You may have gotten this from other comments, but he is on leave right now, so you'll have to wait a little longer before you start getting those juicy daily musings.
from this profile, Matt is very probably underpaid vs his earning potential (probably at least an order of magnitude) and should leave to substack or his own operation. but I respect that money really isn't everything.
He's IMO a perfect example of the intractability of the "fake news" problem. It's not that there aren't high quality news sources out there, like Matt Levine, it's that the market (in the form of folks willing to pay for it) isn't there.
(Maybe it's technology? Micropayments still aren't effectively a thing?)
I got to read his columns while working at Bloomberg, and it was really the only thing, besides a few friendships, I took with me when I left. Still subscribed and missing his take on things while he's on parental leave (but of course happy that he is taking so much time off for the sake of his family).
He's one of the very best writers out there, really. Witty, funny and to the point. (The whole WeWork affair was totally hilarious.) I hope he returns soon!
So this might be the place to ask this. The list of articles by Matt Levine on Bloomberg has button at the end that loads 20 older articles, when you click on it. Now since Matt is on parental leave I want to read some older articles, let's say from 2014.
Am I correct, that to do that I need to click 6 (years) * 200 (work days) / 20 (articles per click) = 60 times and wait for the page load to do that?! Is there really no other way to access these articles? Aren't they effectively unaccessible for most users because of that?
(I found a way to manipulate a JS variable to get to the older articles, but this is clearly not the inteded use.)
The same seems to be the case for the youtube videos of a very active vlogger. You can easily access current videos or the first ones, but not like from 4 years in the past.
I am asking this, because I always wonder if I am just to dumb to see the obvious easy way to use these sites or if there just is no way to do it?
It is a pattern, and even places like Twitter and Reddit are affected. Many of them, you can't even click 60 times, you're limited to X items and then that's it after that, even if it is your own writing! I think it is laziness and incompetence in systems design more than anything nefarious, although a lack of regard for the user can be considered a dark pattern in itself.
HN and dilbert.com are shining example of how to do it RIGHT. They provide calendar archives, filtering by tag, predictable URLs.
I keep this in mind when designing my systems. Because I think it is important for the user to own their data, my forum systems makes user profile downloadable by default, in the smallest possible format readable by both software and humans: text (with some tokens).
There isn't an easier way. Every time I see any variant of the infinite scroll pattern which has come into vogue over the last decade, I feel the same complaints inside my head. True pagination was really nice. I miss when it was the default.
My favorite columnist even when he wrote about me. He always takes the time to return my emails. His voice and wit always bring a bit of happiness to my day. I can't wait for him to return to writing and I hope he's enjoying his new kid.
I actually met his wife when I was going through the SDNY. I was hoping to meet him, but the attorney did not recommend I talk to the "media".
Not OP, but Matt Levine "wrote about me" [0]. I made a Matt Levine insider trading game [1]. It was inspired by a Matt Levine article [2] where he mentioned how some professional traders had access to early earnings but even with that data, they were still highly inconsistent in their trade performance. The point was stock prices are notoriously difficult to predict even with early earnings.
So I made this app where you get early earnings and a graph of prior stock prices and you try to guess one of two paths (they were inverse of each other). Even with all of those myself (and Matt Levine) were correct about 50% of the time.
I emailed him and he actually told me he was worse than 50% , which seems like a good thing because then you could just do opposite of your initial guess and have a profitable strategy. He was very nice in his correspondence, although he didn't give me a heads up saying he was going to blast it out. It's a static site [3] so it wasn't a problem, nor do I really care too much. But it gave me the ultimate flex when another super-fan at work spotted it and spammed it out.
From the article.
> Elsewhere here is “Matt Levine’s Insider Trading Game,” though I actually have nothing to do with it.
This is a very cool app, but one thing I'm noticing is that you aren't providing any numbers about expectations (expected earnings/share, etc). Stock prices are forward projections, so it's less about how much money made/lost and more about how much money made/lost beyond current expectations. And this is certainly information a real insider trader would have.
Thats funny because that was the exact comment Matt Levine made in our email correspondence. I mentioned I'd be happy to include it if he got me a Bloomberg api subscription, but no luck!
My guess would be that expectations wouldn't help much. The analysts at banks that provide estimates are relatively conservative (don't want to stick out from the crowd too much). For instance, it's much better to be way off from actual as compared to other analyst estimates. Because you can always say everyone else believed the same thing as an excuse. If you're way off from others and you happen to be wrong, then thats more embarrassing.
The analysts also rely on internal estimates pretty heavily, and companies aren't dumb, so they usually downplay expectations. So much so that the majority of companies beat their own estimates (over 70% of the time). So I think these numbers are gamed and without being a sophisticated practitioner, they wouldn't help IMO
> Also forfeiture doesn't account for the fact that you may have paid capital gains tax. I feel like they really shafted me on that one.
