98 karma · joined November 30, 2011
Only trade when you have an edge, i.e your model suggests that there is a higher probability of an outcome in your favor rather than a pure coin toss - either in entry or in exit.
Even coin toss entries can make money if you have an edge in exits and vice versa.
All in all, you can be right less than 50% of the time per trade, and still have alpha if your winning trade is 2 times your losing trade. Standard expected value stuff. Heck, I know traders who bat 30 or 35% and make colossal amounts of dollars.
Dramatic statement. I am an SWE and an MBA. There are merits to thinking about every aspect of the business. Tech/Product is just one - an important one in a Saas company, but still just one.
> But there are "light patterns": you can stay ahead in a technological race if you keep running;
This is another way of saying "build it and they will come". You have to combine good business/economic sense with great products.
Apple didn't just get to be Apple by staying ahead in a technological race. Arguably, they are behind a lot of other phone makers in specs. But they have a lot of people thinking about ecosystems, lock-in, marketing and other "MBA" concepts.
It is ridiculous to assume that any artificially designed deflationary digital asset will produce long term returns greater than an index like SPY, which is intrinsically tied to human productivity in the economy.
An average, semi-rational investor will always have the incentive to lend to a credit worthy person/business/asset, regardless of how much artificial deflation you can induce in your asset.
Compared to the Fed, which makes arbitrary (non-cyclical) adjustments to the "cost of money", Bitcoin's more predictable deflationary attributes might lead to more predictability in financial cycles.
This is of course, assuming the hundreds of other problems with Bitcoin as a currency, or credit-instrument have been solved.
The value people get from FB is related to the value of other people being on the network, but there is an intrinsic value drived from the different use cases on the platform - photos, messaging, likes, fomo and what not. Which has directly been monetized using advertising.
The value you get from other people using Bitcoin is that the price goes up, without any other intrinsic value aside from "Maybe my investment grows" - in effect following the 'greater fool' theory (Buffett), or the 'castle in the air' theory (Malkiel et al).
Network effects are premised on the value of the network increasing in value as more users join. By definition then, the value of the network drops as people drop off.
While the speed of adoption might always be > speed of deletion, there is certainly an auto-catalytic effect to people deleting FB, or not using/posting to FB as much.
To me, it sounds like you are describing a naked short call, or a short put.
It is not a spread. By definition, spreads have limited risk, and limited rewards.
The four main types of spreads. Take a look at the PNL diagrams. It is limited risk. https://www.optionseducation.org/strategies_advanced_concept... https://www.optionseducation.org/strategies_advanced_concept... https://www.optionseducation.org/strategies_advanced_concept... https://www.optionseducation.org/strategies_advanced_concept...
FB is very clearly in the latter camp. That is communism.
An innovative, new upshot getting sucked up/ blatantly ripped off by an established player with more muscle, money (and in this case - users) to throw at the problem is not a great incentive for entrepreneurs.
Consolidation at this level resembles communism more closely than the kind of free market innovation we should be seeing.