[HN Gopher] Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other
___________________________________________________________________
Matt Levine makes sense of Wall Street like none other
Author : piker
Score : 524 points
Date : 2020-10-09 08:16 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| maverickJ wrote:
| Levine's articles are very educational and interesting at the
| same time.
|
| He uses a style that sometimes takes an obscure and bland topic
| to become very interesting; Thereby making the reader interested
| in the topic.
|
| That he has done this consistently over a period shows the mettle
| of the man.
|
| Reading through his early career background leaves clues to his
| current success. It reminds me of how Jamie Dimon went about his
| early career in https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/early-
| career-tactics...
|
| I can't wait to see what he writes about once he comes back from
| paternity leave.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| There's a "how to draw an owl" meme at this part:
|
| > When Dimon finished from Harvard Business School in 1982, he
| placed a call to Sanford Weill, then chairman of the executive
| committee of American Express, to ask for advice.
| supernova87a wrote:
| I especially liked his column about the college admissions
| scandal, and it wasn't that it was unfair, it was that it was
| _theft_. Theft from the colleges. Because you know, they already
| sell their admissions:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-03-13/you-ha...
|
| _Here is one thing that U.S. Attorney Andrew Lelling said in
| announcing the charges:
|
| "There can be no separate college admissions system for the
| wealthy, and I'll add that there will not be a separate criminal
| justice system either."
|
| Level playing field! Here is another thing he said less than a
| minute later:
|
| "We're not talking about donating a building so that a school's
| more likely to take your son or your daughter. We're talking
| about deception and fraud."
|
| There can be no separate college admissions system for the
| wealthy, except for the extremely well-known one where you donate
| a building in exchange for getting your kid in! "Lol just donate
| a building like a real rich person," the U.S. Attorney almost
| said._
| xyzzyz wrote:
| This is a good example of what corruption in America looks
| like.
|
| America enjoys a reputation of being a rather non-corrupt
| country. To large degree, this is true: bribing scandals are
| rare, and most Americans would be completely aghast at the idea
| of passing an envelope under the table to the official who is
| responsible for issuing building permits.
|
| Instead, the corruption in the US operates through completely
| transparent and legal means. Instead of cash-filled envelopes,
| you see campaign contributions, board seats, consulting jobs
| for children, and, yes, donations to designated causes. All of
| this is just How Things Are Done, and people are so used to
| them that they no longer even consider it corruption.
| dash2 wrote:
| Actually, among developed countries the US has a relatively
| high corruption level, I believe. (Insert many caveats about
| how difficult corruption is to measure.)
| arcticbull wrote:
| America ranks 23rd on the Perception of Corruption Index.
| Australia, Canada and the UK are 12th, and New Zealand 1st.
| [1]
|
| [1] https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi
| OJFord wrote:
| How much did it pay for that privilege?
| iancoleman wrote:
| One group that measures corruption (I'm sure there are
| many) is freedomhouse.org
|
| They rate USA 3/4 for corruption (Section C2 [0])
|
| Comparing other similar nations for corruption
|
| Australia 4/4 Canada 4/4 New Zealand 4/4 United Kingdom 4/4
|
| [0] https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-states/freedom-
| world...
| adewinter wrote:
| They rate USA 75% for corruption, and the (ex) British
| colonies as 100% for corruption. What does that mean? Is
| literally every single transaction in those places
| corrupt? "Out of 4" seems like a very poor way of doing
| this kind or rating.
| coderintherye wrote:
| Higher score is better. 4/4 is best.
|
| Compare vs. China
| https://freedomhouse.org/country/china/freedom-world/2020
| [deleted]
| baby wrote:
| The fact that lobbyism is legal is telling.
| bambax wrote:
| He's one of the very best writers out there, really. Witty, funny
| and to the point. (The whole WeWork affair was totally
| hilarious.) I hope he returns soon!
| eine_zwei wrote:
| 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 genuinely interesting.
|
| I am in the industry.
|
| It's a missed opportunity, IMHO. It is easy to dismiss some
| uniformed politician criticizing your industry norms. Much harder
| when it's coming from someone who clearly understand what is
| going on.
| o_class_star wrote:
| He's brilliant, and he explains complex concepts really well.