As someone also charged but not convicted, I learned hypothetically you also don't get to account for expenses if you lose. Meaning you could run a $10 billion gross revenue drug empire, it costs $9.9 billion to run so you walk away with $100m and you still have to pay $10 billion in forfeiture.
If the most you could lose is whatever margin you made, that wouldn't be much of an incentive to not do that in the first place and it would be quite a broken system.
What I wrote about is forfeiture which doesn't include criminal penalties. Most of the American (which I am not) federal press releases I read about have a maximum $250,000 fine per count.
>The Sherman Act offense charged carries a statutory maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine for individuals. The maximum fine may be increased to twice the gain derived from the crime or twice the loss suffered by victims if either amount is greater than $1 million. The false statements offense charged carries a statutory maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine. The obstruction of justice offense charged carries a statutory maximum penalty of 20 years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.
These fines are on top of the forfeiture so if the person in this article earned $1 million gross, $100k net they would have to repay on a guilty finding $1 million + say $500k in fines = $1.5m when they only "earned" $100k.
Did it really happen as he describes it? I.e. he wrote about a fraud scheme and you went "hey good idea I'm gonna do that too"? Or was there more to it? :-)
Feel free to not respond or anything, not trying to get you to incriminate yourself or whatever, I'm just nosy.
There's more to it than just reading an article and going for it. I also feel like I got nailed harder because there was a second person that they were trying to get me to reveal. That was not possible because of encrypted messaging. They incorrectly believed it was someone who I knew it was not.
Been reading Matt's work since the Dealbreaker days and agree 100%. It's rare to see someone pull off being genuinely funny when (knowledgeably!) writing about financial and legal mechanics.
Matt once wrote about something I was working on. His analysis was way more on-point and technically accurate than that of any other article I read about it. I wanted to email him at the time but like you wasn't exactly in a position to talk to a journalist.
I really enjoy his writing, which is why I really want to know what this might be:
"Asked about the Etruscans, Mr. Levine said he thought Mr. Mystal might be referring to one of his favorite anecdotes from Herodotus. It was actually about the Persians, he said. He fetched his copy of “The Histories” and read it to me.)"
From a section on Persian customs, somewhere in 130-135 of book one (which is as precise as my copy gets): “If an important decision is to be made, they discuss the question when they are drunk, and the following day the master of the house where the discussion was held submits their decision for reconsideration when they are sober. If they still approve it, it is adopted; if not, it is abandoned. Conversely, any decision they make when they are sober, is reconsidered afterwards when they are drunk.”
I'm surprised that there's only around 150k people (other than me) who read the newsletter. I don't work in finance, always enjoy reading Matt, and often learn.
To that end, if you don't subscribe to him and want a sample to consider joining the free newsletter, let me suggest his column "Arbitrage Discovered" from 2015:
If you clicked to the comments and are debating reading more... here's a passage from the above link:
"So that leaves the option of Aviva settling with him. How much should he take in a settlement? Well, how much is his claim worth? Conservatively, I would ballpark it at an infinite amount of money."
And if you need _even more_ motivation after reading the above:
> Insurers were offering a product that paid you, when you died, the greater of (1) the amount you put in and (2) the return on some risky investment. So he'd buy two of those -- one long the risky investment, one short the risky investment -- and be guaranteed a big profit. The catch is you have to die, but he solved this by enlisting dying patients in AIDS hospices to put their names on the contracts.
only 150k? that's seems like huge for something which is almost a niche. How many people subscribe to newsletters? on these people how many are interested about the opinion of one guy on the details of market finance?
If you mean email newsletters generally, my own biggest is 172k but I know folks like The Skimm or the Morning Brew run into low millions of subs. A lot of it is down to how valuable and targeted the audience is and this guy is clearly winning on that front.
This doesn’t count the people who read the newsletter online or on the Bloomberg terminal (where I typically read it). I didn’t even know there was a newsletter till recently.
You can also access the Bloomberg website and disable javascript and the article will load. Most adblockers have a disable javascript for this page feature
You can even set Safari to automatically go into reader mode for all websites (I do this, then whitelist the sites/webapps). 9 times out of 10 this is much more readable and is darkmode by default.
You can also set reader mode automatically for just certain websites instead (i.e. whitelist vs blacklist); I do this for Bloomberg, Medium, WaPo, and others.
The dot after the TLD represents the root domain. From right to left, URLs read from least to most specific. Root -> TLD -> domain -> subdomain (eg www). The root domain is almost always left out, because it’s always the same and its presence is implied. But if you include it explicitly, it is a distinct URL.
So idk how bloomberg.com works under the hood so I can’t specifically explain this case, but rules that match URLs won’t necessarily see the two versions as identical. This is actually something worth testing your own sites against, to make sure including the root domain doesn’t do something dumb like bypass authentication or whatever.
Edit: also, forgive me if I’m explaining things you already know w/ regard to the root domain and stuff.
