Market Discussions

UNDER THE SEA

UNDER THE SEA

DARLING ITS BETTER

DOWN WHERE ITS WETTER

TAKE IT FROM ME

I LIKE, would you like the first 50m now or do you want the interest when I pay back the full debt?

Interest sent

Could you check your mail please?

I can pay back the 1 bil you gave me now. If you want to get it now, I would prefer if you could log online before I send it over

.

You seem to be a very successful investor in the small offerings. Would you care to share any statistics on your success rates or any hints and tips to picking good investments?

Thanks. I may add whiskey for forgetfulness to my playbook.

Not quite. I gathered the data from a year's worth of investments and found that if someone invested the same amount in everything that had successfully launched they would have made a profit. I LIKE IT's approach is far more risky for a number of reasons:

1) He is only investing in high risk early career bonds, so his risky investment aren't diluted by (statistically) safer ones.

2) I LIKE IT isn't restricting himself to investing the same amount in each investment, so one unlucky scam/default might do as much damage to his portfolio as 2-4 on the approach I took (basically, the damage done will depend on the size of the bond whereas on my model no individual bond would be more of a threat than any other).

3) Quite a few of the bonds he has invested in would not have launched without his investment (and should not have launched, imo), considerably increasing the risk in the pool he is willing to invest in, in comparison to the higher standards in my sample. Indeed, if I were to collect similar data again, I would probably exclude at least some of these bonds and would not consider them to be properly launched unless they had more traction with the community than just I LIKE IT's support.

4) Generally, there doesn't seem to be anyone doing the basic scrutiny work when it comes to small uncollateralised bonds at the moment, dragging down the quality of the pool further.

It looks to me like we are significantly down on both quality and quantity. There is less activity in this forum now than in science and industry!

The problem seems to me to be less to do with the demise of the 'elite' than with the thinning out of the number of regular knowledgeable contributors, although the two are quite closely connected. A newcomer's bond post used to bring out a dozen or more individuals who would ask questions and critique the offering (and even possibly invest!) without having any sort of 'elite authority' but many of the names I had got used to disappeared around the time of Incarna. The loss of those guys also coincided with Setrak/Elise's aggressive trolling campaign and came shortly after the final death of the 'Old MD Elites' (I take your scam as really wiping out the majority of remaining reputations and Cosmoray's as the final nail in that coffin, which ended up with the discrediting of pretty much 100% of the people that had previously been trusted). By the beginning of last year the number of vocal proponents of responsible investing had become very small and while I laughed at Setrak's claim that I was propping up the last vestiges of the old system, there does seem to have been a loose correlation between the time I took a long break and its final collapse.

Part of the problem, I think, is that 'the MD community', to the extent that there was one, failed as a social experiment. The people it put trust in turned out to be almost universally untrustworthy and there was little interest in reforming things because requiring any kind of ethics in the business community was perceived as breaching the broader ethos of eve (yep, still a bit bitter about my campaign on those issues ). With the absence now of any big projects for people to swarm around, and the unlikelihood of any arising, the communal aspects of MD appear to have disappeared almost entirely from the board (although can still be found to some extent in the SCC lounge). I'm not sure what it would take to get things going again. CCP has consistently failed to provide any tools that might allow new things to be tried and it seems that, sadly, one of the most vibrant emergent areas of the game has keeled over and died, or is, at the very least, on life-support.

It is now not really clear to me what an MD community might usefully do. To paraphrase Dean Acheson's famous lines about post-war Britain, MD has lost an empire but has failed to find a role.