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In case you ever feel like its a waste of time, I, for one, appreciate your posts with notes + numbers. Its so easy for conversations about these things to get

In case you ever feel like its a waste of time, I, for one, appreciate your posts with notes + numbers. Its so easy for conversations about these things to get derailed about, oh, I dunno, flying cars, that its great having your post with hard numbers there to keep the discussion grounded. Its great that companies have big dreams and grand visions, but how will it work out in the numbers?

danso 8y ago
Ditto. I'm surprised u/chollida1 hasn't considered making a little newsletter/blog for this content (with the advantages that HTML/etc provide for text and data formatting) and then submitting the link to HN. Even just writing and posting in Github Markdown would feel easier than using HN's plaintext editor.
eric_b 8y ago
I second this! I always look for the chollida post in any kind of earnings release.
chollida1 8y ago
Thx, that's appreciated. It's really something I do for my job, I just put them here as well. I think I often get penalized by the HN algorithms because a post can get edited 4-5 times.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  > I think I often get penalized by the HN algorithms because a post can get edited 4-5 times. They should be boosted, not penalized.
- mkmk 8y ago
  I really enjoy your posts too, thanks! Stupid questions: can you explain 'wall street estimates'? I've heard it a million times, and I get that there are people at the company that make estimates and also analysts at financial firms (investment banks?) that supposedly take a stab at what the earnings per share will be, but-- who are they? What determines if somebody 'counts' as an analyst? How are estimates recorded so that they show up in yahoo finance? What are the motivations and abilities those analysts have to be right?
  - sirspacey 8y ago
    An example of “Wall Street Estimates...” is Seeking Alpha - a kind of a “Rotten Tomatoes” site for analysts.
  - xapata 8y ago
    That's like asking what counts as art. There are some major museums who hire curators, who in turn buy art. Similarly, there are some large financial companies that publish advice, who hire analysts. You "count" if people listen to you.
    - pooya13 8y ago
      But don't they have a conflict of interest since their "estimates" affects the same market they are investing in?
      - sz4kerto 8y ago
        In theory there's a strict separation between trading and research departments. (People on the trading floor cannot even enter the area where research sits.) This doesn't mean that there isn't some conflict of interest, but the industry and regulators are aware of it and at least in principle there are ways to mitigate it.
      - xapata 8y ago
        Any conflict of interest could be seen as an illegal pump-and-dump scheme. It's a fuzzy line, but disclosing one's positions helps avoid the wrath of the SEC.
  - danohuiginn 8y ago
    "What determines if somebody 'counts' as an analyst? How are estimates recorded so that they show up in yahoo finance?" I'm no insider, but I feel like a lot of this comes down to Bloomberg terminal. That seems to be where lots of people get their aggregates of estimates, at least as a common starting point.
  - kgwgk 8y ago
- dang 8y ago
  We'd never penalize anyone for editing. The world could use more of it.
  - noir_lord 8y ago
    Maybe widen the edit window? There are times I’d like broaden a comment. Reddit has a visual indicator for edited posts, I’ve often thought a git diff style view would be interesting.
    - codetrotter 8y ago
      > I’ve often thought a git diff style view would be interesting. I used to think so to but I no longer think having the history of a comment has much value. If someone is consistently making dishonest edits people will call them out on it without needing to point to an integrated version history. Mist edits are made probably to fix grammatical and factual mistakes. Who cares about the history for that. What I do wish for instead would be that you could request deletion of a response to your comment after you’d remedied some error that they pointed out because once fixed that comment is no longer needed. So A writes a comment, B corrects them. A fixed their comment and attributes B then sends a deletion request to B. However at that point perhaps full collaborative editing would be useful, like they have on the Stack Exchange sites and Wikipedia. Then comment history would be useful so that you could inspect individual comments and revert them. I have a specific type of collaborative editing in mind for sites like HN, and Reddit, namely that threads of multiple comments would be summarized and condensed into single comments so that they are fast to read through for people that visit the thread in the future. Again, contributors would be attributed and would get a share of the karma when the summary is upvoted corresponding to how much information they contributed. Of course that is a nice idea in theory but probably not realistically doable. It would be impossible to find enough people that are both willing to do this work and at the same time do so with an “objective” eye, and to not even get paid for it. Encyclopedic articles and Q&A sites are a good fit as we’ve seen with Wikipedia and the Stack Exchange sites. For general discussions I think it would not.
      - nordsieck 8y ago

danso 8y ago

Ditto. I'm surprised u/chollida1 hasn't considered making a little newsletter/blog for this content (with the advantages that HTML/etc provide for text and data formatting) and then submitting the link to HN. Even just writing and posting in Github Markdown would feel easier than using HN's plaintext editor.

