ckelly
Upwave (YC S12) is hiring software engineers
SEC Plans Lawsuit Against Coinbase
I bet many would think n=100 would be worthless once the population reaches millions, or especially billions.
One HN-related piece of evidence for that is when I pointed out what margin of error would be for a n=164 survey sample, I got downvoted hard! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8050801
But I saw this hundreds of times talking to customers when I ran a survey sampling product out of YC.
> If the market price reflected the probability, then an arbitrage strategy should not be profitable > The market doesn't reflect the probability of an event happening.
No, the market's implied probability could be right, on average, across all deals...and the top merger arb funds could absolutely still be profitable by selecting deals when they think the market is mispricing the probability (for the reasons you mention: better experience, knowledge, etc.)
It's like the sports betting market: you can roughly impute a team's win probability from the (opening) betting line...and even if that's right on average, the top gamblers are still profitable.
And, of course, sometimes things with a say, 40% chance of happening do happen...so that doesn't mean the market was "wrong" about the chance (i.e. your LinkedIn mispricing exmaple).
But sounds like we're in full agreement you can't look at the implied probability from the market price and draw some conclusion about it definitely happening, or definitely not happening (e.g. the market not taking it seriously).
It's absolutely fair to impute a rough probability of deal closure from the stock price. The whole "merger arbitrage" industry works around that premise.
Sometimes the market doesn't think a deal has a 100% chance of closing (like MSFT and LinkedIn) and it still closes. There were valid antitrust concerns circling that deal, e.g. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/298573-salesforce-rais...
Survata (YC S12) Is Hiring Front-End Architects – Reinvent Marketing Measurement
Survata Is Hiring a Data Engineer
Google rebrands its ad lineup, with AdWords becoming Google Ads
Survata (YC S12) Is Hiring a Demand Gen Director
Survata Is Hiring for Demand Generation
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On Managing Outrage in Silicon Valley
Survata (YC S12) Is Hiring a Demand Generation Lead
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Website_Optimizer
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/2661700?hl=en
Some screenshots still floating around:
Snap: Too Soon to IPO
Peter Thiel: The online privacy debate won't end with Gawker
Uber Losing $1B per Year in China
Venmo is under investigation by the FTC
This article misstates when Google acquired YouTube. It was October 2006, not October 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube#Company_history