Well, sometimes they only do stuff that should be illegal.
Superfast arbitrage, which is Jane Street's main thing as far as I understand, doesn't really produce anything of value to humanity. Yeah, I guess the contributions to OCaml are worth something, but maybe not 10 billion?
Jane Street is one of the slower market making firms and generates a significant share of revenue from being everywhere on everything (MUCH easier said than done). You want to trade some Canadian lumber ETF? Jane Street will be there. Some bond product with constituents that trade across 3 different trading sessions? Jane Street's active in that market. None of that is to say they don't have any presence in major products or don't have real short term alphas/edges of course.
They've never been at the forefront of latency games, like Jane Street isn't the firm sweeping equity markets since they have the fastest radio network out of CME (dubious value) or getting their quotes first-in-line every time.
They're not that good at arb. Real arb doesn't even really exist anymore. Even when it does, it's not JS that closes it. They market make, which is different.
well, running the financial system is overpaid work but it's the high-order bit in the current form of capitalism.
it's the operating system, some people might think it's a tax on everything, some people might think it provides the foundation to produce everything of value.
similarly, Google is the high-order-bit in the information or content economy, the creators get underpaid, the people who do ad optimization get overpaid.
no financial markets -> no IPOs -> no VC -> no Google and Silicon Valley as we know it.
the closer you are to the money and the transactions, and the high-order bit, the better the opportunities to redirect and organize to your advantage, and the more you get paid.
Well, Tether only needs to hold treasuries and collect quarterly interest payments. They don't need much staff, at least if they haven't looted the treasuries SBF style.
I would be happy to support a bailout of SVB in exchange for some reasonable concessions to American taxpayers.
1) Skin in the game - GPs of YC / a16z / Sequoia / Founders Fund / etc put in some equity in to a joint venture to acquire SVB's assets and make depositors whole. Government will backstop some portion of it.
2) YC / a16z / Sequoia / Founders Fund / etc agree to support ending the carried interest tax exemption
I know a bit about this industry and I have worked on some profitable systems. Honestly not a bad effort for someone working on their own with low-cost data. Don’t let the haters get you down. I would recommend you to pick up a more recent textbook on portfolio construction like Isichenko’s recent book.
Not quite. The market is pricing in a certain trajectory of rate hikes - basically another four 50bp increases with terminal rates around 2.5-3%. If inflation doesn’t start coming down that trajectory will change and the market will adjust accordingly.
my personal theory is that active management can still produce market-beating returns but the good active managers will rapidly grow their capital base to huge levels where they don't need much outside investment.
On the other hand - now we have a situation where most investment savings by individual investors are tracking passive indexes. But if everyone is indexing - what determines the relative weight of each stock in the index?
The answer is active investors. But with an increasingly smaller field of increasingly skilled investors (with more discretionary capital), we end up with the valuations of companies (and thus how societal time is allocated) competitively determined by a fierce prediction competition between the top active managers (Renaissance, DE Shaw, Citadel, etc).
I guess the big question how much active management is good. According to the article for funds it is now roughly 50%. I believe even 10% is plenty for market efficiency.
I was under the impression the relative weights are (often) simply proportional to their market cap. Afaict that's how that works for the sp500 at least.
Exactly, the relative weights are often proportional to the market cap. So if I invest $1M in the S&P that doesn't actually change the relative weights of the stocks in the index (mostly), since the impact on all of the underlying stock market caps should be roughly even as more money flows in to the stocks with higher market cap and smaller sums flow in to the stocks with lower market cap.
So in the case that say Meta's metaverse initiatives suddenly start taking off with the general population, it will take active investors to invest more in FB to increase FB's marketcap relative to the other stocks in the index so that passive investors are "correctly" allocating to stocks in proportion to their earnings potential.
Obviously there are some caveats here. Passive investors still have to choose an index to invest in, and inflows in to one narrow index (i.e. QQQ) will affect the weights of particular stocks in broader indexes. But the point stands that the relative marketcap ranking between stocks in the index is not affected much by in/outflows in to a particular index, and in some sense indexes are outsourcing their stock picking to active investors that actually try to accurately value individual stocks on an absolute and relative basis.
YC is not some magic fantasy organization. Like any other org you should probably discuss things your upset about internally with relevant stakeholders before complaining on Twitter. That said telling other people how to circumvent vaccine queues is clearly unethical and someone high up should have loudly squashed that immediately.
> someone high up should have loudly squashed that immediately
Both the posts about this were promptly removed by YC staff. (And I've just tried searching for any posts with vaccination advice, and there are none whatsoever.)
At least one of the posts didn't seem to be unethical (no lies were being told or rules being broken – though I don't know for sure, I don't live in the US and I haven't read the post myself). But it was still removed by YC staff.
