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Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other

nytimes.com

61–70 of 199 posts

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

#61

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...

Did it really happen as he describes it? I.e. he wrote about a fraud scheme and you went "hey good idea I'm gonna do that too"? Or was there more to it? :-)

Feel free to not respond or anything, not trying to get you to incriminate yourself or whatever, I'm just nosy.

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

#62

One of the perks of working at Bloomberg is being able to read his (and Noah Smith’s) columns for free :D.

The newsletters are free by e-mail too. You can take those and run them through an e-mail to RSS service and pop that feed in your RSS reader.

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

#63
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is a very cool app, but one thing I'm noticing is that you aren't providing any numbers about expectations (expected earnings/share, etc). Stock prices are forward projections, so it's less about how much money made/lost and more about how much money made/lost beyond current expectations. And this is certainly information a real insider trader would have.

Perhaps that would improve players results?

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

#64
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the most you could lose is whatever margin you made, that wouldn't be much of an incentive to not do that in the first place and it would be quite a broken system.

What I wrote about is forfeiture which doesn't include criminal penalties. Most of the American (which I am not) federal press releases I read about have a maximum $250,000 fine per count. Here is a random press release from justice.gov https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/six-additional-individuals-in... >The Sherman Act offense charged carries a statutory maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine for in…

That makes sense, thanks for educating me :)

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

#68

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…

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 background and general mannerisms - even at GS where eccentricity and raw intellect, for lack of better descriptors, are traditionally valued - would be a significant outlier.

I worked at GS and I think the only people that fit the Levine mold were in weird structuring desks, like Matt was. In particular, PFI had quite a few characters that remind me of Matt. Ali Meli, who left GS recently and was written up by Bloomberg, comes to mind. Clearly intellectually above others with weird, interesting perspectives on things. Also given leash to go dream up and do weird and interesting things.

I don't think people like Matt actually have much value add in most areas of a modern investment bank, unfortunately. As Matt says: banking is boring now. I don't see how someone like Matt would succeed is traditional banking - or a flow trading desk - over the "average" GS employee who studied finance at Wharton or whatever. Most areas of banking strike me as having become very commoditized or routinized and outliers are viewed as more apt to cause tail risk than anything.

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

#69

Agree with all the praise. However, reading him long enough, I started to get annoyed with the blase approach to the Wall Street(tm) transgressions. I do not think it is a case of pandering to your audience. The following quote (about his time in Dealbreaker) captures it perfectly: >Part of the problem was that he couldn’t really access a contempt for Wall Street titans. He was of the place, and he found its workings…

I think it's a resignation to cynicism. It's hard to be angry 24/7. I used to work in a "___-tech" area that I dislike from a moral perspective now, and it's not healthy for anyone, let alone yourself, to be openly angry about it all the time. So, instead, I follow the industry a bit and am mostly resigned to the inevitability of more disappointing news.

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

#70

Agree with all the praise. However, reading him long enough, I started to get annoyed with the blase approach to the Wall Street(tm) transgressions. I do not think it is a case of pandering to your audience. The following quote (about his time in Dealbreaker) captures it perfectly: >Part of the problem was that he couldn’t really access a contempt for Wall Street titans. He was of the place, and he found its workings…

I enjoy his column particularly because he talks about all of this scheming and maneuvering in a straightforward and neutral way.

I can decide for myself if something is immoral or offensive or whatever, I don’t need my news sources to decide that for me.

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