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[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I was on the phone with a guy yesterday regarding a land use issue. Conversation was regarding p/e investors in a project who'd no clue about how the physical and infrastructure pieces came together. This was the term he used: "chart readers."

I think you get a lot of that these days. My best friend who covered an industry well enough to retire a few years back doesn't know much about how the industry actually works at ground level. But why would he? He just bet on helicopter level data about it all of which was created by analysts in cubicles, based on occasional field reports from sources most of whom they'd never met.

People write investing newsletters from their homes based on shit they read on Bloomberg terminals.

I don't see how gambling remains illegal anywhere. These "chart readers" are effectively just gambling on projects as you might gamble on a football game. I guess one can say this is technically capitalism because they are allocating money to productive endeavors. But to call these people experts on these fields is a bit rich. They are experts on how investments in these fields perform and the value of investment products based on activities in these field fluctuate and trade in relation to helicopter level data fed to the market for such investments. Two different things.

I was in a board meeting yesterday. At the risk of describing the obvious, you have a back and forth between executives who are buried in the details of the business every day, and directors who check in for a few hours every three months. If you do it right, the directors can add a lot of value. But if it were easy to do right, everyone would do it.