hendzen

Thanks - I’m very familiar with the U2 program. Stealthy reconnaissance missions at 70k ft are very different than trolling a squadron of F22s at 30k ft and lower during a known training mission.

why would the chinese take the insane risk of testing an experimental drone in US airspace and near US fighters during a training exercise...

its a very successful marketing campaign by the history channel for the show mentioned in the article

nope this is a real national securities exchange approval: https://www.sec.gov/rules/other/2019/34-85828.pdf

here is the SEC filing:

https://www.sec.gov/rules/other/2019/34-85828.pdf?mod=articl...

question to LTSE employees: do you plan to host your matching engine in California?

the most interesting thing in this S1 is that Slack has a dual-class supervoting share structure but has a sunset provision after which the class B shares convert to class A and all have the same voting power.

Speaking as someone who was deeply interested in bitcoin in ~2013, cryptocurrency today is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. When someone tells me today that they are working on something related to crypto I make a mental note to never work with them or take anything they do seriously.

There is an interview with Andy Rachleff (former VC at Benchmark and CEO of Wealthfront), where he notes that the problem with Kleiner is that the old partners never retired. They just stayed on and did very little actual work but since they owned huge stakes in the partnership they collected much of the carry. Over time new firms (like Benchmark) formed that basically pushed out partners who started coasting. If you are an ambitious young VC which kind of firm would you work for?

0% chance this is a coincidence. Wild speculation but guessing he is getting pushed out as a concession to the people that want the union in a last-ditch attempt by the board to avoid the union forming.

its very important that this be handled by an independent party. Imagine if google was party to a lawsuit and could monitor what filings their legal opponents were looking at.

> You are welcome to invest in their open, and very mediocre, funds though.

Are you really though? Show me how an individual can invest in any Renaissance fund (e.g. RIEF) They are only open to institutional investors as far as I know - i.e. those looking to invest say, 250m or more.

Your comparison assumes that the alternative to backdoor Roth is a traditional IRA contribution. The (ab)use of backdoor Roth contributions is commonly done by high-earning employees who have access to a 401(k)/Roth 401(k) plan. In this situation none of their IRA contributions are actually tax deductible at all!

So the 'backdoor' Roth contribution allows such people to invest post-tax dollars w/ Roth benefits when the IRS income limits seemingly make it clear that they shouldn't be able to contribute in this fashion. Why does the IRS have income limits on Roth IRA contributions but then allow them to be so easily bypassed in this manner?

> assuming growth and tax rates remain the same.

Big assumption.

their gross return is probably just a couple percent but then they leverage the crap out of it, which they can easily do since the strategy is designed to have very low volatility.

'The firm initially terminated its 401(k) plan for employees in 2010, a step that permitted them to roll the savings into traditional IRAs. Then, employees took advantage of a rule change that year allowing affluent Americans to convert their traditional IRAs into Roths. '

Looks like they rolled all their savings in to traditional IRAs and then converted them in to Roth IRAs. This procedure, known as a 'Backdoor Roth' conversion, effectively allows unlimited Roth IRA contributions beyond the income limits. If you are scratching your head and asking, why this is legal - so are many other people, but it appears to be accepted as within regulation by tax experts.

Read the SEC commissioner's speech that I linked, seriously. He doesn't propose banning them entirely, just phasing them out over a period of time. Clearly there is a flipside to carte blanche founder control when the CEO/Founder is underperforming yet can't be removed (e.g. Evan Spiegel).

Do you think Mark Zuckerberg's children should retain majority control of Facebook after he dies?

I'm not opposed to the use of multi-class shares in private companies, but for public companies I think that they should be phased out in line with the proposal from the SEC commissioner's speech. The self-dealing in the OP is another matter entirely -- and potentially worthy of a shareholder lawsuit for breach of fiduciary duty.

Too much VC money chasing too few deals. They didn't have a choice, he could have just gotten the money elsewhere.

