Cathie Wood and ARK are selling too. While putting out a report with a price target of $4,600 for TSLA, they’ve been taking profits and trimming their TSLA position in their flagship ARKK fund from almost 4 million shares to less than 1 million. One of the biggest cheerleaders for Tesla is publicly saying the stock will quadruple, while cutting their holdings by 75%.
TSLA's gone up a lot in the last few years, perhaps 20% of Ark's market cap being in a single stock might be bad business? But I wonder if it's more likely to do with them losing 50% of their assets in less than a year:
> As of February 2021, the company had $50 billion in assets under management. By January 2022, assets had dropped to $23.9 billion, after a period of poor performance.
> putting out a report with a price target of $4,600 for TSLA
That is the PR department.
> they’ve been taking profits and trimming their TSLA position
That is their fund mangement arm.
Are you for real and should I be angry? Were you really unaware that the words these people say on the tv, while helpfull for their current position, dont always reflect their actions or even actual beliefs?
ARK wants even needs investors. Going on CNBC and telling everyone that the core asset of your fund is going to the moon, dont miss out!!!!!!!! is how you get investors to pay you a fat fee. Going on CNBC and announcing that your research department think your investors are going to lose 50% isnt good for business.
The price targets and investment research is entirely PR - designed to get investors to invest with the fund.
Cathie is a bit of a case and I'd stay away from the ARK fund myself (it's basically a bad way to own TSLA which was great when TSLA jumped) but that fund is limited to holding no more than some percentage as TSLA, maybe it was 10%?
Disclosure: I held TSLA in the past, not at this time, though I hold index funds that hold it.
They turned Time Inc into a spammy content factory - did huge deals with Taboola/Outbrain, along with creating stuff like a short FB video show about brunch foods. Came over to Reddit and keeps spouting off these huge proclamations about billions of users. They came over right after the huge raise so it's clear that the clear mandate is to commercialize at every possibly touchpoint.
this is kind of the perfect example - in theory, the secondary market should correctly price the ISAs based on the quality of the students being graduated.
But there is a significant lag built in on the pricing. It would probably be a few cycles of students, and you wouldn't even know they're not getting good jobs for a number of months if not years. Especially given Austen's kind of a celeb, Lambda could raised a few bigger and bigger rounds in that time period - and their numbers would look fantastic to potential investors with the cash coming in up front. If they played it right, they could maybe even IPO before those secondary ISAs ever get properly priced. Financial innovation at its finest!
> "... would probably be a few cycles of students ..."
This sort of delay would be priced in by the person buying the ISAs from Lambda.
I agree with the grand-parent post. Lambda school definitely has skin in the game. If they want to continue operating (i.e., sell the next batch of ISAs onward to investors) then they need to have students who get high paying jobs.
Facebook's ad model is built to reward "virality" - meaning being over the top and salacious means lower costs. Even Boz acknowledges that was part of the Trump team's genius - they used the platform, as it was built, perfectly. The Democrats naturally have equal access to this platform, so I don't think its as much a left-right thing, vs a crazy-calm divide.
The other thing is just disinformation / identity verification - making sure all advertisers are who they say they are (and you don't get russians posing as black lives matter, etc.)
How do they not address the actual financials? (saying "Numbers aside" and then digging into the strategy shift).
I'm more curious - out of the $200mm they are projecting this year, or the $100mm they made last year - what did they spend? Their business model seems even more insane than Groupons to me.
They apparently have to pay out $12-15 per class to the studios. Had heard that on a $99 membership, with about $50 going to normal expenses (staff, marketing, etc), if a member takes 4 classes in a month they're already underwater - and they'll lose money on every additional class that user takes.
Ellen Pao. Harvard Law, Harvard MBA, time at Cravath (very, very fancy law firm) and partner at Kleiner (which I imagine most of us know) is now to be the head of Reddit?
I am a firm believer that most media out there is not extracting enough value from their audience, or "under-monetizing", to use a ridiculous term. However, Reddit truly is different. I simply can't imagine someone with Ellen's professional upbringing will be the one who figures out how to retain the spirit, activity, and engagement of Reddit, while satisfying that 10x, $500mm valuation.
