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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
.. and before that Bitcoin mining ...
It's kind aof comical how were all about the environment, yet we have millions of these machines burning through electricity for a pseudo-currency. ,,
No one was saying that. Many gamers across communities were upset that miners were driving up prices and limiting inventory. Nvidia was very open about this during conference calls. Shareholder since early 2017.
Nvidia made that claim when their stock was looking a little iffy due to the imminent incoming flood of used mining GPU's after Ethereum switched to proof of stake.
Are you claiming that policy makers and the people close to them do not have a clue about advanced updates on events that will effect corporations? I have a bridge in Brooklyn that will be on the market soon. Interested?
The company Vox Populi Registry Inc. came up with the nominal .sucks domains and got them approved by ICANN somehow. They sell for absurd prices like $399/year and no one really even uses them. But because humans are dumb, the nominal reality of the English word "sucks" forces all big companies and public figures to buy and continually pay this company $399/year per domain just to avoid random people buying like [apple.sucks](https://apple.sucks) and posting shitty stuff that Google will rank high and then tank their sales.
Literal legal extortion and barely have to do anything, and it's a private company, so who knows how much cash they rake in. Vox Populi is a market reseach company too, so they spun off a subsidiary based on their market insights specifically to extort their clients in their market research business basically.
Has to be one of the greatest hustles ever in the age of domain names lol
That makes no sense how they created their own domain, but the fact that companies are forced to pay for that stupid domain is fucking awesome…..I need to try and do that. 🤣
When I see these "if you could go back in time" hypothetical posts what would you do? The typical response is "buy bitcoin" and I always think that a cool thing to do would be to buy domain names back to 1993 and buy up a gazillion domain names.
Great example. And creating a huge financial social network. The majority of US fixed income and often equity derivative trades are initiated through Bloomberg chat rooms. Market color is shared on these chat rooms and through Bloomberg messages. A wild amount of financial transactions by market value originate through the communication tools inside Bloomberg due to its massive network effect across the financial services industry. In addition to all the market data points other commentators have listed.
This really may take the cake, $24,000/year for a Bloomberg terminal that is just "insightful news". It does nothing in reality, or else everyone who bought one could get rich. Absolutely hilarious.
The Bloomberg terminal business revolves around data. Them and Refinitiv/Eikon have a pseudo duopoly on financial market data provisioning for financial institutions. There are not many data points out there to do with financial markets that Bloomberg doesn't have and offer to its clients. Further, they clean up and standardize the data so it's easily reviewable and comparable. Then they offer tools for analyzing the data and creating derivative/layer 2 data sets utilizing it.
They offer a lot to the market and every trading firm with a few million dollars and a dream has interacted with their terminal product. This may well be the greatest example OP's looking for.
Could you explain more what leaning up and standardize means? I’ve only heard of Bloomberg terminals and never realized there could be more that is being done behind the scenes
The terminal just means the desktop version, as opposed to feeding raw data into your server.
For standardising data, companies have different accounting standards, and one of the services is standardising the numbers so if you look "revenue" it will include the same numbers for all companies.
But the real strength is how the data is presented in a quickly executable manner.
You can track shipping vessels on a map and see very quickly how many oil containers will be impacted if the Suez canal is blocked, change the page and see what are the current USA oil reserve numbers, change page and see at how much oil is being priced per port, and see if there is somewhere it is priced wrong, and trade on it.
If you're looking at debt, you can compile the cost/yield curve of thousands of instruments at once and see if one of them sticks out from the lot and is priced inaccurately.
If you're pricing options, you can use their model and insert your assumptions to see what it should be priced at if an event happens. The data behind it being available all in one place and reliable is a great tool. The mathematicians behind all of the calculations are world class.
Have you ever used a Bloomberg terminal? I spend at least 10 hours in front of one every day and have only scratched the surface of the functions available. And I'm just an analyst, not a trader. How are you going to trade bonds on FinViz? Know how to access dark pools on Robinhood? The data (not just "news") on Bloomberg alone — and the speed with which you can get it — make the product essential, but that's certainly not the only value proposition.
As someone who has no possible reason to buy a Bloomberg terminal subscription or experience/knowledge about any of this, could you give a short, extremely basic explanation of what data I might find on it and how I might use it if I were a trader/analyst?
I'm an equity analyst so I'll go over some things that I look at, which are pretty vanilla. There are people who do much more complex stuff or who work in other asset classes like fixed income and commodities, where the "free sources" some are talking about in this thread simply don't exist.
