This is incorrect. The way shorting works is you borrow a stock (and keep paying premium for the duration) and sell it
Premiums are usually small, so you can make many multiples of paid premium
And since their business model is releasing the findings, which in turn makes the stock drop, they can time their short position very well and don't need to pay premiums for long
I think you misunderstood what I meant by "your money" in "double your money" (and I was unclear). You can only earn the value of the stocks you borrow. When trading long, the gain is unlimited.
According to Investopedia, "the Federal Reserve Board requires all short sale accounts to have 150% of the value of the short sale at the time the sale is initiated" so it's the same principle as going long with margin. You can leverage yourself but there's a limit.
Yes, but borrowing short is fundamentally leveraged. As long as the stock doesn't increase in value, you don't need much of your own cash to secure it - because you're holding the cash from selling it.
But, of course, that gets ugly when the stock goes up; that's when you have to start putting your own money in against the borrow.
Isn't this a bit like arguing that you can make infinite money by borrowing infinite money and going long? You have to maintain margin requirements which limits how many shares you can borrow so again, you can really only double your money (not even double, iiuc your account has to have 150% of the value of your short), unless there's something I'm not seeing.
> your account has to have 150% of the value of your short
yep, people who aren't professional traders, and don't actually have an account with a broker to do shorting with, and dont know the margin requirements.
The thing is, a broker will _never_ put themselves at risk of losing money. If they offer you a shorting service, they require a method to make themselves whole. If you short, they will guess some sort of margin of safety for said short (calculated based on the liquidity of the stock) - if it's very liquid, the margin could be lower, but for illiquid stocks, it's even higher. This margin of safety is what the broker will use to close your short position if the market moves against you - you don't get a choice in the matter. You don't even have access to those funds from the sale of the short - the broker holds onto it until the short is closed.
uhh, no. When trading long your gain is limited by the depth of the order book. Stock price isn't relevant if there are 3 buyers out there looking to buy 2 shares each and you're sitting on 100,000 shares
Back in the days Google notoriously launched turn-by-turn navigation on Android only. They bet on this being a big enough differentiator for people to use Android over iPhones.
Apple then launched Apple maps - which at some point became quite good. Google quickly learned that they can't afford to make Android specific features in their apps or they risk losing large percentage of iOS users if Apple makes a competing product
If Apple didn't respond with making their own maps, then maybe we would see more and more Android specific features, to the point where Android would become the dominating platform
But this is also exactly the same game Apple plays against Android users. It's the same reason why iMessage bubbles are green for Android. Google won the maps round, but such wins are vanishingly rare against Apple.
There are non-Android devices that can send texts as well; they also appear as green. It's probably more accurate to say that encrypted messages are blue and unencrypted are green. Look at the recent AT&T hack to see why the difference matters.
Even if that was more accurate (I don't think it is), it's certainly not the way users see it.
In fact that's NOT the way Apple describes it, either (see the Apple article cited above), because Apple doesn't actually want to enable E2EE -- it only wants to be able to say it offers it.
In practice, ensuring that other users are pressured into choosing iMessage on iPhone is the only thing that matters to Apple.
And, this very simple trick works extremely well: at least 87% of teenagers in the U.S. (https://mashable.com/article/apple-messages-green-doj) are pre-programmed to buy an iPhone, even though they have the lowest disposable income of all. Meanwhile, less than a third of the overall global population owns an iPhone.
Is that because iPhones are better? As an owner of both a recent Pro Max and Pixel Pro, I can unequivocally answer, "no", but I do find all of the annoyances between cross-device communication accrue to the point of just wanting to switch to my iPhone full-time, even though it's arguably a worse experience in many ways.
and services like e.g. SMS text reminders from Internet services do no run on Android. The green is not a signifier of Android, just of non-encrypted. Or non-Apple, if you want to be less precise. (Apple devices where encryption is disabled also appear as green.)
As much as I'd like to see it being more open, a lot of people seem concerned about security and are happy with the current state of iOS/iPadOs and not having to deal with troubleshooting of their families devices
I've also had two Garmin watches and I've always been on Android. I also have had Tiles since long before Airtags existed.
Both Garmin and Tile work flawlessly on my Android devices. I've tried to help my wife add them to her iPhone and it's just not worked right, it's a fight to keep things connected and the Tile app only works when it's open and you can't reply to messages from the Garmin and on and on.
