Markets

• How freelance platforms actually work
  how markets work
  A matching market where reputation is the collateral and the platform owns it. That single fact explains the race to the bottom at one end, the durable rates at the other, and why leaving is so hard.
• How private markets work, and why you cannot get in
  how markets work
  Companies stay private far longer than they used to, so much of the growth happens before anyone can buy shares. The rules restricting access were written to protect people, and their effect is to reserve that growth for those who already have money.
• The market that sets the price of everything
  how markets work
  The bond market is larger than the stock market, almost nobody watches it, and it decides your mortgage rate, your house price and what your pension is worth. Here is how it works.
• How crypto markets actually work
  how markets work
  The interesting part is not the assets — it is that the market maker was replaced by a formula. Automated market makers are a genuinely new answer to an old problem, and their failure modes are new too.
• How your wage is actually set
  how markets work
  The market most people depend on is the least efficient one they will ever participate in: no public prices, enormous information asymmetry, and a counterparty who does this constantly while you do it rarely.
• How house prices are actually set
  how markets work
  No market maker, no continuous price, no way out in a hurry. House prices are set by what the next buyer can borrow — which makes lending conditions, not the building, the main thing that moves them.
• How the advertising auction works
  how markets work
  Blogging, YouTube, dropshipping and most 'online business' are funded by the same machine: an auction that runs in the time a page takes to load. Understanding it explains why margins vanish and why some audiences are worth twenty times others.
• How is there always a buyer?
  how markets work
  You can sell shares in seconds at a price you saw in advance. Nobody found you a buyer — a market maker quoted both sides and earns the spread. Liquidity is a manufactured service, and it thins exactly when you need it.
• How markets actually work
  how markets work
  Every market does the same four jobs: match buyers to sellers, discover a price, provide liquidity, and settle. What differs is who performs each job and what they charge. That difference explains most of what feels arbitrary.