4 ms·
That argument is sort of like a chess strategy that starts with "If I get four moves in a row, I can checkmate my opponent." Nobody is denying the basic facts
by byrneseyeview 15y ago
That argument is sort of like a chess strategy that starts with "If I get four moves in a row, I can checkmate my opponent."
Nobody is denying the basic facts you've cited, so it'll be very hard for you to find someone whose ignorance of those facts you can use to your advantage. Groupon won't be as liquid as, e.g., AMZN. But buyers and sellers both know that.
And selling pressure is intrinsically short-term; Groupon's underlying value is completely independent of the number and motivation of selling shareholders. In a Bayesian sense, you could respond to insider selling--except that insiders are almost always selling, and the more successful the company is, the more they ought to sell. The biggest insider sellers are, by necessity, the founders of the biggest and most successful companies.
- jerf 15y agoI would think something more like "If my opponent is going to get four moves in a row, why should I play?" is more what I was going for. I'm not trying to screw other people over, I'm trying to figure out why I'd play this game at all. I'm as big a believer as you're going to find in rational markets, but that entails also knowing that in point of fact they can often be quite irrational by exploiting various human irrationalities, such as using past experience when we really shouldn't. Big fund managers aren't even remotely immune to this. This strategy of selling such a small portion of the company on the market feels like a way of exploiting the fact that "everybody knows" these big tech stocks "always" explode and exploiting the demand that is higher than it should be, while in fact selling hardly anything of value at all. Arbitraging the belief that tech stocks can't help but pull a Google, basically.