For example: https://medium.com/@efeng/can-netfli...n-132a64abad58

Not endorsing anything specific in this article, but pay attention what is taken for granted and what isn't.

I'm not talking about Netflix specifically but either way VCs are the ones that would be funding competitors in the same spaces, so they are the ones that need to figure out, for instance, how big the market for streaming and whether and how Netflix can be beaten and so on. Netflix also does not exist in isolation and VCs are the ones that need to understand the broader technology trends as they relate to businesses and investments at a high level. And I don't think most people here understand what I mean by "product people" nor would they write public pieces about internal strategy, so I added VCs so that people have a better frame of reference as to what I'm talking about.

The point is that you need to understand how technology companies operate, both from a operational perspective and a strategic perspective and also what matters and what does not.

candybar, i work with vcs and see a lot of these - they are total and utter garbage

vcs still want them because it's a good way for dumbasses to expose they are dumbasses but early money is purely throwing crap at the wall and seeing what will stick basically just using the quality of the team as criteria (since nobody knows what the company will actually grow into becoming) and later stage it's simply about revenue/growth

we basically just look for huge logical mistakes and glaring errors, those things serve more to expose the bad bets than to highlight the good ones

this is also why the only VCs to suceed are the ones who either have the brand name to get access to best companies or the ones that highly specialize in specific fields of expertise because nothing the company says itself really matters

I don't think you read what I wrote and you seem to be talking about pitch decks. That's not what I'm talking about. Despacito isn't going to get pitch decks sent to him. I'm just saying, to understand how the tech industry works on a strategic level, at a bare minimum, you should understand how the decision makers in the industry think. Another example:

https://stratechery.com/2019/netflix-flexes/

Regardless of whether VCs are any good or not, they are the ones that are making strategic decisions, as with tech executives and other product people. One of the major reasons why pitch decks aren't important, while the capabilities of the founding team are, is that good VCs can help with a flawed product strategy, they can't make incompetent people competent.

correct, i thought you were talking about pitch decks

my bad

you're also dead on about second half regarding mentorship, they often bring in consultants and sometimes even helicopter in their own picks to become employees

No worries - good to see a fellow tech person in BFI!

St. Louis Fed put together a COVID-19 Economic Data Tracking site https://research.stlouisfed.org/dashboard/49765

...

A couple of thoughts:

1) You can always find people that agree with you directionally on the market - finding one doesn't mean anything.

2) The type of correction he's talking about is well within the range of outcomes I'm arguing for and well outside the range of outcomes that I was arguing against.

My point was that you can't simply extrapolate based on how bad the recession is. For example, I don't buy this argument: this recession will be substantially worse the recessions associated with 2001-2002 or 2008-2009 stock market bottoms, therefore we should expect the stock market price drops to be at least as bad or worse. This is fine: we think the market has slightly mispriced the downside potential, but would be buyers ~10% below the current prices.

https://seekingalpha.com/news/357776...ass-bankruptcy

Gross. There probably needs to be legislation preventing this sort of thing, as it is a clear conflict of interest.



On a related note, banking sector expecting large increase in defaults.

https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/sc...104017292.html

Okey doke. Next question: What will $2,700 actually be worth come year-end?

We will have deflation before notable inflation.

I already explained why this had to happen (net cash balance changes add up to zero), but personal savings rate hit 33%, an all-time high:

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/05/29/us-s...-spending.html

This should stay elevated for some time and it's going to be interesting to see what people do with all this extra money.

^^ It will further elevate inequality as people without savings need people with savings to spend. This will be a year to remember.

We are all socialists now

Yeah it's pretty crazy that personal income was actually up by 10.5% (not annualized) and disposable income by 12.9%.

I expect they'll spend everything they have, plus some, as always. The question becomes what do they spend it on?

Assets / home improvements / home decor / toys are some biggies.

I work delivery. Package volume is up a trillion percent. People are spending, just online not at physical retail.

Likely less will be spent overall and less will be spent on higher productivity generating products.
The US government needs to increase tax on savings and use it to lower inequality. If they try to address this through inflation, it could actually increase inequality as the recent evidence shows us those with high savings rates will benefit from those inflation-creating policies.

Doesn't mean much, just that actual financial managers are mostly on the same wavelength.

51% CFOs believe market tests lows
22% believe in V-shaped recovery

Among North American CFOs, it's 33% vs 47% whether we hit the ATH or go below 19,000 first. It's unclear to what extent EMEA/APAC CFOs are familiar with even what's in the Dow or what's going on in the US from a macroeconomic perspective. On a non-weighted basis, the market is doing much worse than on a weighted basis, so if CFOs are extrapolating from their own situations, you'd get a more pessimistic result because the poll isn't weighted by market cap. LZB and JNJ both get one vote each despite the latter having 100 times the market cap.

Also, they are already aware of how well their own company is doing and if their own company isn't doing well, they'd want other companies to be doing poorly.

Also:

"Forty-one of the 130 members of the council responded to the survey, which was conducted from May 14–28 (15 from North America, 10 EMEA and 16 APAC)."

So among NA CFOs, we had 5 people saying ATH first vs 7 saying DOW 19,000 first. There are way more than 7 US companies on that list (https://www.cnbc.com/2016/04/08/cnbc...o-council.html) that are struggling badly right now.

on that strong economic report friday ("george floyd should be so happy looking down from heaven"),

i'm assuming (and i've seen some talk) that it was largely technical.

did people get laid off but then govt would lend biz money if they re-hired said employees?

if so, that's not real hiring..... i think i'm lazy. i need to go out and buy NYT,WSJ, Barrons and find out

is that corrrect that the hiring was largely technical? thx in advance

p.s. fyi, up till yesterday (not including that economic report), Fed Atlanta GDP NOW had 2nd quarter Real GDP down 53%. seems absurd. i mean, didn't tons of high paid white collar workers just work from home. or is that not alot?

Didn't you hear? Stonks only go up.

What you're talking about isn't possible to ascertain from the report and journalists aren't going to do this type of work since it would be mostly speculation of the type they are unqualified to engage in. This kind of hiring is indistinguishable from real hiring as far as the reports are concerned. You can do the math (distribution of loan proceeds by date) to come up with a reasonable range for this type of hiring but whatever you end up with is still speculation - that PPP is paying for someone doesn't mean you wouldn't have that person on the payroll without PPP. And having someone on the payroll just because it's free during the lockdown doesn't mean they won't keep the employee when the business reopens.

There's also a lot of grumbling about misclassification errors, but I haven't seen any estimate wrt how much this may have moved the rate.

On the whole, I don't think the report was great, the main positive takeaway at this point was that we avoided a surprise on the downside.

Again, this is annualized (so it comes to about roughly 17% down Q/Q) and this seems in line with earlier expectations. Keep in mind, this isn't an informed projection, just something that is mechanically extrapolated based on past data. The data points this is looking at this point are generally from peak-lockdown and the model doesn't know that these conditions won't last for all of Q2.