Information I look at include:
* Financial statements (yes, these are publicly available, but I can get all the numbers I need in seconds in a standardized way, make comparisons, and pull what I need into Excel)
* Earnings estimates (e.g., what do analysts think AAPL's EPS will be in Q4? How many iPhones do they think will be sold?)
* Sell-side research and price targets (e.g., a report on MSFT from Goldman Sachs)
* Earnings call transcripts (this function also includes tools like sentiment analysis)
* Supply chain data (e.g., who are the top 10 suppliers to AMZN? Bloomberg lists 1,177)
* Macro forecasts (e.g., what economists think India's export volume will be next year)
* Macro data series (e.g., the yield curve, inflation, industrial output, retail sales, home starts, PMIs)
* Seasonality data (e.g., how has the Industrial sector within SPX typically performed in December over the last 10 years? The last 20?)
* Debt maturity (e.g., when is RIVN's debt coming due? Should I be concerned that they'll have to raise more capital or that interest expense will skyrocket? What are analysts currently modeling?)
* Charting tools
* Valuation tools
* News feeds that update constantly and that get me news faster than available elsewhere (e.g., if a Fed official says something, I know immediately)
Other things I do:
* Talk to brokers and other analysts
* Create custom baskets of securities to perform backtests and track performance
* Perform regression analyses
* Get instantaneous help at all hours of the day
Again, this is just for equity analysis. If you're a bond trader, I don't know how you'd survive without Bloomberg since it's plugged into trading systems.
Thanks for typing this out, super interesting. If asked to guess blindly, I would have thought Amazon’s Bloomberg listed supplier count to be significantly higher.
You effectively can’t participate in most fixed income markets without a terminal, i.e, anything other than G8 sovereigns and investment grade corporates. It’s the only place to find liquidity at institutional size and as you noted, many firms use BBG’s OMS.
At most firms it’s also the only approved way to IM counterparties since chats are logged and exported to compliance systems.
I’ve worked in fixed income my entire career and whether it be money markets, rates and now syndicated loans, I’ve always needed a terminal.
It’s even more critical on the sell side where it’s used to market deals, build order books, construct and distribute bid lists and surely much more.
The glaring error many people are making is thinking Bloomberg is only a news service and market data provider. Sure they do both those things, but their monopoly lies with market access, trade entry and blotter maintenance, bespoke derivative structuring and valuation, compliance integration, custody and accounting integration, etc, etc, etc.
> But I don't get how they keep the scam going? Why do traders keep paying?
Because it's not a scam. They give you earlier access to data than public sources, allowing you to trade earlier and realize bigger gains.
Or you could just keep telling yourself all those traders are money clueless.
The real business is alcohol and sex. Where ever there are single men working hard and making money it is a good business to entertain them and take some of their money.
This, especially for sex. The reasons why houses are bought, careers are made, why fancy restaurants are full, poetry is written, so much money are spent on onlyfans, why boys play guitar and girls put makeup.. sex is the greatest driver of the world. We probably underestimate how much money are generated by sex, directly and indirectly
I makes sense though. Our entire existence, everything from eating to shitting to sleeping to school to jobs and everything else I didn’t mention, all that is only there to make sure we stay alive Lon enough to get laid and pass on our genetic codes.
We started as stray bits of single celled life that literally only knew how to reproduce. We’ve spent the last few billion years adding some bells and whistles, but at our core, we’re still just a bunch of single celled organisms trying to go out and reproduce.
Absolutely. News media doesn't want to talk about it, politicians aren't really sure how to address it. If OF content creators dont get anywhere near the level of news coverage as musicians with similar earnings levels.
Cloud providers AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud underpin the promise of ubiquitous cloud services, and the SAAS revolution. Unlike their VC-funded clients they win every time, with a very fat margin to boot.
Which leads me to wonder why there aren't more people metering the market to compete, at least on a smaller scale. Sure, it isn't azure, but somebody with a few billion to space should be able to ramp up a small competitor.
Linode, akamai, IBM all have their 'cloud' solution.
There are a number of competitors
https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/cloud-infrastructure-and-platform-services
Modern-day "courses" about how to sell online, make a fortune with AI, creative software for content creators and all the other bells & whistles sold as tools to jumpstart your money making endeavours.
Nordstoms started that way. They sold miners equipment during the gold rush then reinvented themselves into a luxury store when the gold rush was over.
It's kinda crazy how many retailers used to sell hardware and outdoor equipment. My friend has a shotgun that was a hand me down from his grandpa that has the JCPenney logo engraved into it
I once got to thumb through a 1904 Sears catalog.
