Ironic Opportunity (n): a business opportunity that gets better the worse its pursuit fails. Most commonly seen in financial markets when an investment loses money and investors pour capital into it because the upside potential grows as the losses mount.
Word of the Day: Awesome Farm
Awesome Farm (n): a company or organization or place where excellence is practiced and taught. The best way of identifying these places is years and years after the fact when you notice that the people who were there are currently all being awesome. This is a favorite topic of mine:
My favorite test for whether a company is excellent company or not is whether the people who were a part of it go on to do extraordinary things. Think of the Paypal mafia. It’s not clear to me that GO passes this test.
In the (re)insurance business, there are two Paypal mafias that come to mind: AIG’s actuarial department in the 80s and F&G Re. The top ranks of my business have over the last 20 years been massively over-represented by people with one of these two lines on their resume.
It’s possible to be awesome without being an awesome farm, of course. There’s something else in the water at these places, though. Maybe everyone else is just lucky.
Word of the Day: Wormhole Finance
Wormhole Finance (n): a collection of trading strategies most useful when basic assumptions about reality are violated.
Be ready in case you find yourself in a bizarre alternate universe where fire and brimstone rain down from the skies. Forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, the dead rising from the grave, human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together… mass hysteria!
Be ready… to assume geometric brownian motion.
Word Of The Day: Rocking Chair Economist
Rocking Chair Economist (n): someone whose economics is informal and intuitive and invulnerable to debate. My mental caricature is of an old white male living in the country and battering youthful audiences with an infuriating mix of cognitive bias, moralistic reasoning and genuine human insight.
Word/Phrase of the Day – Snake Oil Appreneur
Snake Oil Appreneur: (n) an Internet businessperson who makes no money selling phone apps but makes lots of money on selling app-related media (such as “how to” materials on how to make money selling phone apps) to hapless would-be real appreneurs.
Word of the day – Paul Graham Network
Paul Graham Network (n): One or more overlapping groups of people on earth. They’re the Skull & Bones of Silicon Valley, the Freemasons of Geekdom, the apex predators of innovation. They are the most accomplished engineers/entrepreneurs on earth: high energy, deeply social and deeply technical. They do the extraordinary.
Their junior members cut their teeth founding startups and the silverbacks stock the VC funds and angel lists, forever on the hunt for their own kind.
Also see here.
Word of the Day
Ominy: (n) collective noun referring to many things of ominous portent.
Word of the Day
Datapile (n): A raw set of data downloaded from a human-entry computer information system.
Pile, in this case, is an oblique reference to excrement. A run-of-the-mill datapile, after all, is often indistinguishable from a pile of shit.
Word of the Day
Spexpertise (n): the flawed knowledge and misplaced self-confidence that one achieves having only read blogs and news stories on a topic. Continue reading Word of the Day
Not Unreasonable 