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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

#111

Post by Ntrails »

davidivadavid wrote: post #83
eine_zwei wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reality is that media helps define what is normative and what is not. Describing bad behaviour and abuse of the law, without calling it out as bad, helps normalize it. Matt Levine's columns often goes one step beyond the "neutral way". They often describe them as cool ingenious schemes done by smart people.

They are cool ingenious schemes done by smart people — who sometimes happen to be criminals. That's why people watch heist movies and play GTA, too. Not sure Matt Levine has the power to change what is perceived as cool by western culture.

When he talks about the bankruptcy/CDS/default shennanigans (eg Hedge fund offers bailout to avoid default in exchange for ophaning credit etc), he does not take a stance on right and wrong.

Why? Both sides of the game are Informed. This isn't screwing over the dentist, it is fund A outthinking funds B and C. Is it a social good? Don't know, nor does he (seemingly). So why bother pretending

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

#112

Post by srckinase123 »

Is it worthwhile to read Matt Levine's newsletter, even if someone doesn't even have a rudimentary grasp on finance/economics? I've tried reading excerpts but they just went over my head. Would it be more useful to get a basic understanding of finance before reading his newsletter? There is so much terminology that is foreign to me.

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

#113

Post by SaffronTools »

neplus wrote: post #68
airstrike wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> -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…

Matt's said before that he reached a certain point at GS where he was expected to get more involved in sales, as opposed to just the structuring side of his desk, and felt he was quite bad at it. Probably quite a bit of self depreciation on Matt's part though given that when he decided to quit his boss essentially said, "Why don't you just, you know, take some time off to think about it?" I'd say someone with Matt's…

You have to be smart to trade flow derivatives. Not only is it necessary to understand the product and pricing tools, but also you have less time to examine any given trade than your customer does, you have to deal with weird correlations and dispersions that were forced upon you by customers, your social skills and sixth/"I'm getting played" sense are just as much a part of your toolkit as are your math skills, and you aren't given too much leeway with mark-to-market p&l.

You probably noticed at GS that a risk desk won't put an employee in front of a book just because he got good grades at UPenn.

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

#114

Post by swyx »

o_class_star wrote: post #90
swyx wrote: post #3

from this profile, Matt is very probably underpaid vs his earning potential (probably at least an order of magnitude) and should leave to substack or his own operation. but I respect that money really isn't everything.

How lucrative is substack?

their top 10 all make at least 7 figures a year and Matt would almost certainly be a top 10 writer

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

#115

Post by smogcutter »

titanomachy wrote: post #109
smogcutter wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dot after the TLD represents the root domain. From right to left, URLs read from least to most specific. Root -> TLD -> domain -> subdomain (eg www). The root domain is almost always left out, because it’s always the same and its presence is implied. But if you include it explicitly, it is a distinct URL. So idk how bloomberg.com works under the hood so I can’t specifically explain this case, but rules that match…

New to me and I've been programming web for quite a while. I've only ever seen that final "." in DNS records, it never occured to me that it would affect logic within the site.

You know what’s also missing if you go to bloomberg.com./? All of the ads, and the animated stock ticker. I’m on mobile so didn’t dig into it further, but I bet that all JS loaded on request from another domain (probably including the paywall) is absent or broken.

The site itself loads fine though, because DNS still works and whatever routing layer in their app probably doesn’t care about the domain, just the path that follows it.

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

#117

Post by iso8859-1 »

titanomachy wrote: post #109
smogcutter wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dot after the TLD represents the root domain. From right to left, URLs read from least to most specific. Root -> TLD -> domain -> subdomain (eg www). The root domain is almost always left out, because it’s always the same and its presence is implied. But if you include it explicitly, it is a distinct URL. So idk how bloomberg.com works under the hood so I can’t specifically explain this case, but rules that match…

New to me and I've been programming web for quite a while. I've only ever seen that final "." in DNS records, it never occured to me that it would affect logic within the site.

It shouldn't. It is the fault of hacky protocols like HTTPS that conflate routing with identity. If we had DNSSEC and IPSEC from the beginning, it wouldn't have been necessary to do it on application level.

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

#118

Post by TehShrike »

srckinase123 wrote: post #112

Is it worthwhile to read Matt Levine's newsletter, even if someone doesn't even have a rudimentary grasp on finance/economics? I've tried reading excerpts but they just went over my head. Would it be more useful to get a basic understanding of finance before reading his newsletter? There is so much terminology that is foreign to me.

I have found it to be useful, in the sense that immersing myself in something that I can just barely grasp part of is a good way for me to work my way into a field.

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

#119

Post by phreack »

srckinase123 wrote: post #112

Is it worthwhile to read Matt Levine's newsletter, even if someone doesn't even have a rudimentary grasp on finance/economics? I've tried reading excerpts but they just went over my head. Would it be more useful to get a basic understanding of finance before reading his newsletter? There is so much terminology that is foreign to me.

It was actually my first contact with 'real' finance. I started reading Money Stuff and just accepting that I wouldn't get most of it at first yet enjoying what I did get, and suddenly after a while I was looking up stuff on Investopedia and at some point, I realized I had actually learned lots of the basics and understanding all of the articles. I'm even thinking of studying it formally after the pandemic.

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

#120

Post by sk5t »

titanomachy wrote: post #109
smogcutter wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The dot after the TLD represents the root domain. From right to left, URLs read from least to most specific. Root -> TLD -> domain -> subdomain (eg www). The root domain is almost always left out, because it’s always the same and its presence is implied. But if you include it explicitly, it is a distinct URL. So idk how bloomberg.com works under the hood so I can’t specifically explain this case, but rules that match…

New to me and I've been programming web for quite a while. I've only ever seen that final "." in DNS records, it never occured to me that it would affect logic within the site.

The trailing "." becomes practically important if you have a client that believes in DNS search suffixes (yuck!). I imagine it might have some effect in this particular case if the user-agent includes the dot in the "Host" HTTP request header and it thus evades some non-canonicalizing layer of Bloomberg's paywall thing, while still being a perfectly okay request to the rest of the chain.
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