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Unmasking the Men Behind Zero Hedge

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Re: Unmasking the Men Behind Zero Hedge

#131

Post by soundwave106 »

tomp wrote: post #80
tptacek wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So what? That's not analysis, it's numerology. Just because some things are true doesn't mean all theories are equally deserving of dignity. But the notion that the USG was monitoring the Internet was entirely deserving of dignity: * It's their job * The software security industry is full of people who used to hack professionally for them * There'd been a major news story roughly every other year since the 1990s Eche…

This is basically the no true Scotsmann argument. Things that I believe in aren't conspiracy theories, because I don't believe in conspiracy theories, I'm just better informed. In any case, maybe we're a bit off point here, but what ZH posts is definitely closer to "NSA is spying on everybody" than to "lizards run the world" or "moon landing never happened".

One can never know the true story of anything based on what you read, but one can perhaps find some truths from the meta.

Before Snowden, there was about 10 years of news regarding the NSA desiring to spy on everyone (coming from such organizations as the EFF, which -- while clearly biased, are usually not pie in the sky fanciful.)

I'm not too familiar with Zero Hedge, personally. My "first impression" (just looking at Zero Hedge) is that it's not your ultra-conspiracy-theory Alex Jones type site. Definitely no Jade Helm 15s or Illuminati here.

However, I do think that the tone of the site is excessively negative and excessively Chicken Little. It also hawks gold in a bad way. Very much a red flag. In the real world, gold tends to be a more emotion driven trade than a logical one -- http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21692942... .

The best time to buy gold is actually during times of good prosperity, when the fearmongers stop pushing up the value. :)

I think many of the subjects Zero Hedge reports on look like real issues, to be honest. ZH doesn't seem to have any solutions other than "OMG world going to end buy gold!". Which is... not helpful (see above). There's too much of the "Evil Elite Wall Street / Politician" angle as well; while we should be concerned about inequality, concentration of capital in markets, etc., casting them in emotional terms isn't helpful either.

Having said that, there was an anti-vax article. Zero Hedge better be careful, that definitely is Alex Jones territory. http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-28/why-our-children-sh...

That's my first impression. Maybe I'm wrong, I'd love to hear a counterpoint. From a perspective of where I get my "truths" from, personally I get most of my business news from The Economist and Kiplinger. Even then, this is not really for investment purposes. The best investment advice is relatively simple: invest periodically in a variety of baskets, and hold long.

Re: Unmasking the Men Behind Zero Hedge

#133

Post by pfarnsworth »

nugget wrote: post #126
pfarnsworth wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lost about $100k in 2009 buying into the ZH-gloom and doom mentality, unfortunately. Everything they said made sense, but it just wasn't how the world works.

In a 2009 bear's defense it was unprecedented Government intervention that lit the fuse under the markets and led us here. I remember reaching a point myself where I realized that policy was driving the markets more than any other factor and quit actively trading completely. You can be right but if the Feds take the other side of your trade you will be bragging about it to your fellow corpses in the graveyard.

Agreed. I only wish I figured this out $75k or even $50k sooner :)

Re: Unmasking the Men Behind Zero Hedge

#134

Post by anon1385 »

ConfuciusSay02 wrote: post #121
saalweachter wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another important point-- once you get into the conspiracy theory mindset, it's not so much that a conspiracy or some conspiracies happen. There's a tendency to believe that all conspiracies are true, even the contradictory ones. Your average conspiracy theorist doesn't just believe the NSA is spying on Americans [they better be spying on non-Americans; we taxpayers are paying them a lot of money to do so] or that Pu…

You seem to be making a lot of assumptions about what people believe. Do you have any evidence to show that people believe all or nothing? Over 80% of Americans think that the official 9/11 story is bunk, are you suggesting that all of those people also believe aliens have visited Earth?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/why-people-believe...

