Future of iTulip?

[seobook]

Re: Is iTulip and/or EJ Dead?

won't the prices reach a point of ridiculosity where a sell off is inevitable?

So long as you are one of the insiders getting key data to trade on in front of the average punter (and/or you are using federal insurance to gamble other people's money) none of the downside risk is yours.

The stock option & trade gains are yours to keep. The over-leveraged company which collapses into bankruptcy doesn't come with clawbacks when things crash. The losses are socialized.

And, better yet, it is a 2-way trade, where the entities being subsidized may use the free or virtually free cash with leverage to trade against other weaker players in the market & acquire more of the market for pennies on the dollar, as others sell out in fear near the bottom & "regulators" hold private conversations with assurances to the people doing God's work.

[gwynedd1]

Re: Is iTulip and/or EJ Dead?

They obviously haven't been to the grocery store. They must send their servants to do the shopping.

Hi shiny,

A rise in price in a sector isn't necessarily inflation. A general rise in price , typically as a monetary phenomenon is inflation. That is to say for some people it is far worse, given the basic wage isn't inflating. So what we are seeing is a market action between basic inputs.

[gwynedd1]

Re: Is iTulip and/or EJ Dead?

I'd like more understanding of how "it" works. What assets are going up, and how do those price rises keep the machine humming? And won't the prices reach a point of ridiculosity where a sell off is inevitable?

Strange how something so colossal and obvious can be overlooked including by myself all these years. One thing has recently occurred to me. Having fewer children, for example. What does that really mean? I happen to notice that one of the leading causes of family fortunes to fade away is due to the dilution amount all the heirs. John D had 6 sons. The math by the 4th generation is 1296 heirs. With 2 its 16. Even worse is another Robber Baron Carnegie was know to criticize this more or less saying a philanthropic foundation is much better then offspring that does not follow the genius of a parent. So not only do we see fewer heirs these assets are now held in trusts. The wealth is no longer dispersing. Fuel to the FIRE is all the laws favouring this accumulation even more.

So we may just slowly see this shift from one place to another until at some point society destabilizes. Then its back to calories, BTUs, kilowatts and square footage instead of the more whimsical desires of the wealthy.




With that kind of shift we are not even talking about the same assets anymore. We may be looking at a situation where there is lots of equity in assets of the super wealthy as their disposable income keeps rising. When there is a palace and the domiciles of the peasants, a middle class home has no market to sell into.

[Verrocchio]

Re: Is iTulip and/or EJ Dead?

Hi shiny,

A rise in price in a sector isn't necessarily inflation. A general rise in price , typically as a monetary phenomenon is inflation. That is to say for some people it is far worse, given the basic wage isn't inflating. So what we are seeing is a market action between basic inputs.

I think you were trying to get at this when you wrote that for some people it is far worse, but I want to take this further.

Not to split hairs like Ol' Slick Willy, to say that it "depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is," but the meaning of inflation in shiny!'s message takes individual experiences into account, but the meaning of inflation in the reply to her comment seems to be different. Each individual encounters a different set of rises or declines in price, depending on their consumption of goods and services. Shiny!, if you're spending more on the same groceries than you did before, you are experiencing inflation in the price of groceries.

[shiny!]

Re: Is iTulip and/or EJ Dead?

I think you were trying to get at this when you wrote that for some people it is far worse, but I want to take this further.

Not to split hairs like Ol' Slick Willy, to say that it "depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is," but the meaning of inflation in shiny!'s message takes individual experiences into account, but the meaning of inflation in the reply to her comment seems to be different. Each individual encounters a different set of rises or declines in price, depending on their consumption of goods and services. Shiny!, if you're spending more on the same groceries than you did before, you are experiencing inflation in the price of groceries.

Thanks, Verrochio. Sometimes people speak at cross purposes when they're discussing inflation without explaining what they mean by the word.

Technically, inflation is an increase in the money supply. Practically speaking, inflation also means an increase in prices that exceed increase in wages. I believe the former definition is more favored by economists. The latter, by average people whose wages buy less and less every week. Prices can go up for reasons that have nothing to do with money supply, e.g. crop failures and transportation disruption. That isn't inflation.

For quite some time I've been seeing prices at the grocery store going up in darn near everything. The price of beef, for instance, is ridiculous! The Fed conveniently leaves food and energy out of their inflation calculations. That's what my snarky comment was about.

[goadam1]

Re: Is iTulip and/or EJ Dead?

doing any venture cap on this one?