This ain't sexist, this is anti-elitist.Cutting and pasting monetization templates from other media properties, and building projected revenue models off of traffic numbers just can't work here. It's not Buzzfeed or Business Insider.
I was suspect when Erik Martin left (had the pleasure of meeting him in NYC, he lived and breathed what makes Reddit wonderful), and this really seems to solidify what I guess should've been pretty obvious.
I genuinely hope Ms. Pao holds things together, and the return of Alexis helps things out. The more I've learned, it seems Alexis was already gone by the time Reddit really took off and has been writing and speaking ever since. Curious how his operational prowess shows through the new chairmanship role.
Ellen has the operation prowess, analytical mind, and a ton of other skills that have been the reason she's been so successful at reddit so far. Remember: reddit is not a media company, it is a platform for communities -- thousands of them -- to share and we have a team in place that is going to turn this into a network of a billion people, worldwide.
reddit has doubled in traffic literally every year since Steve & I launched it. Granted, it was smaller in 2010 when we left, but I've been an advisor since (and gotten up to a few other things since - like helping Steve launch hipmunk and investing/advising in a 100 or so startups) but the core reddit product is for better/worse still the same as it was when we left.
I'm excited to work with Ellen, Dan, and the entire reddit team to develop reddit with the vision Steve & I had in creating it, but with the benefit of 10 years of experience & learning from it.
Ellen was also an EE major as an undergrad (at Princeton, which is known for its hard sciences, IAS et al...), a partner at a firm that has invested into many other consumer audience startups (i.e., I'd think she knows very well the difference between a site like Reddit and BI), and a reddit user prior to her role at reddit.
Finally, why should we hold a law degree someone has obtained 20 years ago against them? (Fwiw, this is a background quite similar to Peter Thiel: years in "the elite", until finding a better home).
> Alexis Ohanian, who cofounded reddit nine and a half years ago, is returning as full-time executive chairman (he will transition to a part-time partner role at Y Combinator)
> There is a long history of founders returning to companies and doing great things.
I wouldn't spend too much time worrying about Ellen Pao leading reddit in the long term.
Also from today's reddit blog post[0] by Alexis
> Instead, I joined the board and have done everything I can to not be a helicopter parent, but rather support reddit and all the amazing people who make it work as best I can. But reddit is and will always be my baby
Given her background, I think it will be Pao as a very operations focused CEO and Alexis as a fairly involved Executive Chairman focused on guiding culture and general direction.
I am hopeful for Reddit's future because of its community.
I've been using Reddit for over 8 years, through many transitions, and I still go to it everyday to read and interact with many friends I've met there.
I believe that everyone currently working on Reddit knows why it's great, and is interested in making it even better.
I believe in Reddit's team, and I believe in Reddit.
I think if you check how active u/kn0thing is on the reddit thread about this, you might feel a bit better. Although u/ekjp is rather less active there, so it should be interesting to say the least.
Of course time will tell. Reddit is full of great little communities (and some really messed up ones). Let's hope they can keep things good for the users and not do a digg.
I found this article to embody every problem with the attitude of journalists from traditional media institutions. The author effectively is lamenting his loss of role as the gatekeeper of all information. Apparently, all journalism was 'pure' and devoid of any conflicts of interest and the only way to receive the 'truth' for a reader.
You can see this near arrogance flow through much of the anecdotes. "Ugh, more and more PR people trying to get my attention all the time. It's sooo annoying." "Ugh, PR girls are even trying to sleep with me, but you can't compromise my editorial integrity." It's perfectly represents the entitlement of the gatekeeper role that must've been built into that last generation of journalists.
Sorry for the mild rant but sites like Hacker News and Reddit have shown that readers are plenty smart, and capable of sifting through the bullshit, whether produced by a corporation, a newspaper, or an individual. When news media held a monopoly on distribution and there were few sources of info, I understand the danger of a corporation holding the sole lifeline of info. That's no longer the case.