>Such examples, along with others in my years on the conspiracy beat, are emblematic of a trend I have detected that people who believe in one such theory tend to believe in many other equally improbable and often contradictory cabals. This observation has recently been confirmed empirically by University of Kent psychologists Michael J. Wood, Karen M. Douglas and Robbie M. Sutton in a paper entitled “Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories,” published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science this past January. The authors begin by defining a conspiracy theory as “a proposed plot by powerful people or organizations working together in secret to accomplish some (usually sinister) goal” that is “notoriously resistant to falsification … with new layers of conspiracy being added to rationalize each new piece of disconfirming evidence.” Once you believe that “one massive, sinister conspiracy could be successfully executed in near-perfect secrecy, [it] suggests that many such plots are possible.” With this cabalistic paradigm in place, conspiracies can become “the default explanation for any given event—a unitary, closed-off worldview in which beliefs come together in a mutually supportive network known as a monological belief system.”

>This monological belief system explains the significant correlations between different conspiracy theories in the study. For example, “a belief that a rogue cell of MI6 was responsible for [Princess] Diana's death was correlated with belief in theories that HIV was created in a laboratory … that the moon landing was a hoax … and that governments are covering up the existence of aliens.” The effect continues even when the conspiracies contradict one another: the more participants believed that Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered.

Re: Unmasking the Men Behind Zero Hedge

#135

Post by JumpCrisscross »

jonstokes wrote: post #98

I think ZH is a great site, and I read it daily, BUT if you don't take it with a truckload of salt then it will be hazardous to your wealth. Seriously, if you had been in the ZH bear trade since 2009, then you missed out on the greatest stock market rally in a generation. I know, because I missed the first half of said rally as a ZH reader until I realized that the constant drumbeat of negative news from that site wa…

Reading ZH like Reddit will always turn out to be toxic. It isn't just the low signal-to-noise ratio. The site's core Austrian philosophy is at odds with the forefront of economic evidence.

I skim it from time to time. Very quickly. If I see something interesting, I look look at the source. If it's credible, e.g. Reuters, I cautiously read. If it isn't, I research it. Once in a while I'll come across novel, credible sources this way. This is the No. 1 way to get value from ZH.

The other time I read ZH is when I have a specific crisis on mind, e.g. Greece/Brazil/Venezuela shitting the pot. ZH throws up a good sense of how the bear market feels. Still terrible analysis. But good sentiment stock.

Re: Unmasking the Men Behind Zero Hedge

#136

Post by JumpCrisscross »

nugget wrote: post #126
pfarnsworth wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lost about $100k in 2009 buying into the ZH-gloom and doom mentality, unfortunately. Everything they said made sense, but it just wasn't how the world works.

In a 2009 bear's defense it was unprecedented Government intervention that lit the fuse under the markets and led us here. I remember reaching a point myself where I realized that policy was driving the markets more than any other factor and quit actively trading completely. You can be right but if the Feds take the other side of your trade you will be bragging about it to your fellow corpses in the graveyard.

> In a 2009 bear's defense it was unprecedented Government intervention

The novel part was the purchase of government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) mortgage-backed securities (MBS), and GSE debt securities. The Fed's balance-sheet expansion, interest-rate regime and their effects on the market have precedent [1].

[1] http://www.hoover.org/sites/default/files/14110_-_bordo_-_ex...

Re: Unmasking the Men Behind Zero Hedge

#137

Post by jonknee »

beagle3 wrote: post #103
alistproducer2 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I don't have an interest in digging through ZH posts to prove my point, but in general the spin of the site is conspiratorial in nature. Whether it's the Fed is in it with the banks to provide free money to prop up the market, or the BLS number are not to be believed or trusted, or any other number of reoccurring themes, ZH is a conspiracy site.

BLS numbers are routinely revised in retrospect to be worse a quarter or two later and with a friday release so that no one notices. As in, more than one in two BLS unemployment reports is retroactively revised, and I don't remember a single "it's actually better than we previously reported" revision. tptacek (IIRC quoting someone else) described it well: ZeroHedge is the conspiracy theory site without the conspiraci…

> BLS numbers are routinely revised in retrospect to be worse a quarter or two later and with a friday release so that no one notices. As in, more than one in two BLS unemployment reports is retroactively revised, and I don't remember a single "it's actually better than we previously reported" revision.