|
| I can't fault him for being a bit "over-neutral", for lack of a
| better way to put it. It's how economists are trained to
| express themselves and, more importantly, I don't think he'd
| ever get a fawning piece written about him by the fNYT if he
| took the approach of, say, a certain other gifted writer whose
| name cannot be spoken here.
| ayewo wrote:
| Now I'm dead curious as to who you are referring to: "I don't
| think he'd ever get a fawning piece written about him by the
| fNYT if he took the approach of, say, a certain other gifted
| writer whose name cannot be spoken here."
|
| You are already using a throwaway, so mind revealing?
| munchbunny wrote:
| 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.
| avalys wrote:
| 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.
| kokey wrote:
| I also think he approaches this like a lawyer, where what is
| right and wrong is constantly evolving and people are always
| testing the limits of it. People will keep on finding
| surprising ways to try beat the system, the system will
| always try new ways to prevent it but those ways will have
| unintended consequences. I think this has to be interesting
| to you if you want to have a good grasp of it.
| eine_zwei wrote:
| 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.
| jrumbut wrote:
| I guess it's hard to infer tone in a newsletter, I always
| saw his descriptions as a use of understatement to really
| draw out how evil some of these things were or in other
| cases to pass over the small time crook and focus on the
| systemic issues.
|
| I can see it the other way too though, now that you mention
| it.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| 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.
| Ntrails wrote:
| 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
| civilized wrote:
| You realize there's a difference between "the media does
| (attempt to) define norms" and "the media should define
| norms", right?
| yborg wrote:
| I actually find his approach illustrative - even those in the
| business not inclined to completely disregard the intent behind
| any rules think of the whole enterprise as a great game divided
| into competitors and civilians, who are mostly just collateral
| damage in these contests. There is also a general acceptance of
| the idea that anything not forbidden is compulsory - if someone
| gets around the rules to do something others outside the game
| might consider unethical, then that is the fault of the
| rulemakers for not being clever enough to write the rules well
| enough, and in fact it is incumbent upon the players to expose
| such loopholes. Because leaving money on the table is really
| the only sin on Wall Street.
|
| As a civilian it's important to understand this mindset when
| dealing with the financial industry at any level because if you
| don't, you're going to be on the short end of the things Matt
| writes about.
| Mvandenbergh wrote:
| On the other hand, is there a lack of writing about finance
| with lots of contempt and anger? Matt Taibbi may not be an
| insider in the way that Levine is but he (and others) often
| manage to be fairly well informed and they are certainly
| contemptuous and angry.
|
| I also wonder if to understand is not, in some inevitable
| sense, to forgive? Is it really possible to fully understand on
| an emotional level how a quant trader feels when they spot an
| arbitrage opportunity and be angry about it?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Matt Taibbi is not at the same level as Matt Levine. He is
| writer first, analyst second.
| wp381640 wrote:
| Taibbi also has zero sense of humour - like when he
| reported that a trader was exchanging insider LIBOR tips
| for day-old sushi not realising it was obviously meant in
| jest:
|
| https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-
| news/everythi...
| gregdale wrote:
| It's a very finance culture approach, though, where the bounds
| of what's in and out are tested constantly by what
| (knowledgeable, ideally) participants, compliance departments,
| and regulators are willing to tolerate. Many banks were highly
| criticized after the financial crisis for selling "knowingly
| toxic" CDO/CLOs but on the other side of the trade were highly
| sophisticated buyers who wanted those securities.
| pydry wrote:
| They hacked the ratings system. There were pension funds who
| saw AAA rated garbage with apparently high returns and
| thought "woohoo!"
|
| Theres a really book called traders, guns and money that goes
| into the details on this.
|
| When the government started going after the ratings companies
| they downgraded US bonds (as if the US would ever default...)
| tempsy wrote:
| The irony is that technology journalists always seem very
| defensive when it comes to not having industry experience, yet
| Levine is a perfect example of a journalist who is good at what
| he does _because_ he was in the finance industry.
| throwawgler87 wrote:
| Really enjoyed this, hasn't heard of him before. Just subscribed
| to his newsletter. Thanks for posting!
| basseq wrote:
| You may have gotten this from other comments, but he is on
| leave right now, so you'll have to wait a little longer before
| you start getting those juicy daily musings.
| davidw wrote:
| I think there is a direct correlation between patio11 reading
| this guy, and the liberal use of 'material' in his writing :-)
| srckinase123 wrote:
| 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.
| TehShrike wrote:
| 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.