[EJ]

Re: Is iTulip and/or EJ Dead?

doing any venture cap on this one?

Perhaps.

[Polish_Silver]

Fed's new business ?

. . .We live not so much in an economy as in the Economy exhibit at Disney World, with the artificiality of asset prices and all macro effects driven by the reckless application of central bank balance sheet expansiveness across the yield curve. There is no pressure on the Fed to raise rates to head off an incipient rise in inflation. In fact the Fed got into the inflation creation business in 2008 after being in the inflation containment business since 1913 and remains in this odd role to this day. The period of policy transition from inflation creation back to containment is when I expect the fireworks begin but not for some time yet.

I expect I'll be able to get my head around it once this new venture starts to gain momentum.

Wasn't the fed in the inflation business during 1932-1936?
At least the government as a whole was, since prices did go up in the midst of a recession.


I'd also say that Greenspan was in the asset inflation business, though he will never admit it.

I would say what is new is an official, widespread, policy of raising asset prices by very low rates and other mechanisms.

In the next big article, I hope you delve into these issues:

1) What assets are overpriced, and by what metric?

2) Is anyone going short said assets, and how?

3) Will higher consumer prices be caused by higher oil prices?
If so will the fed have to choose between high inflation and deep recession?

4) The Disney exhibit metaphor seems mainly to apply to assets. How is the "Disneyfication" affecting the country in terms of manufacturing, farming, etc ?


5) Does the (alleged) lack of consumer inflation during ZIRP imply that there are still deflationary forces ? What are these deflationary forces?

[ocelotl]

Re: Is iTulip and/or EJ Dead?

"There is no pressure on the Fed to raise rates to head off an incipient rise in inflation. In fact the Fed got into the inflation creation business in 2008 after being in the inflation containment business since 1913 and remains in this odd role to this day. The period of policy transition from inflation creation back to containment is when I expect the fireworks begin but not for some time yet."
Seems to me the problem is, esentially very simple: no inflation=no problem. Central banks keep interest rates low and buy assets so their prices stay inflated, at will. Inflation=problem. They must try to stop inflation without destroying assets bubbles created since last FC. Bubble bursting shall almost for sure take the rest of world economy with it.
Nobody knows for how long that situation is gonna last.
That is true for USA, Europe, Japan and China. Not true for the rest of the world, meaning Russia, Brazil, India, Mexico or Uruguay. Here the traditional economic conundrum holds true: monetary emission stokes inflation.

I'd rephrase it a bit differently... Monetary emission that generates consumption stokes inflation. When monetary emission sits only in central bank balance sheet and doesn't propagate to general economy, it behaves as if it wasn't emitted at the first place... At least that is the way I see it.

[Rafael]

Re: Is iTulip and/or EJ Dead?

My subscription lapsed and I haven't renewed. Is EJ still posting in the member forums? What's happening to EJ/itulip? Should I renew my paid subscription? HELP!

I let mine lapse. The material is years old. The website is hopelessly out of date in terms of the interface and the navigation- no reinvestment in the site. The administrator does not reply to concerns about the lack of value in the subscription.

[jpatter666]

Re: Is iTulip and/or EJ Dead?

I let mine lapse. The material is years old. The website is hopelessly out of date in terms of the interface and the navigation- no reinvestment in the site. The administrator does not reply to concerns about the lack of value in the subscription.

+1

I said I'd do monthly when I saw new major EJ postings.

There have been multiple "article is coming" or "website update right around the corner" posts. Nothing happens or changes. If there were new articles, they are well out of date now.

IMO EJ has found more interesting fish to fry. I stay around the site for some of the people here but no longer have a premium subscription.

[don]

Re: Is iTulip and/or EJ Dead?

Speaking of how many angels fit on the head of an IPO . . .

Shortly after presenting her start-up to potential investors at a conference, Nancy Hua was bombarded by eager suitors. A little more than 48 hours later, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur had amassed about $2 million from wealthy individuals known as angel investors.

The total number of angels that Ms. Hua raised money from: 21. And she could have gotten more if she had not cut them off.

“Thirty seconds into my pitch, three people emailed me saying they wanted to invest in my company,” Ms. Hua, 29, said of the experience raising money for her start-up, Apptimize, for which she announced the funding last year. “We had dozens of people whose money we turned down.”

