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Perhaps there is a (small) chance that the people in charge of managing SVF's $100 billion fund have a better idea of how to manage that volume of money than yo

• fierro 8y ago
  is there a word for this misstep or bias or whatever it would be called? When you make an un-credentialed analysis/criticism of another entity's action when that entity specializes in and is ostensible optimized for that action? I see this on HN all the time, it's quite tiresome.
  • eanzenberg 8y ago
    Fanboyism
  • camdenlock 8y ago
    Dunning-Kruger effect?
  • mhb 8y ago
    Arrogance
  • delish 8y ago
    Other people are using words like "arrogance", "fanboyism", but there's a fun, short, free book on the question, "Under what circumstances are you justified in choosing to avoid epistemic modesty and assert that you know better than experts?" It's Inadequate Equilibria by Eliezer Yudkowsky: https://equilibriabook.com/inadequacy-and-modesty/ https://equilibriabook.com/inadequacy-and-modesty/ Yudkowsky agreed with a small group of economists, and disagreed with the Japanese equivalent of the Federal Reserve. You might think, "The Japanese Federal Reserve has every incentive and resource to be correct about growth policies, and this small group of economists has no insight they don't have," but the story is more complicated than that.
  • soVeryTired 8y ago
    On the other hand, calling someone out for un-credentialed analysis often amounts to an argument from authority. The GP's point about overhead would have been made just as well without the ad-hominem.
    • Vinnl 8y ago
      An argument from authority is a fallacy when you assert authority from irrelevant credentials, e.g. when someone uses the fact that they're a scientist to lend credibility to their claims about climate change, even though they're an economist. That doesn't apply here.
      • soVeryTired 8y ago
        I don't agree. Any argument that takes the form "Trust me because of who I am" rather than "Trust me because of the following evidence..." is also an argument from authority.
        • Vinnl 8y ago
          It's not so much "Trust me because of who I am" but "Trust me because of what I know". If "what I know" isn't actually relevant to the subject discussed, then that's fallacious. Of course, an appeal to authority is not a valid method of obtaining new knowledge (an authority would be able to formulate the actual arguments that support it). It is a useful method to defer judgment, however, such as when the authority cannot be expected to come in and explain their reasoning in a Hacker News comment.
  • icelancer 8y ago
    The original comment is a person calling out Softbank for bad investment decisions, so let's not get too deep in the weeds here on ground truth.
  • subjectHarold 8y ago
    Nowhere have I seen the "well that looks weird...but they probably know what they are doing" expression used more than in finance. I have been through it myself more times than I care to mention. Everyone assumes that the other person has some knowledge they don't know about or has some secret "edge"...they never do. Amd after ten years or so, I learned that people do weird things for one simple reason: they are fucking stupid. That is it. They won't learn from mistakes. They are overconfident. They are greedy. Intelligence doesn't matter. Money doesn't matter. Whatever, they are just incurably dumb. And btw: organisations are never well optimised for stuff that matters. Finance is the prime example of this. If I wanted to set fire to $100bn, I would do exactly what SoftBank are doing right now. I know that everyone here believes in technology and continuing progress into infinity. This is true in some areas, it is not true in finance.
  • 1123581321 8y ago
    This is a situation where experts in the same field disagree and fail all the time. In the context of a discussion forum, there’s nothing wrong with disagreeing with one large investor’s approach. It reminds me of a response I got in a theological debate: “you really think you’re smarter than pastor ABC?” No, I simply agree with the pastors that disagree with him!
    • fierro 8y ago
      I was not implying it's wrong to disagree here. It goes without saying everyone is entitles to their opinion. I'm just searching for the term to describe what I mentioned in my comment.
• gammateam 8y ago
  There are fundamental challenges primarily regarding excess liquidity, which SVF is a reaction to but not a solution to. There would be no data to suggest that SVF is better at this, but we can recognize their utility in the market without being required to prove or disprove these claims. SVF is a vehicle to deal with excess liquidity from central banks, who have pushed everyone out on the yield curve by flattening the yield curve. The primary way to flatten the yield curve is by purchasing short to long dated government/municipal bonds, and short to long dated corporate bonds, until none of that looks like an attractive investment (overbidding on bonds makes their ROI lower). These purchases are done with newly created money, which is now in the hands of the prior owners (financial institutions) and also the issuers (governments, mostly investment grade corporations). Because society itself is not comfortable purchasing riskier assets, at the speed of which the addressable investment landscape demands it, SVF collects this capital and deploys it in riskier private equity. Keeping the money in circulation better than without SVF existing. This behavior is the point of why the central banks dampened the yield curve with new money, to force people to make the money circulate instead of sitting so passively in bank accounts or holding government bonds. SVF is a reflection of reality, which required the vision of independent people and the assertiveness to form the deals and do it. This is completely independent of acumen deploying large amounts of capital, and should be seen as a natural progression of capital formation. SVF's shouldn't be seen as an outlier in deal size 10 years from now, or 20 years from now, if the money supply is able to continue its expansion at a similar same pace. People will get used to it, ideally wages increase or the benefits of the deal flow reaches a broader population.