Viewing profile — manyhats

Equities in a given sector, whether public or private, tend to be highly correlated, but external observers just don't really get the full picture unless they dig into the specific…

I disagree on the choice of benchmarks as they're not really comparable. A more comparable benchmark for angel investments in Internet / SW startups would be a broad-based ETF that…

Good explanation. I'll nudge it even more with a Scenario C to further illustrate that ignoring non-cash comp leads to an distorted picture. Scenario C: Company hires an engineer w…

1. It's important to distinguish between liquidity risk and solvency risk. Liquidity risk is needing to sell an asset that is fundamentally sound and not being able to get a fair p…

Suggest that readers look at cloud revenue from a business model perspective, not a technology one. Cloud revenues between Amazon and MS are comparable from an investment point-of-…

The "crash" wasn't a day-long, week-long, or even month-long stock pricing event, but lasted 6+ months from the first tech sector to the last going through the crash. The first sto…

Consider other historical antitrust battles. It's often not about dominance in one niche, but leveraging that dominance into other areas and limiting innovation there. By your asse…

It can be spiral-like locally without it necessarily being so nationally or globally. Ask your average roughneck or metal bender in Texas or North Dakota about layoffs, salary cuts…

If you're trading, USO is fine. If you're investing on a longer-term horizon (a year or more), the monthly futures roll where the USO fund sells the current month's oil contracts (…

Nearly all cruise ships currently charge for Internet access by the minute, not the bit, and throughput can vary widely. Typical prices start around $1/minute and with bulk minute …

The least costly line I know of is Pullmantur. Their repositioning cruises across the Atlantic are frequently under $50/day for a solo passenger. US$37 / day at current exchange ra…

SS is scaled based upon the average income as computed over a person's working life. Since he's got lots of zeros in the calculation, and there's a cap on the SS wage computation (…

It's not free if you become an employee and need to put in time to maintain it. Think of it like a fast food franchise - you're buying a job, not a passive income stream.

In this environment, it's very difficult to price IPOs "correctly". I'm no longer involved in that aspect of the business, but I was in the late 90s, and the same thing happened ba…

Adding a little more detail on the mechanics of a typical capital markets raise to your answer, there's an overallotment on the "target" raise, which the bookrunner (lead underwrit…

Yes, it's very uncommon (but not unheard of) to have large blocks of stock that aren't locked up in an IPO. For SHOP specifically, 99.9% of the Class B stock (i.e., stock outstandi…

Dutch auctions have been tried before, with mixed results, most notably by Google. The article below reviews the GOOG IPO. It's not entirely accurate in all the details (e.g., that…