That's how it is supposed to work, they do the best with the data they have and then update as more data comes in. They are trying to gauge hard to measure things using samples, it's a tricky business.

As for revising to the upside, it happens all the time. December and January were both revised upwards:

http://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/empsit_03042016.htm

> The change in total nonfarm payroll employment for December was revised from +262,000 to +271,000, and the change for January was revised from +151,000 to +172,000. With these revisions, employment gains in December and January combined were 30,000 more than previously reported.

Re: Unmasking the Men Behind Zero Hedge

#138

Post by mikeyouse »

beagle3 wrote: post #103
alistproducer2 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree. I don't have an interest in digging through ZH posts to prove my point, but in general the spin of the site is conspiratorial in nature. Whether it's the Fed is in it with the banks to provide free money to prop up the market, or the BLS number are not to be believed or trusted, or any other number of reoccurring themes, ZH is a conspiracy site.

BLS numbers are routinely revised in retrospect to be worse a quarter or two later and with a friday release so that no one notices. As in, more than one in two BLS unemployment reports is retroactively revised, and I don't remember a single "it's actually better than we previously reported" revision. tptacek (IIRC quoting someone else) described it well: ZeroHedge is the conspiracy theory site without the conspiraci…

> BLS numbers are routinely revised in retrospect to be worse a quarter or two later and with a friday release so that no one notices.

See.. this is where you're completely wrong.

> As in, more than one in two BLS unemployment reports is retroactively revised, and I don't remember a single "it's actually better than we previously reported" revision.

All BLS reports are revised -- they're surveys that are aggregated as firms respond. Their methodology is completely transparent.[1]

In fact, the BLS is so transparent that they actually keep a data series that tracks revisions to their own data with monthly history back to 1979! [2]

Their initial monthly jobs numbers in 2015 were overstated by an average of 4,000 jobs. However, in 2014, their initial jobs numbers were understated by 37,000 jobs. Does understating the initial numbers by nearly 40,000 jobs/month sound like the behavior of an agency trying to fool the public?

Conspiracy theories about public entities that report every single facet of their methodology, data, and metadata are silly.

[1] - http://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-2/revisions-to-jobs-numbe...

[2] - http://www.bls.gov/web/empsit/cesnaicsrev.htm#Summary

Re: Unmasking the Men Behind Zero Hedge

#139

Post by supercanuck »

pfarnsworth wrote: post #120
jonstokes wrote: post #98

I think ZH is a great site, and I read it daily, BUT if you don't take it with a truckload of salt then it will be hazardous to your wealth. Seriously, if you had been in the ZH bear trade since 2009, then you missed out on the greatest stock market rally in a generation. I know, because I missed the first half of said rally as a ZH reader until I realized that the constant drumbeat of negative news from that site wa…

I lost about $100k in 2009 buying into the ZH-gloom and doom mentality, unfortunately. Everything they said made sense, but it just wasn't how the world works.

I learned a very valuable lesson from reading Housing Bubble blogs and what not during the 2008 Financial Crisis.

I prided myself on being one of those people who saw it before it was happening, and had purchased double shorted bank ETF's. I thought I was a genius by "getting news first" and acting on it, and seeing the money I was "making". But then the Government stepped in and said they would not let the banks fail. My position evaporated into thin air.

Re: Unmasking the Men Behind Zero Hedge

#140

Post by tcoppi »

themartorana wrote: post #94
tcoppi wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They post things like this all the time. I would take it not as them editorially advocating the position, but rather getting information otherwise censored by other media out there. Sometimes the information is not reported for good reason, such as this. You need a very good BS and relevancy filter to find the few nuggets of gold that are put out maybe a few times a year by ZH.

An "even a broken clock is right twice a day" method of viewing a content publication is a funny way of explaining away dangerous "journalism" for a couple of stuck clock hands.

I prefer to think of it as clock hands that move in a specific direction, one that is mostly uncorrelated with the direction everyone else's clock hands move, but sometimes it reaches the destination everyone else arrives at first, sometimes it is just trolling you.
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