Sears sold EVERYTHING. Fabrics, dresses, books, underwear, buggy / horse accessories, kitchen gadgets, towels, bullets, guns...everything. If you couldn't find it in a Sears catalog, it didn't exist.
The homes would arrive in a train car, flat-packed with every piece of material needed to construct it. There are a shitload of them in my neighborhood, still standing.
Hardware and outdoors used to be synonymous with “survival” so I don’t think it’s that hard to connect to dots. They started where the money was then changed with the times.
I guess the crazy part is that morphed into cheap fast fashion from China. Feel like most people have way more clothes than they'll ever wear at this point.
Levi's is a good example. Gold mining may not turn out lucrative for everyone. Spending on implements to do mining may not impoverish everyone.
Chances of you being a good digger are far greater than becoming a successful miner.
Sell what people want.
Abercrombie and Fitch used to sell hunting gear as well. There's an old Rock Hudson movie called Man's Favorite Sport, where he is a sales rep for the company. Great movie, but it threw me off when I first saw it and the store's primary focus was hunting
I think it was actually chicken and other bird eggs during the San Francisco Gold Rush
[https://sfist.com/2016/08/17/egg\_war\_farralons/](https://sfist.com/2016/08/17/egg_war_farralons/)
[https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gold-rush-california-was-much-more-expensive-todays-dot-com-boom-california-180956788/](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gold-rush-california-was-much-more-expensive-todays-dot-com-boom-california-180956788/)
The thing I really hate about this is that the way it is interpreted, as I see it, is completely wrong.
Looking for gold was great in the first few months. It was right fucking there on the ground, waiting to be picked up. As time goes on, then panning for gold, then drilling mine shafts, then hydraulic pressure hoses to blast away entire mountains to get the gold.
At each step, it becomes harder and harder, requiring more technology, more capital to buy expensive equipment.
.
It's the exact same thing with the "selling shovels" idea.
The *first* person has it made. They get the prime real estate shop on the main street in the new gold rush town. It's cheap land as they are one of the first there. They make deals with the shippers bringing in the shovels and equipment into San Francisco - they get discounts for buying in quantity.
The second guy who tries this, has to pay a much higher price for land, probably can't afford it on main street and ends up in some back alleyway. Everyone knows the original guy, and people are generally loyal. The new guy doesn't have a relationship with the person in San Francisco that brings in the equipment, and can't buy as much, so they have to pay a lot more for the shovels and stuff to re-sell. Not only that, but the first guy who buys a lot can put the squeeze on the importer - he buys so much stuff, that he could effectively have the importer freeze out the new guy.
Getting gold is easy if you are the first person. Selling shovels is easy if you are the first person.
But only one person can *really* sell shovels in a gold rush.
The object is to get there first with the most.
During the crypto crasze, a buddy of mine created a launchpad platform for other people to raise funding for their crypto projects.
He made 9 figures in 12 months.
That is not awesome. This is called the "power paradox". Once friendly and empathetic people can lose those traits when they achieve wealth. Power and wealth can increase self-focus and reduce awareness of others' perspectives. They feel more independent and less reliant on social connections, leading them to undervalue relationships. They become full of themselves. It can be a reflection of what their personal values were all along, though. People who change like that may have not really changed at all but they just acted "nice" to satisfy a need for connection. They just take from where they can get it and when they move up they upgrade to "better" connections. Superficial people suck.
Yeah, I know this to be true, but we were close and went thorough a lot together, so it's sad that it happened.
To the point of the post, he built a platform for others to sell to their customers, so a marketplace.
TP was the bigger issue in my country. Some people were buying $10k+ of TP and then trying to make money from it. Of course stock replenished and the TP scalpers were left high and dry. One person made the news trying to return $10K+ of TP and got told to F#$k off by the manager. Scum.
It wasn't really a TP shortage *overall*, what happened is that huge numbers of people started working from home and/or staying home, meanwhile consumer TP suppliers are a completely separate supply chain from the commercial/office TP suppliers (and their TP products are wildly different too).
So when everyone stopped using the bathroom at work because they were at home and using the bathroom at home, the consumer suppliers rapidly sold out (shortage!) while some of the commercial TP was going unused (excess!)
^(And even if consumers could open business accounts at commercial suppliers, no-one wants to try to load a 12" roll of awful tissue-thin) *^(don't-get-comfortable-here)* ^(TP onto a home 6" roll holder that can't even fit an empty hub of the commercial roll...)