  As part of an investment round for WeWork in 2014, he was 
  granted Class B shares that gave him 10 votes per share, 
  and now he has more than 65% of the overall share vote, 
  according to WeWork corporate filings.

These multi-class ownership structures need to be reformed. The SEC is already thinking about it [0].

[0]- https://www.sec.gov/news/speech/perpetual-dual-class-stock-c...

MongoDB is competing with AWS. Atlas actually runs on top of AWS - Mongo is capturing the spread between their per-instance charge and the AWS charge (or GCE/Azure). What this article ignores is that Atlas is actually competing quite well and has significant adoption. The people who run MongoDB are not dumb, they will try to turn the hosting in to a commodity before Amazon can turn the DB in to a commodity.

  For one, you could simply hand the pile of cash out to the first person who comes by your window. 
  Or you might hand small amounts of cash to a bunch of different people. 
  Both of these seem like nice things to do. But then you wonder: what if the cash in your living room is counterfeit? More to the point — does it even matter? 
  Wherever the money came from, if you dump it through the window, you'll be helping a few people, but at the same time causing inflation that will hurt everyone else.

The key issue with this entire blog post is that it ignores the distribution of wealth within the hypothetical Congolese market. What if one person in the marketplace has 99% of the money, and everybody else has the rest evenly divided between them. Then under some moral/ethical frameworks it might be beneficial to distribute the money evenly to the rest of the population at the cost of inflating away some of the single rich person's wealth.

What you do with the money affects the distribution of wealth & goods within the society. What is a good distribution? You need a moral/ethical framework to decide. I won't make an assumption on which one we go with, but lets say we go with one.

Not spending or donating the money is making the choice that the distribution of wealth as it currently exists is the most optimal. Is this just? Depends on your moral/ethical framework.

Saying that earning is good and spending is bad is overly simplistic. You need an objective function on the distribution of wealth. Earning money in a way that warps the distribution away from the ideal can then be considered bad (and thus should be 'corrected' via taxation and other methods) and spending money in a way that warps the distribution toward the ideal can be considered good and should be rewarded (via tax credits etcetera).

An hour? For JavaScript? Wtf?

William Sealy Gosset, who developed the t-distribution, published under the name 'Student' since his employer (the Guinness Brewery) wouldn't let him publish under his real name.

Sure, I alluded to the concept of beta neutral when I mentioned 'additional constraints' - dollar neutral was a simpler concept I used for a non-finance audience. I've never heard anybody use the term delta neutral outside of derivatives trading.

For the vast majority of symbols, stock borrow is cheap at institutional size.

No - dollar neutral. Delta neutral is an entirely separate concept. I'm talking about equities trading (or potentially total return swaps) not options or other derivatives.

Why do you think its so difficult and expensive to attain? What do you think institutional borrow costs are? And I'm not talking about Interactive Brokers... I'd wager that most funds are long biased because its more difficult to generate short alpha - not because of the costs of portfolio construction.

Many (if not most) quantitative hedge funds are dollar neutral, which means they have one dollar short for every dollar long. There are typically additional constraints about having equal long/short exposure on each industry and investing style (momentum, value, etc).

So contrary to the article, most of these funds don’t take broad bets for or against the market. What they are really doing is correcting the relative valuations of each individual company by shifting bits of capital away from overpriced companies and towards underpriced ones. That doesn’t have the effect of raising or lowering broad market indices.

Now there are of course other investors who take broad directional bets on the market but those are probably more likely to be discretionary bets rather than systematic.

I would guess at least 3 or 4 orders of magnitude.

They aren't ordinary legal businesses. It is a fact that they are still illegal under federal law, regardless of whether you or I agree with that. If you have ever spent any time in Humboldt County, you would know that if you don't enjoy being shot at, you should stay away from marijuana grow operations.

This sounds like a great way to get murdered.

Through this scandal and others, society will learn just how harmful the dual-share class structures that allow founders to reap the economic benefits of public markets while shirking the oversight aspects and keeping all control are.