| exolymph wrote:
| Yes, if you read it consistently you'll pick up a lot, even
| without preexisting knowledge. Google what you don't understand
| and the next issue will make more sense :)
| phreack wrote:
| 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.
| procrastinatus wrote:
| Who is the Matt Levine of other fields (e.g. law, medicine,
| etc.)?
|
| I believe there was a thread on twitter about this, but can't
| find it anymore.
| phasetransition wrote:
| I'm surprised that there's only around 150k people (other than
| me) who read the newsletter. I don't work in finance, always
| enjoy reading Matt, and often learn.
|
| To that end, if you don't subscribe to him and want a sample to
| consider joining the free newsletter, let me suggest his column
| "Arbitrage Discovered" from 2015:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2015-02-27/ar...
| polote wrote:
| only 150k? that's seems like huge for something which is almost
| a niche. How many people subscribe to newsletters? on these
| people how many are interested about the opinion of one guy on
| the details of market finance?
| Nimitz14 wrote:
| Dude matt levine is a legend. I think that despite having no
| connection with the finance industry.
| dcolkitt wrote:
| I thought something similar. Just to contextualize that
| number the LA Times only has 170 thousand digital
| subscribers.
| OJFord wrote:
| And almost all of them in LA, even with a bias from it
| being digital so that's how you get it if you want it
| outside of LA.
|
| Compared to Levine, who has me, in the UK, as a subscriber.
|
| He has a way bigger potential audience than the LA Times.
| petercooper wrote:
| If you mean email newsletters generally, my own biggest is
| 172k but I know folks like The Skimm or the Morning Brew run
| into low millions of subs. A lot of it is down to how
| valuable and targeted the audience is and this guy is clearly
| winning on that front.
| tuna-piano wrote:
| If you clicked to the comments and are debating reading more...
| here's a passage from the above link:
|
| "So that leaves the option of Aviva settling with him. How much
| should he take in a settlement? Well, how much is his claim
| worth? Conservatively, I would ballpark it at an infinite
| amount of money."
| JDEW wrote:
| And if you need _even more_ motivation after reading the
| above:
|
| > Insurers were offering a product that paid you, when you
| died, the greater of (1) the amount you put in and (2) the
| return on some risky investment. So he'd buy two of those --
| one long the risky investment, one short the risky investment
| -- and be guaranteed a big profit. The catch is you have to
| die, but he solved this by enlisting dying patients in AIDS
| hospices to put their names on the contracts.
|
| This column truly is a classic.
| iav wrote:
| This doesn't count the people who read the newsletter online or
| on the Bloomberg terminal (where I typically read it). I didn't
| even know there was a newsletter till recently.
| phasetransition wrote:
| Oh right, I forget that the people in finance day to day are
| accessing via the terminal.
| bko wrote:
| You can also access the Bloomberg website and disable
| javascript and the article will load. Most adblockers have
| a disable javascript for this page feature
| quickthrowman wrote:
| You can also add a '.' after the TLD to bypass the block
| for any Bloomberg article:
| https://www.bloomberg.com./path-to-article
| pandalicious wrote:
| that's amazing, do you know why it works?
| smogcutter wrote:
| 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 URLs
| won't necessarily see the two versions as identical. This
| is actually something worth testing your own sites
| against, to make sure including the root domain doesn't
| do something dumb like bypass authentication or whatever.
|
| Edit: also, forgive me if I'm explaining things you
| already know w/ regard to the root domain and stuff.
| wonnage wrote:
| This is 50% of the reason, the other half is that all the
| tracking/ad requests hit an API endpoint on bloomberg.com
| (no dot at the end), which is now a separate origin as
| far as the same-origin policy is concerned. But the code
| is not expecting this to be the case, and doesn't set any
| CORS headers on the response, and the browser denies
| access to the response data.
|
| This breaks the ads but also breaks any interactive
| charts, etc. that need data from the API.
| titanomachy wrote:
| I tried it and it only gives me a separate counter (i.e.
| 3 free articles on "bloomberg.com." in addition to the
| ones on "bloomberg.com".) This makes me suspect local
| storage or cookies.
| titanomachy wrote:
| 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.
| sk5t wrote:
| 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.
| smogcutter wrote:
| 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.
