Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: Predict Your House Price

Home equity

A typical middle-class American’s two most valuable assets are (1) her human capital and (2) her house. Maybe (3) her stock portfolio. You can do a lot of stuff with your stock portfolio: You can sell some stocks and buy different stocks, you can diversify and hedge and trade actively and YOLO zero-day options on meme stocks. There is a huge industry — “the financial industry” — in which thousands of professionals get paid a lot of money to come up with stuff for people to do with their stock portfolios.

Those professionals sometimes get to thinking. “A typical middle-class ...