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Impressive data on the history of debates within the Federal Reserve Board.


It is a bit misleading to label all private equity as "massively leveraged." None of the major investors in "unicorns" of VC use leverage (e.g. Uber https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/uber/investors). In fact, the typical VC fund is legally barred from using leverage in their investments.

The buyout side of the PE market is leveraged, however, the investments in those investors' portfolios typically have big balance sheets to support the debt loads (and the interest payments).


Perhaps Mac users are wealthier than the average Windows user? I am not so sure about the Linux differential. It would be interesting to see the differences conditional on income.


I would say it's less likely that Mac users are wealthier, and more likely that Mac users are willing to pay for things that they want to have.


I think a more accurate way to say this is, for people that it makes more sense to buy a budget laptop/desktop ($300-500), Apple does not have an offering.


The Mac Mini is in that price range -- or at least has been traditionally. It does what most people need in a desktop machine.


Many of these actions are a consequence of the tax code: non-profit institutions such as universities can borrow for capital projects at the municipal rate and invest at the market rate (the latter is usually higher than the former). Most university have ample endowment for these capital "improvements," but this quirk of the tax code effectively subsidized a bit too much of it.



One might argue they didn't invest -- or the company said no! -- for the same reason corporate VC is sometimes frowned upon. Taking capital from corporations with related products can scare future partners or customers. Moreover, why sell equity if you can simply sell pre-orders?


Here's an academic article on the pay for entrepreneurs backed by VCs:

http://www.stanford.edu/~rehall/HallWoodward6.pdf

High average returns driven by huge exits and most entrepreneurs earn 0.


You have to believe that the (huge) growth rate is perpetual. Most firms do not grow faster than US GDP growth in the long-run.


On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everybody drops to zero, and yet people buy stock.


An API for the raw data that underlies this system would be extremely useful to academics. Databases like compustat and execucomp are expensive and lack some of the most interesting details in SEC documents. I have worked on trying to extract deep information in footnotes in financial statements (e.g. foreign cash holdings and option exercise tax shields) and found even Turk/Crowdflower couldn't handle the complexity. If they can figure out an algorithm to pull out such data, they will have both a great academic and private sector product.


If by the raw data you mean the actual filings with the SEC, then the raw data is available via ftp from the SEC itself.

http://sec.gov/edgar/searchedgar/ftpusers.htm

Parsing the edgar documents is a mixed bag. Many of the older filings and some of the more recent ones are in text rather than HTML. Finding footnotes in the HTML is probably not that bad but the issue is the lack of complete coverage where you miss the HTML footnote or the document is in text instead

I've worked on parsing the HTML tables for tables like Balance Sheet, Cash Flow, etc. It was problematic and I only got about 70% of the way there but I think a more complex rule base could get to 90%. The issue is that 90% isn't really good enough for many users.

I've heard that CapitalIQ/Thompson Reuters actually use Indian financial professionals to manually extract the info. This could be a good way to backfill/double check missing/bad values but I chose not to try that path. In the end, many of the potential customers will opt for paying a much higher price for a better brand and/or higher level processing like normalizing accounting standards.


I was really excited that they'd figured out a way to cull balance sheet data out of the filings. Doesn't appear so though, "XYZ Corp filed their annual statement today, you can view it here"


For historical data, this will be an issue.

Going forward, the SEC is requiring filers to make this process much easier

http://xbrl.sec.gov/ http://www.sec.gov/rules/final/2009/33-9002.pdf


Sounds interesting. Similar to Crowdflower, but with less management on the user end. Crowdflower provides "gold tests" that help filter out mistakes and makes it my go-to source for Turk tasks with a bit too much complexity. Of course, that means I have to manage questions, gold tests and review results. The value proposition here is thus quite appealing. Suppose we wanted to grab information from historic form D's:

http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/vprr/03/9999999997-03-0208...

These older forms lack consistency and would probably require lengthy instructions for data extraction. How do you do quality control?


One of the founders here.

We do a number of things to maintain quality. We do managed crowdsourcing, which means we provide support to our crowd. They can ask us when they do not understand a particular task. Also, our crowd is loosely forming a community both online and IRL. So, people help each other.

On top of that we have developed algorithms that check the crowd's answer against each other. Our algorithms also make sure that the right task is routed to the right person.

We also believe in paying our workers fairly. Happy, more productive workers leads to better quality work.


Awesome, sounds like you automated and crowd-sourced quality control. Will definitely check it out.


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