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Comment by chollida1 | Hacker News Reader

If no one has been to the site before here it is: http://www.zerohedge.com/

Believe it or not it has a huge following in the finance world due to it often being one of the first ones to break or provide color on important stories.

It's not uncommon at all to see a row of traders with tweet deck open allocating a single column to Zero hedge, they are just that prolific with their output.

The downside of the site is that they tend to have a very big bearish slant though. No one has ever accused them of being neutral.

I hope they continue to run the site. I find it provides a fair bit of value to me.

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Regarding the "huge following"... Yes, lots of people read it, send links to friends, etc. But, most of the time those links are sent for comedy or shock value, not because people think it's serious news. To use an analogy, zerohedge is like the 4chan of the finance world.

If there is shock value, it is because ZH focuses on facts (yes, they are usually well documented facts), which the so called mainstream media chooses to ignore, because the narrative does not suit their corporate owners.

Most of ZH's reporting is backed by numbers coming from other sources. They also report rumors ahead of everyone else, which seem implausible, but later turn out to be facts and reported by other outlets.

Yes, they have topic selection bias, but so does everyone else.

"ZH focuses on facts". Seriously?

>They also report rumors ahead of everyone else, which seem implausible, but later turn out to be facts ...

Sure, if you spitting out rumors all day there will be one or two cases per year where you hit a nail.

Example of focusing on facts:

1. The government releases a report with an important indicator looking good

2. Mainstream Media cheers, telling us how good we have it

3. ZH looks at the report and notices that:

   - the number was "seasonally adjusted" once, then again 

   - the number will be revised down, a month later usually on a late Friday at happy hour

   - pesky details: employment growth is in part-time, minimum-wage jobs

ZH often reports facts from official government reports/documents - they are typically buried on page 99 out of 100 (for a reason).

Some people may choose to call the above rumors or "sensationalism" - feel free to ignore ZH, it is a free country.

Do you have any good links for the employment posts on ZH? I was telling someone about that recently then couldn't find it.

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-25/there-problem-bls-e...

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-02-03/adp-employment-grow...

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2015-10-20/ominous-signs-peak-...

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-04/past-year-us-added-...

In The Past Year, The U.S. Added 360,000 Waiters And Only 12,000 Manufacturing Workers

(not sure this is an example of what you were looking for)

Fyi: john Crudele reports on employment at the nypost ; he gets inside info from census (which he blasts) Years ago he reported on plunge protection team(ppt- market manipulation) that i was skeptical about. I no longer am.

> "ZH focuses on facts". Seriously?

Seriously, they do. They spin them in weird ways, though - I remember in 2007 (or early 2008), they had an article about "the bin laden trade" - someone bet $30M or so on a very improbably collapse -- Or so the article inferred based on highly irregular "put" purchase -- losing $30M if that didn't happen, or winning billions if it did.

The data was, in fact, factual. However, they failed to account for alternative explanations, e.g. that someone (probably a pension fund or a hedge fund) was moving a lot of money into the market, and was buying insurance -- a much more likely explanation for the same data.

They do stick to facts. It's their analysis that you should reserve your skepticism to.

> To use an analogy, zerohedge is like the 4chan of the finance world.

Less of an insult than some may think. There are significant signals buried beneath the huge noise at 4chan

> first ones to break or provide color on important stories.

No question about the color, but do you have an example for those "break on important stories".

Little old but this is the first example I could think of but this was absolutely not covered in depth by any mainstream outlet

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-09-26/coming-soon-theater...

This looks like analysis; did they break anything new here?

Also -- were they right on the analysis? The stock chart is inconclusive.

That is not a break on an import story. It would have been if they would have posted this before Moody downgraded Zohars. This is nothing else then some collections of freely available news mixed together with some pubertal slang. And their included predictions have a bad hit rate, even for ZH standards.

You're right, it's not breaking news. I misread your quote. Nonetheless, it was a decently done, freely available analysis done on a semi-esoteric topic that really would not be covered by anyone else. If you solely rely on any source for "predictions", let alone ZH, I don't know what to say. No one is ever going to claim that ZH made them rich.

I can't speak to the "important" in that claim, but the folks at ZH have friends and connections in the world of finance from whom they can get leaked communications and reports.

For example, this post on Trump's nomination chances [1] draws heavily upon charts produced by Goldman Sachs, presumably for their clients only.

[1] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-03-20/can-trump-win-gener...

Edited to add: I also know this because a friend of mine had their report leaked and written about on ZH, leading to a bit of a storm in a teacup at their workplace.

That is also not an break on an important story. Just some analysis again.

But yes, those leaked reports on ZH are interesting. Problem is they also publish lots of stuff from disputable sources. At the end you don't know what to take serious on this website, which results in an entropy of about zero.

Pretty much all financial news outlets receive research from all the sell-side banks. ZH stealing a chart from a GS report is nothing special.

Bank's client research is widely available.

In my experience, for a while when oil was extremely volatile up over $100 per barrel, they were at the forefront of breaking any supply chain stories (ex: Suez Canal). I survey many different sites and I have seen ZH do some very timely and organized reporting. Also, they aggregate a lot of big names (Gross, Gundlach, etc) so I don't have to track down their latest missives. There is a very long and seemingly unending row of garbage barge stories and sensationalism to deal with though, I will never deny that.

In 2009, when WHO upgraded the bird-flu scare to a "pandemic level 6", I heard the news first on the ZH Twitter. Only one-two hours later did the usual agencies also reported this (probably because they were verifying it).

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