4 ms·

It would be nice to know more about what you got out of HN (permanently life improving, I'd like some of that please?). To me, HN is an interesting distraction

by throw14082020 6y ago

It would be nice to know more about what you got out of HN (permanently life improving, I'd like some of that please?). To me, HN is an interesting distraction from deep work. Perhaps you have a better strategy of extracting value from HN, maybe you can share that. I can't disprove "That is a highly filtered signal and equivalent to inside information.", but buying GME based on posts on HN to me (or selling), is absurd and is extremely far from "inside information". As someone who noticed the GME pump 1 week before its peak and spends time on HN, there was no way I was going to put money in GME or "ride it to the moon".

graeme 6y ago
Basically I was running a business, and found someone on HN whose site exposed me to a substantially better model for the same asset I had. Revenues eventually 10x. It’s not some crazy thing, pretty standard business idea for my sort of business, but was still a revelation. Basically you can get a ton of business model info on HN. The specific model wouldn’t help you here, but basically if you have a business hn can show you how to round it out. Roughly: 1. I did a bunch of deep work and produced an asset 2. HN showed me how to use that asset waaaaaay better 3. However HN is dangerous if you go too far into doing only aleatory information seeking and forget to continue doing deep work (I fall prey to this at times) You’ll see some stories in this thread of people who were not programmers on HN and who received the message “hey you can be a programmer”. If you have this knowledge it is trivial, if you don’t it is life transforming. So whether HN has any life transforming potential for you depends on whether you have any such blind spots where simply being exposed to the right idea would let you make a large change onto a new path which is substantially better than the old path. ————— For GME, this is roughly the process. Note I had background knowledge of reddit, wall street bets, memes and basic knowledge of call options. 1. This story was posted Jan 20th, about a week before the surge. Top comment lays out the short squeeze idea. But big signal is showing “hey wsb seems to be on to something, it made it through the hn bubble”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25837208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25837208 2. My reaction was “oh interesting” (—> note to self “stop and pay attention to this reaction. Had it for the early pandemic stories too) 3. But what you could have done was checked the price of short dated call options. I could be mistaken here, as jan 20th might have been too late and the possible returns too small. But bought early enough, far out of the money call options could have a 50-100x return. The stock itself rose 10x so I’d be surprised if call options returned less than that. (If anyone knows what gme call option prices were like on jan 20th I’d be very interested to know_ Don’t put in your life savings. But my claim is that if you faced fifty such decisions on HN and put $1000 in each time your ROI would be very positive. The pandemic is maybe a clearer example. Due to HN and adjacent tech sources I’d say I knew pretty much what was going to happen by Feb 20th. In hindsight this was way too slow, but it was still a good 3+ weeks ahead of most of north America. I feel HN reliably has me a bit ahead of the curve. Disclaimer, to all reading: please don’t start gambling on HN. These are just examples to illustrate my general claim that HN has a high concentration of early info compared to other sources and has high signal.
- chris_st 6y ago
  > If anyone knows what gme call option prices were like on jan 20th I’d be very interested to know Look here: https://omnieq.com/underlyings/NYSE/GME/chain https://omnieq.com/underlyings/NYSE/GME/chain
  - graeme 6y ago
    Are those american or european? Doesn’t have high out of the money but if I’m reading it right the potential returns for buying Jan 20th were insane. A $60 call potion expiring Jan 29th was $1.20. GME went to $500 or so. If you exercised such an option at, say, $350, your profit on the exercise would have been $290. At a cost of $1.20. 242x return. And thank you, that site is incredible. Very hard to find such data. Another example of HN’s value. I searched for this kind of thing off and on for weeks, but it randomly pops up on an unrelated thread because I made an offhand mention. That’s HN.
    - sokoloff 6y ago
      The options are American-style. I also love the typo of “potion” for option in your second paragraph. It seems especially fitting for this story.
    - chris_st 6y ago
      You're most welcome -- glad I had the link. > Very hard to find such data. That is the understatement of the decade.
      - graeme 6y ago
        Huh interesting the site is offering the free data as a byproduct to sell affordably priced subscriptions. They could probably improve their SEO, unless they are new within the past nine months or so. When I searched historical options prices extensively nothing came up. Do you have any affiliation with them? If not I can reach out directly. There are some pretty obvious strategies that would make them much more prominent for searches like “SPY historical options prices”

