I like this version: The optician quotes the price of new glasses by saying "$100", waits to see if the customer flinches, "... for the lenses", waits again, "... each.".
You make a valid point. Dario suggests that DoD wants to have the capacity to do domestic surveillance and autonomous killing. Sean Parnell said the DoD doesn't want those capacities. These statements are in conflict. Them talking past each other is one possibility. Without much evidence except the track record of the Trump administration, I think it is much more likely that Sean Parnell is lying.
From Stephen Fry: "You know that scene in Animal House where there’s a fellow playing folk music on the guitar, and John Belushi picks up the guitar and destroys it. And the cinema loves it. Well, the British comedian would want to play the folk singer. We want to play the failure."
Homer and Peter Griffin are idiots but they smash the guitar. Charlie Brown gets his guitar smashed.
I believe that Happy Days started the trend in the 70s, with Mr. Cunningham being portrayed more realistically than earlier TV fathers. Allegedly (I can't find a source) an executive said "He doesn't look like a father. He looks like my father."
I've worked in finance for 20 years and this is the complete opposite of my experience. Excel is ubiquitous and drives all sorts of business processes in various departments. I've seen people I would consider Excel gurus, in that they are able to use Excel much more productively than normal users, but I've almost never seen anyone use VBA.
There's a lot of confused comments on this thread. "Front running" in the strictest sense means illegal trading that involves taking advantage of trades that you know will happen and you have a responsibility not to exploit. "Front running" is also used informally to mean legally trading prior to trades that you anticipate happening. Studying the rules of an index and buy a stock just before its added to the index and index funds are required to buy it is "front running" in the second sense.
I'll admit that this is a charitable reading of the essay, but I think that MS was dead in 2007 and is still dead in 2025, in the sense that Graham was focused on. In the 90s startup founders were scared that if they started a software company MS would copy their idea and crush them. Bill Gates used to talk about how he wanted to "monopolize" software before the lawyers caught up with him. By 2007 MS was mostly irrelevant to startup founders, and with a few exceptions it's mostly irrelevant to them now. They're not in the business of crushing the life out of software startups anymore. Paul's a VC, and that's what he was focused on.
I've done a fair amount of technical hiring at hedge funds, my experience doesn't support this comment. There is some amount of credentialism/elitism in hedge fund hiring, but I see that more on the fundamental investment side, and much less for technical roles. There are a lot more hedge funds than FAANG companies, and different funds can have very different cultures.
Probably the most important reason this story got big is because it involved Dan Ariely, a popular author and perhaps the most famous active researcher in the world.
Off topic, but as a finance nerd I want to point out that if you know you won't touch your money for 10 years and put it in a savings account paying 5% you are bearing "duration" risk. It's possible that interest rates will fall a lot and by failing to lock in a 4% return you end up with less money at the end of 10 years. (Just a technical note! You probably shouldn't buy 10 year treasuries!)
I believe that I read in Cracking the Coding Interview that big tech doesn't consider your current job as a comp, only pending offers. They won't increase an offer because you make more at your current job. I agree that candidates who are currently employed are generally seen in a much better light that candidates who are not currently employed.
There have been several attempts. For example, Google tried to introduce a JIT in 2011 with a project named Unladen Swallow, but that ended up getting abandoned.
Great story. The part that sticks out to me is 72% (the discount that GS got due to busted trades) and 0% (the discount Knight got due to busted trades.) If you're going to eff up, first make sure you're a big player!
That's what always struck me about this story. I like to think that if I was in the room we would've turned the system off at 9:31 when we knew it was working abnormally but didn't know why. Instead they let it run for over an hour while they tried to QA it. I've heard that Knight had no kill switch to stop all systems from trading, which seems like by far the biggest mistake they made.
1) Kahneman had a chapter in his book about social priming, and endorsed the subfield, which was totally decimated by the reproduction crisis. But Kahneman himself didn't research social priming, and I don't think any of his research with Tversky has been challenged by the reproduction crisis. I think it's unfair to say he was "right in the middle" of it, unless I'm missing something.
2) What's wrong with Katsuyama? If you mean IEX was a dumb idea and HFT is good for markets overall then I agree with that. I think that just means Katsuyama is wrong and self-serving, not problematic.
“Bust Out 1” seems basically OK to me. Everyone hates stock buybacks, but they’re economically very similar to dividends, and seem like a reasonable way for a fading company to return cash to shareholders. Could BBB have survived if they spent $4B on a new initiative instead of returning it to shareholders? I doubt it.
“Bust Out 3” seems pretty sleazy, selling stock in a failed company to retail investors. But hey, that’s what they said about Hertz, so maybe there’s some universe where this could have worked out OK?
I agree “Bust Out 2” was just a scam. Ryan Cohen is a grifter.
Search for "insider trading convictions". They're not rare, and often result in jail time.
Are most of the inside traders that get caught non-professional investors, because the pros know how to escape detection? Are the convictions a small fraction of the number of crimes? Is the SEC too focused on crimes that are easy to prosecute and ignoring more important systemic issues? I'd say yes to all, but the SEC is far from toothless in this type of case.
I strongly suspect these trades are not legit. That said, the trader didn't necessarily KNOW that the deal would be announced today. Trading is a game of probabilities. It's possible that the trader used public information to figure out that Splunk could be acquired soon and there was a small but non-zero chance it would be announced today. In that case taking a $22k flyer on cheap options is a good risk-adjusted bet for a well-capitalized investor. (Although they'd have to factor in that this WILL result in a visit from the SEC, which is probably not fun even if you've done nothing wrong.)
Yes. It's an analysis of the differences in results generated by different teams of academics researching the same data. That required lots of researchers, who all deserve credit for their contributions.
I’m a quant. If all you care about is the realized return of a equal-weighted portfolio than sure, just look at mean return. If you’re trying to understand a strategy in depth you’ll want to look at the entire distribution of hypothetical returns, precisely because financial returns are fat-tailed and portfolio returns are often driven by outliers. I don’t know about SPACs, but for common stock often the outlier returns are in small illiquid stocks where you couldn’t take a large position.