“The most instructive, indeed the only method of learning to bear with dignity the vicissitude of fortune, is to recall the catastrophes of others.”
History is the best help, being a record of how things usually go wrong.
—B.H. Liddell Hart, quoting Polybius
📈📉 🎯🐒💵 In 1988, the Wall Street Journal decided to test Burton Malkiel’s famous claim that a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s stock listings could pick stocks as well as professional investors.
They didn’t use an actual monkey (apparently there were insurance issues 😅), but they had staffers throw darts at stock listings, competing against picks made by Wall Street pros.
They kept this going for 14 YEARS! (gotta love the commitment to the bit)
After the first 100 contests, the pros had beaten the darts 61 times.
But against the Dow Jones index? 51 wins, 49 losses. And that’s BEFORE transaction costs and taxes.
Researchers found that the pros’ stock picks got a price bump simply because they were published in the Journal! And the contest counted returns starting at the previous day's closing price, before readers even saw the picks! 🔄
The Journal stopped the contest in 2002. Without declaring a winner. I guess they know which way their bread is buttered. At least the darts weren’t charging management fees. 😅
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🏦 💰 Business & Investing 💳 💴
💻 The $6.3 billion Laptop: the largest single theft of any kind in history? 💸
Has a laptop ever been that expensive to lose?
Binance just disclosed:
Fellow Binancians,
🫣
Not sure this cringe nickname for customers is the best way to start a news item about a massive hack of your infrastructure, but let’s keep going…
Binance’s initial investigation suggests that the security incident may involve a compromised DevOps engineer’s laptop, which allowed an attacker to gain access to a service container and submit unauthorized withdrawal transactions. We have found no evidence of any wallet private key leak. We will share a detailed technical post-mortem once the investigation is complete and the facts are fully verified.
The estimated total impact sits at around $6.3B. We have worked with blockchain partners to freeze affected assets, with ~$3 billion frozen on-chain so far.
Binance will cover all losses from the SAFU fund and the company’s funds. User funds are safe. We will also publish an updated Proof of Reserves once the remediation is complete.
Binance has since said that its investigation uncovered additional points of breach, so the compromised laptop may have been just the initial entry point. The full attack path is still being investigated.
For context, the previous record was the $1.5 billion Bybit hack in February 2025. This one is more than FOUR TIMES bigger. 😬
TRM Labs, a blockchain intelligence firm, attributes the attack to North Korean hackers:
“TRM attributes the attack to TraderTraitor, North Korea’s elite hacking unit, based on robust on and off-chain intelligence. We make this judgment with high confidence. TRM is tracking the funds and alerting partners through the Beacon Network.”
The FBI attributed the Bybit hack I just mentioned above to the same North Korean hacking group, TraderTraitor. 🇰🇵
Blockchain analytics firm Elliptic says this is almost certainly the largest single theft of any kind in history (as opposed to ongoing fraud over years like Madoff). Not just crypto. ANY kind.
For comparison, Saddam Hussein ordered about $1 billion taken from Iraq’s central bank in 2003, just before the US invasion. Amateur! 😅 (it’s actually in the Guinness World Records!)
Most of the money was stolen in about 20 minutes (!):