I appreciate the efforts to protect privacy and battery life, I can certainly imagine a different Bluetooth device than the Garmin with a worse app that would use the permissions granted it for nefarious purposes, or a worse tracker than the Tile that would wear down battery life with poorly-coded constant background activity, but Apple are clearly also acting in their own selfish interests.
Insider trading being illegal encourages participation in markets for people outside the company. As well as discourages intentionally messing up within the company and profiting from short selling
The argument against it is that markets would be more efficient if people were allowed to trade on information not yet available to the public
That sounds about right. It is hard to make all information public asap (with all the regulation), so I would assume it would be hard to get rid of the wiggle room between when an insider can place a bet and the information actually becomes public
Matt Levine's most recent article touches on insider trading pros and cons (in relation to sports betting) and is, as usual, a great read - https://archive.is/jJ25g
>>As well as discourages intentionally messing up within the company and profiting from short selling
While I do not agree with the OP on insider trading being good.... I also think short selling is a net negative and should be banned right along side insider trading
> I also think short selling is a net negative and should be banned
Why? The potential losses for shorting are infinite whereas the profit is capped, so entering a short requires high conviction. Stock markets are also a market for information: banning short selling takes away a large amount of information and has negative impacts on price discovery, liquidity etc.
All of my non-phone devices are Linux. I like the separation there. Phones are not really good devices for working on, and as a result, aren’t that fun to tinker with. I’d rather just leave it locked down.
The app based model that phones use is kind of crap. I will happily pipe together a bunch of little scripts and programs in bash to make a workflow for my niche usecase. But, phone apps don’t seem to focus on inter-operability. As a result, in the phone ecosystem you just have to find an app, or the task is basically impossible. If I’m not going to use third party store, and there are fewer apps in the official App Store, I’ll probably use my phone less.
On the bright side, maybe making the phone ecosystem worse will open up room for more proper Linux phones with the full desktop suite of tools.
It is, for all the reasons you mentioned, and nobody is aiming for that. He just found and demonstrated a cheat (bug) that the platform itself should have no issue detecting - changing weight mid race
Zwift uploads race results to ZwiftPower and removes any cyclists that are outliers and it assumes are cheating. 8w/kg would be a big outlier. But it looks like the platform calculates w/kg based on the cyclists' ending weight. So if you change your weight to 25kg right after the race begins and back to 65kg before the end - while cycling at 200w, then Zwift's cheat detection system calculates your w/kg as ~3w/kg, which is completely reasonable and would not get caught. But cycling at 8w/kg is far far faster than 3w/kg
The article is overblown. He's not trying to end cheating altogether. He found a bug and demonstrated it
> The article is overblown. He's not trying to end cheating altogether. He found a bug and demonstrated it
The article says he did more than demonstrate a bug:
"He became a founding member of FERA, the Fair E-Racing Alliance, where he works with 25 other volunteers to assess suspected cheats across ~60 online cycling teams. The list of ways to cheat on Zwift he amassed? It’s now up to 127."
I think the article is written in a over-sensationalistic way and I would take it with a grain of salt, but also possible that he's really into finding bugs. Based on the reddit post, he's definitely really into racing on Zwift
The whole Zwift w/kg category system is inherently flawed even without cheating.
If you're in a lower category and right near the w/kg limit you could be 70kg and racing against 100kg riders. If the cat limit was 3.2w/kg you could have 224w a maximum vs 320w for the heavier rider.
On the flats they'll destroy you, in the sprints they'll destroy you and on the descents they'll destroy.
On the climbs? They'll hang right with you because you both climb at 3.2w/kg.
If you get fitter you'll just be bumped up to a cat with higher limits but the same issue.
Unless you're an elite cat A rider, where there's no limits, you should treat the races as just a fitness activity.
The heaviest fit rider will always have a massive advantage regardless of the course. So why "race" at all?
Sorta, Zwift doesn't give a lot of insight into how the w/kg system is reflected in terms of in game speed, but it's not the same as outdoors. I'm 190lbs with a 342FTP and I do not pull away from light guys on the flats the way I would expect on the road. But the light guys do pull away as expected on the climbs. Seems heavily weighted toward w/kg and not pure watts.
No not really. Categories are done on points for how you place in previous races. If you win then no matter what you weigh or how much power you put out you move up a category.
Any rider with enough power to ride you off their wheel would be promoted until they couldn't do that any more.
They don't get a special exemption to ride in races with weaker riders simply because they're heavy like on Zwift.