New to me and I've been programming web for quite a while. I've only ever seen that final "." in DNS records, it never occured to me that it would affect logic within the site.
You know what’s also missing if you go to bloomberg.com./? All of the ads, and the animated stock ticker. I’m on mobile so didn’t dig into it further, but I bet that all JS loaded on request from another domain (probably including the paywall) is absent or broken.
The site itself loads fine though, because DNS still works and whatever routing layer in their app probably doesn’t care about the domain, just the path that follows it.
I once got a verbal C&D from a Novell web dev because they answered to any domain and I pointed (as a joke) a domain to their IP. Google ended up indexing, and customers were asking what 'reallystrangedomain.com' was when they searched for Novell error messages.
They asked me to stop 'mirroring' their content, and didn't understand I was just pointing my domain to their servers. I stopped, but part of me didn't want to.
It shouldn't. It is the fault of hacky protocols like HTTPS that conflate routing with identity. If we had DNSSEC and IPSEC from the beginning, it wouldn't have been necessary to do it on application level.
The trailing "." becomes practically important if you have a client that believes in DNS search suffixes (yuck!). I imagine it might have some effect in this particular case if the user-agent includes the dot in the "Host" HTTP request header and it thus evades some non-canonicalizing layer of Bloomberg's paywall thing, while still being a perfectly okay request to the rest of the chain.
This is 50% of the reason, the other half is that all the tracking/ad requests hit an API endpoint on bloomberg.com (no dot at the end), which is now a separate origin as far as the same-origin policy is concerned. But the code is not expecting this to be the case, and doesn't set any CORS headers on the response, and the browser denies access to the response data.
This breaks the ads but also breaks any interactive charts, etc. that need data from the API.
I tried it and it only gives me a separate counter (i.e. 3 free articles on "bloomberg.com." in addition to the ones on "bloomberg.com".) This makes me suspect local storage or cookies.
-I love reading Matt's stuff. The praise of his writing is totally deserving.
-In my daily life there's rarely a topic I come across that I'm unable to understand. In an otherwise boring day full of mundane work tasks, his column gives me intellectual challenges that I really appreciate.
-Matt's ability to understand and synthesize topics reflects incredibly highly on his intellect. I don't know anyone on Wall Street... is his level of intellect common among investment bankers and such there?
-He was valedictorian at Harvard and became a public high school teacher after!?
-Apparently MoneyStuff has 150,000 subscribers, the total income+power of which is gigantic (multiple billionaire readers along with presumably many thousands of high 6-7 figure readers). But yet they don't seem to do much at all of monetizing it (there's an easily bypassed Bloomberg paywall and a tiny ad in the text of the email newsletter).
-I would really love a weekly Matt Levine podcast. But sadly I don't think we'll ever get that.
> -Matt's ability to understand and synthesize topics reflects incredibly highly on his intellect. I don't know anyone on Wall Street... is his level of intellect common among investment bankers and such there?
Investment banker here.. "Wall Street" is a pretty big concept, not unlike "Silicon Valley".
So in the best banks and the best groups, yes – I'd say he's among the very best, but there are plenty of similarly smart people around.
Having said that, I obviously have no insight into whether he was actually good at all the other things that make a great "banker". To stick to the same analogy, one can be a prolific coder but be absolutely terrible about writing docs and tests, keeping a sane git workflow, prioritizing, communicating, being a team player, etc.
Matt's said before that he reached a certain point at GS where he was expected to get more involved in sales, as opposed to just the structuring side of his desk, and felt he was quite bad at it.
Probably quite a bit of self depreciation on Matt's part though given that when he decided to quit his boss essentially said, "Why don't you just, you know, take some time off to think about it?"
I'd say someone with Matt's background and general mannerisms - even at GS where eccentricity and raw intellect, for lack of better descriptors, are traditionally valued - would be a significant outlier.
I worked at GS and I think the only people that fit the Levine mold were in weird structuring desks, like Matt was. In particular, PFI had quite a few characters that remind me of Matt. Ali Meli, who left GS recently and was written up by Bloomberg, comes to mind. Clearly intellectually above others with weird, interesting perspectives on things. Also given leash to go dream up and do weird and interesting things.
I don't think people like Matt actually have much value add in most areas of a modern investment bank, unfortunately. As Matt says: banking is boring now. I don't see how someone like Matt would succeed is traditional banking - or a flow trading desk - over the "average" GS employee who studied finance at Wharton or whatever. Most areas of banking strike me as having become very commoditized or routinized and outliers are viewed as more apt to cause tail risk than anything.
You have to be smart to trade flow derivatives. Not only is it necessary to understand the product and pricing tools, but also you have less time to examine any given trade than your customer does, you have to deal with weird correlations and dispersions that were forced upon you by customers, your social skills and sixth/"I'm getting played" sense are just as much a part of your toolkit as are your math skills, and you aren't given too much leeway with mark-to-market p&l.