| seppler wrote:
| I once got a verbal C&D from a Novell web dev because
| they answered to any domain and I pointed (as a joke) a
| domain to their IP. Google ended up indexing, and
| customers were asking what 'reallystrangedomain.com' was
| when they searched for Novell error messages.
|
| They asked me to stop 'mirroring' their content, and
| didn't understand I was just pointing my domain to their
| servers. I stopped, but part of me didn't want to.
|
| Edit: Looks like archive.org picked it up: http://web.arc
| hive.org/web/20110623134639/http://thebergenef...
| iso8859-1 wrote:
| 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.
| AgentME wrote:
| The browser's same-origin-policy would still exist the
| same way without HTTPS.
| boogies wrote:
| (Also, I believe all normal browsers allow disabling
| javascript in the devtool settings -- my adblocker
| doesn't because it's just /etc/hosts.)
| tc313 wrote:
| An easy way to do this on iOS Safari is to "Show Reader
| View" after clicking on any Bloomberg article.
| sails wrote:
| Hope they don't see this.
| swyx wrote:
| they almost certainly already know this and dont care
| r00fus wrote:
| You can even set Safari to automatically go into reader
| mode for all websites (I do this, then whitelist the
| sites/webapps). 9 times out of 10 this is much more
| readable and is darkmode by default.
| jdminhbg wrote:
| You can also set reader mode automatically for just
| certain websites instead (i.e. whitelist vs blacklist); I
| do this for Bloomberg, Medium, WaPo, and others.
| sabana wrote:
| How does one sign up for his free newsletter?
| humanlion87 wrote:
| Just as an FYI, he is on parental leave right now. So the
| newsletter is in pause mode for a few months.
| [deleted]
| perseusprime11 wrote:
| http://link.mail.bloombergbusiness.com/join/4wm/moneystuff-s.
| ..
| sabana wrote:
| Thank you!
| nojito wrote:
| https://www.bloomberg.com/account/newsletters
| sabana wrote:
| Thank you!
| tuna-piano wrote:
| 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 Wall
| Street... is his level of intellect common among investment
| bankers and such there?
|
| -He was valedictorian at Harvard and became a public high school
| teacher after!?
|
| -Apparently MoneyStuff has 150,000 subscribers, the total
| income+power of which is gigantic (multiple billionaire readers
| along with presumably many thousands of high 6-7 figure readers).
| But yet they don't seem to do much at all of monetizing it
| (there's an easily bypassed Bloomberg paywall and a tiny ad in
| the text of the email newsletter).
|
| -I would really love a weekly Matt Levine podcast. But sadly I
| don't think we'll ever get that.
| heartbreak wrote:
| His level of intellect is pretty common at Wachtell. Those
| people are _sharp._ Levine worked there as an associate out of
| law school.
| FOMO_capital wrote:
| He went on Tyler Cowen's podcast
| thedufer wrote:
| > -I would really love a weekly Matt Levine podcast. But sadly
| I don't think we'll ever get that.
|
| I don't know that you do. I've found him to be a much better
| writer than speaker - the content was similar (brilliant,
| funny, interesting, etc) but his spoken delivery simply isn't
| very good, and where do you put a footnote in a podcast?
| jskdvsksnb wrote:
| The Bloomberg website is 100% a vanity/halo project that makes
| Bloomberg (the man) and Bloomberg (the company) seem relevant.
| The terminal business is such a cash cow that they can easily
| afford to bankroll journalism to maintain their brand and
| mindshare.
| airstrike wrote:
| > -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 smart
| people around.
|
| Having said that, I obviously have no insight into whether he
| was actually good at all the other things that make a great
| "banker". To stick to the same analogy, one can be a prolific
| coder but be absolutely terrible about writing docs and tests,
| keeping a sane git workflow, prioritizing, communicating, being
| a team player, etc.
| neplus wrote:
| 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.
| airstrike wrote:
| Thanks for the insight. My perspective is from the M&A side
| which can be a little bit different / less boring (or at
| least I like to tell myself so)
| SaffronTools wrote:
| 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.
| whatok wrote:
| > -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?
|
| Intelligence is 100% absolutely not a prerequisite but anyone
| who rises above a certain level in finance has to be talented
| at something. At a bank that's likely to be either sales or
| politics.
| Spinnaker_ wrote:
| I'm sitting in a large room filled with bloomberg terminals,
| each costing 2k a month. MoneyStuff isn't monetized much
| directly, but plays into the larger business plan.
