Dear Ones,

Magnet Fishing, an absurd new hobby

I went magnet fishing with Yuhong and our friend Scott this weekend:

Why magnet fish? The Mad River had too low flows, and the regulations prohibited actual fishing on Saturday. Here are other reasons:

• Environmentally-friendly alternative to fishing for fish: While we do enjoy fishing for fish, we do notice the ample amount of trash left by fellow anglers. The magnet allows us to retrieve lost rigs that harm wildlife.

• Replenish our gear: lures can cost $5-10 these days because of supply chain issues!

• Novelty: I saw that people are pulling up guns and other unexpected items on r/magnetfishing. There’s also a new survival trend called “wastelander” where the goal is to build a complete survival kit with only scavenged items. I thought it would be neat if I can pull up useful items from bodies of water…

Fishing, Foraging, and Information Arbitrage

But what we really enjoyed while being out in nature was spending time with Scott, and Yuhong pointed out all the good spots where fish can be found when the river flows higher.

This is one aspect of fishing (foraging, hunting) that those who have not experienced it first hand don’t realize—most of the work is gathering and exchanging beta (information such as location and timing.)

A related misconception is that the information can be found online: NOPE. Most anglers do not share their beta outside of trustworthy friends, and will scrub any identifying information such as EXIF data from their social media. (“Spot burning,” or accidentally divulging, is highly taboo.)

As such, fishing is an activity of information arbitrage—What you see online with photos and videos, are highly curated snapshots.

I wonder if this is where the entrepreneurial path and fishing parallels in two ways—

1. As I get impatient with myself in repeating data gathering phases, should I instead see them as necessary foundations?

2. How can I, as a “thinky person,” identify more areas of information arbitrage—where I can distill information from an exclusive source and sell it to another party? Or know how to use an information source in a new way that others haven’t thought of?

I used to think that “arbitrage” is a big scary business term, but perhaps we have all been doing it all along. It’s all just beta.

What beta do you have up your sleeve?

Warm Wishes,

Christin

P.S. Thank you for answering my poll! Most of you wanted a variety of posts, so I’m sticking with this rotating format. One subscriber asked for more graphs 📊, hence today’s quick mobile graphing attempt.

Please do not attempt without understanding how to read river flows, water crossing skills, etc.