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K.S. Anthony

I am a New York City-based writer and editor.

As a writer, I have earned hundreds of millions of page views and over a billion Facebook impressions. In addition, I have written branded content, feature-length screenplays, Billboard-charting song lyrics, and edited thousands of news articles, graduate and undergraduate research papers, college application essays, and more.

I graduated cum laude from Columbia University with a B.A. in English and am proud to be an honorary G-Chief (civilian advisor) in the NYC Chapter of the Special Forces Association. This portfolio represents a fraction of the work I've done over the last 12 years. Use the dropdown menu in the upper right corner to see a collection of my personal essays, examples of the buyers guides I wrote for A Plus, press coverage of my writing, recommendations,and more.

Work: 2014 - Present

A sample of some of my work outside of A Plus including articles for SumZero, Outer Places, Get Global, and my lyric-writing for Sebastian Bach's 2014 album "Give 'Em Hell"

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SumZero •

SubPrime Bull: Fund Manager Judd Arnold Says KPLT's "land grab" in BNPL is a BUY NOW

8/16/21 Update: LCRM's Judd Arnold reports that he has closed his position on KPLT: details are here https://sumzero.com/pro/research/ideas/19975.
Lake Cornelia Research Management CIO discusses his bullish thesis on Katapult Holdings Ltd. (US: KPLT) with SumZero CEO Divya Narendra. Read Judd's 60 page memo for free with a SumZero login here: https://sumzero.com/pro/research/ideas/19975
Presentation slides available here: https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/09I_mT6N3SVvX2XSbdQcRSZ3A#LCRM_KPLT_CALL_8-2-21
For more fundamentally-driven investment research on stocks as well as crypto, please join https://www.SumZero.com.
00:00 Start
00:10 Divya Narendra intro
00:40 Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) trend in consumer spending
00:50 Square (US: SQ) acquisition of AfterPay
01:05 Jargon
01:24 Judd Arnold intro and discussion of BNPL and subprime financing space
01:45 BNPL segmented across verticals
02:13 "Pay 4", Average Order Value, (AOV) and BNPL (Slide 7)
03:15 Advantages of financing over credit cards
03:33 Volume of receivables
03:55 Square and the AfterPay deal
04:12 AfterPay's penetration in the Australian market
04:26 KPLT's higher AOV
04:37 Competition from Acima and Progressive (US:PRG)
05:02 Market demographics, subprime credit customers
05:11 Wayfair (US: W), furniture, and auto parts
05:29 7-month average on KPLT leases
07:18 Savings relative to compounded credit card interest
07:43 How defaults are handled
09:10 How payments are handled
09:44 The two things American consumers can't live without
10:44 BNPL and bad debt expense
11:01 Direct lender OPFI's 35 - 40% credit losses
11:20 KPLT's 3% credit losses
11:40 Is KPLT pure fintech? (Slide 11)
12:06 PRG has over 2000 employees
12:18 KPLT has 80-90 employees
12:43 KPLT partnership with Affirm (US: AFRM)
14:11 KPLT's free cash flow (Slide 20)
15:30 How KPLT manages client credit risk
16:00 Credit data granularity "beyond FICO scores"
16:57 Algorithms bidding on extending credit to Wayfair customers
17:10 "KPLT winning on two fronts"
17:30 KPLT bidding aggressively on existing customers
18:10 KPLT holds data for 1.5M subprime credit customers
18:20 KPLT algos faster to respond than competition
19:05 Integration, diversification, partnerships
19:25 Quarterly revenue determinants
21:35 Addressing concern's about Wayfair's '21 Q2 (Slide 17)
22:18 "Wayfair risk isn't about the quarter" (Slide 16)
22:45 KPLT's partnership with Wayfair is an advantage
23:25 Total addressable market
23:54 Customer acquisition potential (Slide 15)
24:48 Most small merchants only have one subprime solution
25:40 "This is all a land grab right now"
27:15 PRG's 3 biggest customers
27:43 BNPL market is growing
29:20 KPLT history, founders, and early investors
31:58 KPLT's relationship with CURO Group (US:CURO)
32:16 KPLT 30-40% of CURO's market cap
32:26 How KPLT went public: SPAC, PIPE investors, etc
36:16 Recent dip and free cash flow
39:50 KPLT's investments in growth
41:00 Understanding KPLT's business (Slide 20)
41:41 Biggest threats to KPLT
42:31 Waterfall partnership with AFRM (Slide 9)
43:53 Barriers to entry in subprime
45:54 Macro-risks to BNPL in COVID-19 era
48:20 Square/AfterPay and KPLT's recent performance
49:35 PIPE unlock likely a non-event
50:45 Q2 earnings expectations (Slide 14)
52:03 Possible catalysts
55:15 Target price by end of 2022
56:45 Kafene
58:14 Closing remarks
Copyright 2021 SumZero Inc (www.sumzero.com). No portion of this video - including any excerpted audio - may be used without express written permission from the copyright holders.
SumZero •

