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Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

nytimes.com

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Re: Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

#31

Post by tuna-piano »

phasetransition wrote: post #25

I'm surprised that there's only around 150k people (other than me) who read the newsletter. I don't work in finance, always enjoy reading Matt, and often learn. To that end, if you don't subscribe to him and want a sample to consider joining the free newsletter, let me suggest his column "Arbitrage Discovered" from 2015: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2015-02-27/ar...

If you clicked to the comments and are debating reading more... here's a passage from the above link:

"So that leaves the option of Aviva settling with him. How much should he take in a settlement? Well, how much is his claim worth? Conservatively, I would ballpark it at an infinite amount of money."

Re: Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

#32

Post by bko »

tuna-piano wrote: post #15
rwmurrayVT wrote: post #9

My favorite columnist even when he wrote about me. He always takes the time to return my emails. His voice and wit always bring a bit of happiness to my day. I can't wait for him to return to writing and I hope he's enjoying his new kid. I actually met his wife when I was going through the SDNY. I was hoping to meet him, but the attorney did not recommend I talk to the "media".

Mind sharing (or linking to) the story of why he wrote ahout you?

Not OP, but Matt Levine "wrote about me" [0]. I made a Matt Levine insider trading game [1]. It was inspired by a Matt Levine article [2] where he mentioned how some professional traders had access to early earnings but even with that data, they were still highly inconsistent in their trade performance. The point was stock prices are notoriously difficult to predict even with early earnings.

So I made this app where you get early earnings and a graph of prior stock prices and you try to guess one of two paths (they were inverse of each other). Even with all of those myself (and Matt Levine) were correct about 50% of the time.

I emailed him and he actually told me he was worse than 50% , which seems like a good thing because then you could just do opposite of your initial guess and have a profitable strategy. He was very nice in his correspondence, although he didn't give me a heads up saying he was going to blast it out. It's a static site [3] so it wasn't a problem, nor do I really care too much. But it gave me the ultimate flex when another super-fan at work spotted it and spammed it out.

From the article.

> Elsewhere here is “Matt Levine’s Insider Trading Game,” though I actually have nothing to do with it.

[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-16/we-kep...

[1] https://insider-trading-game.netlify.app/

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-26/knowin...

[3] https://github.com/breeko/stox

Re: Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

#33

Post by rwmurrayVT »

tuna-piano wrote: post #15
rwmurrayVT wrote: post #9

My favorite columnist even when he wrote about me. He always takes the time to return my emails. His voice and wit always bring a bit of happiness to my day. I can't wait for him to return to writing and I hope he's enjoying his new kid. I actually met his wife when I was going through the SDNY. I was hoping to meet him, but the attorney did not recommend I talk to the "media".

Mind sharing (or linking to) the story of why he wrote ahout you?

Securities fraud. I have linked it below. There are a few other articles where I am mentioned in passing or via hyperlink.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-05-22/fitbit...

Re: Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

#34

Post by airstrike »

tuna-piano wrote: post #26

Thoughts: -I love reading Matt's stuff. The praise of his writing is totally deserving. -In my daily life there's rarely a topic I come across that I'm unable to understand. In an otherwise boring day full of mundane work tasks, his column gives me intellectual challenges that I really appreciate. -Matt's ability to understand and synthesize topics reflects incredibly highly on his intellect. I don't know anyone on W…

> -Matt's ability to understand and synthesize topics reflects incredibly highly on his intellect. I don't know anyone on Wall Street... is his level of intellect common among investment bankers and such there?

Investment banker here.. "Wall Street" is a pretty big concept, not unlike "Silicon Valley".

So in the best banks and the best groups, yes – I'd say he's among the very best, but there are plenty of similarly smart people around.

Having said that, I obviously have no insight into whether he was actually good at all the other things that make a great "banker". To stick to the same analogy, one can be a prolific coder but be absolutely terrible about writing docs and tests, keeping a sane git workflow, prioritizing, communicating, being a team player, etc.

