

Good News for People who Hate Bad News - qhoxie
http://calacanis.com/2008/10/28/good-news-for-people-who-hate-bad-news/

======
Eliezer
"Bottom line: there is zero chance of a short or medium term-rebound. Zero."

The price of a security is its expected value, more or less. If the market
thinks a security has zero chance of going up, the market must also think it
has zero chance of going down.

The possibility of a rebound is priced into this market, and so is the
possibility of further decline; the two should balance.

Even in really crazy markets with forced selling due to liquidation, this rule
shouldn't get too far out of whack. If a security can only go up, people will
buy it until it can go down again. If a security can only go down, people will
sell it until it can go up again. If this guy really believes he has
privileged info that the market can only go down from here, he should short-
sell his way to a risk-free fortune.

But somehow, I doubt that, once this is pointed out to him, he will be
anywhere near as confident with a few thousand dollars of his own money, as
when he is helpfully advising entrepreneurs about their business strategy for
years to come.

~~~
toby
Thank you for pointing this out.

People's willingness to point out what they know about markets _for certain_,
without being willing to actually make the bet, has always amazed me.

The truth is, if someone was 100% certain that the market would not recover
from where it is, it's easy to bet on that without committing any capital and
you'd even make the money if the market stayed exactly where it is.

I see a quote on Dec 350 GOOG calls at $24. If you feel lucky, write ten
contracts and take the $24,000... all you'll need is your broker to trust that
you can cover the bet if you're wrong.

It's ok to hedge your language, it's alright to admit you're guessing. The
less often you make definitive statements, the less often you'll look like a
fool in hindsight. And the less often you make definitive statements that
exactly mirror a market position, the less often you'll look like a fool in
foresight.

~~~
swombat
"Bottom line: there is zero chance of a short or medium term-rebound. Zero."

I don't see any claim about share prices there. He's talking about economic
growth, consumer confidence, investor confidence, etc.

Another way to say what he stated there is: "We're headed for a deep, long
recession, and there's zero chance of it miraculously getting better in the
short or even medium term."

That's not a statement about share prices, it's a statement about the economy.

Also, how do you know he doesn't have a bunch of shorts on the markets?

~~~
toby
He does spend a paragraph before that talking about the state of the Dow and a
lot later on how companies will manage their earnings, so I went with the
parent posters interpretation. But you're right, I could have misinterpreted.

Also, I don't know his trading positions. I just find these statements that
are _so_ certain to be mildly irritating, when it's been clear for a while
that no one really has a knows what is going on or how to fix it.

~~~
swombat
Granted, but the truth is, no one has any clue what's going on, ever. And yet,
"Who the hell knows what will happen?", despite being always truthful, is not
really good advice at any time. It doesn't matter what the state of the
economy is - no one knows what will happen next.. if they did, they could make
some good bets on the stock markets and become rich. All that anyone ever has
is opinions.

I think that opinion pieces would get tedious fairly quickly if they were
constantly paraphrased with "imho"s...

~~~
ph0rque
> Granted, but the truth is, no one has any clue what's going on, ever.

Hmmm... that sounds like a pretty absolute statement... is there any way to
bet on that ;~)?

~~~
adrianwaj
You can but who can ever prove it.

You have to have absolute knowledge to know if someone else has absolute
knowledge. In the end you have to take people's words on things based on their
acquired and intuitive knowledge.

------
rw
Nice-sounding metaphor + leaky abstraction: maybe useful.

2817 words of take-your-breath-away verbosity: useless.

------
ChaitanyaSai
Ugh, what is with the subscribers only, but on popular demand farce?

~~~
tlrobinson
A sneaky ploy to gain more subscribers?

------
dcurtis
"I’m retired from blogging and have moved to the comfort of my email
newsletter, where 9,400 of my close friends and I have a nice intimate
discussion."

I like Calacanis and the things he has to say in his emails, but to say the
9,400 people are his close friends and that he has an intimate discussion with
them is just stupid.

He's a blogger using the Cartmanland technique.

~~~
adrianwaj
When blogging, I didn't like the fact that all the feed readers were
anonymous. At least with an email list one can see someone's email address and
contact them no matter whether they've stopped subscribing or read your
emails. Even with Friendfeed subscribers, one can discover quite a lot about a
person, and then contact them directly in most cases with a little bit of
investigation (like a LinkedIn profile, blog feed or YouTube account that one
might explore.)