It would the same issue in reverse if they simply grouped riders by absolute wattage without using weight as a component. The light riders would always win in the hilly races and hold their own on the flats. Also weird.
What Zwift needs is an Elo system based on results. Just like in real life.
The pro peloton doesn't use an ELO system. There is a points system based on races placement, but outside of the team promotion/demotion every three years it's basically useless, especially for the individual riders.
Light riders are at an advantage on climbs IRL because "a light rider doesn't need to generate as much power as his heavier competitor because he has less weight to propel up hills." [1]
That's why I said "almost always". It's not like any branch of bicycle racing has weight classes. You always compete with people in your category no matter how much power they generate or how much they weigh.
I mean the same thing can be said of many sports that break amateurs into categories for subcompetition. They're all arbitrary at some point, and even if they're based on competition results, it doesn't distinguish between "took five years to reach this point" and "incidentally passing this category by on their whirlwind to XYZ much higher rank".
For example I compete in high power three position. Your classification (unranked, marksman, sharpshooter, expert, master, high master) is based on whether you scored X% of points for three consecutive matches (or your first two matches for initial rank). I've shot Master scores in every single match bar one, including my first match. But in the second match, there was some confusing misfire on one string (like faulty ammo related? Still don't know to this day lol), which dropped something like 20 points, which is basically enough to kick you down. Which means for the subsequent three matches, I was effectively sandbagging in Expert, and scoring high expert, and getting some pocket change for it (like $20, a fraction of the ammo cost). But I've never pieced together three high master, and may never get there. Meanwhile, we've got a couple people in the area who are literal national champions, and they score so close to perfection every time it's untouchable for the rest of us. It's like they're competing in a much more difficult sport than we are, like smallbore (actually one of the guys went to the Olympics for air rifle so that makes sense lol, air rifle is way harder than high power, score-wise and competition-depth -wise). If one of them shows up to the match, it's a guarantee they win, even if they're massively sick during the match.
In a previous life I did fencing, and had years long struggles to barely make B (sorta the equivalent of Master in high power 3p I guess). In earlier years of that life, I would get crushed beyond belief by Ds, Cs, and Bs. Eventually I got to the point where I could occasionally beat Bs, and by stringing enough tournaments in there, I got it. But I'd still usually lose to a B. And, just like in 3p above, everything we did was a joke to the serious competitors with national rankings, because they could just walk all over us. The massive gap between random A, and A who is high on the points list and seriously might make the Olympic team isn't shown by the category ratings. On paper they're the same rank as the old high master guys, but there's no real comparison.
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But ... despite all that, breaking into subcategories is a Thing in virtually all competitions, because it encouraged more people to participate. You're less demoralized if there's something hypothetically tangible to work for. It's everywhere - we break colleges into D1-D3 schools, high schools get even more partitioned. We break kids into tiny age brackets.
So you can compete in lower subcategories, but I think you're right in the back of your mind you need to remember you're doing it for fun or exercise (certainly not exercise in high power lol). That's why the people who get super worked up over scores or times or whatever at some middling amateur category look so out of place.
I think you've missed the point. Having categories is not the problem. Getting beaten by more talented riders, able to skilfully make of drafting is not a problem either.
The problem is that the categories are designed in such a way that heavier riders are allowed to put out more power than lighter riders.
At the limits of what the category allows the lighter riders just can not win. If they do put out more power then they get disqualified and bumped up a category.
Moving up a category does not help you and in most races you are not allowed to race against lower cat riders because of power limits are enforced.
In open category races you'll be racing against Cat A riders and they're going win because they have more power than you.
So if you race in Zwift and you're not Cat A, you either have to be the heaviest in your race or accept that you won't get on a podium. Ever.
> So if you race in Zwift and you're not Cat A, you either have to be the heaviest in your race or accept that you won't get on a podium. Ever.
I think you're missing my point. I mean even if you move to a different classification method, you'll still end up with the same problem. Even if you move to some vague skill-based or prior-results-based classification instead of a power metric or weight class or whatever, any amateur subclassification is still going to have almost everyone get crushed by the people who are just sandbagging or blowing through the lower classification on their way up.
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So what I mean is
Yes what you state is a problem. But I posit that even if you fix that problem, you'll still end up with basically the same underlying problem anyways.
Premiums are usually small, so you can make many multiples of paid premium
And since their business model is releasing the findings, which in turn makes the stock drop, they can time their short position very well and don't need to pay premiums for long
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