hidenotslide

But how is being delta neutral a scam? If they weren't taking the other side of the long futures trade, someone else would at an even worse price. And if they weren't buying it back lower, someone else would at a worse price.

The idea that Tether just prints out of thin air is a conspiracy theory, I've seen large traders confirm they can do create/redeems and there was some information released about their holdings of commercial paper, settlement with NYAG, etc. And they have frozen stolen funds in the past, in the case of the Poly network hack. USDT routinely trades at a premium to USD, the market does not seem worried.

Of course Binance and Tether and a lot of other unregulated crypto companies are shady, but it's more interesting to focus on the particular shady company in the original post.

I don't think you understood what Sam was saying, being short BTC futures is NOT the same as having a net short exposure to bitcoin prices. And what does Tether have to do with BitMart, an exchange I had never even heard of before this "hack"?

Short squeeze dynamics can cause a stock price to diverge significantly from fundamentals. There are limits to what can be arbitraged, and that may be what is happening in this case. https://www.marketwatch.com/story/tilray-is-the-poster-boy-o...

1) Those tests results would be highly correlated, so you wouldn't necessarily be much more than 99% accurate still.

2) If the prior probability of someone committing a crime on a given night is low, you are in the classical example of false positives doing harm via Bayes rule.

Those "structural changes" are called austerity and they have not worked well where they have been tried. There is a very strong argument that the Euro currency is deflationary and is causing many of the various issues like unemployment, government debt crises, etc. See Stiglitz's book The Euro for an in depth argument.

Or just look at the unemployment statistics. https://www.statista.com/statistics/268830/unemployment-rate... The countries outside of northern Europe that are on the Euro or pegged to it have much higher jobless rates than those with their own currency. Czechia, Romania, Poland, Hungary are not pegged while Bulgaria, Lithuania, Estonia are. Similarly outside the EU, Bosnia is pegged and doing poorly, Iceland is not and doing fine even though they were very hard hit by financial crisis.

It's exactly analogous to the way the fixed gold exchange rate was deflationary during the Great Depression and as soon as countries dropped the gold standard they started recovering.

Reminds me of the old Conan segment that highlighted this behavior. Here are some clips from 2012-2014.

Twinkie Trouble https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OzdV0Imti3s&ab_channel=TeamC...

Could this be the end of email overload? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8p7RnDQwFRw&ab_channel=TeamC...

I scream, you scream, you know the rest. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46-fI18pJyw&ab_channel=TeamC...

Enjoyed from a desk or the couch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QZnoSy7NHgI&ab_channel=TeamC...

You don't need us to tell you that gas prices are back on the rise. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dAkxR9T01pw&ab_channel=TeamC...

Economic factors may take some spring out of the Easter Bunny's step this year. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dguiAWrUGMM&ab_channel=TeamC...

A child's happiness is priceless, especially on a birthday. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFsDnn9FjOQ&ab_channel=TeamC...

Mike Myers says "Yeah, Baby." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIevazPIPzU&ab_channel=TeamC...

It's okay, you can admit it if you've bought an item, or two, or ten for yourself. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TM8L7bdwVaA&ab_channel=TeamC...

Don't worry, be happy. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KZ1mA1NeUmU&ab_channel=TeamC...

Those with a special someone may look to their mobile device to help them say "I love you." https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=44ojS4UNn8I&ab_channel=TeamC...

Frank Ocean tells a major fast food chain to buzz off, and which celeb peed in a glass jar? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u41bQG_Ll7E&ab_channel=TeamC...

Is it time for dogs to have a social network of their own? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dZElSajQdOo&index=13&list=RD...

The final days of the campaign can get a little salty. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hKziIEXT6MU&index=18&list=RD...

Apparently my answer is worse than the guy who thinks "The fed is literally giving asset holders free money" and the guy who makes a pitch for Bitcoin. Whatever. Utilize your downvote cartel however you see fit I guess.

Regardless of whether the loans are linked to individual deposits or borrowed from other banks, I was just trying to communicate how commercial banks could increase the money supply without input from the central bank. Nowhere did I claim the reserve requirement and monetary base were the limiting factor of the money supply (in fact the last sentence says supply of loans is influenced by interest rates). This is just what figure 1 depicts in the paper. The direct quote from the conclusion of the paper is "Most of the money in circulation is created, not by the printing presses of the Bank of England, but by the commercial banks themselves."

Furthermore I claimed that central banks affect the money supply via rates, which is supported via the conclusion as well: "The Bank of England is nevertheless still able to influence the amount of money in the economy. It does so in normal times by setting monetary policy — through the interest rate that it pays on reserves held by commercial banks with the Bank of England. "

Here is a simple way to demonstrate the point of the article. If I deposit $100 in a bank, the bank can lend out around $90 to someone else (fractional reserve banking). That person now deposits the money at another bank, and the "money supply" is $190 instead of $100.

On the other hand when a central bank "prints money", they use it to buy assets with an equivalent value, so there is no net transfer of wealth done by the central bank. That assumes they don't affect asset prices, which not a great assumption.

The way central banks affect the money supply is through interest rates to change the supply and demand of private loans that banks make, which indirectly affects the money supply.

Depends how you define loss, a lot of people would disagree with you. They have had significant positive free cash flow for a long time, over a decade at least.[1] But since they reinvest the profits this becomes low net income.

[1] https://ycharts.com/companies/AMZN/free_cash_flow

His new investors made $10 million less than they would have if he had not stolen from them. Embezzlement is still a crime even if you are the CEO and the company is profitable. And there was a bunch of lying in securities disclosures of course, which is a crime by itself.

