

The Peter Thiel Principle - comatose_kid
http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/11/05/thiel-gop-weakness-oped-cx_pr_1106robinson.html

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anon256
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.

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shimon
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.

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maximilian
"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.

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

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byrneseyeview
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).

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comatose_kid
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

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rwebb
"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.

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byrneseyeview
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.

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someperson
Better link: [http://www.forbes.com/2008/11/05/thiel-gop-weakness-oped-
cx_...](http://www.forbes.com/2008/11/05/thiel-gop-weakness-oped-
cx_pr_1106robinson_print.html)

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yters
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.

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byrneseyeview
"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.

~~~
yters
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?

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

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

