That it only took 14 trades to go from phone to Porsche is most impressive. He's gonna have an awesome last year of high school with that ride.
Wonder what his insurance costs?
Teen Trades up on Craigslist from Phone to Porsche in 2 Years
11–20 of 57 posts
Re: Teen Trades up on Craigslist from Phone to Porsche in 2 Years
#12Reminds me of my pokemon card days in elementary school. I started with ~5 cards a friend gave me and somehow traded up to a deck of 400-500 with a decent amount of holographics too. The only time I ever bought cards were a couple booster packs, but that was after I already had 200 some. Good times. The art of trading comes from knowing that value is relative, you just need to find the people who want what you have m…
Is that what is called arbitrage ?
Re: Teen Trades up on Craigslist from Phone to Porsche in 2 Years
#13It was alarming to read that people tell him he is a con artist. He's a good businessman.
He's a businessman, but whether or not he's good is a question for debate. Most people working the same hours have a higher income. Do the math, if the Porsche trade represents all of his "income" from bartering he made $3.6 an hour, if it represents half of his income then he made minimum wage. It's interesting, and somewhat novel, but hardly astounding or terribly impressive.
The drive is incredibly impressive. The kids 17! You can use math to water down time spent to gain any result:
Kid plays quake through middle school to determine he wants to learn computers so he tinkers 6 hours a day through high school. Then goes to college and spends another 8-10 hours a day working on school for 4 more years, then he works for 3 years to save up enough money to buy a porche in cache.
Hah, nice spelling mistake. Back to fixing this bug in my cache.
Re: Teen Trades up on Craigslist from Phone to Porsche in 2 Years
#14I feel like this is a YC start up in the making.
AirBNB = Couchsurfing/Craigslist rentals
Daily Booth = The "Pic a Day" meme
Along those lines a startup where people can trade their "junk" in a slightly competitive aspirational way. A more social eBay, based around local and some competitive game mechanics that reward big scores.
Re: Teen Trades up on Craigslist from Phone to Porsche in 2 Years
#15Reminds me of my pokemon card days in elementary school. I started with ~5 cards a friend gave me and somehow traded up to a deck of 400-500 with a decent amount of holographics too. The only time I ever bought cards were a couple booster packs, but that was after I already had 200 some. Good times. The art of trading comes from knowing that value is relative, you just need to find the people who want what you have m…
Is that what is called arbitrage ?
Not exactly. Arbitrage is exploiting mispricings of the same item in different markets.
For example, say you buy an iPhone from Craigslist for $100, then turn around and sell it on Ebay for $150, netting you $50.
Or conversely, you get an iPhone for your birthday for free, sell it on Ebay for $150, then buy a second one from Craigslist for $100, netting you an iPhone+$50.
That's arbitrage. It sounds like makeramen's Pokemon trading all happened in basically the same elementary school market.
Re: Teen Trades up on Craigslist from Phone to Porsche in 2 Years
#16I feel like this is a YC start up in the making. AirBNB = Couchsurfing/Craigslist rentals Daily Booth = The "Pic a Day" meme Along those lines a startup where people can trade their "junk" in a slightly competitive aspirational way. A more social eBay, based around local and some competitive game mechanics that reward big scores.
NotifyWire automates Craiglist monitoring. I don't know if it would help the barter system, though, since that relies on judging each trade opportunity.
Re: Teen Trades up on Craigslist from Phone to Porsche in 2 Years
#17One of the points that Charlie Munger makes in his talk on worldly wisdom (http://ycombinator.com/munger.html) is that good investors tend to bet heavily when the odds are grossly in their favor and not bet at all the rest of the time.
The teen in this story illustrates how consistent application of this principle yields good results.
This is also how Paul Graham operates YCombinator: he carefully evaluates all the investment opportunities that come his way and only bets on the few that seem to him to be particularly good deals.
More generally, the key to highly profitable business seems to be to focus on servicing profitable customers.
Re: Teen Trades up on Craigslist from Phone to Porsche in 2 Years
#18One of the points that Charlie Munger makes in his talk on worldly wisdom ( http://ycombinator.com/munger.html ) is that good investors tend to bet heavily when the odds are grossly in their favor and not bet at all the rest of the time. The teen in this story illustrates how consistent application of this principle yields good results. This is also how Paul Graham operates YCombinator: he carefully evaluates all the…
YCombinator's strategy is better described by Nassim Taleb's "Extremistan" parable. In Extremistan, most of your gains from stock investing happen from the few investments that make you a lot of money. So it's wise to distribute your investments over a large number of small investments, counting on the fact that your winners cover your expenses for your losers.
This is the opposite of the small number of large investment strategy.
Re: Teen Trades up on Craigslist from Phone to Porsche in 2 Years
#19I feel like this is a YC start up in the making. AirBNB = Couchsurfing/Craigslist rentals Daily Booth = The "Pic a Day" meme Along those lines a startup where people can trade their "junk" in a slightly competitive aspirational way. A more social eBay, based around local and some competitive game mechanics that reward big scores.
NotifyWire automates Craiglist monitoring. I don't know if it would help the barter system, though, since that relies on judging each trade opportunity.
I'm sure NotifyWire violates CL's terms of service.
Re: Teen Trades up on Craigslist from Phone to Porsche in 2 Years
#20Five hours a day at $10/hr for two years could have earned him $30,000 (5x10x600, i'm sure he was bartering during weekends too)
His car only worths $15,000.