I believe Youtube videos are a great resource for learning this! I picked up electronics and computer/gpu repair as a hobby over the pandemic lockdowns.
A cheap multimeter and a cheap soldering iron/hot air station combo will get you very far in the hobby. I enjoy these channels:
YouTube videos are great -if- the problem you're having is exactly the same as the problem the YouTuber is solving. For example, I was able to replace the HDMI capacitors on my A/V receiver because I lucked upon a YT video where the problem I was having was identical to the problem the YouTuber was solving. So it was basically, buy these capacitors, replace them, and off you go. Repair usually just requires basic soldering skills and the ability to put things back together you took apart.
When the problem is not exactly the same, I'm just lost. There is not a lot of diagnosis videos on YouTube. All the videos are: "1. I observed this problem. 2. [???] 3. I'll walk you through soldering on the new components." skipping the most important step 2.
Same for car repair videos: "I see Problem X happening. Problem X usually means component Y has failed. Here's how to replace component Y. The end." If that doesn't work, you wasted money on the part and your time ripping apart your car and putting it back together.
I agree that the diagnosis and visual inspection is the most important skill in fixing random items.
In the channels that I suggested, all of them go into the repair not knowing what the fault actually is. They take the viewer through the whole diagnosis, and they (with the exception of Electronics Repair School) are not electronics technicians.
Once a person has seen enough different ways of diagnosing items (by watching videos or hands on trying), then faults in other items become easier to find.
What _i'm_ missing from those videos is - while they do go through the steps finding the fault - usually don't really explain their reasoning why they suspect component a, b, c to be faulty and how exactly a good (or bad) component would behave...
Might not be the case for all the vids of course, but for those i watched i never had that "ah, that's how it works" gotcha moment...
I feel like the 10 year MBS investment might actually have been a case of excess risk. In a world of zero interest rates (which I presume is when they invested in the MBS), 1.5%-2% yield makes SVB quite a bit of extra profit.
Their investment may have been a case of greed and poorly controlled risk.
Go back to 2021 before rates go up and tell me what you’d do. Kinda damned either way. The bank had to make profit to survive btw. They dont pay for their services on good will.
I understand that they needed to put the money to work somewhere, but they really chose a bad way to do it. Hence the 'poorly controlled risk' that I mentioned.
I think it was quite fair to think they could have sold 10 year treasuries at cost at least. An invert yield curve for this long is not normal. But yes maybe they should have laddered better.
>An invert yield curve for this long is not normal.
Risk management at financial institutions isnt meant to be an exercise of expecting or planning for the normal. Any way we slice it, they failed to adequately assess risk.
You understand that’s the silliness of risk management. Anyone who failed is always accused of not managing it. It’s a truism.
You can’t prepare for all outcomes and this was not one a bank expects. A 3 day 40 billion dollar draw down maybe a first ever event for any bank in all of history. Should they also have risk managed for a nuclear bomb going off in their lobby?
Get real man. Recognize that you are Monday morning quarterbacking here.
Do you really think the owners and senior management of SVB ended up with nothing? What about the stock sales they made right before the FDIC took over, or the bonuses given out, or even their compensation during the years in which this high-risk interest rate scheme was going on?
They have orders of magnitude more money than most people, and will get away with no liability.
> What about the stock sales they made right before the FDIC took over
Is there a more clear cut case of insider trading? SEC should already been working on that now.
Anyhow, you're arguing that they SHOULD end up with nothing, that is an entirely different subject of its own. Because you're talking about punishment, while I'm talking about deterrence.
Punishment must be enacted from outside after the fact, while deterrence can be innate before it happens. These senior management could have years of cushy job and more equity, and now they have to rely on savings and have the SEC up their ass. It's clear which is more preferable.
Just wondering, if they know for sure that they will be sued afterwards, why would they sale their stocks? Why not do nothing and live with what they already have? Is there a possibility that they can get away with it?
> Is there a more clear cut case of insider trading?
Genuine question, is there any evidence that these trades were out of the norm, rather than a regular portfolio rebalancing that’s common with any employee who receives part of their comp in RSUs?
I would love some kind of game where spoilers on the internet don't affect the feeling of discovery within the game. It seems too easy to just look up game secrets on the internet now, and it's almost necessary to do so in order to 'keep up' with other players (mainly in an MMO type game). I don't know if something like this exists now, or how it might be done.
One idea I've been kicking around is to have some sort of disincentive to posting in-game discoveries online. For example, the usefulness or power of an item is inversely proportional to how many instances of the item have been found. Not sure if this is really feasible in practice though.
My 6 year old son played with SimplyPiano for several months this year, and I tried it out a bit as well. For me, SimplyPiano brings the excitement of being able to play popular music that you recognize and enjoy in a matter of weeks. The app has easy arrangements of everything from Adele to Beethoven that it takes you through as it 'teaches' you. There is also a gamification aspect that gives you more stars for hitting the right notes at the right time.
When I had piano lessons as a child, playing classical music for years became boring and uninteresting to me. I believe apps with a wide range of music help keep interest levels up. The app seems like a great way to dip your toes into playing piano without committing to finding a teacher.
This video is from July of 2020, and at this time I don't doubt that they have a semi-truck chassis with a fuel cell drivetrain in it. However, whether this truck performs even close to the specifications and capabilities of what Nikola claims is never substantiated.
Fuel cell vehicles have been around for a long time, and I presume it's not that difficult to put a basic prototype together with amount of capital available to Nikola.
> contributing to global warming is securities fraud, and sexual harassment by executives is securities fraud, and customer data breaches are securities fraud, and mistreating killer whales is securities fraud, and whatever else you’ve got. Securities fraud is a universal regulatory regime; anything bad that is done by or happens to a public company is also securities fraud, and it is often easier to punish the bad thing as securities fraud than it is to regulate it directly.
