am3101

It’s a much simpler answer. There is a shortage of skilled blue collar workers. When demand outstrips supply for talent, talent becomes more expensive and low-quality talent survives longer. It’s the exact same in construction which is why construction costs are so high (and quality of work worse).

For example, there’s a forecasted 550K plumber gap in the US— https://www.morningbrew.com/stories/2024/03/15/plumber-short...

It’s “easy” (from a barriers to entry perspective) to become an uber driver. It’s also hard to advertise to one-off riders. Uber exists to match a super liquid pool of drivers with a large rider base.

There is no incentive for a plumber to sign up for a platform like this that (1) takes a cut and (2) will say if you are bad. You as a plumber have plenty of work.

Solving this is not a tech problem, it’s a labor supply problem.

(I run a company that at one point took a ton of tier 1 venture money to use tech/automation to solve a blue collar skilled talent problem. It was extremely unsuccessful.)

Bourbon was definitely on the downswing before this (note that any spirit made in the US will have the same issue with tariffs).

First, as noted, there are generational (and cyclical) shifts in spirits.

Second, bourbon’s “box” is very narrow. There are LOTS of innovative things that scotch manufacturers can and do pursue. Bourbon has to be barreled and bottled at specific proofs and, more importantly, must be majority corn and aged in a new oak barrel. There’s only so much differentiation you can have between distilleries, which is why some of the more innovative distilleries like High West often do “American whiskey” instead of bourbon.

Third, the bourbon boom in particular was so fast (and on the heels of a broken industry) that there wasn’t much quality aged supply. Partially because it’s cheaper and partially because size you can’t spend four years aging bourbon with no positive cash flow, most “craft” distilleries source from MGP (white label producer in Indiana), and I think you end up in this consumer trap where consumers know they want something nicer than bottom-shelf Jim Beam, but don’t know how to differentiate a distillery that does in-house product vs a distillery that sources. (Also, some distilleries that do in house are quite bad.) The net of it is consumers who want “nice” bourbon eventually conclude that “all bourbon tastes the same” which if you only buy from MGP sourced distilleries is sort of true. (Ironically some of the large brands like Wild Turkey are actually the really great brands in the space.)

I think this is more a function of “development is hard and there are a lot of fraudsters” vs conversions specifically. Conversions are harder than an average development but there are hundreds of similar stories for normal ground up.

Not just regulations. Basic issues like - office floor plates are wide, but all bedrooms need windows so you end up with weird sliver rectangular floor plans bc you can’t have an all interior apartment. Or - the plumbing in office runs up the core so you are constrained where your bathrooms and kitchens sit.

Also most office buildings aren’t totally vacant and leases can be 10+ years. If you have 48 floors empty but an office tenant on the second floor and one on the 44th floor, and they both have 8 years left on the lease, you can’t just evict them for no cause. It compounds since most of these candidates are eg 30% occupied with a ton of small tenants. Most successful conversions are single tenant buildings where you just do a deal with that one tenant (JPM was tenant in one NYC building).

Regs are an issue but not the main one.

Just to put this in perspective, the Mamdani housing plan is 200k homes over ten years which would be far below the historic pace of new construction in nyc. Conversions are great but a drop in the bucket.

That’s true though: (1) while Tolkien isn’t trying to write an allegory he is trying to tell a story and build a world that is internally consistent (he famously builds up from language, as a philologist) and so this kind of criticism is appropriate (perhaps more so than say GRRM or CS Lewis who are often much less internally consistent and thus harder to analyze) (2) there is a pretty compelling argument that when Tolkien argues that his world is tabula rasa / de novo (eg claiming it did not have “any influence” on the plot), he’s deceiving himself. Many Tolkien scholars (including his pal Lewis) seem to think WWI heavily influenced LOTR in particular (esp the sacking of the shire).

Agree it is very odd to ignore everything outside of LOTR. Like making claims about the gospels without reading the Old Testament or epistles

Canavan is eminently more qualified to talk about Tolkien than I am, though I am surprised (as another commenter noted) that there are no references to any of the legendarium beyond LOTR.

