turingcompeteme

If a senate report causes issues for you, I don't think it's exactly crap. But I understand your point :) It also keeps mentioning Reg T which I agree is not relevant here. I was wrong to say that RenTech used illegal amounts of leverage, thanks for explaining that. I'm still not convinced it's wrong to say that RenTech worked with BDs to bypass rules that would have stopped them from using the leverage they did in the manner they did.

Was the leverage in the non-lending category though? Isn't that like saying their gains were long-term? That's the whole point of this, no? They used some different terminology to reclassify loans and taxes, in order to use more leverage and pay less tax than they normally would have.

I guess another way to put it: would there have been a way for RenTech to hold the same portfolio, using the same leverage, with the same payout characteristics, that no government agency would have issues with? Maybe the answer is yes, but I doubt it.

They weren't in violation of Reg T. They were in violation of Reg U and Reg X. You are right that there is no law saying you can't use more than x leverage, but there are absolutely regulations governing loans in margin accounts and using securities as collateral for leverage. And The government believes Rentech was in violation of them.

It was 1.9% during the time of some of these trades. But yes, you're right, I should have said 3% over the risk free rate

It was never about returns exceeding borrowing costs. Rentech is probably the greatest money manager of all time. They can make returns that exceed the borrow costs.

It was always about the amount of borrow available, and the tax paid on the gains. The (illegal) strategies they used allowed for much larger borrow amounts, as well as only paying long term capital gains, when in reality there were millions of trades.

The simple setup: Rentech pays the bank $1B for a call option. The call option is on a $10B pot of money. The bank then hires Rentech to invest the pot of money for them. After a year or two, Rentech then exercises it's call option, which gives it everything in the pot except the bank's $9B plus a fee. The banks loved this fee. And since this was a year long call option, all gains are taxed as long term. They avoided $6B in taxes doing this.

Not me, The IRA thinks it's illegal. There are limits on how much leverage you are legally allowed to use, and Renaissance has made a name for itself by trying to bypass those laws in every tricky way possible.

I guess everything you wrote is correct, but it seems like a very white-middle-class perspective. Legal segregation in America only ended a generation or two ago. That's just one of many examples which meant that for many Americans, since the founding of the country, there was never a hill. More like a ditch they couldn't leave.

Of course it's a massive issue, but it always amuses me when people look back to how "great" it used to be. For a white male, the 50's seemed pretty great. If I was anything else I'm pretty sure I would choose 2019.

These articles are silly, and don't understand alcoholism. They give a few examples of successful ways that people have quit on their own, and since lots of people did it that way, then it must be more effective than treatment.

They miss the blindingly obvious point that every single person in treatment has already tried and failed those "self-help" ways. Treatment is a final, desperate, step for alcoholics, once all those self treatment methods have failed. You can't compare the two, and the first treatment has already failed for the second group.

It's like saying Tylenol is a more effective treatment than going to the hospital, because more people get better that way. Of course they do - because they have a less serious problem.

> most alcoholics get better on their own.

These statements and studies show how little the average person, even a doctor, understands about alcoholics. Anyone who's attended an AA meeting or worked with alcoholics can easily tell you what's so crazy about these types of studies:

AA is full of people who, by definition, cannot quit on their own. Other than some court-ordered cases, every single person in AA has already tried and failed to quit on their own. It's a nonsense comparison.

You are comparing a group of people who have never tried quitting before, with those who have already spent years failing to quit on their own. Of course the first group does better! The second group is filled with more serious conditions. If they were able to quit on their own they would have never tried AA.

Is there any 'wall' between the owners and editors of a newspaper?

Does someone like Bezos now have access to similar information that the Times was hiding from the public shown here?

That information would appear to be worth a lot more than the 250 million he paid for the Post.

I don't know about that. RATM are a festival-headlining, mass radio-played, commercial band, who wrote the same "protest song" over and over again.

Killer Mike, Tom Waits, Bikini Kill and a lot of others on the list are less vanilla than RATM.

> I showed them it is statistically very unlikely they would find a better candidate

So I get where you are coming from, but not having the 1/20 requirement is a much easier excuse than explaining why they don't want someone who thinks it's ok to do this.

I realize this doesn't actually matter and I feel weird defending Renaissance... but Virtu is a public company and hasn't been doing that well, and returns from Citadel's various funds are not hard to find. Also, I don't know how to compare a fund's returns to that of a private business. But Medallion has been around since before HFT was really a thing, and I'm not aware of any HFT places that have been growing at 70% a year for 20 years.

Bigger sure, but can you point to one that has had better performance than the medallion fund?