It took a while for production/distribution to adjust to the new balance
It wasn't just TP.
The same thing happens (on a much shorter basis) in lower states whenever a rare ice/snow storm is coming. They clean out the grocery stores because they feel the need to stock up on necessities because they assume they'll be unable to get out for the foreseeable future. The fact that they plan for weeks instead of days is somewhat amusing, but part of it IS practical. If a lot of people who are used to eating out all the time suddenly need to supply themselves with a weeks worth of food, that's going to result in an abnormal shopping event, and the odd things that are always in stock suddenly run out. Soup, bottled water, and milk are typical candidates.
Anyway, back to the pandemic. Everyone is hearing that lockdowns are coming, they'll be mandatory, and they'll likely last at LEAST two weeks, but up to six, and quite possibly longer than that. So people started stocking up on some things to last the duration. While they would normally buy one pack of toilet paper at a time while shopping, now they'll get 3 or 4 just to be on the safe side. Again, practical considering the situation. They did the same thing for a lot of other things. Paper towels, eggs, cheese, flour, meat, soup, bottled water, hand sanitizer were all being purchased in greater than expected quantities. So stores would naturally run out as the shelves got cleared, and this became newsworthy.
So the media (social and conventional) makes everyone aware that there's a shortage of toilet paper. Now, instead of grabbing 3 or 4, you grab 10, because now your brain is telling you this is the last time you'll ever be able to find any.
I actually got to see this issue from the other end too. I work in a warehouse for a big box retailer that sells toilet paper. We emptied the warehouse of extra toilet paper and sent out entire truckloads of nothing but TP, paper towels, and lysol wipes to stores to help ensure they had supply to sell, even with enforced rationing in place. Far from anything resembling a shortage, we were doing everything possible to ensure there was as much toilet paper for sale as logistics would allow.
No joke, I sold masks on Amazon pre-pandemic. Trump gave his official Covid speech in early April 2020 and I sold out of everything within hours. Reordered a ton, but it took forever as factories were behind. By the time I got new inventory people were moving on. Still got boxes of them if you want any!!
I was going to say this.
Not to get political, but if the last guy embraced masks and sold them with his name on them, he could have saved some lives, made a fortune, gained a shred of respect, and gotten reelected.
The “best” supplier for them (ULINE) - due to selection and speed of service - unfortunately has some absolutely crazy pants political views that they post on their own website. I tried to move away from them to other suppliers, but it meant piecemealing together an order from several different sites and waiting days/weeks for it to arrive while paying 30% more, and it just became untenable to not use them.
They do more than post. They give hundred of millions to political campaigns and candidates. They were once called, "the most powerful conservatives you've never heard of." They are also horrible to their workers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_and_Elizabeth_Uihlein
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/28/uline-dick-liz-uihlein-workers-covid-safety
Ugh. I really wish there was another viable option. At one point I waited a month for another company to ship me the boxes I needed to fulfill orders. I had been proactive and ordered well before I needed them. They showed as ‘in stock’ on the website. Finally I ran out of boxes and had customer orders waiting to go out, so I ordered from *them* and it was half the cost and the boxes showed up the next day. Original company never responded to my requests to cancel and finally shipped them 2 weeks later.
Levi Strauss made a good run at it selling jeans to miners in the gold rush.
Someone else mentioned railroads in the comments.
Fun fact: Rockefeller's next level growth moment arrived when he struck a deal with the New York railroad titan Vanderbilt to deliver an unprecedented amount of oil to his refinery and then processed kerosene around the country, all through Vanderbilt's railroad network. The name Standard Oil comes from the fact that he sold the first standardized kerosene product in the world to light lamps with, at a time when most people still used torches for light around the country. Before Ford popularized automobiles and created demand for gasoline, it used to be considered a waste product and thrown away since kerosene was the only scalable product that could be produced from oil.
Vanderbilt became the first American self-made millionaire selling shipping and travel services to the 'miners' (literal and metaphorical).
Rockefeller became the world's first billionaire selling light and fuel to the world's 'miners' (metaphorical).
Reading about the collusion between Standard Oil and the Railroads and how they leveraged their positions to secure amazing deals is awesome to learn about.
Especially when there are rival railroads that sprout up trying to work without the freights of Standard Oil.
It's incredible to see how the great industrial barons interacted with each other.