I am however surprised because leftists have historically criticized Tolkien for his black and white views, which I always thought was the point. Another English professor (who defends this view) notes:

It has just become the tale that middle-to-high brow critics tell--ever since Edward Wilson was saying his own manifestly untrue things about Tolkien in the New Yorker fifty years ago--that Tolkien's fictional world is morally simplistic and rigidly Manichaean. It may be true that the story of the Ring is less morally ambiguous than the average realistic novel, but that's primarily because Tolkien wasn't especially interested in the problem of knowing right from wrong. His concern was to explore the psychology of the moment when you know right from wrong but aren't sure whether you have the courage and fortitude to do the right thing.

Modern liberalism likes to think that all our problems are epistemological: we are afflicted by never knowing with sufficient clarity what we ought to do. Our fictions tend to reflect that assumption. Tolkien, not being a modern liberal, thought it more interesting to explore situations when people know what they need to know but may lack the strength of will to act on that knowledge. He might say, and with some justification, that contemporary literary fiction is not simplistic in regard to such problems but oblivious to them.

By "insider trading" I assume you mean illegal insider trading. There are a few levels:

(1) explicitly illegal insider trading where you trade on MNPI and hope no one notices (e.g., CEO sells shares before bad-news results). I don't think you could track this because usually the person trading is either not a prolific insider (a janitor who sees a draft report in the trash can) and therefore how would you track them OR a prolific insider using some sort of shell (e.g., wife/cousin) [or some combo]

(2) totally legal and ethical "insider trading." The SEC allows insiders to trade, you just have to do it with proper disclosure and in open periods. As noted Unusual Whales and others track this because in theory this is a signal—if mgmt is selling does that mean they no longer believe long-term in this company (irrespective of near-term MNPI)? The flip side obviously is that management cannot eat shares and sometimes wants liquidity for lifestyle reasons.

(3) everything in between—shadow trading, auto selldowns that are turned off if you realize there is good news, etc.

Tracking (2) is as mentioned kind of useful for investors but I would argue not a great signal, tracking (1) is mostly useless because it's a post-hoc analysis (most analyses here are—there was a massive spike in trades before/after a big announcement, or more obviously, a big block trade) and tracking (3) is similar to tracking (2). Btw there is also a lot of academic evidence that insider traders of type (1) overestimate the importance and misestimate the impact of their MNPI—knowing J&J had a drug that passed FDA may not matter if (a) there are twenty drugs that failed and (b) the street assumed it would pass. (none of this is legal or trading advice)

This is really hard to quantitatively track, but there is a similar concept called the "hairy back chart" where you compare management guidance to actuals (or street guidance, which is usually developed in conjunction with management, to actuals). E.g., https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/strategy-and-corporate...

I think this goes back a bit to what personas you are trying to solve for. Many companies have a generic investor presentation on the website.[1] Every professional investor will have access to sell-side coverage and initiations of coverage is basically this (an overview of the company, key drivers, etc.). Retail investors will often have access through wealth managers. And if it went public relatively recently the IPO deck will function as this.

[1] E.g., https://s27.q4cdn.com/632832908/files/doc_financials/2024/q4...

there are definitely times when you care about absolute price—e.g., if you are trading options that strike at given prices, or if the company has convertible debt that can be converted at a given strike price, or if there is a risk of the exchange delisting you if you consistently trade below $1.

this would be a good toggle but both matter

For sure though I assume this is targeting small shops without R&D teams. R&D teams prob have built this tooling / you can get it from Bloomberg.

Target shops don’t have time to dedicate to elbow grease

I am a portfolio manager of a small/mid-cap equity fund. This is definitely cool and clearly took a lot of time and thought!

If this is a side project, that's amazing and I love it. If you did want to take it further though, I would though encourage you to spend some time interviewing potential users and thinking through how you are creating value.

As a fundamentals investor, to win in stockpicking (especially against quant traders), you need to get really deep into the details. As mentioned there are lots of tools that summarize earnings calls, but more importantly, I don't think summarizing earnings calls or releases are super useful for investors.