> sites like Hacker News and Reddit have shown that readers are plenty smart, and capable of sifting through the bullshit,
Oh? I've had the opposite impression. That Reddit adequately demonstrates that readers are impulsive, poorly informed, narrow-minded, and easily manipulated. On subreddits with the most passive style of moderation, the comment threads are a self-congratulatory shouting match where any contradictory information is shouted down regardless of its merit. On the other hand, where conversations are productive and good information is rewarded, those subreddits are moderated strictly and editorial control is frequently used to remove distracting comments or guide conversations.
In my opinion, Reddit validates the usefulness of a gatekeeper for news.
More rigorously, the explicit goal of sites like Reddit, Facebook etc is to present you with content that you like. In effect, they're doing a search over recent news stories to optimize for likability.
Journalism outlets, at least those operated in the traditional manner with a wall between business and copy, explicitly eschew this goal. The whole point of "church and state" separation in news outlets is to enable journalists to write about stories that readers probably wouldn't upvote, but is important for them to see. This sort of story will be given _much_ less exposure on sites that are single-mindedly optimizing for likability in general.
I think traditionally-operated news outlets serve a socially-useful function, and that the metamorphosis of these outlets into likability optimizers means everyone loses out. You may disagree, and that's your perogative!
Would disagree here. Facebook as a platform promotes feel-good stuff and it's been self-reinforcing. It makes the space more attractive to advertisers and everyone "wins" (while we all lose).
I still however believe people are smart on average, and are becoming better and better at thinking critically. Possibly a bit naive, but I hope as information becomes more accessible, people will only develop a better sense for what's bullshit (again, no matter who it's produced by).
> Sorry for the mild rant but sites like Hacker News and Reddit have shown that readers are plenty smart, and capable of sifting through the bullshit
It's not that they are not capable or smart, it's that they don't bother fact checking every single story or seek out opposing analysis or interpretation, especially for things like US foreign policy.
Main difference is stories aren't fact-checked before discussing. In the end the right information ends up disseminated probably as often as a standard news story, it's just the 'sausage is made' in the public eye vs. in a closed newsroom the public has no visibility to.
This is way I built sagebump over a weekend as a side project for myself.
It applies merging aswell as custom filtering using open source algorithms I came across on HN and elsewhere. I only wish more people gave it a go, I seem to be the only user at the moment unfortunately. Feedback is totally welcome if anyone wants to take a quick gander.
Use this link for a "Technical filtering pass" http://www.sagebump.com/?view=technocrat&info
1) Auto-categorization: Great if it works. I understand it's beta, but it isn't working now. For example, almost every story is labeled 'Controversy' including "High school football player gives best post game interview ever.", "Chocolate lab after the dog park" and other similar stories.
2) Auto-curation: Again, great if it works and I know it's beta, but the Technocrat view currently offers "LPT: The correct & easiest way to safely break up a dog fight", "California boy gets detention for sharing school-prepared lunch with another student", etc.
Those are hard problems; if you could solve them, count me in. Possibly I misunderstand your goals, but as the other poster said, they could use more explanation.
1)Content is not categorised. It is filtered on a personal level (your self) then again on an application level (sagebump) to provide a reading digest. I am not sure how I would categorised such a product.
2) Where you using either the default views (technocrat for instance) or your own personal feeds? The articles selected are only as good as your feed filters on your different sites and the settings selected in the menu.
I think you really need a clearer explanation of your goals for the project. I mean, it looks like it could be a neat time-saver, but I don't think I can customize it (I've picked my subscribed reddits carefully already), and it doesn't have the niceties of Reddit Enhancement Suite.
The point is you enter in your customised reddit feed link, the add the other accounts you have from other websites (EG slashdot) so you can have a merged, filtered, organised list on the same page.
Sagebump sits ontop of your different aggregator site accounts.
Cathie Wood and ARK are selling too. While putting out a report with a price target of $4,600 for TSLA, they’ve been taking profits and trimming their TSLA position in their flagship ARKK fund from almost 4 million shares to less than 1 million. One of the biggest cheerleaders for Tesla is publicly saying the stock will quadruple, while cutting their holdings by 75%.