Crypto and domain names might be in a different class, for sure—I don’t know how those markets work, although I’d be interested to hear more. But options contracts that involve e.g. the fortunes of the S&P 500 are not.
(I want to encourage rationalists to look for future opportunities to trade on, too. I just think those opportunities are vanishingly unlikely to come from highly liquid securities markets, and a lot of the recent talk is going to lead to misplaced effort.)
I don’t think in any of the three cases in which Wai Dai made very high returns he would have had a problem with telling other people about his investment and it would make sense to behave as you suggest a Realistic winners would (I will of course never tell anyone about it, or it will become useless).
Yeah, I’m still not exactly sure about whether anomalies can persist in public (see one of my confusions below). But if the trade is based on a one-off event, like this one, it’s obviously fine to tell people about it. If it’s a formula for an ongoing edge that persists in [stock-picking/domain name-picking/crypto] then not so much.
I think that when it comes to events that have such high societal impact as COVID-19 and that don’t really fall in anyone’s expertise that happen in the future it’s likely that rationalists can lucratively trade on them and pre-run the market. These kinds of event might be once per decade, but when they come along it’s worth trading on them.
As far as domain name picking goes, Wei Dai brought WeiDai.com at a time where US domains did cost money but there Chinese domain names weren’t worth much and sold it years later. The edge isn’t in trading either of that in the current market.
I’m still not exactly sure about whether anomalies can persist in public
In hindsight mispricing of Chinese domain and Crypto exist for years while being public. I think there was maybe 1-2 weeks of mispriced pandemic information in the case of COVID-19 when I take my personal information at the time into account.
In neither of those cases it would have changed much to be public about one’s investment about how long the anomalies persisted.
Crypto and domain names might be in a different class, for sure—I don’t know how those markets work, although I’d be interested to hear more. But options contracts that involve e.g. the fortunes of the S&P 500 are not.
(I want to encourage rationalists to look for future opportunities to trade on, too. I just think those opportunities are vanishingly unlikely to come from highly liquid securities markets, and a lot of the recent talk is going to lead to misplaced effort.)
Yeah, I’m still not exactly sure about whether anomalies can persist in public (see one of my confusions below). But if the trade is based on a one-off event, like this one, it’s obviously fine to tell people about it. If it’s a formula for an ongoing edge that persists in [stock-picking/domain name-picking/crypto] then not so much.
I think that when it comes to events that have such high societal impact as COVID-19 and that don’t really fall in anyone’s expertise that happen in the future it’s likely that rationalists can lucratively trade on them and pre-run the market. These kinds of event might be once per decade, but when they come along it’s worth trading on them.
As far as domain name picking goes, Wei Dai brought WeiDai.com at a time where US domains did cost money but there Chinese domain names weren’t worth much and sold it years later. The edge isn’t in trading either of that in the current market.
In hindsight mispricing of Chinese domain and Crypto exist for years while being public. I think there was maybe 1-2 weeks of mispriced pandemic information in the case of COVID-19 when I take my personal information at the time into account.
In neither of those cases it would have changed much to be public about one’s investment about how long the anomalies persisted.