life is swinging back to normal,” he said afterward. “But I think normal is going to have some new meanings.” For one thing, he said, employee mental health is something forward-looking executives are paying far more attention in this pandemic world. “Normal in terms of nine to five, Monday to Friday, I don’t know,” he said. “I just think flexible working is now part of people’s routine.”

Even as many city dwellers are thrilled to escape their cramped apartments, some flexibility in work schedules is likely to linger, he said.

“The key for us, back in April and May of last year, was to get that core of people, like with any startup,” said Carey, a London-based veteran of media companies Mobix Interactive, Deltatre and Vice Media. “If you can get that critical mass, you can then build a team around them. The saving grace for us was that we hired Dennis,” he added, referring to Dennis Lisberger, the head of production, who is of average height. “He was the kind of beating heart we could then start to build around. When you’re facing uncertainty about when you’ll actually be in an office, you have to have that kind of anchor point.”

There is no one answer for all a company’s goals and challenges.

“There are certain things, like the web development team, you can do remotely,” Carey said. “But the production businesses and the creative businesses are inherently collaborative. We can get to a certain point on Zoom. But a lot of the creative energy comes from incidental conversations, right? You sit down with some coffee. You’ve had an idea. They’ve had an idea. You grabbed this other guy who was working on a project. Working remotely has been great, but it’s hard to do that. At 50 employees, it’s important for me to understand how each department evolved on the day to day and what the opportunities are.”

Also see: Google just paused January 2022 office return plans amid omicron — will other companies follow?

And frankly, as a company grows, the numbers make everything more complex. “Working remotely with 50 employees, you just can’t look over people’s shoulders in the same way. We’ve relied heavily on the department heads. Fortunately for us, we’ve got a rock-solid team in terms of department heads, but getting together in a room full of people for two or three hours at a time, there’s nothing to replace it.”

Walking the room. Grabbing people for lunch. Getting a feel for each other in a way that isn’t the same across even the fastest internet connection.

“It’s all about the incidental conversations,” Carey said. “I just don’t know how you replace that.”

Ellis Henican is an author based in New York City and a former newspaper columnist.

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Mining crypto requires large amounts of computing power to drive the complicated algorithms used to generate the currency. As the programs ran, it resulted in large costs being added to the account of the St. Charles, Mo. company, prosecutors said. The company was only identified in court papers by its initials, T.T.

The company was unaware of the intrusion until it received a bill from Microsoft for $760,00 for the use of the additional server capacity, prosecutors said.

The defendants, Danial Jeloudar and Saeeid Safaei, were indicted this week on charges of conspiracy to commit wire fraud. They are believed to be living abroad and haven’t been taken into custody. They couldn’t immediately be reached for comment, and it didn’t appear that they had retained lawyers.

Jeloudar had previously been indicted in the United States in 2016 for allegedly trafficking in stolen credit-card numbers and purchasing goods using hijacked credit-card accounts. He was never detained in that case.

Cryptocurrency has provided new avenues for hackers to make money, and cyrptojacking has been on the rise in recent years. In many cases, hackers will infiltrate many people’s devices and harness their computing power jointly to drive the crypto programs. Users often get hit when they download something corrupted with malware.

A hack such as this often causes minimal disruption for users, so it’s easy for hackers to take over a machine for months. If your smart TV isn’t running well, for instance, a cryptojacker could be to blame. Some people don’t know they’re targeted until they see they have unusually high electricity bills.

Experts say tip-offs for home computer users that their machines may have been hacked can be if the batteries on their devices frequently overheat or if their devices shut down due to a lack of available processing power.