It’s basic speculative finance shenanigans. Any sleazy stock broker back in the 80s would say the same stuff, “JUST IMAGINE YOUR NEW AND BETTER LIFE WHEN WE DOUBLE YOUR PORTFOLIO EVERY 6 MONTHS!” Lots and lots of people seduced by these flights of fancy.
The use of “disruptive” in a general sense (e.g. without specifically describing what will be disrupted and how) should be an even bigger bullshit alarm IMO,
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It’s a new paradigm. If you dont get in now you’ll regret it for the rest of your life.
Not to mention the use of “platforms.” Looking at it again I’m a little shocked that she didn’t get “network effects” into that press release.
Yeah, and it will probably work for Cathy to an extent. It’s like seeling used cars now where it’s legal to sell lemons and your customers would never know the difference.
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Reading Good Strategy/ Bad Strategy
This talks about exactly this. It’s an amazing breakdown of what bad strategy and “fluff” looks like vs what it should be instead.
Recommended.
Two points.
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GDP vs enterprise value are apples and oranges, so this is a non-sequitur. The enterprise value of US companies trades (sort of by definition) at a multiple of US GDP.
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She could easily be correct in her assessment of the cumulative EV of ‘disruptive’ companies going 15x in 7 years, but doesn’t mean that any investor can actually capture that as a return. See: railroad stocks in 1890, automobile stocks in 1920, the entire Chinese economy, etc.
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Meta $40b buyback aka STONKS!
Some big losing stocks from last year are absolutely ripping YTD. LOL sample sizes for both selecting stocks and we’re talking about a single month, but this seems noteworthy
Carvana +192%
Opendoor +118%
Redfin +101%
Peloton +101.5%
Coinbase +95%
Lendingtree +95%
Stitch Fix +78%
TSLA +67%
Ffs.
Like. Its technically true he dropped out of school, but I fucking hate shit like this.
Bootstraps!
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Came to post about this. And it’s fucking Democrats who are in on it!
Gray was referring to New York Democratic lawmakers passing legislation significantly increasing the amount of retiree money that pension officials can deliver to Wall Street. The bill was championed by the New York City comptroller, Brad Lander, just weeks after the Democrat won office promising he would be “reviewing the funds’ positions with risky and speculative assets including hedge funds, private equity, and private real estate funds”.
The New York governor, Kathy Hochul, quietly signed the legislation on the Saturday before Christmas, just weeks after the Wall Street Journal reported that analysts have started warning pension funds of looming private equity losses. New York lawmakers simultaneously rejected separate legislation that would have allowed workers and retirees to see the contracts signed between state pension officials and Wall Street firms managing their money.
The Empire State is hardly alone in continuing to use retirees’ money to enrich the planet’s wealthiest financial speculators – from California to Texas to Iowa, pension funds controlling hundreds of billions of dollars of workers’ retirement savings are planning to dump more money into private equity, while keeping the terms of the investments secret.
While globetrotting to elite conferences in exotic locales, pension officials have defended the high-fee investments by parroting Wall Street executives’ claim that private equity reliably outperforms low-fee stock index funds. At the same time, those officials continue to conceal the terms of the investments, raising the question: if the investments are so great, why are the details being hidden?
Perhaps because the investments aren’t as wonderful as advertised. In a landmark study entitled An Inconvenient Fact: Private Equity Returns & the Billionaire Factory, Oxford University’s Ludovic Phalippou documented that private equity funds “have returned about the same as public equity indices since at least 2006”, while extracting nearly a quarter-trillion dollars in fees from public pension systems.
A 2018 Yahoo News analysis found that US pension systems had paid more than $600bn in fees for hedge fund, private equity, real estate and other alternative investments over a decade.
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I cannot think of a single reason to keep secret where the money is being invested. I can log on right now and see where every penny of my IRA and 401k are parked.
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positions are very large so it could allow others to know when you have to sell or are selling and how much your stake is and front-run your actions.
This is only for publicly traded companies.
