81–90 of 165 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And that exactly is the problem. The game is rigged in favor of folks who already have access to information (or can afford to buy it), not available to regular folks. That is how billionaires double their billions faster than me essentially playing lottery/roulette with my $1000 on Robinhood.
There is probably a useful fact that you know that billionaires don't. It is probably local or related to your technical expertise. Peter Lynch famously researched companies by watching to see where his family spent pocket money. I recall reading analyses of trading performance by members of Congress -- they generally did about the same as everyone else except in companies associated with their districts. Anecdotally…
Well, the people working for Billionaires should be able to figure that out right?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> track flights to speculate on M&A, or use satellite and aerial imagery to look at parking lots This is very interesting, got any source or article? Thanks edit: found this https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/05/stock-v...
Can't remember off top of my head but if I'm not mistaken, Muddy Waters Research did similar things with a listed Chinese company: went all the way to China just to fimd out that there's not much going on in those warehouses,while they were reporting record resuls.Shorted the stock,made tons of money.
It's pretty interesting that FAANG doing venture capital is basically like legal insider trading. They clearly have data on web traffic, consumer usage, advertising spend, etc. that other VC firms and investors generally don't have access to. They can use this to understand entire markets, see who the incumbents are, estimate revenue/users, see who's up-and-coming, etc. Obviously within some margin of error. I wonder…
That’s what I thought they were doing with Oculus originally. Same with WhatsApp, then they started to commingle the branding.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Disclosure: I worked for WhatsApp, including while owned by Facebook, and Facebook is assigned my twoish [1] patents. Has Facebook done anything with their patents? I know they had an early spat with Yahoo and got access to a bunch to help with that, and have since put more effort into building a portfolio, but I don't recall seeing anything in the way of litigation. I know there's been issues with clauses in license…
I also have three identical seeming patents. I was also confused, so I asked my patent examiner friend, and this was his response. I assume the same applies to you: "You have one patent family with three patents in it. The lowest number is the parent, it was first to grant. Before it was granted a continuation was filed - they wanted to claim some shit that you disclosed in the parent but didn't claim, and it got gra…
> they wanted to claim some shit that you disclosed in the parent but didn't claim, and it got granted
Also, thanks to your friend!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not really insider trading. Matt Levine pops up here all the time, and one of the really distilled mantras he has: inside trading isn't about fairness , it's about theft . Like the people who track flights to speculate on M&A, or use satellite and aerial imagery to look at parking lots. Gathering information isn't a crime, in fact gathering and acting on that information is explicitly what you want at an aggre…
And that exactly is the problem. The game is rigged in favor of folks who already have access to information (or can afford to buy it), not available to regular folks. That is how billionaires double their billions faster than me essentially playing lottery/roulette with my $1000 on Robinhood.
No good co will actually take money from the incumbent they're trying to uproot
One of William Bernstein's Efficient Frontier articles summarises some research on this:
> In the December issue [of Journal of Finance] Jarred Harford found that cash-rich firms destroyed 7 cents of corporate value for every dollar of cash reserves held. How does this happen? Let’s take two firms, both of which are considering a project or acquisition of marginal value. The first firm is cash-poor, and must obtain the capital from a bank, or a stock or bond issuance. This necessitates scrutiny of the project from the outside. The second firm is cash-rich, and thus requires no outside scrutiny—they can simply cut a check. Clearly, the cash-rich company is much more likely to make this potentially unprofitable investment.
> Rajan, Servaes, and Zingales look at the performance of large conglomerates, and find that investment capital tends to flow most readily to its least productive divisions. The more highly diversified the company (i.e., the less related its component businesses) the more dramatic the effect. What is most interesting is that Harford's research found that cash-rich companies are more likely to make diversifying acquisitions—in other words, to turn them into the same companies that this paper shows are the least efficient.
> [...] the February JoF contains an absolute gem from La Porta, Lopez-de-Silanes, Shleifer, and Vishny on dividend policy around the globe. Their primary finding is that in so-called "civil law" countries, such as most of Latin America, Scandinavia, and southern Europe, where investor protection is the weakest, dividend payouts are low. In so-called "common law" countries—basically the world’s English-speaking nations, where investor protection is excellent—payouts are high. Which gets back to Graham’s basic premise; investors prefer dividends and take them whenever the law and culture allow. The authors reinforce the points made by Graham and the other pieces; "failure to disgorge cash leads to its diversion or waste, which is detrimental to outside shareholders’ interest."
> But what is most remarkable about this piece is its tone, which is almost Menckenesque in its description of modern corporate ethics. They describe a Hobbesian world in the kind of plain English rarely seen in academic finance; "Firms appear to pay out cash to investors because the opportunity to steal or misinvest it are in part limited by law, and because minority shareholders have enough power to extract it."