Hacker News Reader

Comment by legohead | Hacker News Reader

The YouTube video of him doing an Ebay Analysis [1] was very interesting I thought, both from a technical point of view and another look at his character.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jFSf5YhYQbw

View on HN

I watched a few of his early stock evaluation videos, really informative. Shkreli's a bit sociopathic, but he's wickedly smart, in his spare time he teaches himself javascript and organic chemistry.

Watching Excel power users is really fascinating.

Oh yeah, watching his Excel You Tube video puts me in awe! Can't tell you how many people I've recommended that video to!

The first time I saw that video was when referenced in a HN submission about Excel use[1]. You might find it interesting.

1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545

Yeah, I think he's better at excel than I've ever been at anything. Jesus.

I think I got an epiphany watching this - is this what the missus sees when I'm tapping away at a bunch of (to her) garbled text flicking between text editor tabs, webpages and CLIs

I spend a good chunk of my day in Excel and some might consider me a power user. He's pretty decent, and I picked up a couple tips from him (using a graphical line object instead of messing with cell borders for something you might need to move frequently for example).

There is definitely something mesmerizing though about watching someone conjure complex data onto a screen seemingly by magic and a few key strokes though. Although really it is just memorizing a ton of hot keys and a bunch of buried menu shortcuts.

Lots of tapping, little happening really. This is what it must be like when your horizon starts and stops with Excel, you find yourself copying numbers from a SEC PDF to do the same model for the umpteenth time.

The timing of this video is a lesson in humility. It's posted one month before a positive earnings report showing high growth in active buyers that gives the stock an ongoing 1.3x price increase. As far as I have viewed, Shkreli seems ambivalent, using vague heuristics to predict the future -- expectation of a yahoo-like slow decline, poor UX and discovery, and stiff Amazon competition.

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NASDAQ:EBAY (click 5y)

https://www.fool.com/investing/2016/08/11/why-shares-of-ebay...

He's doing something similar, looking at some companies in the video game industry right now, live.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qvArpDQHf-Y

Thank you so much for sharing this, I've been looking for something just like it.

Are you still inclined to trust his teaching? I mean... he's a convicted financial criminal and you're linking to his finance video.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com