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Annoyed to see a unit error in the first paragraph. Bulgaria nominal GDP is $50 billion PER YEAR. Two Sigma assets under management is $50 billion. (Not per y
by strong_silent_t 9y ago
Annoyed to see a unit error in the first paragraph.
Bulgaria nominal GDP is $50 billion PER YEAR.
Two Sigma assets under management is $50 billion. (Not per year).
If your car goes 100km/hour, and Shelbyville is 100km away, your car is not the distance of Shelbyville.
- LanguageGamer 9y agoIf I have a sense of the distance of Shelbyville, then I'd say juxtaposing these two facts gives me a better sense of how fast your car goes.
- mtarnovan 9y agoHyperbolic comparisons like these are very off-putting for me too, but I see them everywhere, presumably "for effect". The effect in this instance is that I stopped reading.
- emodendroket 9y agoI'd saying having the yearly GDP of Bulgaria as AUM is still pretty impressive. And the point is more to contextualize. It's hard when you get past the millions to understand exactly how much we're talking about.
- smallnamespace 9y agoIt's a bit odd though because I doubt the majority of readers will have any direct experience with Bulgaria to put it in context. It's like trying to explain X in terms of Y, when Y is equally unfamiliar.
- emodendroket 9y ago"The yearly GDP of a sovereign nation, albeit a relatively small and poor one" is a lot more meaningful than $50b without context, I'd think.
- orbifold 9y agoIt is 1/4th of Toyota's or Volkswagen's revenue of one year, so not that much. And last time I checked they did not create a game for recruiting tech talent either.
- emodendroket 9y agoOh, only a quarter of the yearly revenue of the world's fifth-largest company by revenue, or the second-largest if we exclude state-run enterprises (c.f. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_revenue https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_companies_by_r...). Alright then.
- barrkel 9y agoStill stock vs flow.
- emodendroket 9y agoSo what? I'm not trying to claim they're bigger than Bulgaria. If somebody compared the distance traveled by some object to the length of a football field, you could similarly object that the football field is stationary, the object isn't as long as that, etc., but none of those things are the point of the comparison, right?
- philipwhiuk 9y agoNot really: https://www.nbim.no/en/ https://www.nbim.no/en/
- emodendroket 9y agoI mean, if your reference point is a state fund run by the government of an OECD country I suppose it's not that big.
- hkon 9y agoThat is being overly sensitive.
- Chriky 9y agoGDP is the amount of value created by the economy in a year, and it is measured in USD so there is no unit error. A better comparison would he the Hour Record in Cycling (how far can you cycle in an hour). It's determined by speed, obviously, but the value is still a distance.
- graedus 9y agoThe unit error is in the comparison between USD/year (a rate) and USD (a value at a single point in time)
- Chriky 9y agoDo you think the Hour Record is measured in km or km/h?
- mtarnovan 9y agoIf you want a fair comparison, do GDP vs value produced by that investment fund in a year.
- Chriky 9y agoI'm not suggesting its anything other than a ridiculous and meaningless thing to write, I was just saying that both GDP and AUM are measured in the same units (USD). Apparently several people decided this fact was necessary to downvote ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- Retric 9y agoNo GDP is in $/time. Gross domestic product (GDP) is the monetary value of all the finished goods and services produced within a country's borders in a specific time period. Though GDP is usually calculated on an annual basis, it can be calculated on a quarterly basis as well. https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gdp.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/gdp.asp
- 9y ago
- detroitcoder 9y agoThe comparison is mainly to put their available resources into perspective. Imagine the question: 'We have the entire economic output of Bulgaria in liquid assets at our disposal, what is the optimal portfolio we can construct'? And then re-ask yourself this question every second and just make sure you account for transaction costs as you shift stuff around. Also remember this is pre-levered money so deployed capital is a lot higher.
- gizmo686 9y ago>We have the entire economic output of Bulgaria in liquid assets at our disposal. This is still a unit error. They do not have the entire economic output of Bulgaria, they have the yearly economic out of Bulgaria. The correct comparison would be to say that they have 1 Bulgaria-Year worth of liquid assets. In this context, where the number is used simply for effect, this is not that big of a deal. However, in conversations where the GDP is what is actually important this unit error causes alot of misunderstanding. For example, what happens when the debt to GDP ratio reaches 1? For a lot of people, this seems like a particuarly important point; but in reality, it is just the debt reaching 365 days. Possibly too high, but nothing particularly special about this threshold.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- drharby 9y agoI thought it was called Morganville, ya?
- gumby 9y agoHey, but with the right ship you can make the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.
- khedoros1 9y agoAnd then make some more movies to invalidate the clever Expanded Universe reinterpretation of that line.
- benji-york 9y agoI live in Shelbyville, therefore I am an hour.