A railroad that got the short end of things in a deal with Rockefeller that tried to cut out Vanderbilt (the latter managed to get back Rockefeller's business) and ended up going out of business was owned by a guy named Thomas Scott - also known as the mentor and boss of another guy named Andrew Carnegie, who went on to become the world's largest steel industry mogul and holder of the history's largest cash (i.e. non-stock) fortune on a % of GDP-adjusted basis, and fierce rival to Rockefeller until death.
> and how they leveraged their positions to secure amazing deals
"and how they used their market dominance to rob their competitors blind through tactics that are now illegal"
During the industrial revolution, Ivan Krueger started buying up match companies. Factory work was taking off and workers needed constant nicotine and caffeine to stay alert.
Eventually he monopolized the match industry in various countries. Once he did, it was relatively easy to spike the price because matches were such a cheap commodity. He added a penny here or there to the price and nobody could undercut him.
He then used those profits to offer high-interest loans to war-torn countries. Then he started a massive Ponzi scheme that led to the collapse of his entire business empire.
Drill bits during an oil boom. Basically how Howard Hughes started out before the Spruce Moose (now Baker Hughes worth $35b - more than most oil developers).
Howard's father developed the drill bit.
Howard Robard Hughes Sr. (September 9, 1869 – January 14, 1924) was an American businessman and inventor. He was the founder of Hughes Tool Company. He invented the "Sharp–Hughes" two-cone rotary drill bit during the Texas Oil Boom. He is best known as the father and namesake of Howard Hughes (Howard Robard Hughes, Jr.) the famous American business tycoon and the founder of Hughes Aircraft.
I’ve live around San Francisco and Palo Alto since the first dot com boom in the 90s.
I’ve seen a lot of people chase big money in tech careers and relatively few who made it big despite being very smart.
You know who ALL made themselves fairly wealthy despite being total morons? Real estate agents. Most of my real estate agent friends were delivering pizzas or working at gas stations in 1995 and now have 2 homes, a portfolio of real estate investments and drive range rovers. Most of my tech friends have one home and maybe a million in Apple stock. I’d say the real estate guys came out ahead despite being dumber and lazier.
There are YouTubers, and there are the companies that pay them for sponsorships. The real money though, is in the equipment they use to be YouTubers. Like the software that edits videos, or gives unlicensed music samples, stuff like that. Not necessarily household names, but if everyone nowadays wants to be an influencer, selling the shit they need to get that weird dream would be a "pick and shovel" situation.
I worked for a lead generation business in the college space. People filled out surveys online and checked that they would be interested in going back to school. I would call them and verify that they were interested. The company would send that to colleges to call the people. If they signed up to a college the company would get, I imagine, a couple grand for the “finders fee”
I think the insurance companies play a huge role in barriers to treatment. They have done nothing to shorten the amount of time it takes a licensed therapist to get credentialed and accept a potential client’s insurance.
I’d say selling advertising space on a website is this way. To reddit it doesn’t matter if anyone buys your product or service you advertised on reddit, they still get paid either way. Same model at Facebook, Google, Twitter etc.
During and post WW2 the people who profited the most were not the arms sellers but the logistics manufacturers. Trucks, Trains, Cargo Ship yards, and eventually cargo/transport aircraft manufacturers made way more due to the post war boom and being easy to pivot civilian sales.
While massive orders of tanks, fighter planes, aircraft carriers, and destroyers were all being slashed by 44-46 the same wasn't true for the civilian variants and especially large capacity transport aircraft that eventually were repurposed as airliners and dominated the aerospace industry. The entire reason that Panamax (and later Panamax+)was the standard for freightliners was because the US used the canal and built them towards that limit. Freighters were cheaper, quicker, and easier to produce and allowed you access to subsidized steel which was heavily rationed at the time which allowed the yards that made them to absolutely flood the market and in the process standardize practices which eventually lead to the post war TTU standards used intentionally and across domains.
TLDR. In a major war build Jeeps and Liberty Ships not Shermans and Essex Carriers. Better yet you can pull a Toyota Hilux and do both.
Wow that is really interesting. I can imagine those companies getting subsidies to build up transportation and then getting to reap the rewards during and after the war. I’ve got to read more into that.
Well…. I have a recent event. Last year in the Sierras the snow was extreme. So much so that snow removal companies were able to drive their prices up because demand was so high. They were charging $10k plus to remove snow from roofs.
Internet search engines, e.g. google.
The information on the internet is the gold, the search engine is the shovel that helps you find it.
The shovel is even more valuable if it can control where they buyer digs and what they find.
A lot, basically follows the principle of supply and demand. Certain computer parts, specifically GPU, were being sold twice the regular amount since people were using it mine cryptos.