|
| I too would love that podcast.
| pratik661 wrote:
| One of the perks of working at Bloomberg is being able to read
| his (and Noah Smith's) columns for free :D.
| matthewmcg wrote:
| 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.
| alelos wrote:
| I use this feed with my reader: https://www.bloomberg.com/opi
| nion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...
|
| It was working up until he went on his parental leave, I
| expect it to get updates when he is back.
| h1srf wrote:
| One of the perks of my employer paying ~$3k a month for my
| Bloomberg subscription as well.
|
| That and the other few times a month I need to check some data.
| saltmeister wrote:
| posted on Toilet Paper Record and "makes sense of Wall Street"?
| My ass
| monadic2 wrote:
| Man I love it when the NyTimes covers such brave and useful
| topics as.... new york financial reporting.
| [deleted]
| relate wrote:
| FYI Here is an overview of all of his columns:
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...
| w23j wrote:
| So this might be the place to ask this. The list of articles by
| Matt Levine on Bloomberg has button at the end that loads 20
| older articles, when you click on it. Now since Matt is on
| parental leave I want to read some older articles, let's say from
| 2014.
|
| Am I correct, that to do that I need to click 6 (years) * 200
| (work days) / 20 (articles per click) = 60 times and wait for the
| page load to do that?! Is there really no other way to access
| these articles? Aren't they effectively unaccessible for most
| users because of that?
|
| (I found a way to manipulate a JS variable to get to the older
| articles, but this is clearly not the inteded use.)
|
| The same seems to be the case for the youtube videos of a very
| active vlogger. You can easily access current videos or the first
| ones, but not like from 4 years in the past.
|
| I am asking this, because I always wonder if I am just to dumb to
| see the obvious easy way to use these sites or if there just is
| no way to do it?
| yowlingcat wrote:
| There isn't an easier way. Every time I see any variant of the
| infinite scroll pattern which has come into vogue over the last
| decade, I feel the same complaints inside my head. True
| pagination was really nice. I miss when it was the default.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| It is a pattern, and even places like Twitter and Reddit are
| affected. Many of them, you can't even click 60 times, you're
| limited to X items and then that's it after that, even if it is
| your own writing! I think it is laziness and incompetence in
| systems design more than anything nefarious, although a lack of
| regard for the user can be considered a dark pattern in itself.
|
| HN and dilbert.com are shining example of how to do it RIGHT.
| They provide calendar archives, filtering by tag, predictable
| URLs.
|
| I keep this in mind when designing my systems. Because I think
| it is important for the user to own their data, my forum
| systems makes user profile downloadable by default, in the
| smallest possible format readable by both software and humans:
| text (with some tokens).
| tuna-piano wrote:
| Similarly- Is there a way to get a list of all his longform
| pieces (not the daily newsletters)?
| curiousgal wrote:
| Does anyone know of an equivalent newsletter that covers European
| markets?
| encyclopedia wrote:
| Related 'Price Bumps: Tactics for Stocks that can be Used for
| Cryptos' https://medium.com/@gaetanconsulting/price-bumps-
| tactics-for...
| Zenbit_UX wrote:
| How exactly is this related? It's a puff piece for vectorspace.
| rwmurrayVT wrote:
| My favorite columnist even when he wrote about me. He always
| takes the time to return my emails. His voice and wit always
| bring a bit of happiness to my day. I can't wait for him to
| return to writing and I hope he's enjoying his new kid.
|
| I actually met his wife when I was going through the SDNY. I was
| hoping to meet him, but the attorney did not recommend I talk to
| the "media".
| joshcain wrote:
| Been reading Matt's work since the Dealbreaker days and agree
| 100%. It's rare to see someone pull off being genuinely funny
| when (knowledgeably!) writing about financial and legal
| mechanics.
|
| Matt once wrote about something I was working on. His analysis
| was way more on-point and technically accurate than that of any
| other article I read about it. I wanted to email him at the
| time but like you wasn't exactly in a position to talk to a
| journalist.
| tuna-piano wrote:
| Mind sharing (or linking to) the story of why he wrote ahout
| you?
| bko wrote:
| 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 you get early earnings and a graph
| of prior stock prices and you try to guess one of two paths
| (they were inverse of each other). Even with all of those
| myself (and Matt Levine) were correct about 50% of the time.