Re: Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

#35

Post by JDEW »

tuna-piano wrote: post #31
phasetransition wrote: post #25

I'm surprised that there's only around 150k people (other than me) who read the newsletter. I don't work in finance, always enjoy reading Matt, and often learn. To that end, if you don't subscribe to him and want a sample to consider joining the free newsletter, let me suggest his column "Arbitrage Discovered" from 2015: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2015-02-27/ar...

If you clicked to the comments and are debating reading more... here's a passage from the above link: "So that leaves the option of Aviva settling with him. How much should he take in a settlement? Well, how much is his claim worth? Conservatively, I would ballpark it at an infinite amount of money."

And if you need _even more_ motivation after reading the above:

> Insurers were offering a product that paid you, when you died, the greater of (1) the amount you put in and (2) the return on some risky investment. So he'd buy two of those -- one long the risky investment, one short the risky investment -- and be guaranteed a big profit. The catch is you have to die, but he solved this by enlisting dying patients in AIDS hospices to put their names on the contracts.

This column truly is a classic.

Re: Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

#36

Post by Drip33 »

rwmurrayVT wrote: post #33
tuna-piano wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mind sharing (or linking to) the story of why he wrote ahout you?

Securities fraud. I have linked it below. There are a few other articles where I am mentioned in passing or via hyperlink. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-05-22/fitbit...

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20927197

> Also forfeiture doesn't account for the fact that you may have paid capital gains tax. I feel like they really shafted me on that one.

As someone also charged but not convicted, I learned hypothetically you also don't get to account for expenses if you lose. Meaning you could run a $10 billion gross revenue drug empire, it costs $9.9 billion to run so you walk away with $100m and you still have to pay $10 billion in forfeiture.

Re: Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

#37

Post by polote »

phasetransition wrote: post #25

I'm surprised that there's only around 150k people (other than me) who read the newsletter. I don't work in finance, always enjoy reading Matt, and often learn. To that end, if you don't subscribe to him and want a sample to consider joining the free newsletter, let me suggest his column "Arbitrage Discovered" from 2015: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2015-02-27/ar...

only 150k? that's seems like huge for something which is almost a niche. How many people subscribe to newsletters? on these people how many are interested about the opinion of one guy on the details of market finance?

Re: Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

#38

Post by FOMO_capital »

tuna-piano wrote: post #26

Thoughts: -I love reading Matt's stuff. The praise of his writing is totally deserving. -In my daily life there's rarely a topic I come across that I'm unable to understand. In an otherwise boring day full of mundane work tasks, his column gives me intellectual challenges that I really appreciate. -Matt's ability to understand and synthesize topics reflects incredibly highly on his intellect. I don't know anyone on W…

He went on Tyler Cowen's podcast

Re: Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

#39

Post by iav »

phasetransition wrote: post #25

I'm surprised that there's only around 150k people (other than me) who read the newsletter. I don't work in finance, always enjoy reading Matt, and often learn. To that end, if you don't subscribe to him and want a sample to consider joining the free newsletter, let me suggest his column "Arbitrage Discovered" from 2015: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2015-02-27/ar...

This doesn’t count the people who read the newsletter online or on the Bloomberg terminal (where I typically read it). I didn’t even know there was a newsletter till recently.

Re: Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

#40

Post by phasetransition »

iav wrote: post #39
phasetransition wrote: post #25

I'm surprised that there's only around 150k people (other than me) who read the newsletter. I don't work in finance, always enjoy reading Matt, and often learn. To that end, if you don't subscribe to him and want a sample to consider joining the free newsletter, let me suggest his column "Arbitrage Discovered" from 2015: https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2015-02-27/ar...

This doesn’t count the people who read the newsletter online or on the Bloomberg terminal (where I typically read it). I didn’t even know there was a newsletter till recently.

Oh right, I forget that the people in finance day to day are accessing via the terminal.
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