Investing General Discussion

Jysin said:

You're citing analyst upgrades as some kind of tea leaves for an earnings beat? Analysts are absolutely worthless.

You're far smarter than that.

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Gravel said:

Yesterday my neighbor (who's around 70) was talking to me and asked me if we were in the stock market (he knows we're retired, so I dunno what he thinks).

Anyway, he starts talking about his investments and how he's with Blackrock. The first thing he brought up were some class A shares he has. He acknowledged that he had to pay a fee upfront for them. His issue is that the charts for the fund are wonky, with one saying it's been negative for the last 5 years and the other positive. But he said it's earned 11% total. In the last 15 years.

Then he mentioned he's in some tech fund which is way better and has earned like 80% over those same 15 years.

I just stared at him like what the fuck? Pretty sure the broad market is up somewhere between 3-400% in that time period.

If you want to know what the average investor is, that's him. Getting raped on fees and maybe earning 2-3% a year on a good year.

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Haus said:

I can attest to seeing this first hand. Middle managers spawning supervisors below them and continuously needing to improve processes which inevitably means hiring more underlings...

The company I work at just did a sweep or reorganization and did away with an entire swath of middle managers towards the end of last year. And not unsurprisingly, we're still getting just as much work done. I'm in a sales organization so they also had the drive of wanting to reduce the number of mouths being fed on commissions on every closed deal.

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Haus said:

This is close, but in the current post-dot-com-boom era the dance looks more like this.. (saying this from having watched multiple startups go through this cycle)

1. Brilliant people come up with a brilliant product
2. They hire enough sales people with enough sense to build a business model around the product
3. They get venture capital funding to make it happen
4. If they're lucky, they hit it big.
5. If they avoid the temptation (or VC driven push to sell) they don't sell out to another company and become a real player.
6. They reach "market leader" status.
7. Revenue growth stops being as large each Year over Year, they're reaching the top of the bell curve.
8. VC (now functionally "the board" along with hopefully the original founders) need to find a way to get revenue to keep growing at the same rate.
9. If you can't keep innovating forever and you still have to grow your bottom line you do it one of two ways, increase raw sales, or reduce costs.
10. Who can you hire to accomplish those things? "Pure" sales executive management, and "Pure" bean counters.
11. VC/Board replace founders in CEO/COO type positions with "Proven business leaders" and "Proven Sales Leaders"
12. Profit displaces innovation as the primary motivator....
13. The original geniuses who have made their insane money at this point fade from leadership into roles like "Chief Technical Officer", "Chief Product Evangelist", Etc... and the real power goes to the CEO, COO, Chief Revenue Officer, and sales teams.
14. The really brilliant people eventually realize they sold their baby to the devil...
15. Really brilliant technical people then leave, and go try to do it again.
16. Leaving nothing but number crunchers and revenue business heads.
17. Company continues to grow for a while, because of squeezing of every penny/etc....
18. Eventually company stagnates and fades.

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Araysar said:

MSFT, AMD, GOOGL earnings today after market close


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Sanrith Descartes said:

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Big Phoenix said:

Oof AMD on its way to pulling an intc.

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