You probably noticed at GS that a risk desk won't put an employee in front of a book just because he got good grades at UPenn.
I'm sitting in a large room filled with bloomberg terminals, each costing 2k a month. MoneyStuff isn't monetized much directly, but plays into the larger business plan.
The Bloomberg website is 100% a vanity/halo project that makes Bloomberg (the man) and Bloomberg (the company) seem relevant. The terminal business is such a cash cow that they can easily afford to bankroll journalism to maintain their brand and mindshare.
> -I would really love a weekly Matt Levine podcast. But sadly I don't think we'll ever get that.
I don't know that you do. I've found him to be a much better writer than speaker - the content was similar (brilliant, funny, interesting, etc) but his spoken delivery simply isn't very good, and where do you put a footnote in a podcast?
> -Matt's ability to understand and synthesize topics reflects incredibly highly on his intellect. I don't know anyone on Wall Street... is his level of intellect common among investment bankers and such there?
Intelligence is 100% absolutely not a prerequisite but anyone who rises above a certain level in finance has to be talented at something. At a bank that's likely to be either sales or politics.
Agree with all the praise. However, reading him long enough, I started to get annoyed with the blase approach to the Wall Street(tm) transgressions.
I do not think it is a case of pandering to your audience. The following quote (about his time in Dealbreaker) captures it perfectly:
>Part of the problem was that he couldn’t really access a contempt for Wall Street titans. He was of the place, and he found its workings genuinely interesting.
I am in the industry.
It's a missed opportunity, IMHO. It is easy to dismiss some uniformed politician criticizing your industry norms. Much harder when it's coming from someone who clearly understand what is going on.
On the other hand, is there a lack of writing about finance with lots of contempt and anger? Matt Taibbi may not be an insider in the way that Levine is but he (and others) often manage to be fairly well informed and they are certainly contemptuous and angry.
I also wonder if to understand is not, in some inevitable sense, to forgive? Is it really possible to fully understand on an emotional level how a quant trader feels when they spot an arbitrage opportunity and be angry about it?
Taibbi also has zero sense of humour - like when he reported that a trader was exchanging insider LIBOR tips for day-old sushi not realising it was obviously meant in jest:
>Screwing around with world interest rates that affect billions of people in exchange for day-old sushi – it’s hard to imagine an image that better captures the moral insanity of the modern financial-services sector.
"...an image that captures..."
I think it's you who misread Taibi's meaning rather than him having missed something there, fwiw.
It is exactly what happened and is literally in the direct quote. The reader is assumed to be sufficiently intelligent to work out that day-old sushi was not actually exchanged in a quid-pro-quo. It is darkly comic but surely isn't funny. The morally and ethically wanton ridculousness of it is what frames the image according to Taibi in his writing. He's deeply aware of what is going on there, suggesing he isn't is really missing the point totally.
Taibi does not write with a style I particularly like. Taibi's politics are not my own. What he does is write masssive stories that are being ignored elsewhere. Wall street criminality. Russia-conspiracy theories discrediting media. Defence funding and contracting. There is always a campaign to discredit him becuase he upsets wealthy, corrupt assholes by shining a light on their behaviour. I wish journalists whose style I cared for more did that. I wish jouranlists whose politics are closer to my own did that. Taibi does do it and that alone is deeply, deeply impressive. We need a lot more of that with many different perspectives and different writing styles. I'll happily start with Taibi because he's doing it and support him totally that he actually does it.
I'm sticking up for Taibi even though I dislike his style and his politics because he's a journalist practisising journalism and not a cheerleader who is playing an acting role of a journalist on tv. Journalism is to be encouraged. Unfair criticisms of journalism should be called out. Yours is such, be that intentionally or not.
I think it's a resignation to cynicism. It's hard to be angry 24/7. I used to work in a "___-tech" area that I dislike from a moral perspective now, and it's not healthy for anyone, let alone yourself, to be openly angry about it all the time. So, instead, I follow the industry a bit and am mostly resigned to the inevitability of more disappointing news.
One of my favorite pieces of his writing was the "Programming Note" he wrote in June of this year, during/after the protests around George Floyd's death, and the Trump photo op in Lafayette Square. It has his usual insight into what really are the rules behind the rules, and what are the true incentives beneath the surface. It has some of that same sense of resignation, and even goes a bit into where that comes from.
---
Programming note
I don’t know. Mostly I am dazed and heartbroken all the time, and it
seems trivial and disrespectful to write a column about finance these
days. But this is a financial newsletter, and like a lot of my readers
I like having a mostly safe space for finance, so here we are.
A theme of this column over the past few years has been legal realism,
the idea that “law,” really, is just what officials do about
disputes. Rules, the written laws, the constitution, are all “law”
only insofar as they predict or explain the actions of public
officials, or persuade those officials to do things. “That is all
their importance, except as pretty playthings,” as the great legal
realist Karl Llewellyn put it. If this column sometimes seems cynical,
it is mostly Karl Llewellyn’s fault.
