Is Dr Dre an amazing talent scout, or was he out and about and by nature of his own fame approached by artists such that he could pick the obvious good opportunitie? Or maybe both apply?
Perhaps having money, power or fame is an attractor of opportunities all on its own.
It doesn't have to be that, but "better than average consistently" doesn't mean much to me when the person is already not average in a few other aspects.
Also, consider that a lot of what hedge funds offer is bespoke risk profiles to high net wealth individuals that are overexposed to particular market sectors.
The issue, as you imply, is that in a bull market people lose almost all ability to exercise reason and view the opportunity cost of capital as the S&P.
But a lot of hedge funds aren't running high levels of beta, and investors in their funds don't demand that (unf for some hedge funds, who demanded low vol and then went into index funds when beta did well).
And, ofc, most equity hedge funds have had very strong performance. All the Tiger group hedge funds have private companies, everyone owns tech companies, you are even seeing value hedge funds in FAANG stocks...it is quite something.
Not the other way around.
Just look at timelines of careers. Paul was already very successful before her career, not since.
Nancy could do unpaid work in the Democratic party because of Paul's success ( 70-80's), which helped her career a lot.
I also predicated it with
> Not saying she didn't give him info
He benefits if Apple and Amazon go up. So does everybody who owns an S&P 500 fund.
Does this mean that Pelosi has an incentive not to be too harsh in regulating the tech giants? Is that a big problem?
Or was the timing based on an insider's knowledge of when there would be publicity about regulations and when it would die down?
I would agree that options look suspicious, even if they are not "short dated out of the money" types.
But mega cap stocks are lot harder to manipulate than some tiny obscure company.
I think I read that Barack Obama put all his savings into government bonds while he was in office, which is admirable and maybe it would be good to mandate high level people all do that.
But if we don't have such a law, it doesn't seem too far out if they own the same big companies that almost everyone who invests in the stock market does.
Before accusing Mr. Pelosi, at a minimum, I think it would be relevant to check how much different his investment returns were from an index of the entire stock market.
I think there have been Republicans that were overzealously accused of insider trading during the beginning of the pandemic too. I forget who, but there was a fuss made about several of them and Matthew Levine dissected some of the claims in his column and didn't think there was much there.
Blind trust is the only acceptable option. It's been tradition for Presidents through most of my lifetime. Trump didn't do it and it was rightfully a big shit storm.
Is there some specific knowledge that Pelosi allegedly traded on, that didn't belong to him?
Pelosi and indeed all of Congress has non-public information about laws, government contracts, etc. Right now they can and do trade with this "insider" information. Legally this is not considered insider trading. Congress wrote the legal definition of insider trading in such a way that excluded their insider knowledge. There is no value in arguing the semantics of this so I won't address it further.
The traditional solution for this glaring conflict of interest that is used for Presidents is a blind trust. Most Presidents put their wealth in a blind trust to avoid even the potential of a conflict of interest between their actions as President and their personal wealth. Trump did not do this and it was a shit storm. He even tried to get the government to rent out his resort for some UN thing. Presidents and Congress should all be required to put their wealth into a blind trust to avoid conflict of interest.