The problem is, who was defrauded? The investors, I guess, but if they sue then they can only collect money from the company that they own anyway. It's not obvious that's a money-gaining proposition.
The investors could bring a derivative suit against the officers of the corporation. They wouldnt be collecting from the corporation, but from the officers of the corporation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_suit).
Not a money-gaining proposition, but that's why some CEOs should go to jail. We need to create an environment where fraud like this isn't profitable or sustainable.
Fyi, fraud is notoriously hard to convict on and even when large frauds are successfully prosecuted, the penalties are quite small. The SEC also can't be seen to be "hammering entrepreneurs" or let its conviction rates drop. So why get involved?
I feel like Nikola is an example of why it might be bad for retail investors to have access to early stage companies (pre-IPO or not). A traditional venture capital investment has a better ability to do due diligence than the general public does.
I'm not familiar with IPO listings through SPACs, but do these type of listings go through as much DD as a traditional IPO listing? It seems that every step along the way, NKLA had avoided close inspection of it's actual IP and assets.
On the otherhand, if Nikola was successful and retail investors couldn't get in early, it's an unfair advantage to the rich who are still allowed to invest.
Nikola is actually a poor example of your point. Their stock price is still up since they IPOed. A retail investor could sell their shares now and be fine.
It would seem we would gain a lot from greater transparency in who owns shares.
For example, Robintrack's data was very illuminating, almost every stock that made it to the week popular list was full of retail bagholders: https://imgur.com/a/LbvUOdi
Bet you thought I meant insiders. I'd run from stuff idiots buy!
Almost all of those institutions are holding shares on behalf of normal "retail" people, not professional investors. The statistic you are seeing is both in support of the claim of how much retail is a bagholder and in support of the claim that the word "institutional" is misunderstood.
They don't, SPACs up until recently had a very poor reputation, and it seems like we will soon have a new generation of investors learn the hard way why they had that reputation.
Seriously. I read "The intelligent investor" a few years back and it was striking how the original author was using examples from 1921 that read like they happened last week. For all the innovation in the rest of finance, investor psychology has really not changed that much.
Someone who honestly believes they can jump into the market and make it rich has to genuinely believe they are smarter than everyone else that came before them. It self selects for "This time it's different"
Had NKLA not been publicly traded, there would have been little financial incentive for an institution with skin in the game to systematically research and report on potential fraud.
The only way they are getting exposed is because they are public. There are countless Nikolas with vaporware getting hundreds of millions in VC funding, don't deceive yourself. Just look at how far WeWork was able to go until they had to go public, that public scrutiny is what eventually did them in.
Further up someone says a private investor should have done due diligence. My point is before it went public, Nikola was private, and someone should have done the DD.
Due diligence can and should be done before investing in any company at any time, public or private. While any discovered fraud on the part of Nikola will be punished by the SEC and law enforcement, investors need to take personal responsibility for where they put their money (i.e. performing their own DD).
Discovering that Milton hired his brother whose previous experience was paving driveways, or that the chief engineer has no relevant prior experience isn't even deep DD. We shouldn't be playing the violins for retail investors on this one.
Conversely, we could treat retail investors like the adults they are.
Generally speaking, knee-jerk reaction to create rules and regulations for every problem in society will only lead to further dysfunction, less growth, and permanently locking the little guy out.
Statewide rent control in California wasn't enacted until January 1, 2020 (with a retroactive period of several months I believe).
So, if you rented before Jan 1, and your rental unit was built after 1979, it wasn't covered by any rent control. Landlords could raise rent as much as they wanted on those types of units.
I would disagree, and I believe that others would as well. A 'millionaire' in my mind is someone with liquid assets of at least one million dollars.
The company isn't worth more than $1 million until someone else exchanges shares or money for it for over a million dollars. VC funding does not make someone a millionaire, except in rare cases where founders are allowed to sell shares to 'take money off the table'. VC money is the hope that the company will be worth $X in the future.
That's pretty much the age old debate about wealth. But the actual definition of millionaire is "someone whose assets are worth more than $1 million".
A VC investment is literally the exchanging shares for money. No it doesn't make someone liquid. Yes it does set something sorta like a market value, though it's usually really high. In more meaningful terms, that company now has $8 million in cash. There's almost no scenario where it's worth less than $8 million now, because companies at that stage usually have very little debt.
There are many scenarios where the founder is less than $8 million though, even on paper. The article doesn't give details about what % of the company Lee still owns or what their balance sheet or margins look like.
Based on that article, we don't actually know if Lee has assets worth $1 million. This is all before even bringing up how liquid he is.
I agree with all of your points. However, the 'company' having $8 million in the bank does not mean that the 'founder' has or will ever have $1 million.
The expectation of funding is that it is spent growing the company (employees, inventory, etc), not immediately paid out to the founders.
Value comes before an exchange. How can you buy something without an established value? So, yes something can, in fact MUST be worth something before an exchange happens. In this case the company itself has raised $8 million in capital with a worth of $33 million.
Now we don't know the exact nature of the share distribution, but since this is such a lean company I'm willing to wager that the found is still in the vast majority.
A cheap multimeter and a cheap soldering iron/hot air station combo will get you very far in the hobby. I enjoy these channels:
MyMateVince (a guy who fixes many useful household items): https://www.youtube.com/user/mymatevince
StezStixFix: https://www.youtube.com/@StezStixFix
Electronics Repair School (more advanced, he fixes laptops, tvs, and sometimes gpus): https://www.youtube.com/@electronicsrepairschool