Probably because the cancels were followed up by aggressive sales calls that mentioned the issue. A quote from the article:

"The no-shows were accompanied by an OpenTable inquiry about Tavern’s 'sagging sales,' with a renewed attempt to convince them to switch."

I'm sure it is structured in a way that mitigates that issue. E.g. donate to an intermediary trust for the tax benefit, then that trust makes the gift to the university. In fact the article seems to name this entity as the Pearson Family Foundation.

He may be right in this case, I am not a doctor and don't know the details of his anecdote. My point is that if I'm looking for medical advice from a pop science author I'd much prefer Dr. Gawande's evidence and experience based account to some half baked story about convexity.

I'm not even sure whether Taleb's style of writing is meant to communicate much at all, what's the point of all this phony formalism? http://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/medconvex

I'd like to see Taleb acknowledge at least that medical and financial estimation risks have a different character. Financial mispricing is adversarial, whereas you'd have to be more cynical than me to think doctors are always trying to get you to take the maximum care they can sell you.

Nassim Taleb is great at providing backward looking advice. My back got better, therefore I was right to ignore the expert advice. He has predicted about ten of the last two financial crises. I wouldn't take medical advice from a financial pundit who can't seem to go more than a day without picking a fight on twitter.

What is the LTSE? From their website it doesn't really seem like they do anything other than some apps for entrepreneurs?

Often the mechanism for destroying great companies is plundering one group of stakeholders to pay off equity and management. E.g. firing long-time employees, underfunding/changing pensions, over leveraging, or risky regulatory strategies that they won't be around to face the consequences for. I don't see how what stock exchange something is listed on has much effect on any of those.

Why wait until the end to point out that this letter is most likely nonsense? Seems unlikely that people are getting scammed out of hundreds of million dollars a month.

I tracked down the actual letter here and confirmed it has all sorts of stupid stuff in it. https://assets.bwbx.io/documents/users/iqjWHBFdfxIU/r8LCxXQ4...

Repeatedly blames the CME, which has nothing to do with the VIX. Losses to investors of trillions in a week, what? The mechanism they describe is that the indicative VIX value is affected by option orders (true) and this somehow affects VIX futures (I'm skeptical). The only time this index affects VIX futures directly is during settlement, and the only example they provide totally mangles the definition of implied volatility.

Furthermore, they are complaining about someone posting a 0.35 executable bid in a illiquid market where the offer price is oscillating between 1.40 and 9.80. Doesn't seem sinister considering far out of the money options are known to be illiquid.

I'm not saying they are being untruthful. But they are very clearly biased to the right on economic issues, and significantly more than traditional news. All the articles I saw on regulation and taxes were negative.

I probably even agree with them on many things, but they are _not_ unbiased.

That is clearly a libertarian news site. They may be negative towards both US parties but it's still a right-leaning site, at least in an economic sense of right and left.

This article doesn't seem biased to me, just some statistical information relating to the well known debate about why crime dropped in the late 90's. The lead gasoline theory is an interesting one, in addition to the ones given credit in Freakonomics. Here are some of the theories: https://www.vox.com/2015/2/13/8032231/crime-drop

I hardly use pandas at this point besides read_csv, which is very good once you know the syntax for parsing strings/dates, skipping rows, dropping columns, etc.

After that I usually just keep the numpy array since all I need is floats. I guess the index groupby stuff is cool, but I never really needed it. Postgres is fine but if you're just doing numerics it doesn't help much.

Good point about pandas dataframes taking up extra space, and the solution of using chunking/generators. 33 GB is what Wes McKinney would call "medium data": https://twitter.com/wesmckinn/status/413159516096585729

The problem is libraries that works fine when everything fits in RAM start breaking down if you aren't careful. Not really python speed issue, but you lose some of the tools you relied on previously.

I don't find this a very compelling argument. The author doesn't mention any attempts to profile or speed up the code.

Specifically with pandas I've found if you aren't careful you can do a lot of unnecessary copying. Not sure if that's what is going on here, but cProfile can help find the bottlenecks.

Capital gains are equivalent to dividends, just with better tax treatment. You are "technically" correct though, which is of course the best kind.

Normally that would be true, but under ACA profits are capped at 25% of premiums. They can increase profits only by increasing premiums, which can be justified by rising costs. Private insurance companies in America have no incentive to lower healthcare costs.

Single payer does not mean non-profit, providers would still be for profit.

What doesn't add up with the numbers you quoted? Being valued at higher than revenue isn't odd, that's a stocks vs. flows issue. Same with the debt, that's not too much relative to market cap.

Initially this sounded like AOL buys TimeWarner, but since it's a cash dividend that doesn't seem to be the explanation. I suspect there is a significant tax benefit as is often the case when a foreign company takes over an American one (known as a tax inversion).

Yes, looks very fake. The parts about if your dog needs to go out, how they target women, whether your chair scrapes or not? Just silly.

I don't know the details. Multiple places seem to imply there is at least some planned mechanism, that's all I was referring to. E.g. from the white paper: "Tethers may be redeemable/exchangeable for the underlying fiat currency pursuant to Tether Limited’s terms of service".

I don't have a position here and no axe to grind, but parting from your auditors is in many cases a significant red flag.

I have no clue, you'd have to ask people who sell below par.

If they are selling because they can't access the normal withdrawal mechanism (e.g. US customers or people in a rush relative to processing delays) then it is the former. If they are speculatively shorting it is more likely the latter.

It could be both: people who can't do normal withdrawal and think there is at least 2% chance of fraud.

Either tether is trading at a discount due to liquidity issues like a closed-end fund or due to real credit issues (fraud).