|
| I emailed him and he actually told me he was worse than 50% ,
| which seems like a good thing because then you could just do
| opposite of your initial guess and have a profitable
| strategy. He was very nice in his correspondence, although he
| didn't give me a heads up saying he was going to blast it
| out. It's a static site [3] so it wasn't a problem, nor do I
| really care too much. But it gave me the ultimate flex when
| another super-fan at work spotted it and spammed it out.
|
| From the article.
|
| > Elsewhere here is "Matt Levine's Insider Trading Game,"
| though I actually have nothing to do with it.
|
| [0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-16/we-
| kep...
|
| [1] https://insider-trading-game.netlify.app/
|
| [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-26/kno
| win...
|
| [3] https://github.com/breeko/stox
| yayitswei wrote:
| Cool game! I was able to get over 65% by looking at just
| the year, that should be hidden in the guessing phase.
| harmegido wrote:
| 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?
| bko wrote:
| Thats funny because that was the exact comment Matt
| Levine made in our email correspondence. I mentioned I'd
| be happy to include it if he got me a Bloomberg api
| subscription, but no luck!
|
| My guess would be that expectations wouldn't help much.
| The analysts at banks that provide estimates are
| relatively conservative (don't want to stick out from the
| crowd too much). For instance, it's much better to be way
| off from actual as compared to other analyst estimates.
| Because you can always say everyone else believed the
| same thing as an excuse. If you're way off from others
| and you happen to be wrong, then thats more embarrassing.
|
| The analysts also rely on internal estimates pretty
| heavily, and companies aren't dumb, so they usually
| downplay expectations. So much so that the majority of
| companies beat their own estimates (over 70% of the
| time). So I think these numbers are gamed and without
| being a sophisticated practitioner, they wouldn't help
| IMO
|
| [0] https://insight.factset.com/record-performance-
| vs.-eps-estim...
| rwmurrayVT wrote:
| 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.
| ..
| Drip33 wrote:
| Previous discussion:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20927197
|
| > Also forfeiture doesn't account for the fact that you may
| have paid capital gains tax. I feel like they really
| shafted me on that one.
|
| As someone also charged but not convicted, I learned
| hypothetically you also don't get to account for expenses
| if you lose. Meaning you could run a $10 billion gross
| revenue drug empire, it costs $9.9 billion to run so you
| walk away with $100m and you still have to pay $10 billion
| in forfeiture.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| 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.
| Drip33 wrote:
| 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 individuals. The maximum fine may be increased
| to twice the gain derived from the crime or twice the
| loss suffered by victims if either amount is greater than
| $1 million. The false statements offense charged carries
| a statutory maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment and a
| $250,000 fine. The obstruction of justice offense charged
| carries a statutory maximum penalty of 20 years
| imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.
|
| These fines are on top of the forfeiture so if the person
| in this article earned $1 million gross, $100k net they
| would have to repay on a guilty finding $1 million + say
| $500k in fines = $1.5m when they only "earned" $100k.
| Voloskaya wrote:
| That makes sense, thanks for educating me :)
| rwmurrayVT wrote:
| Correct. :-(
| skrebbel wrote:
| 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.
| rwmurrayVT wrote:
| There's more to it than just reading an article and going
| for it. I also feel like I got nailed harder because
| there was a second person that they were trying to get me
| to reveal. That was not possible because of encrypted
| messaging. They incorrectly believed it was someone who I
| knew it was not.
| fisherjeff wrote:
| To be fair, everything is securities fraud
| anonu wrote:
| He's been on paternity leave for a few months - hope he gets back
| soon to writing his newsletters! They're excellent
| redmalang wrote:
| I really enjoy his writing, which is why I really want to know
| what this might be:
|
| "Asked about the Etruscans, Mr. Levine said he thought Mr. Mystal
| might be referring to one of his favorite anecdotes from
| Herodotus. It was actually about the Persians, he said. He
| fetched his copy of "The Histories" and read it to me.)"
| fluster wrote:
| From a section on Persian customs, somewhere in 130-135 of book
| one (which is as precise as my copy gets): "If an important
| decision is to be made, they discuss the question when they are
| drunk, and the following day the master of the house where the
| discussion was held submits their decision for reconsideration
| when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted;
| if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make
| when they are sober, is reconsidered afterwards when they are
| drunk."
| Ericson2314 wrote:
| The interview should have done an homage footnote with this.