While the anonymoity and ease of subscribing to RSS gives it appeal to
surfers, the former aspect can still be unattractive to writers, especially
with lurkers and non-commenters often going above 95% of a blog's traffic,
thus the lack of a feedback loop can make blogging unattractive, (poor return
on energy, feelings of depletion to others - at least on HN there's mod-
points, profiles and the likelihood of replies to encourage hefty postings)
and also with advertising or sponsorship unsuitable unless a blog is extremely
trafficked or focussed. The difficulty with blogging on FriendFeed is it only
allows micro entries. Also, micro-entries can be too interspersed with one's
other feeds.

Solution: startup offering key-based RSS urls individualized and presented on
a blog site if readers are logged-in to the startup site (or hold a cookie).
Also, by revealing a reader identity to an author, the author can at most
tailor their writing and find offers or opportunities for readers, and at the
least continue blogging. The idea is also useful for bands as they release new
material to fans. There can be an option to prevent the display of non-keyed
RSS URLs (ie you must be logged in to see the rss URL on a blog page.)

This idea would be useful for a new startup networking site, a tipping site
(eg Tipjoy), comment site (ie Disqus), networking site (ie Linkedin,
Younoodle, Friendfeed as a way to promote each one's service and make it
useful offsite) or a web analytics site.

Alternatively, Google could reveal blog readers to blog authors with
information from Reader, provided readers opt-in to the feature and setup a
profile, and blog owners claim their blog.

Personally, I may restart blogging if such a service existed, likewise I would
also be very happy to use it when subscribing to others. Right now I only blog
mainly via linking to HN comments on my Friendfeed.

From experience, I know that anytime I contacted a blog reader whom I had
known about, they were generally always helpful for whatever the reason, but
many readers just won't contact the author, so it became a guessing game as to
who was reading my material. Even in a blog posting if you ask readers to
email you, they won't because it's tacit that there's no obligation. So rather
than setup a list of 500+ LinkedIn contacts who I barely know, a typical blog
(ie an exercise in charity to some extent), I'd rather keep a blog using this
startup's feed-identifying tool, and then I can contact and network with those
on my reader list if the need arose. This is something Calacanis can do to a
greater extent with his list than he could've done with his blog (which
incidentally I never was interested in): identify and contact readers who
cannot lurk so easily.

------
markessien
This is just weak fearmongering by the people who have the most to gain from
it. I'm actually glad about the drama, as it means that less of the cheap
money will be coming into the software space, giving those who care about real
products time to polish, rather than having to release as soon as possible
because of the sheer amount of competition.

------
wastedbrains
I like the album that Modest Mouse album quite a bit...

OK for Modest Mouse it is actually, "Good New for People who Love Bad News"

[http://www.amazon.com/Good-News-People-Who-
Love/dp/B0001M7P7...](http://www.amazon.com/Good-News-People-Who-
Love/dp/B0001M7P78)

------
Jasber
Thumbs up for the Modest Mouse reference.

I realize the actual line is "people who love bad news" but close enough to
make me smile.

~~~
timr
Yeah, but by switching around the words, he makes you wonder if he understood
why the original album title was clever.

When you first heard the Modest Mouse album name, it begged a question: what's
good news for people who love bad news, anyway? Bad news? Good news? Bad news
that's good news? It was a clever bit of wordplay.

~~~
byrneseyeview
1) It didn't beg the question.

2) Bad news, obviously. For people who like bad news, good news is bad news.
You just need to avoid the assumption that the phrase "good news" means the
same thing at different levels of abstraction.

------
fallentimes
Dupe (sort of): <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=345463>

------
redorb
yeah I think a blog without comments wouldve served his mission better, but
this option includes a list to spam later

------
ram1024
it's a good read.

i don't think the meltdown is going to be QUITE as bad as he insists. must be
that entrepreneural bias...

~~~
alaskamiller
[http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/10/11/business/20081...](http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/10/11/business/20081011_BEAR_MARKETS.html?hp)

------
ScottWhigham
_The severity of what has happened can’t be underestimated... What you do in
the next 30 days will probably make or break your company. The storm is upon
us and the death spiral has started._

Oh shit - I'm just gonna jump off a bridge then, Jason. What's the point of
living?

