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One thing we should have a discussion on is George Soros someday. I’ve read his books, he’s realistically seemed like an untenured professor type who got out of grad school but was not smart enough to get a job. He’s viewed as a financial market genius but to be honest the quality of market participants was far lower back then. There were guys who were plumbers one day and making $50 million the next year after showing up on stock exchange floor.
I have enough respect for Soros mental capabilities that I just don’t understand what he’s doing in politics. Things like bail reform and ending mass incarceration I was reading today that the Koch Brothers funded those activities too. George Mason and the other think tanks funded by the Koch always supported a lot of reforms. But some of the people he’s gotten in bed with like Chesa Boudin makes it feel like he’s literally bored and running social experiments. Perhaps to test his reflexivity theory on markets. That he could go too far and cause a counter and farther reaction the other direction. The Trump prosecution itself feels authoritarian to me and not Democratic and is reasonable justification for a lot on the gop to give up on the system. And yet Soros backed this guy.
Yeah, I feel like I actually know approximately nothing about the guy. My impression has always been, "Well, he's made a bunch of money, and he leans left with that money, so that makes him a boogeyman to the right, but that could be consistent with a variety of pretty milquetoast actual behavior." The only thing that has sort of shocked me on the topic was reading a translation of Chinese-language publication that was presumably written for consumption by Chinese bureaucrat types, and it just very casually threw in something along the lines of, "...and of course, we have a clear example of financial warfare conducted by George Soros..." pretty much without justification, as though that perspective was just a commonly-held belief for, uh, Chinese bureaucrat types. I'd be pretty interested in a deep dive that actually looks at what he's done domestically and internationally and breaks down why people view him the way they do.
It sort of is, even in the west. They're most likely referring to Black Wednesday and it's not that long ago that lefties were seeing the whole episode as a neoliberal plot to force privatization, dismantle welfare, and whatnot. Of course since populists started hating him, they had to cozy up to him.
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The most notorious speculator in the world is a hack to you? Seriously?
He is one of the most respected figures among the best traders in the world. These are people who not only beat the markets, they beat the crap out of them. And I'm not talking about the average Goldman trader. I'm talking about the desks that don't even consider taking your money unless you put 10 million on the table, no questions asked.
Everythin was easier in the old days, yes. That's what a loser would say.
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What is characteristic to me about Soros, more than anything else, is that he's funded DAs. Plenty of money gets thrown around for the legislative branch openings, but Soros is synonymous with DA races, and specifically getting DAs elected who then go on to be soft on crime.
It reads to my mind as a market inefficiency he decided to exploit. Better RoI by spending money on the prosecutors so their discretion is your suggestion, rather than trying to fight for lawmakers who then still need to enact the laws you prefer.
This makes him distinct in my mind from other people attempting to spend money to buy results in democratic elections.
Problem with the inefficiency he found is it seems like it’s causing political dysfunction and adding politics into the administrative state.
For markers I believe Millenium and they may have got in from ren tech were Arbing some mutual fund rebalances. Mutual funds lost a little bit everyday. Eventually mutual funds need to prevent that so instead of having a cheap way to do their fund they need add personal to rebalance which just adds an extra costs to system.
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One of my casual past time is reading the biographies of famous / wealthy traders and hedge funders. The two major themes I've discovered are first, a lot of these guys (and, as of now, it's only men) are entrepreneurs, meaning that they did something fundamentally different than anyone else. Second is that, failing actual entrepreneurship, they took a massive contrarian position, went all in, and it paid off. You could call the latter group "gamblers" but I don't think that's fair. Warren Buffett - he of the "kindly old man who likes coke" public image - has explicitly said that when you are really convinced of an idea, you should go all in and even borrow money.
It's important to remember that Soros originally wanted to be a philosopher and actually studied under Karl Popper in England. He used a lot of Popper inspired thinking on falsification and applied it to the market. Now, I should point out that this is almost always a stupid idea - trying to transplant an integrated way of thinking from one wholly independent domain to another. But, unfortunately, it sometimes days work incredibly well. Soros' MegaTrade was when he "Broke the Bank of England" in what is now seen as a blindingly obvious opportunity. The Bank of England publicly announced they would buoy the currency vis-a-vis the Deutschmark. What do you do when a sovereign entity announced unlimited support for an asset? You short the shit out of it. That's what Old George did and made about one billion dollars in single day.
I'd argue that, like Buffett, the rest of Soros' success largely came from the fact that he was seen as successful. In public markets, this is especially potent. The Buffett Bounce is a real thing. Also, when you have that much (i.e. billion(s)) of float capital, you have options that other players don't. People don't understand that a "normal" hedge fund cannot simply hold capital out of the market. In a lot of cases, if they don't deploy their capital within a certain timeframe, LPs can take legal action. Soros, Buffet, and a couple others can spend a lot of time hanging out on the sidelines and then bet on the game when its 42-0 in the 4th with 10 seconds left.
On Soros' politics - this is just his billionaire's fantasy. Some rich dudes buy an NFL team because they always wanted to play ball but we're 5'8 and 160 lbs. Soros wanted to be this great philo-political mind, but wasn't, and is now investing in all of the political things! to, in my opinion, brute force his way into that role.
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