Harvard professor rides 170x return in Moderna stock to become a billionaire | Hacker News Reader

Harvard professor rides 170x return in Moderna stock to become a billionaire

marketwatch.com

45 pointsspking25 comments

Step 1: be a millionaire.

Believe the article indicates step #1 was to found a successful business and sell it.

"Springer made his first killing during the bubble of 1999, Bloomberg reported, when he pocketed $100 million by selling his first venture to Millennium Pharmaceuticals."

Step 0: be born in the position to ever be able to have the opportunity to do something like that in the first place

If you get a thousand people to each roll a pair of dice two times, you're almost certain to get at least one person who rolls snake-eyes twice. Then he'll go around telling everyone how luck was only a minor factor and if you just copy all of his irrelevant biases/habits you drastically improve your chances of getting the same outcome.

No, you don't. It's still a crap-shoot.

I don't discount the importance of skill and hard work in this story. I'm sure there was a lot of that, and I'm sure it was a necessary ingredient ... but it wasn't a sufficient ingredient. This is still a story about making two bets and winning twice. A lot of people who were also skilled and hard-working made bets that were just as good based on information available at the time. Most didn't even win the first bet, so were never in a position to make the second. If these two bets hadn't worked out, we'd be reading a different story about someone else's two bets that did. The names change; the story doesn't. What lesson, exactly, are we supposed to take away from that?

Be in position to take these bets in the first place by meeting the necessary but insufficient requirements within your control: gain skills, work hard using them.

Harvard professor is surely very connected to both administration, regulation, technology and everything else.

It's literally impossible for an outsider to achieve this feat even if he has the initial money at his disposal.

You don't get a 17,000% return even with the best insider trading in the world. You get it with luck.

And to become a billionaire you'd have to bet over $5M to start with.

If I had 5M I'd go mostly dividend stocks and retire.

Yes, but if you had $100M you could retire and take some risky bets.

Some jobs are not just about getting enough money to retire, they can also be about making the world a better place (or sometimes just believing that's the case), just living a passion, just having a social activity and many other reasons.

His stock was worth $320 million after the IPO, and he let it all ride. On a single stock in a two-year-old company. Nobody could afford to do that unless losing most of $320 million wouldn't affect their lifestyle. Being wealthy explains most of it, but I suspect being 72 years old was a factor, too.

Sounds like his net worth was over 100M at the time. I guess past a certain point, you’ve got enough dividend stocks and want to gamble on something more exciting.

yeah, also 5m out of 100m is nowhere close to an all in. There's a good chance he just had it lying there amongst a bunch of other stocks he was gambling with and didn't even think much of it.

This is the wet dream of every investor, not something anyone can achieve with hard work.

I recently heard on a podcast (Planet Money or The Indicator, I think) that insiders generally don't do much better at beating the market. I think that is for the "average" case though. Sorry I don't have a citation.

Trick is to scale up that inside knowledge via a 20 and 2 hedge fund.

Don’t worry about beating the market after fees, enough fools will see you have a winning strategy and assume it will continue to get better and exceed the fees.

In the mid 1950s a young investor fresh from a Walk Street hedge fund pitched his investment partnership to doctors and dentists in Omaha, Nebraska. Those who participated earned an average 35% annual return for the next 12 years, increasing their investment by 35 times.

Then around 1970 investor shut down the partnerships and switched to running a public company he controlled. Investors who rolled over their investments could buy into the company for around $12 per share IIRC.

By the late 70s the stock traded for hundreds of dollars per share. In 1990 it hit $7,000, and $70,000 in 1998.

There is a group of Omaha residents who invited this young kid named Warren Buffett into their living rooms in the mid 50s, liked what he said enough to give him $10K, and ended up as billionaires because they believed in him.

“I have an academic lifestyle. I’m not into ramen noodles, but my friends are academics, so it doesn’t really behoove me to be flashy,” Springer told Bloomberg at the time. “I feel that I’ve had more than enough wealth for myself for some time. I don’t feel I need more.”

Compare and contrast with: https://youtu.be/eb3pmifEZ44 https://youtu.be/mOI8GWoMF4M

Is this a credible example of Elon Musk derangement syndrome? Why make it about elon musk? It seems like you're preoccupied with a person who has no idea you exist.

Watched the first video. The McLaren F1 is a very reasonable investment. If you can get your hands on one. It is priceless.

Edit: He WRECKED it??

x.com

They didn't even bother to reroute to paypal.com

Less than two years later (of the IPO), and the 72-year-old (Timothy Springer) has ridden a 17,000% return in his Moderna shares — which he paid about $5 million for in the company’s early stages — into the billionaire club.

The Cambridge, Mass., biotech has jumped 162% this year, as of Wednesday’s close, surging on hopes for its mRNA-1273 coronavirus vaccine, one of the first (along with five other vaccines) to begin human trials.

https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/stock/MRNA?countrycode...

Wow that was an incredible bet.

Biotech is hot in general and as the article says, the ones around Harvard were doing well. So investing 5m in one is not crazy. I'm sure he merely expected single or double digits return.

He got lucky to be an investor in one that hit it big. Stories are also about spectacular winners or losers. There are no story on all the investor that got normal returns last year.

try beating this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Thiel#Facebook

>In August 2004, Thiel made a $500,000 angel investment in Facebook for a 10.2% stake in the company

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