I posted this to see if it would get upvoted. I was a bit surprised to come back and find it doing well, but not surprised it got flagged.
Did you know karma here is < 1/2 of the votes up on a submission, but downvotes on a comment seem to count about 1 to 1? At least I got some karma from it!
In regards to it being flagged, I suppose it's a questionable ethical practice to see the site flag an article about itself. I've made other self-interest related censorship observations here before and I guess the lesson is that those in control can do what they want, when they want.
I was listening to a podcast with Jason Sudeikis and he said that they specifically brought it up several times because they knew that later in the same episode they would be doing a riff on the Allen Iverson "we talking about practice" speech.
Damn, here I was thinking /u/DeepFuckingValue was winning by turning 53k into 13M, more than any of the jealous fucks here will make in their lifetime working their miserable engineering jobs and afraid to take any risks in life
I'm happy that guy did well. But one guy taking a negative expected value bet and winning big doesn't really help all the other little guys on WSB who got roped in to buying GME at 100+ today or might even be ITM on their calls but will get crushed by insane spreads, theta decay due to halts and don't have the capital to exercise.
I'm not spiteful of KG and the other people who are making the real money off all the crowds at the option casino, if anything I respect their shrewdness - Citadel prints insane money on these option premiums, and as a bonus KG gets to invest in Melvin at firesale prices and probably gets to extract insane terms.
As far as 'jealous fucks working miserable engineering jobs' - I think you might be projecting a bit there :)
>But one guy taking a negative expected value bet and winning big doesn't really help all the other little guys on WSB who got roped in to buying GME at 100+ today
I don't disagree with your post overall, but do want to give some credit to the particular user being discussed. He had a solid bull value thesis that was well thought out and not at all based on memes, with the short squeeze potential being a mere afterthought. He has a great youtube channel where he explains his thesis in-depth. While he posts occasionally on WSB he does not seem to fit the wild gambler image that WSB has.
I don't have enough experience or knowledge to speak intelligently on whether his play was actually negative or positive expected value but it was not a random gamble.
Just felt the need to throw this out there because with all the attention this is getting I've seen him unfairly (in my opinion) being grouped with the admittedly large amount of people who are essentially just gambling.
That guy bought and held GME since 2019 at ~$5 who yolo'd $53k with call options. Just one of many who took a diamond-handed bet on a lowly priced stock to be the 0.0001% of those who became multi-millionaires as soon as the short were squeezed up to $155 a share. Well played to that guy and others who didn't sell and got in very early.
As soon as it's reported on the news, for that stock at least it is probably too late to get in.
> more than any of the jealous fucks here will make in their lifetime working their miserable engineering jobs and afraid to take any risks in life
I'm afraid you're spot on. But I'm sure that some may say it is less risky to work at those FAANMG companies than it is to go all in your life-savings into meme stocks. (TSLA, GME, etc.)
On the other hand, building startups is also very risky, via the VC route or bootstrapped route. Depending IF you attract VCs to invest in it, its either you get acquired for >10x or IPO (might become a multi-m/billionaire), or you return their money or go completely bust.
Some play it safe whilst they watch others take risks.
Yea and Elon Musk made 170B. Meanwhile, the average HN user probably made somewhere around 200k. I made 1.3 million last year. I know it's not a lot because I know people several orders of magnitude richer than myself, but I also know that there are risks worth taking in life, and no one becomes Elon Musk, Ken Griffin, DeepFuckingValue or even myself by calmly working a desk job. You have to have balls to really succeed in life.
There's an argument to be made that it's not worth it, that you are happy enough with your low 6 figure existence, but the sentiment here clearly shows that's not the case. The sentiment here shows that people are not happy in their FANG and other engineering jobs, and they are in fact incredibly jealous of Musk, Griffin and the newly rich WSBers, and instead of admit that jealousy, they make up lies claiming that the WSBers aren't winning, when it's clear as day they are in this moment and big hedge funds are the losers.
I'm not saying WSB will continue to win, I think hedge funds will get their shit together and not get themselves into a GME-like position again in the near future. However, let's call a spade a spade while it lasts. DeepFuckingValue and his WSB brigade have scored a HUGE win, many becoming overnight multi-multi millionaires, and instead of bash them, why not celebrate them for a day.
Can’t upvote this enough. HN has turned to shambles over the years as people here are way more concerned with “getting out” than they are with building companies. It’s not surprising the place is a cesspool of jealousy whenever someone succeeds.
I’ve called them out on this shit years ago. It still hasn’t changed.
This seems like a case of randomness plus sample bias equals overgeneralization. In case of indignation, multiply by 10x.
Separately: Could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Tether made 4.5bn net income in Q1 2024 w/ probably <50 employees.