For entrepreneurs, nabbing numerous angels — and prominent ones to boot — has become a kind of trophy collecting, a chase that comes with some risk for their companies. And for many relatively new investors, a winning bet on a hot start-up can pay off richly in Silicon Valley cultural capital.

Last year, over 2,960 angels participated in a financing round, more than triple the 822 angels who did so in 2010, according to CB Insights, a research firm that studies venture capital. There is even a moniker for financing rounds that have many angels with no lead investor: “party rounds.”

“Seed investing is the status symbol of Silicon Valley,” said Sam Altman, president of YCombinator, the start-up accelerator that has birthed companies such as Airbnb and Reddit. “Most people don’t want Ferraris, they want a winning seed investment.”

But while young founders are taking advantage of what is probably one of the best times to be raising venture capital, there can be serious downsides. When many angels are involved, for example, no one investor may feel compelled to help the company if it runs into trouble.

Yet at the same time, having a dozen or more on-the-ground investors can also mean a dozen or more opinions about company strategy.

Danielle Morrill, chief executive of Mattermark, discovered this firsthand. She founded the start-up, which tracks the growth of private companies, in 2013 and said she ended up with almost 160 investments from individuals, many of whom wrote roughly $50,000 checks. The investors often chime in about Mattermark’s product direction, she said, and to be polite, she is encouraging to them.

“You want to keep tapping into their collective intelligence so you keep saying ‘Thank you for the feedback’ and they keep sending it,” Ms. Morrill said. “But then you are sitting there alone at 3 a.m. and you have to decide on just one thing to focus your tiny team on and your mind races like you had too much to drink but you’re totally sober.”

To cope with the deluge of advice, Ms. Morrill said she has had to start turning a deaf ear to many of the suggestions. “I love those Beats commercials where the basketball player puts on his music and tunes it all out, to go win the game,” she said. “That’s what it feels like.”

The ballooning number of angels has been spurred by incredible wealth creation over the last five years in Silicon Valley. The initial public offerings of companies like Facebook, Twitter, Workday and LinkedIn created scores of tech millionaires, many flush with cash to spend on the next generation of new entrepreneurs.

Dave Morin and Kevin Colleran, for example, two former Facebook employees, are now active angel investors. Other prominent angels, like Max Levchin and Marissa Mayer, banked tens of millions of dollars from their days at slightly older web companies like Google and Yahoo.

Brand-name Silicon Valley start-ups such as Pinterest, Uber and Lyft have grabbed attention in recent months with their efforts to raise expansive multibillion-dollar funding rounds. Yet the technology start-up fervor begins at a far earlier stage — when many of these companies are the sum total of just a few people and their MacBook Pros.

The frenzy has now reached the point where tiny start-ups have unprecedented ranks of angel investors. CodeFights, a coding start-up, and Amplitude, a data analytics company, said they secured about 30 angel investors each within the last year. Spring, a mobile shopping start-up, counted about 45 investors in its first round of funding in 2013, according to CB Insights. ZenPayroll, which calls itself a human relations software start-up, has 56 angels.

When Tigran Sloyan, co-founder and chief executive of CodeFights, was looking for funding this year, he wanted to get a well-known angel to commit. He approached Adam D’Angelo, an early Facebook employee and co-founder of the question-and-answer site Quora.


“When I pitched the idea to Adam, he was super on board,” Mr. Sloyan said. By March, a month after Mr. D’Angelo agreed to invest, CodeFights had raised $2.5 million from more than 30 investors. “After they see a name they trust, everybody wants to invest,” Mr. Sloyan said.

In an email, Mr. D’Angelo, who began angel investing after cashing out of Facebook, said that he was drawn to the experience of CodeFights’ founders, the fact that consumers were already using the start-up’s products and the company’s potential market size if things go well. “There is a lot of potential here,” he wrote.

That’s in contrast to the handful of angels — usually five to 10 people — that start-ups typically had in the past. “The total angel scene back when I started in 2006 was 30 or 50 angels, maybe with three to five very active ones,” said Aydin Senkut, founder and managing director of Felicis Ventures, a Silicon Valley firm that focuses on early stage investments. “Now everybody and their family and their pets who have some money want to get into angel investing.”

The growing numbers of angels have spurred competition to get into deals, leading to some questionable practices. Spenser Skates, co-founder and chief executive of Amplitude, said some angels were so eager to put money into start-ups that they barely glanced at deal terms.

“They don’t do the same sort of diligence,” Mr. Skates said. “They hear your story and you send them the paperwork.”

