everybody knows that any 37signals blog post is part of their PR strategy. ( no, wait, this time its different..)
And then the music stopped
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Re: And then the music stopped
#32If you have strong thoughts on this, consider contributing to this related question on Quora as well: http://www.quora.com/Venture-Capital/Why-do-people-care-abou...
Re: And then the music stopped
#33I'm sure I'll burn karma, but let me say it again: there are companies out there generating real, long term value, but the HN news stream ignores most of them.
A perfect example is Guidewire, the company I worked for previously, which is up nearly double its IPO price and is rocking the earnings, which has been voted the best place to work in Silicon Valley for two straight years, and which has contributed a JVM language back to the community, but which is in an unsexy industry (insurance, enterprise software.)
Re: And then the music stopped
#34"So between just these three, some $40 billion has been extracted from pension funds and other last-sucker-in-line investors." This is incorrect, David takes the change in market cap and then equates that to losses in pension funds. But this does not represent the state of affairs because when companies go public they don't put all of their stock on the market, rather they put a small percentage of the company on the…
...and it isn't 2000 again, and it isn't newsworthy.
Well to the extent that a great many people seem to believe that this current boom is nothing like the dot-com era boom, perhaps it is.
Re: And then the music stopped
#35"So between just these three, some $40 billion has been extracted from pension funds and other last-sucker-in-line investors." This is incorrect, David takes the change in market cap and then equates that to losses in pension funds. But this does not represent the state of affairs because when companies go public they don't put all of their stock on the market, rather they put a small percentage of the company on the…
GRPN, FB, or ZNGA
Yuri Millner.
Re: And then the music stopped
#36Plenty of people were warning about Groupon and Zynga being unsustainable businesses BEFORE they went IPO, and I have no sympathy for those that played that risky game. It's disingenuous to be outraged about those two stocks being below the IPO price when it was a common sentiment before they went IPO. Facebook is actually a real business, making $1B/quarter in revenue. Maybe they should have went IPO at $8 and allow…
Your last line is interesting and seems like a useful line of discussion to come out of this otherwise PR-laden exercise. Is there somewhere that you could elaborate on the evidence and suggest alternatives? You'd have at least one reader.
I guess I'll start with a rebuttal. The stock market is a great place to invest if you understand a couple things:
* The market is high risk, people have lost half their life savings in it. You should know how to balance that risk with your needs. With risk comes high reward, the stock market tends to average much higher returns than lower risk investments.
* You will never know as much about individual companies as institutional investors and hedge fund analysts. These guys have the CEO's cell phone number and invest billions of dollars. But their analysis is priced into the current value of stocks; consider this a free service they are providing you.
My advice is to invest only your savings you won't need for at least 20 years. Invest in funds that average your risk across many companies (e.g. s&p 500 index funds) and avoid funds with high fees.
The stock market is an opportunity to own a small part of a large chunk of the economy. It's economically liberating to people who are willing to educate themselves on it, and a dangerous trap to those who don't. The fact that in 30 seconds I can spend 50 dollars and own a small part of the 500 largest companies in the USA is a modern marvel.
Re: And then the music stopped
#37Plenty of people were warning about Groupon and Zynga being unsustainable businesses BEFORE they went IPO, and I have no sympathy for those that played that risky game. It's disingenuous to be outraged about those two stocks being below the IPO price when it was a common sentiment before they went IPO. Facebook is actually a real business, making $1B/quarter in revenue. Maybe they should have went IPO at $8 and allow…
Your last line is interesting and seems like a useful line of discussion to come out of this otherwise PR-laden exercise. Is there somewhere that you could elaborate on the evidence and suggest alternatives? You'd have at least one reader.
Thanks for the encouragement. If I decide to post something, I'll let you know. :)
Re: And then the music stopped
#38Selective bias in action. LinkedIn also debuted and is far from a flop and its too early to call demise of Facebook.
Sigh, SVN used to a blog about the small guy, the startup people and advice from the trenches. Its sad to see it deteriorate into banal arguments without any merit.
Re: And then the music stopped
#39This is a typical anti-finance rant, with no substence. The only thing that would have made it worse would be a blantently political statement any of the parties. So between just these three, some $40 billion has been extracted from pension funds and other last-sucker-in-line investors. While, in the process, soured many on the idea of the public markets and enriched investment bankers hawking the toxic stocks. Hey,…
>This is a typical anti-finance rant, with no substence. The only thing that would have made it worse would be a blantently political statement any of the parties.
Because finance in itself is something like nature, and not at all political and ideological, right?
Re: And then the music stopped
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your last line is interesting and seems like a useful line of discussion to come out of this otherwise PR-laden exercise. Is there somewhere that you could elaborate on the evidence and suggest alternatives? You'd have at least one reader.
I guess I'll start with a rebuttal. The stock market is a great place to invest if you understand a couple things: * The market is high risk, people have lost half their life savings in it. You should know how to balance that risk with your needs. With risk comes high reward, the stock market tends to average much higher returns than lower risk investments. * You will never know as much about individual companies as…
I recommend the book "Dark Pools" by Scott Patterson[1]. It is an account of how traders beat each other by microseconds to get an order in, and can find and exploit every possible way they can in order to get an advantage.
There is (perhaps) no way a human can compete in the stock market any more. This is the age of AI, where computers are pushing around billions of dollars in an automated fashion. Taking every arbitrage advantage in milliseconds, and are even able to find under- and over-valued stocks in the blink of an eye.
[1]http://www.amazon.ca/Dark-Pools-High-Speed-Traders-Financial...