There are basically two ways to build useful software for investors. One way is to create summaries / off-the-shelf analyses that tell investors if a company is good or bad. Right now as-is, that is sort of where this product is. The problem is, an earnings call summary is insufficient. Yes, AAPL revenue may be up 4.0%, but the fact that you figured that out in 15 seconds with an LLM is not a differentiator since everyone else can figure it out in 45 seconds by just doing mental math. And, what did _you_ expect it to be? Very different trade answer if you thought it should be down 10% or up 40% and it in reality hit 4.0%.

I think generally this is also tough because the people really good about building recommenders (black box or otherwise) just work at hedge funds and make a ton of money for themselves / their clients. It is almost always going to be more profitable to do this, in no small part because once you reveal your secret sauce to the market, it gets priced in.

There's also the issue of user personas. There is no one generic investment strategy. A "good" investment is very different for a long-only vs. a long-short vs. a macro fund vs. an activist fund (and yes these are not mutually exclusive at all).

So, I think in order for this to become truly useful you need to make it more of an interactive tool to allow people to run their own analysis (vs having a "one size fits all" analysis). A few ways you could do this:

1) investments are done behind an investment thesis. Can you TRACK theses over time? For example, a merger arb thesis might be that a big M&A deal is on track (or not on track) to close. Can you track my THESIS, which almost becomes a detailed LLM prompt. E.g., "I think that Company X's acquisition of Company Y will close at the current offered price of $Z by date A, and key milestones are (1) regulatory approval on or around date B, (2) stock price converging toward the offered price of $Z as date A approaches, (3) positive sentiment on earnings calls about the acquisition by both Company X and Company Y"; let me know if earnings releases or calls or 8-Ks should make me update my thesis ("8-K came out that said that the target date of A has slipped by 90 days"). Or, "Company X said they bought Company Y and at the time expected revenues of $Z in three years; what compound quarterly growth rate does this imply" and then track that every quarter to see if they are on track or not

2) Can you help me track a specific question through each quarter—almost like automated BI / reported? Bloomberg/CapIQ/etc. will do this for GAAP metrics like revenue or COGS but often companies will report bespoke metrics. Can you help me track WeWork's community-adjusted EBITDA (lol) every quarter? Can you help me track business unit non-GAAP EBITDA with an addback for taxes every quarter? These are things that won't show up in your GAAP 3-statement model but for _individual_ companies may be super important

3) similarly can you help me run comparisons across companies? E.g., can I compare Vornado's total revenue (almost all office) to Bridge's office segment's revenue to SL Green's total revenue (also almost all office) and every quarter see how their relative revenue (market share) is changing? What about their occupancy and rent levels?

4) generic RAG/natural language search (when did SmartRent talk about their acquisition of Planon), although as noted, many competitors are doing this

All of the above are things that analysts do in real life and basically just track manually in Excel.

Again don't mean to be discouraging—I posted this in part because I think there is a ton of value here to (a) having a clean pipeline and (b) having a basic working knowledge of applying LLMs in a useful way. If helpful I'm happy to discuss more.

Small note: it’s Cliff Asness from AQR who came up with the illiquidity “premium,” though Levine does report it a lot. This matters a bit bc AQR is a large hedge fund that trades in liquids and therefore is marked frequently… there’s a bit of self-serving bias here (although may still be true).

The two biggest threads that seem to be coming out: 1- a number of large shareholders are on board 2- (probably related to the prior point) no one seriously thought Musk would be able to secure the financing, but he did. Remember, this is the guy who promised to do a take-private of Teslas with "funding secured" when it was very clear no such funding was secured. The Board, understandably, didn't want to waste time negotiating with Musk and said "show us the money"

This is a good piece (before Musk had secured the financing): https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-04-20/elon-c...

Another point I would make is that Twitter’s board is doing a decent job of (1) asking these questions and (2) forcing Musk to answer them. In a sense, launching a tender offer is a way for Musk to put pressure on the board to do a deal. But in another sense, forcing Musk to launch a tender offer is a way for the board to pressure him to find financing, which is a prerequisite to a deal and not something he would do on his own. In his own life, Musk is very casual about what counts as “funding secured,” as we know now from repeated experience. Writing a tender offer document will force him to be less casual.

