moeymo1

This is factually incorrect, and saying a trading shop failed because of language choice is, um, less than smart.

> Buffett missed out on massive tech company returns because he was opposed to investing in businesses he did not understand, and he did not understand tech companies.

He also missed out on massive tech company losses.

BRK has clobbered the index on a 1 and 2 year basis, and beaten it on a 5 year basis. I'll wager a good sum that as interest rates continue to be nonzero, they will continue to massively outperform.

There is no shame in a market performance when zero interest rates have caused people to chase crypto, GME, and other money-losing businesses. People are in the process of finding out how, say, AMC or TSLA will do when there is a actual cost of money.

(edit: spelling)

If he can do what he claims (which as I said above is less impressive than it sounds) he can take it to a Chicago prop shop. They'll give him a budget and a share of the PnL. Very straightforward, it happens all the time.

However, his write up is completely devoid of talk of risk (beta is not risk), bankroll, Kelly sizing, etc. This is integral to understanding the trade.

For example, he could have a successful strategy that works in small lots. However, absent from nearly every ML model is the impact on sizing up. As soon as you post a sizable bid, the market will lean against you, and the edge evaporates. Same if you cross bid-ask, plus you're now giving up edge. ML cannot take this into account, at least not very easily and with the usual models.

Most programmers with models like this fall into this last category.

I interviewed there and got a job many years ago.

They are very smart. And weird. During my final round with the CTO I was waiting for him in his office on a couch. The couch was in a living room-like area of the office. After a few minutes of waiting I turned around. The CTO was sitting there staring at me; I've no idea for how lone. I stared back, then said "hi, I'm moeymo1. Are you Mr. X?" We started the interview.

They are conservative because the owners "like getting their dividend check and eating caviar" I was told. Apparently they tried to expand internationally in the 1970s when an employee wanted to move home and start a warehouse there. It turns out "home" was Iran, and the warehouse and its contents were seized after the revolution. That apparently put them off international expansion for a very long time.

They can pay big bonuses like financial firms. I didn't take the offer because they were too odd. Years later I ran into a woman that used to work there. Apparently they are super, um, not nice to women, at the exec level. She left for Grainger.

"steadily beating the S&P 500 for over a year on a weekly basis"

Can be achieved by chance alone.

If not chance, I can give you a strategy that would be highly likely to achieve such a result: it would take a lot of risk though!

I love it when people post this stuff to HN. Naive people try it, loose a bundle to market makers, then go back to their day job.

TW employee ~200 here (now ex). The vast majority of the profit was invested in expansion. You can't grow from the low hundreds of employees in year 2000 to almost 5,000 in 2017 without many tens of millions of dollars reinvested in expansion.

Ex-TWer and current TW shareholder here. US securities law does not allow a company to be private over a certain number of shareholders. The owner couldn't legally offer to sell the company to all 4000-some employees, even if they all lived in the US. (They don't live in the US, which makes it much more complicated).

Goldman Sachs tried to end-run around this limitation with Facebook, but failed: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2011/jan/17/goldman-sac...

There are other restrictions: you cannot sell shares of a privately held company unless the prospective buyer makes over 250k per year or has a net worth of $1 million.

All of the above are SEC rules. There are numerous other hurdles.