The Peter Thiel Principle | Hacker News Reader

The Peter Thiel Principle

forbes.com

30 pointscomatose_kid15 comments

Interesting article, but the fact that Peter Thiel didn't bet any money on it was disappointing. It could just be a case of the halo effect. There's just too many stories of "I predicted this too!". A broken clock is right 2 times per day.

His rationale seems like it should be easily testable, though.

For example, the coolness and talent argument should apply to most intellect based companies. So, say software companies, should also have the same correllation between success and politics.

The free market argument can be applied to other investment firms.

The government intervention argument is trickier to test. I don't know of another business that has the same setup as banks.

Yes, very disappointing. This guy is an investor. His job is make a lot of guesses about the future, monitor all of them so he can learn what works and what doesn't, and place money on those guesses he believes in strongly. This article covers a pretty cool theory, but I'm sure Thiel has plenty of similarly provocative theories that turned out to be wrong.

Still, treating an organization's constituents' campaign contributions as a performance indicator for the organization is a pretty cool hack.

"Betting against the entire sector would have been clumsy."

This would have still made a lot of money. Maybe not a maximum amount of money, but still a lot.

It might have been wiser to do a pairs trade: short {BSC, LEH, MS}/ long xlf.

Clarium doesn't usually do that, though. They usually look for ideas so big they don't need to hedge to offset them (e.g. with oil prices, they found a discrepancy between the prices of various heating oil contracts, which could have been a nice arbitrage. But they just bought the cheaper contract, because they saw it as a cheaper way to get exposure to the price moves).

Peter had a pretty amazing sequence of insights a year ago -

1) Financial institutions are in trouble

2) The ones that will do the worst can be predicted by looking at their campaign contributions

"Betting against the entire sector would have been clumsy." It's my impression that he did just this. Short financials, long oil. This was a sweet position until about 2.5 months ago and apparently he either didn't get out or took up new positions elsewhere that went bad because they are down big now.

Down big now? I thought they were down single digits, and thus about 15% ahead of the average hedge fund, which is itself ahead of most other financial assets.

Better link: http://www.forbes.com/2008/11/05/thiel-gop-weakness-oped-cx_...

What makes the Democrat party cool at the big name universities? I know it is by far the favored party at these schools, but I didn't realize it is a matter of coolness.

"Why" is rarely the right question for fashions. "How" works better: the party was a little cool, so cool people were more likely to associate with it, so it became cooler, so cool people were even more likely to associate with it.

Now, it's just visceral. A rally against the double-taxation of capital gains and dividends just doesn't have the cachet of a rally against hunger. This despite the fact that economic growth (the kind you get when taxes aren't excessive) has done a lot more to stop hunger than any rally or government program ever did.

Doesn't coolness reach critical mass at some point, where the really cool people drop out and do something different? Which is why fashion changes so much?

Also, why not just dress the rally against boring sounding, but important things, in trendier terms?

Cargo cult logic at it's worse, from Thiel and the author.

I'd consider myself a Republican, and I consider his reasoning fascinating. All three theories seem incredibly reasonable to me.

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