Woke Data

9 is the number this week! Nine is the number of directors on the board of Six Flags when it went bankrupt in 2009. If you ever wondered what happens to a few chums take over a board for a company with a business they know nothing about and it fails, don't worry - they fail up. How Dan Snyder, Mark Shapiro, Dwight Shar, and even Harvey Weinstein are a cautionary tale of groupthink and chummy boards!

No! The number of the week: 36! That's the number of sell side analysts covering Tesla, with basically all of them disagreeing. Why do we hold ESG ratings to a different standard than sell side analyst recommendations? It's pretty simple: because we're obsessed with what we know (and terrified of what we don't).

15,000! people pooled crypto into ConstitutionDAO in an effort to win a first-edition copy of the Constitution auctioned at Sotheby's last week! While the headlines talked about using crypto to buy the Constitution and the drama of the bidding war, the real story to Ari the Data Queen was the bizarre nature of “crypto coops” and the power of smart contracts! Can we solve poverty with blockchain IDs, smart property rights, and smart trade?

The number of the week: 13%! That's the percentage of assets at US funds with ESG policies that are devoted to dual class or limited voting rights companies! Investors, even the ESG ones, are proving more and more that chasing the growth is worth trading their voting rights to capture - and at the dawn of the metaverse, it might mean an entirely new universe off the engagement table...

This week's number: 49%! That's the share of the US population receiving health insurance through employer-sponsored plans! This question came from a listener as Kyrie Irving, the NBA star, sits on the sidelines protesting vaccine mandates - when can employers tell you what to do with your health? Or, as Aaron Rodgers, the critical thinker, might put it - does capitalism win the in battle of body autonomy? And why aren't their flu vaccine mandates? All through the eyes of one of the worst COVID offenders: Tyson Foods.

72% is the number of the week! 72% is the number of white men on BlackRock's active fund portfolio management team. SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce thinks Nasdaq's new diversity rule is bad for shareholders on the back of Harvard professor Jessie Fried's paper. And maybe they're right - for the wrong reasons. A case study in diversity of the people who pick stock prices: portfolio managers at BlackRock.

The number: 1%! 1% of the global population is responsible for HALF of all aviation emissions - the "super emitters" who fly business class! If you're wondering which flight you should take to avoid being a super emitter, Ari has your answers.

231! That's the average CEO pay ratio for S&P 500 companies in 2020! With proxy season is over, it's time to celebrate the CEO pay ratio! Turns out, even after a pandemic, that number stayed pretty high, and worse - you'll never guess who got paid like Steph Curry, the superstar NBA player, in 2020... featuring such greats as Aptiv's CEO Kevin Clark and Hilton CEO Chris Nassetta!

74%! 74% of employees answered YES in a survey at an Amazon warehouse when asked if they held their pee at work! It prompted Ari the Data Queen to build the very first index of companies at which you're MOST LIKELY to get a UTI if you work there! Why? Because women's health is totally overlooked as an ESG issue - women are 8 times more likely to get UTIs and, on average, lose a half day of work every year due to UTIs. Avoid the Shewee, get the data.

12.8% of the time! Between 1990 and 2020, according to MSCI data on carbon targets and whether they were withdrawn or replaced, carbon targets get restated at almost the same rate as financial statements in the last two years. So why is it again we distrust ESG but not financial statements?