It seems to me that one central argument of the past few days has been
about whether people with power should have to follow rules at
all. America has good rules about freedom of speech and assembly and
religion; it has a president who violently dispersed a peaceful
protest and drove priests from their church so that he could pose for
photographs outside of it. America has good rules against unreasonable
searches and seizures, about the right to a trial by jury and due
process of law; it has a long history of police killing black people
with impunity.
A message of the protests is that the police should have to follow the
same rules as everybody else, that when they break the law they should
face consequences. A message of the response to the protests is: No,
they shouldn’t. Is the law what it says? Or is it the raw fact of what
the people with the guns and the tear gas do? I think I know the
answer and it makes me sad.
The reality is that media helps define what is normative and what is not. Describing bad behaviour and abuse of the law, without calling it out as bad, helps normalize it.
Matt Levine's columns often goes one step beyond the "neutral way". They often describe them as cool ingenious schemes done by smart people.
I guess it's hard to infer tone in a newsletter, I always saw his descriptions as a use of understatement to really draw out how evil some of these things were or in other cases to pass over the small time crook and focus on the systemic issues.
I can see it the other way too though, now that you mention it.
When he talks about the bankruptcy/CDS/default shennanigans (eg Hedge fund offers bailout to avoid default in exchange for ophaning credit etc), he does not take a stance on right and wrong.
Why? Both sides of the game are Informed. This isn't screwing over the dentist, it is fund A outthinking funds B and C. Is it a social good? Don't know, nor does he (seemingly). So why bother pretending
I also think he approaches this like a lawyer, where what is right and wrong is constantly evolving and people are always testing the limits of it. People will keep on finding surprising ways to try beat the system, the system will always try new ways to prevent it but those ways will have unintended consequences. I think this has to be interesting to you if you want to have a good grasp of it.
He's brilliant, and he explains complex concepts really well.
I can't fault him for being a bit "over-neutral", for lack of a better way to put it. It's how economists are trained to express themselves and, more importantly, I don't think he'd ever get a fawning piece written about him by the fNYT if he took the approach of, say, a certain other gifted writer whose name cannot be spoken here.
Now I’m dead curious as to who you are referring to: “I don't think he'd ever get a fawning piece written about him by the fNYT if he took the approach of, say, a certain other gifted writer whose name cannot be spoken here.“
You are already using a throwaway, so mind revealing?
It's a very finance culture approach, though, where the bounds of what's in and out are tested constantly by what (knowledgeable, ideally) participants, compliance departments, and regulators are willing to tolerate. Many banks were highly criticized after the financial crisis for selling "knowingly toxic" CDO/CLOs but on the other side of the trade were highly sophisticated buyers who wanted those securities.
I actually find his approach illustrative - even those in the business not inclined to completely disregard the intent behind any rules think of the whole enterprise as a great game divided into competitors and civilians, who are mostly just collateral damage in these contests. There is also a general acceptance of the idea that anything not forbidden is compulsory - if someone gets around the rules to do something others outside the game might consider unethical, then that is the fault of the rulemakers for not being clever enough to write the rules well enough, and in fact it is incumbent upon the players to expose such loopholes. Because leaving money on the table is really the only sin on Wall Street.
As a civilian it's important to understand this mindset when dealing with the financial industry at any level because if you don't, you're going to be on the short end of the things Matt writes about.
Is this really that compelling? I find it with lots of rhetorical flourish, but lacking the analysis of how the rich really do enrich themselves.
> They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system — one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational
What does this mean? Why wouldn't the other banks short the post-IPO tech companies if they knew the "real prices" and make off with a killing.
And what even is a bubble? If you had invested in a tech ETF at the peak of the 2000s bubble, you would have still outperformed the market by 2020. So were the 2003 prices that far off?
yeah wow the idea that matt taibi is well informed on these topics... he's not even a good writer either... other than that, he's a great Matt Levine comp haha.
no because when read he comes across as someone who isn't great at grasping the full details because they are too busy with their own preconceived notions. "not a details person", or whatever. he has always been pretty good at preach-to-the-choir-style writing, which genuinely has its uses, it's just that you have to squint before drawing firm conclusions about the subject matter. which is the absolute opposite of levine.
but hey, that's just, like, my opinion, man. to each, their own.
This is weird. This morning I was thinking about how much I miss his newsletter, but we also have a new young baby in the house so I totally understand. I even considered writing him an email to tell him this. Now I can at least read an article about him.
I said "Almost every issue teaches me something interesting I didn't know, and almost every issue makes me laugh" and I showed four examples. If you're looking for a quick intro to what he's like, maybe check it out.
He's still on paternity leave but I hope he'll return soon.
> When Dimon finished from Harvard Business School in 1982, he placed a call to Sanford Weill, then chairman of the executive committee of American Express, to ask for advice.
