yellowstuff

Java marketing in the 90s was more intense and much less organic, since it was totally driven by Sun.

No, the consensus estimate was a .3% rise, so a .2% rise is lower than expected by Wall Street analysts. You may be confusing rate vs level.

What about this story makes you confident they had the assets to pay out the client balances they reported?

Yes, every hype cycle brings reckless gamblers and outright conmen, but crypto is remarkable for the high ratio of scams to value produced. This was also true for the real estate boom preceding the 2008 crash, and the invention of stocks in the 1600s. Financial innovation seems to be somewhat riskier than purely technological innovation.

Yes, trusting grifters to play by the rules. In crypto the most important risk is counterparty risk.

I said yes to about half and also got 11%

If someone invented a new thing that was possibly but not definitely a drug requiring FDA approval, and the FDA refused to make an explicit judgement on it for years as it grew to a huge industry, then eventually brought down the hammer, that would be a bad process. The courts may agree with the SEC that Coinbase sold unregistered securities, but they had the opportunity to clarify the law years ago, and Coinbase has been earnestly seeking clarification.

My wife has written cookbooks and worked as a recipe tester for cookbooks, blogs, and even the little recipes on the back of bags of flour and stuff. I’m sure not every published recipe was tested, but a lot of them were. Some by me, an inexperienced cook nervously testing recipes for my wife’s book as she watched me like a hawk. At least 2 people tested every recipe in her books.

On the contrary, equities markets need the liquidity HFTs provide to function well. Before HFTs there were human market makers who played a similar role in equities markets, but charged far more to do it. HFT is a story of efficient technology bringing prices down a lot and shrinking the profitability of an existing industry.

I’m sympathetic to the view that a lot of resources have been poured into making trades happen in 1 nanosecond when 100 or 1000 nanoseconds would probably be fine for all practical purposes. The issue is that people keep finding that letting the fastest system get the trade actually does work better than alternative approaches.

Tesla was a lot weirder than Einstein, but Einstein's personal life was not totally normal. He wrote his wife a letter saying “You will expect no affection from me”, cheated on her with his first cousin, then married his first cousin, but only after deciding against marrying her daughter instead.

https://allthatsinteresting.com/elsa-einstein

Basically. There are a ton of logistical problems, but a major one is that the big office buildings in Midtown have a lot of interior space with no windows, and apartments need windows.

A recent study in NYC found:

"Most conversion projects would only become financially feasible if buildings could be acquired at significant discounts, in many cases at prices that valued the structures as having negative value."

https://cbcny.org/research/potential-office-residential-conv...

Sure, in an idealized enough world you can make many statements true. In the real world people buy and sell stock for many reasons, and value different types of returns on different time horizons, and it’s likely that for a majority of stock trades both the buyer and seller are happy with the trade.

Surely you need to keep the data inside your own system and can’t send it to OpenAI, right?

It's internet speak for "I agree with this."

Matt Levine has explained the Fed's disdain for narrow banking. Fed payments are a subsidy for regular banks, and regular banks are effectively public/private partnerships that make loans, enforce regulations, and generally satisfy the goals of the government. A narrow bank would capture the entire subsidy and not satisfy any of the other goals.

Yeah, this seems pointless. Here's an example of the paradox:

1) Hitting both nails and screws with a hammer is a losing game.

2) Screwing both nails and screws with a screwdriver is a losing game.

Paradox alert! If you hammer the nails and screw the screws you've transformed two losing games into a winning game!

Lyft operates Citibike, but it looks like they make less than $1mm per month from membership fees: https://mot-marketing-whitelabel-prod.s3.amazonaws.com/nyc/M.... Not a cash cow!

Members use the bikes heavily, which requires maintenance, and people who drive around Manhattan taking bikes from popular parking spots and bringing them to popular departure spots, and recharging electric bikes. This is very imbalanced, EG everyone wants to go to Grand Central in the morning and leave from there in the evening.

In addition to the marginal cost from each member, Citi bike has high fixed costs, like maintaining the bike docks. My guess is that even at $205 for a membership Lyfy doesn't profit much.

