nakedshorts

You do realize actual patients got completely wrong results on their blood tests, thereby potentially jeopardizing their ongoing treatment for pretty serious conditions? How is it a "non-violet" crime when we're talking about potentially killing patients due to fraud?

How have things changed since 2001? My opinions only:

1. VCs don't sign nondisclosure agreements: yes you will be laughed out the door if you demand one.

2. VCs are sheep: yes, make sure your startup hits one of the hot buzzwords (metaverse, ai, etc) to maximize interest.

3. VCs aren't technical: diligence these days is even more of a joke than it was back then.

4. VCs don't take risks: second time founders can get funding just off their name, yes.

5. Venture funds are big: IMO, there's way too much capital chasing too little talent these days.

6. VCs collude: absolutely, make sure you don't tell VCs other firms you're talking to before the term sheet.

7. VCs don't say no: very annoying, they'll string you along forever.

8. Your idea, your work, their company: biggest change since 20 years ago. Founders have way way more leverage these days. You can negotiate insane valuations (and therefore tiny dilution) compared to even 5 years ago. You can also fight harder for provisions that maintain board control in favor of the founders. The risk of a VC being seen as "founder unfriendly" is way higher than fighting you, a single company out of 100s in their portfolio.

Name one career where rent is 60% of the income yet only exists in the largest cities.

For those momentarily confused as I was, in English the title would be Notepad++ 7.9.1 – for (in memory of) Samuel Paty

Self plug: If you are interested in short selling and activist funds, I run an online community where people post original research and discuss other short theses: https://activist.cafe/

Yes, Taleb's entire life work is premised on the fact that people's mental models of probability distributions are not fat-tailed enough to match reality. He believes that such strategies should be positive in expectation (aka, should make money over the long run).

> Email and photo sharing are generally dependent upon third parties, and generally extremely centralized and powerful ones, such as Google or Facebook or Twitter.

I think even still, the fact that you could go p2p acts as a behavior regulator for these companies. Gmail wants to charge you a monthly fee? Jump ship to a free competitor or run your own mail server.

It's the same way with crypto. If an exchange starts charging me for custody or ridiculous fees to transfer money I'll just download my own wallet and transfer the money myself.

One year ago, if you had asked me what would happen if we printed $4T+ (that's 20% of GDP for perspective) out of thin air and injected it into the economy, I would've told you massive hyperinflation and immediate collapse of the dollar.

Instead, we see the US Dollar Index strengthening over the last 6 months [1]. The dominance of the United States as a global hegemonic superpower truly cannot be overstated; I'm in awe. We can literally print trillions of dollars worth of fiat and people around the world will give us real assets for it. Not only that, they will give us real assets at better rates than before we ramped up the printing presses. Makes me feel pretty good about the future, to be completely honest.

[1] https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/index/dxy

> I'd like to think I'd have had the foresight to see what was coming if someone was pitching it to me like this.

Well, you can test yourself, short ideas are abound in these uncertain market conditions. It's surprisingly hard to have clarity while things are happening, even if they are obvious in hindsight. For example, do you believe you should

1. Short restaurant equipment suppliers because up to 15% of restaurants could go out of business? https://www.presciencepoint.com/research/research-archives/m...

2. Short Chinese tech companies claiming to have exponential growth numbers in the wake of "The China Hustle" and Luckin Coffee? https://citronresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/GSX-Te...

3. Short tangentially related healthcare companies trying to cash in on COVID test kits? https://hindenburgresearch.com/scworx-evidence-points-to-its...

I believe at least one of these things will appear extremely obvious in hindsight ("duh, restaurants going out of business was a no-brainer").

See the charts for yourself: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/WALCL

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed managed to unload a mere $800B (balance sheet went from $4.5T to $3.7T) in the longest bull run in history. Now that it's an order of magnitude bigger, you can draw the logical conclusion yourself.

The Fed's balance sheet is now at $6T, which is too large for them to unwind. This only ends in one of two ways:

1. A massive asset bubble and a fundamental re-evaluation of risk/reward ratios for all investments. Historically, the average P/E ratio for S&P 500 companies is around 16. Roughly speaking, this means that investors are comfortable making their investment back in 16 years in static market conditions. Does this decision calculus change if you know that the Fed will bail you out as soon as times get tough? You bet it does. Similarly, corporations are much more incentivized to take on as much debt as possible in hopes of inflating their stock prices. When times are good, massive bonuses for execs all around. When times are bad...hey, bailout! I expect the "new normal" for P/E ratios to be in the 30-50 range. In the short term (next decade or so), this means the party continues, and we see massive growth in the stock market. But when the bubble pops, it'll pop harder than ever...

2. The second scenario is that debt-holders worldwide lose faith in the dollar and start dumping Treasuries, leading to hyperinflation. This doesn't seem to be happening as of today, in fact, the more money the Fed prints, the stronger the dollar. Central banks worldwide are printing money as well, so the dollar looks like the "least ugly" choice by comparison. The big unknown is how long the Fed can keep printing before debt-holders start second guessing the dollar's value.

How is it exploitative? The creators of the website are volunteering their time because they have adequate resources (which you would know if you read the website). Or is all volunteering exploitative?

If only there were a way to short privately held companies.

I agree. At the end of the day, the startup ecosystem is much healthier when the market is sane. On the one end you have newbie angel investors and VCs throwing money at pre-revenue startups that will go nowhere. On the other end of the spectrum you have Softbank pumping in billions and ruining what could've been great businesses. Honestly, WeWork had (and still has) such a great value proposition. It could've been a very stably profitable company with a valuation in the hundreds of millions, but here we are.