201 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 197 ms ] threadAt least a million a year is quite a lot.
(Maybe it's technology? Micropayments still aren't effectively a thing?)
Am I correct, that to do that I need to click 6 (years) * 200 (work days) / 20 (articles per click) = 60 times and wait for the page load to do that?! Is there really no other way to access these articles? Aren't they effectively unaccessible for most users because of that?
(I found a way to manipulate a JS variable to get to the older articles, but this is clearly not the inteded use.)
The same seems to be the case for the youtube videos of a very active vlogger. You can easily access current videos or the first ones, but not like from 4 years in the past.
I am asking this, because I always wonder if I am just to dumb to see the obvious easy way to use these sites or if there just is no way to do it?
HN and dilbert.com are shining example of how to do it RIGHT. They provide calendar archives, filtering by tag, predictable URLs.
I keep this in mind when designing my systems. Because I think it is important for the user to own their data, my forum systems makes user profile downloadable by default, in the smallest possible format readable by both software and humans: text (with some tokens).
I actually met his wife when I was going through the SDNY. I was hoping to meet him, but the attorney did not recommend I talk to the "media".
So I made this app where you get early earnings and a graph of prior stock prices and you try to guess one of two paths (they were inverse of each other). Even with all of those myself (and Matt Levine) were correct about 50% of the time.
I emailed him and he actually told me he was worse than 50% , which seems like a good thing because then you could just do opposite of your initial guess and have a profitable strategy. He was very nice in his correspondence, although he didn't give me a heads up saying he was going to blast it out. It's a static site [3] so it wasn't a problem, nor do I really care too much. But it gave me the ultimate flex when another super-fan at work spotted it and spammed it out.
From the article.
> Elsewhere here is “Matt Levine’s Insider Trading Game,” though I actually have nothing to do with it.
[0] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-12-16/we-kep...
[1] https://insider-trading-game.netlify.app/
[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-11-26/knowin...
[3] https://github.com/breeko/stox
Perhaps that would improve players results?
My guess would be that expectations wouldn't help much. The analysts at banks that provide estimates are relatively conservative (don't want to stick out from the crowd too much). For instance, it's much better to be way off from actual as compared to other analyst estimates. Because you can always say everyone else believed the same thing as an excuse. If you're way off from others and you happen to be wrong, then thats more embarrassing.
The analysts also rely on internal estimates pretty heavily, and companies aren't dumb, so they usually downplay expectations. So much so that the majority of companies beat their own estimates (over 70% of the time). So I think these numbers are gamed and without being a sophisticated practitioner, they wouldn't help IMO
[0] https://insight.factset.com/record-performance-vs.-eps-estim...
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2017-05-22/fitbit...
> Also forfeiture doesn't account for the fact that you may have paid capital gains tax. I feel like they really shafted me on that one.
As someone also charged but not convicted, I learned hypothetically you also don't get to account for expenses if you lose. Meaning you could run a $10 billion gross revenue drug empire, it costs $9.9 billion to run so you walk away with $100m and you still have to pay $10 billion in forfeiture.
Here is a random press release from justice.gov https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/six-additional-individuals-in...
>The Sherman Act offense charged carries a statutory maximum penalty of 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine for individuals. The maximum fine may be increased to twice the gain derived from the crime or twice the loss suffered by victims if either amount is greater than $1 million. The false statements offense charged carries a statutory maximum penalty of 5 years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine. The obstruction of justice offense charged carries a statutory maximum penalty of 20 years imprisonment and a $250,000 fine.
These fines are on top of the forfeiture so if the person in this article earned $1 million gross, $100k net they would have to repay on a guilty finding $1 million + say $500k in fines = $1.5m when they only "earned" $100k.
Feel free to not respond or anything, not trying to get you to incriminate yourself or whatever, I'm just nosy.
Matt once wrote about something I was working on. His analysis was way more on-point and technically accurate than that of any other article I read about it. I wanted to email him at the time but like you wasn't exactly in a position to talk to a journalist.
"Asked about the Etruscans, Mr. Levine said he thought Mr. Mystal might be referring to one of his favorite anecdotes from Herodotus. It was actually about the Persians, he said. He fetched his copy of “The Histories” and read it to me.)"
http://perseus.uchicago.edu/perseus-cgi/citequery3.pl?dbname...
I don't know what evidence there is that Matt Levine not a normie at his core, or how it show up in his writing.
To that end, if you don't subscribe to him and want a sample to consider joining the free newsletter, let me suggest his column "Arbitrage Discovered" from 2015:
https://www.bloomberg.com/amp/opinion/articles/2015-02-27/ar...
"So that leaves the option of Aviva settling with him. How much should he take in a settlement? Well, how much is his claim worth? Conservatively, I would ballpark it at an infinite amount of money."
