A prescient footnote
blog.oddhead.com
A prescient footnote
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Re: A prescient footnote
#2Suppose you've made such a prediction about a tech company. How do you act on it? You can buy stock, of course, but is there a more powerful action available?
Re: A prescient footnote
#3Suppose you've made such a prediction about a tech company. How do you act on it? You can buy stock, of course, but is there a more powerful action available?
Sell the stock of its competitors short.
Re: A prescient footnote
#4Re: A prescient footnote
#5Suppose you've made such a prediction about a tech company. How do you act on it? You can buy stock, of course, but is there a more powerful action available?
Sell the stock of its competitors short.
Taking a short position in the competitors is troublesome because you need to time it right. If you think apple can win, you can go long any time the stock is low and end up a winner.
Re: A prescient footnote
#6Perhaps Apple reads pg, so it was a self-fulfilling prophecy...
Re: A prescient footnote
#7Suppose you've made such a prediction about a tech company. How do you act on it? You can buy stock, of course, but is there a more powerful action available?
Leverage and buy stock. The only thing that stops you from increasing the size of your bet is the risk of the downside. To some point, this is manageable, but after that point, it becomes pure insanity. YMMV.
Shorting the competitors because you think a company is going to do very well is actually a bad idea -- it's entirely possible that Microsoft would have been able to open another very profitable market.
Re: A prescient footnote
#8Suppose you've made such a prediction about a tech company. How do you act on it? You can buy stock, of course, but is there a more powerful action available?
There's a bigger problem. There's always going to be a spot-on prediction ex post. But you need to know which prediction is spot-on ex ante.
Re: A prescient footnote
#9Heh, I made the same prediction one year before Apple released the iPhone.
http://stuff4ben.blogspot.com/
Oddly enough, it was the last post I made on my blog. Wish I could have capitalized on my foresight.
Re: A prescient footnote
#10Suppose you've made such a prediction about a tech company. How do you act on it? You can buy stock, of course, but is there a more powerful action available?
If you knew a technology was going to take off, learning their programming language/API and becoming a well-known expert on it could pay great dividends. Additionally, you could work there to make contacts and learn even more. Finally, you could try to join their developer programs while they are still in beta.
Note that unlike suggestions to purchase stock in the company, this advice applies to technology at private companies, as well.