eric_b 8y ago

I second this! I always look for the chollida post in any kind of earnings release.

chollida1 8y ago

Thx, that's appreciated. It's really something I do for my job, I just put them here as well. I think I often get penalized by the HN algorithms because a post can get edited 4-5 times.

jacquesm 8y ago
> I think I often get penalized by the HN algorithms because a post can get edited 4-5 times. They should be boosted, not penalized.
mkmk 8y ago
I really enjoy your posts too, thanks! Stupid questions: can you explain 'wall street estimates'? I've heard it a million times, and I get that there are people at the company that make estimates and also analysts at financial firms (investment banks?) that supposedly take a stab at what the earnings per share will be, but-- who are they? What determines if somebody 'counts' as an analyst? How are estimates recorded so that they show up in yahoo finance? What are the motivations and abilities those analysts have to be right?
- sirspacey 8y ago
  An example of “Wall Street Estimates...” is Seeking Alpha - a kind of a “Rotten Tomatoes” site for analysts.
- xapata 8y ago
  That's like asking what counts as art. There are some major museums who hire curators, who in turn buy art. Similarly, there are some large financial companies that publish advice, who hire analysts. You "count" if people listen to you.
  - pooya13 8y ago
    But don't they have a conflict of interest since their "estimates" affects the same market they are investing in?
    - sz4kerto 8y ago
      In theory there's a strict separation between trading and research departments. (People on the trading floor cannot even enter the area where research sits.) This doesn't mean that there isn't some conflict of interest, but the industry and regulators are aware of it and at least in principle there are ways to mitigate it.
    - xapata 8y ago
      Any conflict of interest could be seen as an illegal pump-and-dump scheme. It's a fuzzy line, but disclosing one's positions helps avoid the wrath of the SEC.
- danohuiginn 8y ago
  "What determines if somebody 'counts' as an analyst? How are estimates recorded so that they show up in yahoo finance?" I'm no insider, but I feel like a lot of this comes down to Bloomberg terminal. That seems to be where lots of people get their aggregates of estimates, at least as a common starting point.
- kgwgk 8y ago
dang 8y ago
We'd never penalize anyone for editing. The world could use more of it.
- noir_lord 8y ago
  Maybe widen the edit window? There are times I’d like broaden a comment. Reddit has a visual indicator for edited posts, I’ve often thought a git diff style view would be interesting.
  - codetrotter 8y ago
    > I’ve often thought a git diff style view would be interesting. I used to think so to but I no longer think having the history of a comment has much value. If someone is consistently making dishonest edits people will call them out on it without needing to point to an integrated version history. Mist edits are made probably to fix grammatical and factual mistakes. Who cares about the history for that. What I do wish for instead would be that you could request deletion of a response to your comment after you’d remedied some error that they pointed out because once fixed that comment is no longer needed. So A writes a comment, B corrects them. A fixed their comment and attributes B then sends a deletion request to B. However at that point perhaps full collaborative editing would be useful, like they have on the Stack Exchange sites and Wikipedia. Then comment history would be useful so that you could inspect individual comments and revert them. I have a specific type of collaborative editing in mind for sites like HN, and Reddit, namely that threads of multiple comments would be summarized and condensed into single comments so that they are fast to read through for people that visit the thread in the future. Again, contributors would be attributed and would get a share of the karma when the summary is upvoted corresponding to how much information they contributed. Of course that is a nice idea in theory but probably not realistically doable. It would be impossible to find enough people that are both willing to do this work and at the same time do so with an “objective” eye, and to not even get paid for it. Encyclopedic articles and Q&A sites are a good fit as we’ve seen with Wikipedia and the Stack Exchange sites. For general discussions I think it would not.
    - nordsieck 8y ago