> Insurers were offering a product that paid you, when you died, the greater of (1) the amount you put in and (2) the return on some risky investment. So he'd buy two of those -- one long the risky investment, one short the risky investment -- and be guaranteed a big profit. The catch is you have to die, but he solved this by enlisting dying patients in AIDS hospices to put their names on the contracts.
This column truly is a classic.
Compared to Levine, who has me, in the UK, as a subscriber.
He has a way bigger potential audience than the LA Times.
So idk how bloomberg.com works under the hood so I can’t specifically explain this case, but rules that match URLs won’t necessarily see the two versions as identical. This is actually something worth testing your own sites against, to make sure including the root domain doesn’t do something dumb like bypass authentication or whatever.
Edit: also, forgive me if I’m explaining things you already know w/ regard to the root domain and stuff.
The site itself loads fine though, because DNS still works and whatever routing layer in their app probably doesn’t care about the domain, just the path that follows it.
They asked me to stop 'mirroring' their content, and didn't understand I was just pointing my domain to their servers. I stopped, but part of me didn't want to.
Edit: Looks like archive.org picked it up: http://web.archive.org/web/20110623134639/http://thebergenef...
This breaks the ads but also breaks any interactive charts, etc. that need data from the API.
-I love reading Matt's stuff. The praise of his writing is totally deserving.
-In my daily life there's rarely a topic I come across that I'm unable to understand. In an otherwise boring day full of mundane work tasks, his column gives me intellectual challenges that I really appreciate.
-Matt's ability to understand and synthesize topics reflects incredibly highly on his intellect. I don't know anyone on Wall Street... is his level of intellect common among investment bankers and such there?
-He was valedictorian at Harvard and became a public high school teacher after!?
-Apparently MoneyStuff has 150,000 subscribers, the total income+power of which is gigantic (multiple billionaire readers along with presumably many thousands of high 6-7 figure readers). But yet they don't seem to do much at all of monetizing it (there's an easily bypassed Bloomberg paywall and a tiny ad in the text of the email newsletter).
-I would really love a weekly Matt Levine podcast. But sadly I don't think we'll ever get that.
Investment banker here.. "Wall Street" is a pretty big concept, not unlike "Silicon Valley".
So in the best banks and the best groups, yes – I'd say he's among the very best, but there are plenty of similarly smart people around.
Having said that, I obviously have no insight into whether he was actually good at all the other things that make a great "banker". To stick to the same analogy, one can be a prolific coder but be absolutely terrible about writing docs and tests, keeping a sane git workflow, prioritizing, communicating, being a team player, etc.
Probably quite a bit of self depreciation on Matt's part though given that when he decided to quit his boss essentially said, "Why don't you just, you know, take some time off to think about it?"
I'd say someone with Matt's background and general mannerisms - even at GS where eccentricity and raw intellect, for lack of better descriptors, are traditionally valued - would be a significant outlier.
I worked at GS and I think the only people that fit the Levine mold were in weird structuring desks, like Matt was. In particular, PFI had quite a few characters that remind me of Matt. Ali Meli, who left GS recently and was written up by Bloomberg, comes to mind. Clearly intellectually above others with weird, interesting perspectives on things. Also given leash to go dream up and do weird and interesting things.
I don't think people like Matt actually have much value add in most areas of a modern investment bank, unfortunately. As Matt says: banking is boring now. I don't see how someone like Matt would succeed is traditional banking - or a flow trading desk - over the "average" GS employee who studied finance at Wharton or whatever. Most areas of banking strike me as having become very commoditized or routinized and outliers are viewed as more apt to cause tail risk than anything.
You probably noticed at GS that a risk desk won't put an employee in front of a book just because he got good grades at UPenn.
I too would love that podcast.
I don't know that you do. I've found him to be a much better writer than speaker - the content was similar (brilliant, funny, interesting, etc) but his spoken delivery simply isn't very good, and where do you put a footnote in a podcast?
Intelligence is 100% absolutely not a prerequisite but anyone who rises above a certain level in finance has to be talented at something. At a bank that's likely to be either sales or politics.
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthe...
I do not think it is a case of pandering to your audience. The following quote (about his time in Dealbreaker) captures it perfectly:
>Part of the problem was that he couldn’t really access a contempt for Wall Street titans. He was of the place, and he found its workings genuinely interesting.
I am in the industry.
It's a missed opportunity, IMHO. It is easy to dismiss some uniformed politician criticizing your industry norms. Much harder when it's coming from someone who clearly understand what is going on.
I also wonder if to understand is not, in some inevitable sense, to forgive? Is it really possible to fully understand on an emotional level how a quant trader feels when they spot an arbitrage opportunity and be angry about it?
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/everythi...
"...an image that captures..."
I think it's you who misread Taibi's meaning rather than him having missed something there, fwiw.
