Saying “we gotta get Greenland” when the people in Greenland say they don’t want to join the US. Then refusing to rule out using force. If you want to say that no exact act of treachery has been committed, then substitute “treacherous words”, which also harms alliances.
Heads up on this media source: part of Hunterbrook's business model to give investment funds early access to the news, so they can trade ahead of it [1].
Now that is not to say that this story is false, or even that the business model is necessarily bad, I will leave that up to you to decide. But this media source has a different set of motivations than most readers are used to. You'll notice that the news is about two US companies that are easily shortable, DHI and LEN.
I agree that it is not economics, or at least that their argument about economics does not suffice.
This is not a challenge and I am genuinely curious to hear your perspective: in what way does Greece teach their youngest generation to not want to have children?
Would you mind continuing your tangent? I have a set of friends who really like Oster and I don’t know much about her. Feel free to email me (address is in my profile) if you don’t want to discuss in these comments.
You have the best post on this thread. One question, since you seem pretty knowledgable: I thought margin accounts were covered under SIPC? Can you send me a link on how with a margin account we are unsecured creditors? I found this one but it didn't really mention being unsecured:
https://www.sipc.org/for-investors/investor-faqs#how-are-mar...
I'd be pretty interested to see how cash account is treated differently; I couldn't find a better reference either. But one advantage over the coinbase situation is at least the margin account falls under SIPC.
The paper picks 1980 as the start year…interesting because the recent HN article about obesity-caused-by-contamination post also picked 1980:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27936016
Perhaps spurious, but could be seen as more evidence for the contamination theory, since depression and weight gain are correlated.
“ In seven days, the over 100 nuclear power reactors run out of emergency power and go Fukushima, spreading radioactive plumes over the most populous half of the United States. ”
I didn’t see in the article, but why can’t the nuclear power plants shut down well before they ‘go Fukushima’?
It is feasible, although I would be surprised if it something like this were at play. For one thing the other CEO Brown and Simons himself are on the opposite side of the political spectrum. That's not any guarantee but my point is that these organizations aren't monolithic...if there were geopolitical impacts hopefully someone would leak. But even if rentech were completely amoral, they probably still wouldn't do it just because the risk/reward asymmetry is too great. Sounds like it'd fall more to the FBI than SEC; much higher penalties. Too much of the rest of the business is profitable. These people have a lot to lose. And when hedge funds engage in bad behavior, it tends to look more like this [1]. Perfectly legal, yet still harming society, in my (less informed) opinion.
What keeps me up at night is not rentech but state actors, like you said, hostile foreign nations. They have the resources to pull it off and plenty of motivation...trading profits would just be icing on the cake, really.
Here's an amateur-level manipulation example you may find interesting [2]. Could rentech do this more subtly with 10x impact? Like I was saying, it may be feasible...still kinda doubt it. If this happens my guess it would be a fund that was no longer profitable, on it's way out, they have nothing left to lose, all this computing power laying around...
> their outsized gains are due to market manipulation, front running, or other insider activities (as in, illegal/unfair).
as a former insider at a different, less successful-than-rentec-but-still-successful firm, I doubt it. They have better data, technology, and employees than most other market participants. So then the question is how did they get there:
> No one is smart enough; no algorithm or model is future-proof
I agree with the sentiment, but the way it worked was in the early days, it was much easier for one person or a small team to get those advantages. Then, as the market matured and simple algorithms became less profitable, they made new, more complex ones. It became harder for new entrants to jump-start the whole process from scratch. Simons started rentech in 1982. Teleport that Simons to today and his fund probably wouldn't even get off the ground. He would still be a genius, but a billionaire? I don't think so. As you say, no one is smart enough. It was right place/right time, and they built on their advantages.
Seems like the "cure" comes when you get the sleep deprivation from waking up early, not staying up late. Well it's a little more complicated since they start with a day of total deprivation, but the days after are focused on waking up early. Something I might try.