What's Up Wednesday #21 - Wall Street Bets, Risk of Failure, Right vs Working
What’s Up Wednesday #21 - Wall Street Bets, Risk of Failure, Right vs Working
Happy Wednesday everyone!
💸 The Game Stop stock is going through a stock squeeze as individual investors hold onto a highly shorted stock (up to 300USD from 20USD in December). The subreddit /wallstreetbets is going wild with people sharing screenshots of their profits. Some big Hedge funds are losing billions on a highly risky bet while many small investors people make great profits. On Reddit many investors align their interest and hold onto the stocks, forcing the price higher and higher. One guy had so many balls to buy stocks for 50k USD over half a year ago and hope for the short squeeze. He has now made 20+ million $ out of 50k$. This is a really interesting thing to happen. People make big money and immediately financiers call for regulations because of the annihilation of the Hedge Fund Melvin Capital (losses in the billions $!). This is of course complete bullshit. To quote a Redditor: „Don’t sell naked shorts. Don’t take an infinite risk for finite profit. It’s just common sense and not our fault a hedge fund didn’t realize this. It’s not our fault they didn’t close their position and eat losses at $30. It’s not our fault they didn’t close at $40. They did this to themselves. No one held a gun to their head and made them make those trades. They did this to themselves and they are standing by their bad decision and are now faced with infinite losses.“ I am really curious how much the stock will skyrocket to this week.
Risk of Failure
Do you take on the risk of failure? Only the best are. Expose yourself to failure. Else you don’t know what you can possibly achieve.
This is a bit cliché but can be really helpful if you think a bit further. Exposing yourself to stupid failures (like shorting stocks, unlimited loss, and limited gain) is different from reversible failures (like buying stocks with money you don’t need, unlimited gain, and limited loss). Both are called a failure if you are losing and a gain if you are winning. However, they are drastically different. Try not to do things with unlimited negative consequences. Stick to unlimited positive consequences with a capped downside. And remember, if you don’t show up you can not win anything.
You are not done when it is working but when it is right.
This might be something that programmers in a big corp embody. When writing code the first working version is often badly written, not understandable to others, and just not using all the fancy tricks programmers love. Now the code is getting recaptured and beautified again and again to make it shiny. This refactoring takes way more time than writing the code itself. But it has its place and is important (in big companies and small ones). But I feel this is sometimes pushed too far. If better quality allows a faster adaption and addition of new features it makes sense. If many people are working on it and it should be maintained for a long time it makes sense. If you just want to use to do the job, if you want to test something new, or if time matters, it is completely relevant if there are diamonds inside or concrete. What counts is if it works. Not how.
♾ And if you have asked yourself if you can create a snow-falling animation in pure CSS in under 140 lines of code. Here it is!