graeme 6y ago

Basically I was running a business, and found someone on HN whose site exposed me to a substantially better model for the same asset I had. Revenues eventually 10x. It’s not some crazy thing, pretty standard business idea for my sort of business, but was still a revelation. Basically you can get a ton of business model info on HN. The specific model wouldn’t help you here, but basically if you have a business hn can show you how to round it out. Roughly: 1. I did a bunch of deep work and produced an asset 2. HN showed me how to use that asset waaaaaay better 3. However HN is dangerous if you go too far into doing only aleatory information seeking and forget to continue doing deep work (I fall prey to this at times) You’ll see some stories in this thread of people who were not programmers on HN and who received the message “hey you can be a programmer”. If you have this knowledge it is trivial, if you don’t it is life transforming. So whether HN has any life transforming potential for you depends on whether you have any such blind spots where simply being exposed to the right idea would let you make a large change onto a new path which is substantially better than the old path. ————— For GME, this is roughly the process. Note I had background knowledge of reddit, wall street bets, memes and basic knowledge of call options. 1. This story was posted Jan 20th, about a week before the surge. Top comment lays out the short squeeze idea. But big signal is showing “hey wsb seems to be on to something, it made it through the hn bubble”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25837208 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25837208 2. My reaction was “oh interesting” (—> note to self “stop and pay attention to this reaction. Had it for the early pandemic stories too) 3. But what you could have done was checked the price of short dated call options. I could be mistaken here, as jan 20th might have been too late and the possible returns too small. But bought early enough, far out of the money call options could have a 50-100x return. The stock itself rose 10x so I’d be surprised if call options returned less than that. (If anyone knows what gme call option prices were like on jan 20th I’d be very interested to know_ Don’t put in your life savings. But my claim is that if you faced fifty such decisions on HN and put $1000 in each time your ROI would be very positive. The pandemic is maybe a clearer example. Due to HN and adjacent tech sources I’d say I knew pretty much what was going to happen by Feb 20th. In hindsight this was way too slow, but it was still a good 3+ weeks ahead of most of north America. I feel HN reliably has me a bit ahead of the curve. Disclaimer, to all reading: please don’t start gambling on HN. These are just examples to illustrate my general claim that HN has a high concentration of early info compared to other sources and has high signal.

chris_st 6y ago
> If anyone knows what gme call option prices were like on jan 20th I’d be very interested to know Look here: https://omnieq.com/underlyings/NYSE/GME/chain https://omnieq.com/underlyings/NYSE/GME/chain
- graeme 6y ago
  Are those american or european? Doesn’t have high out of the money but if I’m reading it right the potential returns for buying Jan 20th were insane. A $60 call potion expiring Jan 29th was $1.20. GME went to $500 or so. If you exercised such an option at, say, $350, your profit on the exercise would have been $290. At a cost of $1.20. 242x return. And thank you, that site is incredible. Very hard to find such data. Another example of HN’s value. I searched for this kind of thing off and on for weeks, but it randomly pops up on an unrelated thread because I made an offhand mention. That’s HN.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    The options are American-style. I also love the typo of “potion” for option in your second paragraph. It seems especially fitting for this story.
  - chris_st 6y ago
    You're most welcome -- glad I had the link. > Very hard to find such data. That is the understatement of the decade.
    - graeme 6y ago
      Huh interesting the site is offering the free data as a byproduct to sell affordably priced subscriptions. They could probably improve their SEO, unless they are new within the past nine months or so. When I searched historical options prices extensively nothing came up. Do you have any affiliation with them? If not I can reach out directly. There are some pretty obvious strategies that would make them much more prominent for searches like “SPY historical options prices”