Taibi does not write with a style I particularly like. Taibi's politics are not my own. What he does is write masssive stories that are being ignored elsewhere. Wall street criminality. Russia-conspiracy theories discrediting media. Defence funding and contracting. There is always a campaign to discredit him becuase he upsets wealthy, corrupt assholes by shining a light on their behaviour. I wish journalists whose style I cared for more did that. I wish jouranlists whose politics are closer to my own did that. Taibi does do it and that alone is deeply, deeply impressive. We need a lot more of that with many different perspectives and different writing styles. I'll happily start with Taibi because he's doing it and support him totally that he actually does it.
I'm sticking up for Taibi even though I dislike his style and his politics because he's a journalist practisising journalism and not a cheerleader who is playing an acting role of a journalist on tv. Journalism is to be encouraged. Unfair criticisms of journalism should be called out. Yours is such, be that intentionally or not.
By "it" I mean someone trading day-old sushi for LIBOR manipulation. Such an event never happened. Did you think I meant something else by "it"?
To be clear I'm not even trying to disagree with you at this point, it's that I legitimately don't understand how you interpreted my sentence.
---
Programming note
I don’t know. Mostly I am dazed and heartbroken all the time, and it seems trivial and disrespectful to write a column about finance these days. But this is a financial newsletter, and like a lot of my readers I like having a mostly safe space for finance, so here we are.
A theme of this column over the past few years has been legal realism, the idea that “law,” really, is just what officials do about disputes. Rules, the written laws, the constitution, are all “law” only insofar as they predict or explain the actions of public officials, or persuade those officials to do things. “That is all their importance, except as pretty playthings,” as the great legal realist Karl Llewellyn put it. If this column sometimes seems cynical, it is mostly Karl Llewellyn’s fault.
It seems to me that one central argument of the past few days has been about whether people with power should have to follow rules at all. America has good rules about freedom of speech and assembly and religion; it has a president who violently dispersed a peaceful protest and drove priests from their church so that he could pose for photographs outside of it. America has good rules against unreasonable searches and seizures, about the right to a trial by jury and due process of law; it has a long history of police killing black people with impunity.
A message of the protests is that the police should have to follow the same rules as everybody else, that when they break the law they should face consequences. A message of the response to the protests is: No, they shouldn’t. Is the law what it says? Or is it the raw fact of what the people with the guns and the tear gas do? I think I know the answer and it makes me sad.
I can decide for myself if something is immoral or offensive or whatever, I don’t need my news sources to decide that for me.
Matt Levine's columns often goes one step beyond the "neutral way". They often describe them as cool ingenious schemes done by smart people.
I can see it the other way too though, now that you mention it.
That's why people watch heist movies and play GTA, too.
Not sure Matt Levine has the power to change what is perceived as cool by western culture.
Why? Both sides of the game are Informed. This isn't screwing over the dentist, it is fund A outthinking funds B and C. Is it a social good? Don't know, nor does he (seemingly). So why bother pretending
I can't fault him for being a bit "over-neutral", for lack of a better way to put it. It's how economists are trained to express themselves and, more importantly, I don't think he'd ever get a fawning piece written about him by the fNYT if he took the approach of, say, a certain other gifted writer whose name cannot be spoken here.
You are already using a throwaway, so mind revealing?
Theres a really book called traders, guns and money that goes into the details on this.
When the government started going after the ratings companies they downgraded US bonds (as if the US would ever default...)
As a civilian it's important to understand this mindset when dealing with the financial industry at any level because if you don't, you're going to be on the short end of the things Matt writes about.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/the-grea...
> They did this by setting up what was, in reality, a two-tiered investment system — one for the insiders who knew the real numbers, and another for the lay investor who was invited to chase soaring prices the banks themselves knew were irrational
What does this mean? Why wouldn't the other banks short the post-IPO tech companies if they knew the "real prices" and make off with a killing.
And what even is a bubble? If you had invested in a tech ETF at the peak of the 2000s bubble, you would have still outperformed the market by 2020. So were the 2003 prices that far off?
but hey, that's just, like, my opinion, man. to each, their own.
It was working up until he went on his parental leave, I expect it to get updates when he is back.
That and the other few times a month I need to check some data.
https://blog.plover.com/ref/money-stuff.html
I said "Almost every issue teaches me something interesting I didn't know, and almost every issue makes me laugh" and I showed four examples. If you're looking for a quick intro to what he's like, maybe check it out.
He's still on paternity leave but I hope he'll return soon.
Does anyone have recommendations for anything similar to scratch that itch?
He uses a style that sometimes takes an obscure and bland topic to become very interesting; Thereby making the reader interested in the topic.
That he has done this consistently over a period shows the mettle of the man.
Reading through his early career background leaves clues to his current success. It reminds me of how Jamie Dimon went about his early career in https://leveragethoughts.substack.com/p/early-career-tactics...
I can't wait to see what he writes about once he comes back from paternity leave.
> When Dimon finished from Harvard Business School in 1982, he placed a call to Sanford Weill, then chairman of the executive committee of American Express, to ask for advice.