> Or you answer to somebody else, which is how perpetually cannabilizing next quarters numbers to appease short term shareholders becomes more important than cost savings and using your labor pool time to solve actual problems.

If CEOs were actually wrecking their companies in order to get a fake short term boost, they'd be shortly out of business. If a person was sure a CEO was doing that, they'd be making money shorting the stock.

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atomicnumber3 30 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Shorting stocks has a very high "you must be at least this right" bar in order to make money. And given the uncapped nature of losses - the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent - you need to also be really correct about how high it'll go before you're right, and also, you're borrowing these shares you've sold, so you're on the hook for the borrow fee and also on the hook for paying dividends paid out to those shares you're borrowing but not holding. Plus you have to pay for the margin loans you're using.

That's a very high set of both static and scaling costs that eat away any profit you made by being nominally correct. Combined with the risk profile... you can't "just" go short a stock.

And yes, you can hedge losses with options or construct complicated options positions to try to hone in on a specific price movement you're anticpating. Now you have to deal with entering and exiting a complicated multi-instrument position without price slippage, AND you have theta decay and volatility-related price movements also eating away at the core money you're making by being nominally right.

Have people made money? Yes, for sure. There's also a lot of dead bodies and people who barely broke even despite theoretically having been right.

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exmicrosoldier 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Github? Windows? Ibm? Intel? Boeing?

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WalterBright 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Github and Windows aren't companies.

A more productive view would be looking at an index of tech companies - try QQQ.

	▲	g8oz 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There is a great deal of ruin within a nation - and a company.

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TheOtherHobbes 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well - the premise is that they will indeed shortly be out of business, because their increasingly slop-coded infra will collapse within the next year or so.

Or if it doesn't, token inflation will kill their profitability.

A lot of people are putting big money on both sides of those predictions, and they can't all be wrong.