A Wall Street Informant Who Double-Crossed the FBI | Hacker News Reader

A Wall Street Informant Who Double-Crossed the FBI

bloomberg.com

86 pointschollida123 comments

Good article. But I don't agree with the title that he "double-crossed the FBI". According to the article he did everything they asked him, and in the end they double crossed him, and he then mounted a successful defense.

Agreed. Even without promising Gentile a deal, the fact that they needed to groom him on how to lie to their own auditors (seemingly about entrapment, as well as the various breaks with protocol) speaks to a failure on their end first.

"In two years they’d spent a few hundred thousand dollars on expenses, Gentile says, including about $15,000 for his travel. The agents told him that an investigator would be asking him some questions, and they wanted to go over what to say... They advised him to say he hadn’t directed any criminal activity. (“Of course I did,” Gentile says.) And they said not to mention his gun."

That's not an account of a properly-handled operation with an unreliable informant. Gentile appears to be a bit round the bend, but that's not the only thing wrong here.

Does anyone know how Bloomberg magazine is funded? It seems to produce very high-quality articles that are provided for free (unlike WSJ which has a very aggressive paywall).

It's funded by the financial firm Bloomberg L.P.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloomberg_L.P.

I'm not sure it's necessarily related to why it doesn't have a paywall (I don't think bloomberg news is opposed to money), but Bloomberg the company started selling computer terminals on wall street in the 80s and made a fortune. Basically, "Hey stock broker, how'd you like to look up stock quotes instantly on a computer instead of..." I'm actually not sure what they were doing before, paper trading slips I guess? "Sort it out at the end of the day"?

"Selling networked computers to banks" wasn't actually as obvious then as you'd think. Wall Street was a relatively boring place and went crazy in the 80s, kind of coinciding with the rise of Bloomberg terminals.

These days, a bloomberg terminal costs $24,000 a year, for a computer and a subscription to Bloomberg's information service, which ostensibly gets high quality and timely market information. It's a good business.

Bloomberg is a really interesting startup story overall.

From about 1870 to the 1960s stock quotes were communicated using stock tickers that communicated over telegraph lines and printed thin strips of paper.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ticker_tape

The system worked well until the 1960s when the volume of trading on busy days overwhelmed the system, sometimes delaying the quotes for hours. There had been plans to build a computer network already, but the data outages made it an urgent issue.

The classic book Business Adventures has a chapter on the chaos sowed by the failure of ticker tape.

https://www.amazon.com/Business-Adventures-Twelve-Classic-St...

Historical trivia - it also overwhelmed the system in 1929 - adding to the panic then were long delays in stock prices being updated regionally.

Not just high-quality articles; it employs excellent columnists as well. Matt Levine is a favorite of many HNers.

They hired the former editor of The Economist John Micklethwait as their editor-in-chief a couple of years ago. That was felt both by Bloomberg News, whose articles have become more interesting for the general populace, and by The Economist, whose quality and impartiality I felt has gone down since then.

Bloomberg LP makes roughly 8 billion in revenue from selling their terminal to 300,000 subscribers (25,000 per annum).

I feel like the Bloomberg magazine is just a way to reinforce their status as the top disseminator of financial news, so that financial firms don't really think of the other options when looking for new data/terminal subscriptions, because Bloomberg is always "there".

Strange model. It's kind of like, a pretty high quality product you get for free, paid for by the people who purchase the really-really-expensive product.

Is it really strange? Isn't somewhere on the loss-leader/freemium spectrum, just on a grander scale than what we're used to from con/prosumer webapps?

The model is far more established than you might think. The first general-circulation newspapers in the US were largely party political organs, some of which retain elements of that in their names: the Arizona Republic was originally the Arizona Republican. Papers with Union in their titles occasionally reflect a labour bent.

That faded with the advent of mass-market advertising, which grew tremendously from about 1860 onward, and becoming a mounting concern in the 1890s and 1900s.

I've mentioned Hamilton Holt's short book (notes of a lecture, really), Commercialism and Journalism (1909) a few times. The first section is a very good breakdown of the role of advertising in media.

https://archive.org/details/commercialismjou00holtuoft

Not that strange. Think of the magazine as being paid for by the marketing budget.

> 300,000 subscribers (25,000 per annum)

Crazy, unverified statistic I heard- around 20% of those users only use that subscription for access to their AOL instant messenger clone. All trades are on it, so you've got to be on it too. Walled garden to the extreme.

Bloomberg says its 325k and the revenue number is a pretty good estimate

https://www.bloomberg.com/company/bloomberg-facts/

People gladly pay that to be certain they are dealing with other people who have paid that, exclusively. That is, after all, the classic function of walled gardens (and private parties, clubs, etc.)

I wonder how long for -

http://uk.businessinsider.com/goldman-sachs-symphony-custome...

I think it's kind of like the magazine Departures that American Express sends to its platinum card holders - it let's the company do some free advertising/marketing - but it allows the company to sell print advertising to a very desirable client base

All the great news services were luxury products built on top of distribution monopolies. Bloomberg is just one of the few that still has that monopoly intact.

terminal sub is not the only thing you can buy at bloomberg.

asset pricing, data, order management, trading platform, STP, risk management are all things you can pay for on top of the terminal itself. some of these services are quite expensive compared to other providers on the street

Rather similar to The Economist newspaper.

Its revenues are divided roughly by thirds: advertising, subscribers, and the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a bespoke research consultancy.

> They bought Gentile a bacon cheeseburger and a Diet Coke ..

I don't even.. Is this normal in the USofA or are they just denying him sugar, while feeding him, to pacify him ?

edit: but the cheeseburger already has plenty of sugar and the coke has caffeine. idk

No. But if you want someone to cooperate with you, the carrot can work better than the stick.

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