over these past few days it seemed like the college bribing scandal was reported everywhere, & ppl generally seemed 'outraged' at what was probably an open secret in some circles
i remember reading one of the reports and they cited the capuchin fruit study as an analogy to how anger at unfairness is seen with other primates as well, lol. apparently the capuchins got super angry/ completely went ballistic when they saw others getting juicy, succulent grapes instead of some tasteless bit of cucumber.
maybe it just strikes a nerve, evolutionarily speaking, to see the brazen unfairness out there in the open
but then i would argue that in the trading ecosystem, there are also instances of unfairness that have been swept under the rug. this is not talking about the secret quant formula/ hush-hush proprietary algo type of 'edge', but more along the lines of unfair built-in issues that favor some in the game w/o necessarily being correlated to skills in the game, eg:
- certain brokers charging different margin rates for different customers, also the practice of changing margins at very short notice. maybe the more unscrupulous ones would have incentive to do this to shake ppl out of positions
- restriction of eligibility to buy private placements to certain individuals, eg. i'm sure most of us would have recognized the potential of facebook, uber, airbnb if presented with the chance to invest in them early, but for the most part these few companies' shares haven't been/wouldn't be made available to the public until their IPOs at sky-high valuations, which is pretty much the time for insiders/early stage private investors to cash out their winnings at 100-10000x return on their initial investments. i mean, according to some reports, Peter Thiel made like $1 billion on an initial $500k investment in FB. I'm sure if the investment opportunity wasn't restricted to a few family offices at that time most of us would have invested - totally landscape changing, stratospheric addictive growth, advertising cash flow like the search engines, no legit competition. At that rate of return, every 10k would have turned into $20m cash at IPO. Pretty solid for those who got hold of the early private shares. probably on the same scale for uber, airbnb, etc -- it's not so much as the skills in investing that makes a difference in those, but rather the opportunity to even access their shares early on before the huge capital appreciation. comparatively speaking, what happens to those shares after ipo are like small blips/ the skin of the orange compared to the juicy pulp that already been squeezed out
i remember reading one of the reports and they cited the capuchin fruit study as an analogy to how anger at unfairness is seen with other primates as well, lol. apparently the capuchins got super angry/ completely went ballistic when they saw others getting juicy, succulent grapes instead of some tasteless bit of cucumber.
maybe it just strikes a nerve, evolutionarily speaking, to see the brazen unfairness out there in the open
but then i would argue that in the trading ecosystem, there are also instances of unfairness that have been swept under the rug. this is not talking about the secret quant formula/ hush-hush proprietary algo type of 'edge', but more along the lines of unfair built-in issues that favor some in the game w/o necessarily being correlated to skills in the game, eg:
- certain brokers charging different margin rates for different customers, also the practice of changing margins at very short notice. maybe the more unscrupulous ones would have incentive to do this to shake ppl out of positions
- restriction of eligibility to buy private placements to certain individuals, eg. i'm sure most of us would have recognized the potential of facebook, uber, airbnb if presented with the chance to invest in them early, but for the most part these few companies' shares haven't been/wouldn't be made available to the public until their IPOs at sky-high valuations, which is pretty much the time for insiders/early stage private investors to cash out their winnings at 100-10000x return on their initial investments. i mean, according to some reports, Peter Thiel made like $1 billion on an initial $500k investment in FB. I'm sure if the investment opportunity wasn't restricted to a few family offices at that time most of us would have invested - totally landscape changing, stratospheric addictive growth, advertising cash flow like the search engines, no legit competition. At that rate of return, every 10k would have turned into $20m cash at IPO. Pretty solid for those who got hold of the early private shares. probably on the same scale for uber, airbnb, etc -- it's not so much as the skills in investing that makes a difference in those, but rather the opportunity to even access their shares early on before the huge capital appreciation. comparatively speaking, what happens to those shares after ipo are like small blips/ the skin of the orange compared to the juicy pulp that already been squeezed out