Broadly speaking, what has happened so far is (1) Musk offered the board $54.20 per share to buy Twitter, (2) the board said “show us the money,” and (3) Musk is working on it. If he comes up with the money, then the board will have to make some decisions, but right now the ball is in his court.

I went to Princeton and actually found the "COS" department was excellent at introductory programming. A lot of people took COS 126 (the introductory class—equivalent of AP Computer Science) with no programming background and did fine. There was also a COS 109 class that was way easier that _Brian Kernighan_ (of K&R) taught that was explicitly targeted at humanities majors. https://www.cs.princeton.edu/courses/archive/fall21/cos109/ . I think classes beyond COS 126 were _not_ like this and similar to what you describe re: meaningful hours outside of class, but if you are just exploring, 126 probably scratched your itch.

I had a very similar impression of non-COS STEM classes while I was at Princeton, however... both course descriptions and other students pretty strongly discouraged me from exploring STEM classes.

Also, really only relevant in NYC, but [Subwaydle](https://www.subwaydle.com/)

I think this article drastically underestimates how hard it is to build and acquire new businesses. It reads like a caricature of a first-year management consultant’s recommendation—step 1, acquire adjacent businesses. Step 2, profit. (Edit: former management consultant)

Set aside the culture piece, which is well described in the thread.

First, MSFT struggles a lot with keeping innovation going and a big piece of this is that in order to get the full value out of vertical integration with your existing product portfolio (and customer base), you need to build full integration with other products, which often handicaps the new product with old protocols.

Teams is a great (organic) example. The concept of slack+zoom+Dropbox is awesome. I think if it was executed well, it would be the market leader (or the other three would consolidate). But my experience doing anything with files in it has been very poor (it eats my files constantly!!!), and I think that is because it’s stuck using SharePoint as the backend, which was great for its time but was not intended for modern use cases.

On the flip side, MSFT has also done a great job of acquiring / building _noncore_ products that don’t struggle with this. GitHub is a good example—there aren’t a lot of legacy core dependencies. But I find it hard to believe that if they bought airtable they wouldn’t try to merge it with excel and get stuck with the .xls/xlsx limits. By the way, if you don’t… how do you sell to legacy clients, which is their advantage?

Second, Microsoft’s history has made it quite fearful of regulatory intervention. Yes, positioning themselves as “we’re not evil like Amazon, stealing your ideas” is a strategy, but it is also because they are terrified that they will be caught doing something like Amazon because everyone there remembers the ‘90s. It is amazing how often the phrase “we have to stay neutral” comes up in my meetings with my (multi year relationship) Microsoft sales reps.

Third, related to this… Microsoft probably would get slammed with antitrust action if they started buying every company with a $100mn market cap!

Fourth, I think this article drastically overestimates network effects. Actually, I think it misunderstands them. Zoom does not have network effects. If a client or vendor (or my boss) sends me a WebEx link, I am going to (begrudgingly) download the WebEx client and use it. There is no additional value to having more users (which is the definition of a network effect). This article is conflating scale with network effect.

As an aside, I thought some of the advice to startups was funny. Capital may be a nice moat, but it seems hard to action on (“ah, I realized what I was missing… I will go raise $5bn for my series A SaaS business!”) as does the concept of cross-selling, which requires multiple (compelling) products, a large and very capable sales force, and years of trust with the client. I think the core insight here is spot on—it is Microsoft’s sales team that is the special sauce here.

Finally, another aside—I think share buybacks are extremely appropriate for large tech companies. I get that people think about them in % terms, but we have _trillion dollar companies_ now. It’s very hard to imagine that the last marginal dollar of profit goes as far in innovation at a trillion dollar company as it does as a billion dollar company. I would much rather a firm like Microsoft return some of that capital to shareholders rather than spending every last penny on innovation, at least in its current form and structure.