91–100 of 128 posts
The same people with large shorts in Wirecard like Chanos also have large shorts in Tesla. Just saying.
Chanos, the guy sitting on a bearish call against Tesla in November. The stock is up 200% since then. If Chanos were really betting to match his propaganda, he'd never work again after being destroyed like that.
If you have high conviction something is wrong then it doesn’t matter that it works the wrong way in the meantime.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's really interesting is seeing the same people sound the same alarms about extremely popular companies that continue to trade today , and yet our regulators, auditors, and journalists all ignore them. We really never learn. If I were a regulator I would be taking short seller statements extremely seriously when it comes from one of the proven reliable ones.
Though I can't speak for regulators and auditors, you have to keep in mind that 99% of journalists are just hired guns who's sights are specified ahead of time. Since no one with power had their sights on Wirecard, nothing happened - it's not unexpected.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd would rather say: a) Incompetence instead of curruption. Plus b) trust culture as entry-vector. a) It has been bemoaned on many instances regarding Germans and finance: We're just inapt when it comes to knowledge about finance. Teachers unions fight tooth and nail to keep finance and business acumen out of the curriculum. This (itself being rooted in culture) will have to bear fruit in some way or another. Eg. Ge…
> Eg. Germany has the lowest share of people invested in equities of all industrialized nations. Even with negative interest rates, people rather use savings accounts than "risky" products with yields above 2% That is mostly to be blamed on savings accounts being decent in interest until the 2008 financial crisis while at the same time, especially in the dotcom boom, a lot of money was destroyed in the stock markets.…
This model has never stopped. Equity markets have never really existed because they are competition with the banking system. And the banks are heavily supported by (or owned) government. They have always paid a rate significantly under market. Always.
Germans have the same median net wealth as Greeks and the highest level of wealth inequality in the world (bar China). This is part of the system. If savers take their money out of banks, it is over (and btw, most German banks are functionally insolvent...they were the biggest buyers in pretty much every meltdown in the past fifteen years).
Germany is a developed economy but it's financial markets/banking system is Chinese (unsurprising because China copied Japan and Japan copied Germany). Savers get utterly screwed, the wealthy are eating their lunch.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really enjoy Levine's stuff, but had to unsub from his newsletter because they are too long for me to keep up with.
and here we witness the death of journalism
A better approach would be to either pull a single paragraph from the full length piece, a TLDR type summary conclusion of the broader thought and hyperlink that clip to the expanded/full content on Bloomberg's site. This would result in my stayed subscription to the (truncated) newsletter, a higher open rate, and actual visits to their website (which the newsletter does not drive IMO). Cheers!
I was just listening to a podcast last night, in which a financial analyst who identified problems with Wirecard was harrassed for years, both online and IRL. Interesting story: https://www.npr.org/transcripts/868001948
It was on HN couple of days ago. Quite interesting even though I expected more info about the fraud in the podcast.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> there is almost no venture capital That's simply not true. There is a lot of VC but there aren't many good startups - because the best people are heading straight for SV instead of dealing with a second-rate environment and a second-rate (in IT) labor force.
The German venture market (USD 6B) is about the size of a second tier market like Los Angeles. MoneyTree says that SV investment In Q1 of 2020 was about 2X Germany’s total for last year. Not to mention that what gets invested in is mostly food delivery, shops and not particularly technical businesses (which are a very large investment sector in the US but aren’t considered “startups”. What gets written up in, say, Gr…
I don't know where that number comes from, but I'll assume it's the sum of investments and not the sum of capital available for investment since the latter is a bit hard to determine.
it baffles me that it had to come this far. There were warning signs all over it. The German BaFin messed up so badly that one must either fundamentally doubt theircompetence or question their integrity.
It's not a Germany specific problem. Warning signs all over tons of companies.
Most of silicon valley darlings are plastered with red flags all over. But financial regulators like SEC are unable/not willing to take an action against darlings of wall street.
The same people with large shorts in Wirecard like Chanos also have large shorts in Tesla. Just saying.
Tesla is probably over-valued, but not every over-valued company fails. Some (amazon, tesla, google) eventually back-fill value into their bubbles. IMHO it really comes down to how solid the business and its' operations are as a whole. As long as they aren't mis-spending any excess capital in horrible ways, they can definitely do well. Of course, I prefer to see more conservative approaches to growth and expenditures…
Of course, growth oriented companies fall flat on their face plenty of times, but for your Amazon's and Google's, with hindsight I don't think you can call them overvalued with the information we have now.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Define plenty? It seems to me the other commenters have offered counter points to you. In the US, before taxes, an income of $130,000 to $170,000 is the norm in bigger cities. I imagine based on my calculations that the difference between Berlin's discretionary income for SWE and NY/SF/SEA/BOS is probably an extra $50,000 post tax.
And what do you think do houses cost in Germany, compared to "bigger cities" in America? I know plenty of people in that income range myself who do own houses (or apartments in some cases) and wouldn't think of forgoing their summer vacation in Menorca or Ibiza. "The other commenters" is just one, and he's factually wrong. No matter how much HNers love to pile on, 50k Euros is a respectable income in most parts of Ge…
After an entire decade of working, this will only result in a best case scenario of $250,000 in savings, which, for my personal lifestyle is not going to work. I think collective action for higher wages is proper here.