| Can't believe they missed the opportunity.
| redmalang wrote:
| Thank you :)
| Tomte wrote:
| According to his Twitter account, it's Herodot, The Histories,
| 1.133.
|
| http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/citequery3.pl?dbname...
| redmalang wrote:
| Thank you :)
| [deleted]
| kokey wrote:
| This is weird. This morning I was thinking about how much I miss
| his newsletter, but we also have a new young baby in the house so
| I totally understand. I even considered writing him an email to
| tell him this. Now I can at least read an article about him.
| preem_palver wrote:
| He deserves the mark twain prize for his series on we work. I
| mean , that was art!!!!
| blindwatchmaker wrote:
| I have missed Matt's columns since he went on parental leave.
|
| Does anyone have recommendations for anything similar to scratch
| that itch?
| exolymph wrote:
| Byrne Hobart, who writes about tech but also finance:
| https://diff.substack.com/
| mjd wrote:
| I also recommend Matt Levine, he's just great. Here's a blog post
| I wrote a couple of months ago to talk about him:
|
| https://blog.plover.com/ref/money-stuff.html
|
| I said "Almost every issue teaches me something interesting I
| didn't know, and almost every issue makes me laugh" and I showed
| four examples. If you're looking for a quick intro to what he's
| like, maybe check it out.
|
| He's still on paternity leave but I hope he'll return soon.
| swyx wrote:
| 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.
| o_class_star wrote:
| How lucrative is substack?
| swyx wrote:
| their top 10 all make at least 7 figures a year and Matt
| would almost certainly be a top 10 writer
| carapace wrote:
| He's IMO a perfect example of the intractability of the "fake
| news" problem. It's not that there aren't high quality news
| sources out there, like Matt Levine, it's that the market (in
| the form of folks willing to pay for it) isn't there.
|
| (Maybe it's technology? Micropayments still aren't effectively
| a thing?)
| jdminhbg wrote:
| The market for Levine is certainly there. He could easily
| clear 7 figures on Substack.
| antasvara wrote:
| Pretty sure he has a Substack called Big that's about
| monopolies, but I don't think it's paid.
| freddie_mercury wrote:
| Big is by Matt Stoller, not Matt Levine.
| mcjoken wrote:
| You're thinking of Matt Stoller
| pg_bot wrote:
| That's Matt Stoller, and I wouldn't want to confuse the two.
| Levine has a much stronger grip on reality.
| lkramer wrote:
| I got to read his columns while working at Bloomberg, and it was
| really the only thing, besides a few friendships, I took with me
| when I left. Still subscribed and missing his take on things
| while he's on parental leave (but of course happy that he is
| taking so much time off for the sake of his family).
| person_of_color wrote:
| He's good because he's not a normie at his core.
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| I have no idea what this means.
| alea_iacta_est wrote:
| The rule is if you don't know what's a normie, you're
| probably one :)
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| Dude, I know what a normie is. Everyone (or at least
| everyone on HN) knows what a normie is.
|
| I don't know what evidence there is that Matt Levine not a
| normie at his core, or how it show up in his writing.
| kilbuz wrote:
| True, but no one is.
| yowlingcat wrote:
| I think perhaps what the two of you may be getting at is that
| some repress it less than others? At least to me, that comes
| through in the writing.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| I like his newsletter but I think Matt Taibbi was much better at
| explaining complex finance transactions
| curiousgal wrote:
| Any recommended readings by him?
| misiti3780 wrote:
| This is probably his most famous:
|
| https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-
| grea...
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Is this really that compelling? I find it with lots of
| rhetorical flourish, but lacking the analysis of how the
| rich really do enrich themselves.
|
| > They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-
| tiered investment system -- one for the insiders who knew
| the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was
| invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew
| were irrational
|
| What does this mean? Why wouldn't the other banks short the
| post-IPO tech companies if they knew the "real prices" and
| make off with a killing.
|
| And what even is a bubble? If you had invested in a tech
| ETF at the peak of the 2000s bubble, you would have _still_
| outperformed the market by 2020. So were the 2003 prices
| that far off?
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| yeah wow the idea that matt taibi is well informed on
| these topics... he's not even a good writer either...
| other than that, he's a great Matt Levine comp haha.
| misiti3780 wrote:
| so matt taibbi is isn't well informed because he didnt
| work in investment banking previously ?
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