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Comment by wrong_variable | Hacker News Reader

SoftBank is playing a game that is way above any hedge fund's pay grade, let alone some blogger.

- If SoftBank goes down, every coder loses his/her rice bowl. The pain inflicted on Son, Tim Cook and MBS is minimal, compared to your average tech worker.

- Valuation are not isolated beasts, the nominal value looks high because of the extraordinary financial alchemy that is going on the Fed. Large pool of capitals are betting the Fed is going to continue with QE4, QE5, .... QEn.

Imagine how it feels to be a sovereign wealth fund, watching the Fed print almost a trillion dollars / yearly in good times ! You must be terrified of what happens when the ball stops rolling.

- Owning growth stocks is an amazing way to hedge against many possible future outcome, both good and bad.

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> If SoftBank goes down, every coder loses his/her rice bowl.

Maybe for silicon valley and money burning enterprises like uber.

>Imagine how it feels to be a sovereign wealth fund, watching the Fed print almost a trillion dollars / yearly in good times ! You must be terrified of what happens when the ball stops rolling

They are likely well diversified. They are anything but dumb money.

> They are likely well diversified. They are anything but dumb money.

I never said SWF are dumb money, in fact my argument is exactly the opposite. They are watching the Fed reduce their purchasing power through money printing and are rightly buying up growth stock as a way to maintain the value of their wealth.

Those money burning enterprises raise salaries for everyone.

Unrealistic salaries in an unrealistic business subsidised by unrealistic investment money.

His point is that their competitive salaries, regardless of their numbers, make other companies, with profit, up their offers a bit.

Instead of getting a small slice of the pie, we get a small slice plus a few percentage points (that perhaps we should already get). That's huge for most people that aren't financially independent or even close to it.

Should tech workers consider buying deep out of the money puts on tech ETFs as a form of insurance?

You should only do that if you believe the crunch is coming in three months or so.

Unless you can time the crunch exactly, put options are a mug's game. They bleed value over time (negative theta in industry parliance).

If you really want to protect yourself, just plan your finances as if your high income was temporary rather than permanent.

> plan your finances as if your high income was temporary rather than permanent.

This is the best advice I've heard all week. I wish someone had told me this when I was 21 (even though I wouldn't have listened)

I’m not sure what it means

It means if you make more than an average income in your area, spend as much as you would if you had an average income and save and invest the rest.

That makes sense! Thanks!

Yup, it's easy to spot a bubble but it's not easy to be able to tell how big it's going to get or when it's going to pop. You can be out by years and by magnitudes, which isn't useful for being able to profit from it. It's better to just plan for the worst and treat your exposure to the upside like a gamble.

Can't you get options whose expiry is a year or two out (LEAPs), or is the time premium not worth it?

I never traded long-dated options when I was in finance, but anything with longer than a three-month maturity was crazy expensive in terms of the spread you'd pay. These are not liquid instruments.

It's been a while since I've done the maths, but I'm pretty sure it'd be cheaper to buy shorter dated puts and roll them over on expiry. Which would still be very expensive.

I used to do options in the end 90s and back then long term options were crazy expensive. You need a lot of capital for such a strategy.

Did you profit from that strategy?

I lost money. Which would make a successful startup these days :)

Options are going to affect the returns so much in good times rhr insurance probably isn’t worth it.

A better idea would be to go long short, 30% short, and 100% long has always been popular. The leverage from the shorts lets you juice the long side while also giving you the 30% short protection. This should allow you to achieve a better Sharpe ratio than the market.

If you can’t get the leverage, consider buying a S&P ETF that has downside protection in exchange for capped returns.

It's cheaper to just mix in more bonds.

A 60/40 equity/bond portfolio is going to underperform the market pretty significantly most years. Historically, 60/40 has outperformed the market slightly looking back 40-50 years.

Risk parity is probably a better idea and should give you recent returns with some downside protection. The problem is that rebalancing could be costly, you probably would only want to on a yearly basis.

But if you have access to leverage via shorts, I still think that’s the better play.

My personal investments do nothing of the sort though: I just go with a 3x leveraged S&P ETF. Annualized returns of around 20% year over year. Of course, I have massive exposure to volatility and market crashes. But in the five years of investing all of my money in this strategy, I’ve outperformed the S&P by over 80% :)

The past five years has been one of the best forming markets ever. I would not assume a strategy which worked well since 2014 will continue to do well until 2034.

Maybe it wouldn’t work if you are starting today, but I hsve enough returns built up that I should be able to experience a major depression and still beat the S&P. Assuming that the market doesn’t go down more than 33% in a day.

example of such an ETF?

Assuming you currently have a portfolio of naked longs, selling covered calls and buying deep puts is an effective risk-limiting straddle.

Hedging is better than hope. You could sell some nontech etf puts to reduce your cost also.

Why doesn't the government stops with QE already ?

With both houses prices inflating, and huge sums of money going into automation startups and investments, the future looks scary, for regular people.

Yes, automation will happen anyway. But why accelerate this very disruptive process(Although one that transfer a lot of power to the already powerful) ? Isn't it better to slow it and have it in a more controlled fashion ?

The US Government stopped QE in 2014.

The ECB continues QE because Europe's economy never really recovered.

The Bank of England restarted QE when Brexit was announced.

> Why doesn't the government stops with QE already ?

Without QE many people's retirement saving would have been wiped out, along with jobs.

You would have a period of large scale joblessness and homelessness.

In early part of this decade Ben Bernanke said that he would continue QE until unemployment rate dropped below 6.5% or inflation rose above 2%.

I agree that the easiest solution would have been a jobs guarantee or better yet print money and send everybody a cheque.

But that would have been outside the Fed's mandate.

It's not clear how the situation resolves, currently inflation is low and joblessness is also low ; so the fed seem to have done their job.

The questions you raise can only be solved through a political process, not monetary policy.

what would you suggest if you currently work for a softbank startup?

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