Too many angels can also hurt a start-up and be taken as an indication that a company is not strong enough to attract any one “lead” investor, said Ms. Hua of Apptimize. Many angels may also not know the exact health of the start-up they have invested in when asked by others, which can give the perception that the company is not doing well.

“That communication overhead isn’t something I’d realized would happen beforehand,” Ms. Hua said.

For would-be angels, help is on the way. Mr. Altman’s YCombinator is educating new individual investors and held an event in March at its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters that was essentially a crash course in angel investing. The four-hour, invitation-only event included tips on how to evaluate founders and their ideas and how angels can be helpful to companies they invest in. The event also stressed that angel investing was difficult to do well, and that newcomers should expect to lose money.

YCombinator also warns young entrepreneurs about taking on too much, too fast. “We tell them very explicitly, they should prefer a small number of investors,” Mr. Altman said.

[vt]

Re: Is iTulip and/or EJ Dead?

Unfortunately we have an economy that is manipulated, and there is not much to add other than what EJ has said.

Fortunately we have great forecasts from Finster, including today's gem.

We also have posters like GNK with his man in country real data. Humor and common sense from Lextrode. And dozens of other great posters sharing from their perspective. Thanks to all.

EJ will likely appear when necessary. Remember this is not a trading service, but a way to grow and protect capital by using uniquely valuable information at crucial times. Where else are you going to understand what is really happening in the world economy?

[Woodsman]

Re: Is iTulip and/or EJ Dead?

...IMO EJ has found more interesting fish to fry.

Check out the sizzle!

Honestly, we're all beautiful people made in God's image and deserve the best life has to offer. But this looks so much more fun than writing long, deep think pieces chock full of macroeconomic data. Or what we have going on here of late in the peanut gallery.

Winter is coming and everybody's making hay while the sun shines. Nothing wrong with that.

[don]

Re: Is iTulip and/or EJ Dead?

What could be more cool that VR Sex . . . .

Pornography often helps to drive new technology into the mainstream. Everyone knows that. In fact, by now the point has become rote. It’s the sort of thing that needlessly contrarian dinner party guests routinely trot out 20 minutes before embarking upon trickier subjects like “Hitler had some good ideas” and “Female drivers, eh?”

Still, an element of truth remains. Print, film, video, the internet, ebook readers – they’ve all been given a tremendous boost by their ability to show or describe sexual practises to the public. However, now that I’ve been forced to experience porn on the next wave of popular technology – lightweight virtual reality units Oculus Rift and Sony’s Project Morpheus – I think we might be selling it short by calling it a catalyst for popularity. In fact, VR porn might even bring about a new era of world peace.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The reason I agreed to road test this fountain of muck had nothing to do with porn and everything to do with virtual reality. Ever since the huge – and, retrospectively, quite rubbish – Virtuality units became popular in the 1990s, I’ve been desperate to lose myself in a virtual world. And, if anything, the berserk – and, retrospectively, quite rubbish –1992 film The Lawnmower Man just compounded that desire.

“That bloody film set the industry back decades,” says Sam, rolling his eyes. Sam is a VR producer who creates virtual reality games and military tools. He’s agreed to show me some VR porn, even though he keeps going to great pains to explain that he doesn’t make porn, that he only sourced the porn as a favour for the Guardian and that he really doesn’t want me to name his company in print just in case anyone gets the wrong idea.

Sam’s brought along a range of porn, ranging from the silly to the hardcore. He sits me down in an office chair, attaches the display unit to my head, quietly mentions something about motion sickness and revs up the first demo.

It’s a desk. That’s it. A desk with a lamp, a plant and a pyramid of cards on it. It’s a taster designed to get me used to VR before we delve into any sexy stuff, but it’s immediately the most immersive piece of software I’ve ever tried. My sense of space feels entirely grounded in reality. Bend down and you’ll see the underside of the table. Look up into the lamp and you’ll see the screw cap of the lightbulb. It’s astonishing how quickly I lose myself in the scene. However, it isn’t remotely sexy.

But it’s much sexier than the first porn experience Sam loads up. Alien Makeout Simulator is a game where you have to kiss a cocktail-swigging alien on all of its many mouths before the time runs out. It’s like one of those light-up Batak reaction games, except you use your face instead of your hands, and also it couldn’t be any less erotic if it were a game about picking slimy furballs from a plughole with your teeth. Worse still, I scored abysmally at it. My self-esteem isn’t great at the best of times, but it still stung to be told that I wasn’t even charismatic enough to cop off with an alcoholic extra-terrestrial who looks like the results page of a colon-cleanse website.

