
We Kept Almost Making Money - xrd
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-16/we-kept-almost-making-money
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kgwgk
“When people tell you that cryptocurrency will enable smart contracts on the
blockchain that supersede traditional court systems and automate trust,
allowing frictionless commerce with no need for archaic subjective state
justice systems, remember the time people asked the police to dig up a corpse
to ask it who stole their Bitcoins!”

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jkoudys
I'm CTO of a legal tech company, and we've set pretty realistic goals: define
a good schema to describe contracts, link them to relevant knowledge, and
track how they change over time like git. We use some NLP for figuring out how
a contract is structured and identifying clauses.

The number of competitors we saw start up 2+ years ago, promising a fully-
automated lawyer, predicting outcomes to cases, building smart-contracts that
would somehow be perfect and not ever be contested or need to keep up with
case law, getting funded was shocking. Less shocking is how many of them I've
seen collapse under their utterly unworkable premise over the past 6 months.
Worst part is, this is actually bad for us, because all the baseless hype has
eroded trust in the industry.

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woodnich
Just curious - what company is that?

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Scoundreller
WRT Aramco ‘s IPO:

> By the way, all of this is … sort of an obvious trick? Like, go public with
> a limited float, put the stock in friendly hands, give investors incentives
> to buy and not sell, get a high price and then hand the stock off to index
> funds to consolidate that price and make a profit for the early investors.

But isn’t that what short sellers prevent? Every index investor basically bets
on there being active long and short investors keeping everything in check.

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qqqwerty
> limited float, put the stock in friendly hands

That part is key. In order to short the stock you need someone to lend you
shares first. If there is high demand from short sellers relative to the
available float, then the cost to borrow the stock will go up, making the
short position more expensive to maintain.

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jkoudys
The biggest scam WeWork pulled was only lightly touched on: getting investors
to compare them to a software company. I'll never understand how a group
trying to monopolize office space so they could jack up the price in the
future has anything at all to do with tech.

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dmix
Does Levine talk about WeWork in all of his articles?

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gumby
No he also has a running joke about the the SEC’s seeming view that
“everything is fraud”.

He has said that for some topics like WeWork he’d like to stop writing about
them yet they continue to have absurdist revelations that can even be
enlightening, or at least amusing. Hovinian was like that for a few months.

~~~
perl4ever
Also, he used to almost always have a section called "people are worried about
bond liquidity" although sometimes it was something else, like unicorns.

Some recent column had a bit where he _should_ have mentioned bond liquidity
and he didn't, so maybe he's gotten tired of it.

