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another version could be to capitialize on this: "The efficient markets hypothesis may be "the best established fact in all of social sciences," but the best e

another version could be to capitialize on this: "The efficient markets hypothesis may be "the best established fact in all of social sciences," but the best established fact in all of financial markets is that, when there is news about a big famous private company going public or being acquired, the shares of a tiny obscure public company with a similar name will shoot up. I don't know what that tells you about the efficient markets hypothesis, but it happened to Nestor, Inc., and to Tweeter Home Entertainment, and to Oculus VisionTech Inc., and now it has happened to SNAP Interactive Inc.: In what is almost surely a case of mistaken identity, investors sent shares in a little known startup called SNAP Interactive Inc., ticker STVI, surging 164 percent in the four days since Snap Inc. filed for a $3 billion initial public offering. The $69 million SNAP Interactive makes mobile dating apps, while the IPO aspirant is the parent of the popular Snapchat photo-sharing app. These stories are always less impressive when expressed in dollar terms than they are in percentages. In the four trading days since Snap Inc. filed its S-1, SNAP Interactive has traded 19,963 shares, worth less than $200,000, according to Bloomberg data. If you had a cunning plan to buy up SNAP shares and sell them for a quick profit when Snap filed to go public, it might have worked, but not in particularly huge size." article here: https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-02-09/quasi-indexers-growth-and-confusion https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-02-09/quasi-ind...

warbiscuit 10y ago
There was an article a while back -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144548 -- purporting that the efficient market hypothesis is true if and only if P = NP. ... which I'd argue implies social science is overly optimistic about that hypothesis.
- idanoeman 10y ago
  That also implies that if the market is very close to efficient, you need absolutely massive amounts of computational power to bring it even closer (i.e. to make money). So even if it is inefficient, that doesn't mean anyone can reasonably expect to find exploitable patterns.
tedmiston 10y ago
Comparing the last version of STVI's Investor Relations page on archive.org [1] (May 2016 pre Snapchat company name change) to the version today [2], I'm not convinced they aren't trying to be intentionally deceptive. It almost looks like they rewrote their description to sound vaguely like Snapchat. May 2016: > Snap Interactive, Inc. (“SNAP”) develops, owns and operates dating applications for social networking websites and mobile platforms. SNAP’s flagship brand, FirstMet.com, is a multi-platform online dating site with a large user database of approximately 30 million users. FirstMet.com‘s mission is to improve the online dating experience of meeting new people by integrating a user’s friends and interests to enable more meaningful connections. SNAP’s newest application, The Grade, is a patent-pending mobile dating application catering to high-quality singles. Present (emphasis mine): > Snap Interactive, Inc. (“SNAP”) (OTCQB: STVI) develops, owns and operates real-time, rich media social networking and dating applications on desktop and mobile computing platforms. Supported by a portfolio of 25 patents, SNAP is a leader in real-time video communication, with groundbreaking products powering one of the world’s largest collections of video-based communities. Through brands such as Paltalk, FirstMet, Camfrog and Tinychat, SNAP has helped hundreds of millions of users around the world make meaningful friendships and romantic connections. [1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20160506160057/http://www.snap-interactive.com/investor-relations http://web.archive.org/web/20160506160057/http://www.snap-in... [2]: http://www.snap-interactive.com/investor-relations/ http://www.snap-interactive.com/investor-relations/
wolfgang42 10y ago
The example that is cited in my family is the Seaboard Air Line company, whose stock experienced a short surge in popularity in the late 1920s after Lindbergh's transatlantic flight. The only problem was that the company was a railroad, first founded in the early 1800s. The "air line" part of its name was a reference to direct route from point A to point B, 'as the crow flies'.
deleted 10y ago
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warbiscuit 10y ago

There was an article a while back -- https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144548 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1144548 -- purporting that the efficient market hypothesis is true if and only if P = NP. ... which I'd argue implies social science is overly optimistic about that hypothesis.

idanoeman 10y ago
That also implies that if the market is very close to efficient, you need absolutely massive amounts of computational power to bring it even closer (i.e. to make money). So even if it is inefficient, that doesn't mean anyone can reasonably expect to find exploitable patterns.

tedmiston 10y ago

Comparing the last version of STVI's Investor Relations page on archive.org [1] (May 2016 pre Snapchat company name change) to the version today [2], I'm not convinced they aren't trying to be intentionally deceptive. It almost looks like they rewrote their description to sound vaguely like Snapchat. May 2016: > Snap Interactive, Inc. (“SNAP”) develops, owns and operates dating applications for social networking websites and mobile platforms. SNAP’s flagship brand, FirstMet.com, is a multi-platform online dating site with a large user database of approximately 30 million users. FirstMet.com‘s mission is to improve the online dating experience of meeting new people by integrating a user’s friends and interests to enable more meaningful connections. SNAP’s newest application, The Grade, is a patent-pending mobile dating application catering to high-quality singles. Present (emphasis mine): > Snap Interactive, Inc. (“SNAP”) (OTCQB: STVI) develops, owns and operates real-time, rich media social networking and dating applications on desktop and mobile computing platforms. Supported by a portfolio of 25 patents, SNAP is a leader in real-time video communication, with groundbreaking products powering one of the world’s largest collections of video-based communities. Through brands such as Paltalk, FirstMet, Camfrog and Tinychat, SNAP has helped hundreds of millions of users around the world make meaningful friendships and romantic connections. [1]: http://web.archive.org/web/20160506160057/http://www.snap-interactive.com/investor-relations http://web.archive.org/web/20160506160057/http://www.snap-in... [2]: http://www.snap-interactive.com/investor-relations/ http://www.snap-interactive.com/investor-relations/

wolfgang42 10y ago

The example that is cited in my family is the Seaboard Air Line company, whose stock experienced a short surge in popularity in the late 1920s after Lindbergh's transatlantic flight. The only problem was that the company was a railroad, first founded in the early 1800s. The "air line" part of its name was a reference to direct route from point A to point B, 'as the crow flies'.

deleted 10y ago

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