From there we tried some Asian animated porn in the form of Kurumi’s Bedroom, where a young woman thrashes away by herself on a bed. What you do with her is up to you. Quite naturally, I edged around the room like a terrified matador trapped in a ring with a loose bull for a few moments before running away. Manners cost nothing, and I didn’t want to intrude.

There was also something called VR Girl: Kayla, which was nothing more than a series of 3D-rendered statues of a porn actress in varying states of undress. Despite presumably being designed as a masturbatory aid, the whole thing felt airless and cold, like a museum exhibit. No matter how many times Sam enthusiastically hooted about the level of detail in the vaginal mapping, I remained profoundly unstirred by it. So far, this whole thing looked to be a dud. Virtual reality seemed about as likely to become the future of pornography as finding a Razzle in a binbag in the woods.

But then things got a little more promising.

Technolust: A Way Out isn’t pornographic in any way, but it is a sign of what can happen when care is taken with VR experiences. In Technolust, you’re trapped in a room with a female hacker, and you have to try and escape. It’s a rich, ornately-detailed scene that’s clearly had a lot of time and money lavished upon it.

The hacker’s face in particular is so realistic that, when I got close enough to look her in the eyes, I felt something brand new, something I’d never felt with either pornography or videogames: I felt intimacy. It’s a profoundly odd sensation to feel emotional closeness to a videogame character, but it points to an interesting future of the medium.

Then again, the future of the medium may just be loads of videos of people shagging. That’s how my testing session ended, with three films produced by Virtual Real Porn. In the first scene, you float above a couple obliviously banging away. But because it was shot with a 180-degree camera, you’re free to look around. You can glance up at faces, you can glance down at genitals. Or, if you’re me, you can hold your head as far away from the action as possible, and try to avoid acknowledging that any of it is actually happening.

The second puts you in the body of a man being pleasured by a woman. This was just as weird because, whenever you looked down at your own lap, you saw someone else’s penis jutting out. And all you could do was watch. There was no sensation, no manipulation. It was entirely passive, like a cross between Boxing Helena and locked-in syndrome.


The real game-changer, though, was something that I hadn’t even anticipated. It came in the form of the third film, in which – unusually for the male-fixated world of porn – you’re placed into a woman’s body. For a moment you’re alone on a sun lounger, gazing around innocently at your surroundings. Then, into frame, walks a man who I believe is called Adrian. He pulls your knickers off, performs cunnilingus on you and then engages you in penetrative sex. Which, to say the least, is unsettling.

Because Adrian, bless him, was being terribly aggressive. Looking down at where it was all happening wasn’t really working for me – it was a bit too much like watching a 1950s time and motion government film about schnitzel production – so instead I looked up. That was even worse, because Adrian was looming over me and refusing to break eye contact. It was so unpleasant that, at the end, when he pulled out his penis to ejaculate on my belly, I shrieked and all but flung myself off my real-life chair in an attempt to dodge the splodge.

And, in that moment, I broke through and realised why men get such a bad rap. If that’s what a heterosexual woman sees when she has sex – a mess of veins and anger and dumbly moronic facial expressions, uselessly bobbing up and down three inches from your face – then it’s perfectly understandable for them to hate men. By the end of it, I pretty much hated men as well.

This is why I think VR porn may serve a greater purpose. If everyone sat down, popped some goggles on and saw what it was like for someone of a different gender or sexuality to have sex, our shared empathy would go through the roof. At the next G8 summit, in fact, Cameron and Obama and Putin should all experience first-hand how gruesome it is to be humped by a horny bloke. Mark my words, there’d be unilateral nuclear disarmament by teatime.

I’m not sure what to make of my dabble with virtual-reality porn. For the time being – mainly thanks to all the cartoons – it all seems a bit niche, like it’s been designed by one lonely man with a very specific and vaguely unpleasant set of peccadilloes.

Perhaps it’ll take off more meaningfully once it’s matured a little. Perhaps an equivalent to I Modi or Fifty Shades of Grey or the Pamela Anderson sex tape will come along and thrust it into the limelight, and all the streets will fall dead because everyone will be stuck at home manically abusing themselves with a pair of goggles strapped to their face.

If not? Well, at least Adrian gave it his best shot.

The Guardian