There's a 2014 paper that describes this dynamic. Clients want deposits (bank liabilities) that act like cash, but they are backed by assets that have fluctuating values. Banks need to be "optimally opaque" to make this work.

https://economics.sas.upenn.edu/pier/working-paper/2014/bank...

"Structuring" makes a huge difference. VCs will invest $10mm for 10% of a company, making it apparently "worth" $100mm. However, they will get guarantees such as a right to the first 30% of profit before any other investors get paid back. It's not straightforward to know precisely how deals like that that translate into the final value of the company, but it's a guarantee that it's less than $100 mm, and with harsh enough structuring the actual value of the company could be closer to $10 mm.

You have just enough information about foundations to completely misunderstand them.

It's true that a major reason for the popularity of foundations is legal tax avoidance: you can donate to a foundation in a year when you have lots of income, get the tax benefit in that year, and not have to make a charitable donation in the same year. The foundations is allowed to sit on most of the money for a long time. However, crucially, when the money leaves the foundation it must go to an approved charity. There have been some high-profile abuses of foundations, but that's simply illegal, the same way it would be illegal to not make a donation in the first place and claim a tax exemption.

During the pandemic the US government tried to send money to just its own citizens, this was generally successful, but plagued by a ton of fraud. I don't think any organization has the capacity to get close to the goal of sending $1 to every human on earth. Also, the US is able to enforce its laws on dollar transactions happening outside its borders, so sending money into countries the US has sanctioned will be very difficult from most places.

I think that's the exception, not the rule. Many large public companies have many board members with only trivial ownership stakes.

CEOs have a ton of leverage and use it to use to their personal benefit. But they really are important- stock prices will change the value of a company by hundreds of millions of dollars based on a good or bad CEO joining or leaving, and it's not like the investors are all in on the scam.

There are mechanisms in the existing system to fight high CEO pay, EG activist investors will get involved with companies and occasionally force CEOs out or cut their pay.

That seems to be a popular internet myth, but without much evidence:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_is_thicker_than_water

Seinfeld's first season was not particularly good or popular at the time, it gradually improved. The US Office was similar. Even at it's best I don't like Seinfeld as much as modern sitcoms, but it was audaciously different and innovative when it was made.

Most people care about their findings replicating. The hard part is knowing what you need to do to improve your chances.

I've spent the last few years helping to launch a quant fund, so I have a sense of what institutional investors look for. I'm impressed with the thought and hard work that went into Didact, but this guy never had a shot of attracting interest from the types of institutional investors who fund large quant funds.

The strategy has a 18% correlation to SPY, so "beating the market" is the wrong benchmark. The proper reference point is probably 0, when correlation is that low it shouldn't matter much whether the market's up or down.

The strategy had 14% return and .82 Sharpe ratio, so 17% vol. That's bad. With large asset levels and a long track record a Sharpe of 1 might be OK, for 1 year with minimal assets a Sharpe less than 2 isn't necessarily that impressive.

Another huge issue: this strategy was run with less than $1mm. It would certainly perform worse at higher asset levels as market impact becomes meaningful, the only question is how much worse.

Finally, results matter, but fund raising is primarily a sales process. Investors aren't just looking for the highest numbers. They're going to evaluate the people and processes involved, the risk management philosophy, really every aspect of the business. OP has some professional finance experience but it doesn't sound like he has the connections or reputation that would help with fund raising. If his sales pitch was anything like this article I don't think most institutional investors would be impressed (EG, minimal references to risk management, frequent comparisons to SPY performance when that's not an appropriate benchmark.)

I've heard of large consulting companies that do a "bait and switch" where the client initially talks to a fantastic technical person prior to signing a contract, then never hears from them again.

It seems like no one criticizing the article read it. There's a graph, starting in Feb 2020 so that it highlights the pandemic spike in rates and return to normalcy.

And the article is written in the most neutral tone possible, pretty clearly targeting a business audience that wants information about shipping rates because of their importance for the economy and financial markets.