Pessimists have lots of questions about LendingClub, but optimists have just one: how do their loans perform during recessions? LendingClub made roughly 99.8% of all of the loan originations it’s ever made in the years since 2009, so the business as a whole hasn’t been stress-tested. And
Twitter is considering a paid product for power users, offering better analytics and posting tools targeted at marketers and journalists. This has mildly excited a few people — if Twitter can’t grow its monthly active user number, at least it can get a few of them to pay for it!
In a way, CNBC is the perfect business: it has a great brand name, and it caters to a rich audience. CNBC managed to create the world’s most lucrative reality TV programming, by finding stars who are already famous, and paying them $0. Really, the only problem is that
The number of UNIX installations has grown to 10, with more expected * The UNIX Programmer’s Manual, 1972 Post-scarcity economics is a fun thought experiment: what would you do if everything you needed was available for free? As rich countries asymptotically approach that state (we’re all post-scarcity with respect
Every summer, roughly two hundred thousand people around the world will take a six-hour multiple-choice and essay-question test organized by the CFA Institute. At a recommended 300 hours of study per test, we’re talking about roughly 60 million person-hours devoted to studying the ins and outs of discounted cash
“Factor-based investing” is a hot topic, but it’s a clunky misnomer. The dean of value investing, Benjamin Graham, says: An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and a satisfactory return. - Security Analysis, 1934 Factor-based investing sure isn’t that. It’s a
I recently had the pleasure of attending a Bloomberg Ideas panel discussion on the AI. Don’t miss a chance to visit Bloomberg HQ at least once. It’s a good way to understand Bloomberg, as a person and as a mayor. When you go to Bloomberg, you can’t
A fence? But why? A sensible theory about Blockbuster was that they made so much money on late fees that they eventually went broke. Everybody hated late fees, but Blockbuster kept charging them — at thousands of stores! Then at hundreds of stores! Then at dozens, then one, then none. It’
A few weeks ago, I spent a weekend at an obscure conference for a wildly ambitious, way out-there software project. Everyone was united by one weird belief (that the project could, against all odds, succeed). And what’s surprising is that they had a lot of other crazy beliefs, too
I like to write, and occasionally I idly consider the possibility that I should do it for a living. Then I remind myself: writing is a structurally terrible job. Whatever dreams you have of living off of big checks from Random House and Vanity Fair: crush them now. The economics
Financial engineering is a powerful tool. Here, we see it transform negative-sum risk into positive-sum fun. Nobody knows what advice is worth, which is why there are three different ways to charge for it, none of which really make sense. The cheapest tier of advice is the kind you get
While I was in the middle of writing about writing, I realized there was a book on my to-read list that addressed the same themes, but from opposite angle: not the writers getting stuck in a bad system, but the PR people and ad buyers who shape their terrible financial