Legendary Value Investor Mohnish Pabrai on Turkish Stocks, Big Tech and his $650k Lunch with Warren Buffett

When we last spoke to Mohnish Pabrai in April 2020, his confidence was as unwavering as ever. While gloom seemed to grip the market, Mohnish and other value investors were hunting down deeply discounted stocks in the fire sale that followed the March crash, marking a resurgence of active investing. Amidst the sell-offs in the uncertainty generated by the pandemic, Mohnish Pabrai seemed almost serene. "This too shall pass," he told SumZero.
SumZero •

EXCLUSIVE VIDEO: Divya Narendra Interviews Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss on Bitcoin, Ethereum, NFTs, Crypto, and More

Gemini founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss are probably the most well-known cryptocurrency investors in the world and for good reason: according to the New York Times, the two were early acolytes of blockchain-powered currency, having held positions in Bitcoin since 2012 before expanding to other coins and eventually launching the Gemini trading platform in 2015.
SumZero •

Curtains or Comeback? Movie Theaters and Studios Adapt or Die During Pandemic

The news that Disney (DIS: US) plans to release the live-action version of Mulan with an additional $29.99 on-demand price tag to Disney+ subscribers shone a spotlight on one of the biggest questions impacting the film industry as the COVID-19 crisis continues to hamstring the economy: how will new cinematic releases be affected if movie theaters remain closed or if audiences stop going to movies?

While filming and production have been delayed or halted altogether on some features, Hollyw
SumZero •

Fight or Flight? Two Deep Value Investments While Air Travel is Grounded

As the COVID19 virus continues to disrupt the market, contributing to the historical plunge that briefly halted trading on Monday, March 9th and again on Thursday, March 12th, some portfolio and fund managers are looking to the skies for deep value investments. No, they’re not experiencing religious epiphanies: they’re proselytizing the virtues of buying into various aspects of air travel...
SumZero •

Irrational Exuberance: An Interview With WallStreetBets Founder Jaime Rogozinski

While SumZero has served the professional BuySide community since 2008, we would be remiss if we did not comment on trends that affect the financial ecosystem. As many have noted in recent weeks, there is an undeniable impact being made by retail investors that affect the market as a whole. Among them is Reddit’s WallStreetBets. Our aim was to avoid sensationalist coverage and examine this phenomenon as objectively as possible to better serve our members.



– Editor




Irrational Exuberan
SumZero •

Anti-Viral: Two Biotech Stocks Rising With COVID-19

With the COVID-19 coronavirus dominating the headlines and sparking a downturn across broad swaths of the market, many investors are looking to those who are leading the way in the search for either a vaccine, a cure, or both. While many in pharma and biotech are contributing research to this global health crisis, two companies are at the forefront of this battle: Gilead Sciences Inc. (GILD:US) and Moderna Inc. (MRNA:US). Not only have both GILD and MRNA seen significant increases in an otherwis
SumZero •

Peloton and Nautilus: The Long and Short of Fiscal Fitness

The biggest change in exercise machines is the adoption of endogenous technology intended to quantify performance or physiological metrics. Speedometers, pedometers, heart rate monitors, and calorie calculators – once separate tools – can now be found on the least advanced stationary bicycles or treadmills at nearly any gym across the world as well as in wearable devices and phones. At a certain point, the number of useful metrics drops off for the average exerciser.
Outer Places •

A Stalker's Dream: Startup Scraped Billions of Images From Social Media for Facial Recognition AI

An artificial intelligence start-up that has scraped billions of images from social media websites – in likely violation of the sites' terms of service – for facial recognition use by law enforcement agencies is renewing concerns among privacy advocates who fear that the technology could eventually make stalking a complete stranger as easy as taking a picture. The company, Clearview AI, Inc. , was
LinkedIn •

Resistant Mindsets, Resilient Resets

In Psychology of Intelligence Analysis, Richards J. Heuer writes, “A mind-set is neither good nor bad. It is unavoidable. It is, in essence, a distillation of all that analysts think they know about a subject. It forms a lens through which they perceive the world, and once formed, it resists change.” There are myriad examples of resistant mindsets – of inaccurate mental maps that do not reflect the operational terrain – in business, particularly as you proceed up the corporate hierarchy.
SumZero •

The Frontlines of the Streaming Wars

With Disney and Apple entering the arena, we reviewed some of the ideas posited by SumZero contributors to examine how these two giants are shaping the competition for subscription-based video and how companies like Apple and Netflix – the 6th and 7th most-searched for companies on SumZero – are being affected.




Disney Plus: Not Just For Kids



Disney's (DIS) acquisition of Marvel Entertainment and Lucasfilm (and thus, the Star Wars franchises) in 2009 and 2012 respectively, expanded its
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