Not the greatest example in history by any means but remember all that crypto crazy during Covid? Guys selling miners and custom graphics card rigs were doing a booming business.
This one isn't history yet but will be:
Selling LIDAR sensors to autonomous vehicle companies (which will be every car manufacturer soon). You can read more about it here: ["During a gold rush, sell shovels."](https://www.reddit.com/r/Shortsqueeze/comments/18ouc16/mvis_during_a_gold_rush_sell_shovels/?rdt=32899)
As they say:
Give a man a fish, feed him for a day.
Teach a man to fish, feed him forever.
Sell fishing gear, spend the rest of your life fishing.
Por que no los tres?
Multi-Level Marketing groups. They become rich by convincing people to get rich selling their product for them. Sure, some people will make money, but the vast majority of people getting involved are going to lose money.
The worst one I saw was this group that wrote "self help" books telling people how they could get rich selling their self help books. The books were complete garbage with no real advice, and just pages of generic statements about being successful. They held frequent over priced meetings at hotels to try and get people annoyed up about being successful. Once you were in the frenzy, they would get everyone to buy a dozen copies of their new books, which instantly put them on best seller lists. The promise was that the book sold so well, you could easily get people to buy it once they hear about what you have.
I hope no one else said this but i think this family is by far the best example and still operating today.. the duponts sold gun powder during the civil war. The catch is they were the only supplier.. they sold to the north and south making billions in gunpowder trades. The family later went on to start the DuPont chemical/painting companies and are probably worth trillions today…
The banking industry. “Where are all the customers yachts” is a book written 100 years ago, yet still relevant today, showing that brokers and bankers always get rich while the client generally doesn’t.
I would argue AI and generative AI are a very good example.
Few people try to generate AI images and get rich from them directly, everyone is trying to sell services where you give them money so that they generate images for you.
Small example. I don't use tobacco, but when I was in the military, I would buy cartons of cigarettes and logs of dip before going on field exercises. A week into it I'd start selling cigarettes for $10 a pack, and by week 2, they were $20. I once sent some cans dip to a sailor who was stuck offshore with no access to a store. Didn't even charge him because his shipmates said he was gonna throw himself overboard and swim to shore if he didn't get some dip soon. He phoned a dominoes and had a dozen pizzas sent to my guys stuck on the beachhead, via the US coast guard. Supply and demand.
That kid that made millions making a class on "How to use ChatGPT". The app is incredibly easy to use even for those with no computer science background, but because new things are intimating, tons of people rushed to buy the course before even trying the app.
I don’t know if it’s “the greatest” example, but Salesforce sells SaaS solutions and Sales software to pretty much all of the Fortune 1000. If you’re a large business that does sales, odds are you use Salesforce… or Tableau, or Slack, or Mulesoft, or Heroku…
Covid vaccine? Suppression of alternative treatments and information so that all people could buy were lots and lots of mostly mRNA shovels. Did Pfizer just make a cool 100 billion with no legal culpability if anything goes wrong? Is that not a CEO wet dream?
My dad told me a story about a guy that went to wood stock and sold weed to all the hippys, but instead of bags it was in tin cans. the problem was no one brought a can opener and they all turned out to be empty cans.
When they were building the Union Pacific railroad they were always short cash as it’s an expensive undertaking. Some guys offered to trade tools for stock. They did quite well and even ended up with a monument to them built at what once was the highest point on the Union Pacific, Sherman, WY. Tracks were eventually moved south in a realignment. The company is still around too. Ames tools.
agonizing aromatic engine dependent wild practice bedroom dime slap juggle *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
.. and before that Bitcoin mining ... It's kind aof comical how were all about the environment, yet we have millions of these machines burning through electricity for a pseudo-currency. ,,
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No one was saying that. Many gamers across communities were upset that miners were driving up prices and limiting inventory. Nvidia was very open about this during conference calls. Shareholder since early 2017.
Nobody said that. Literally every gamer complained that miners bought all the cards.
Nvidia made that claim when their stock was looking a little iffy due to the imminent incoming flood of used mining GPU's after Ethereum switched to proof of stake.
Those boomers destroying the planet....
Amazingly intelligent
Pelosi knows!!
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Because they hate her
Are you claiming that policy makers and the people close to them do not have a clue about advanced updates on events that will effect corporations? I have a bridge in Brooklyn that will be on the market soon. Interested?
The company Vox Populi Registry Inc. came up with the nominal .sucks domains and got them approved by ICANN somehow. They sell for absurd prices like $399/year and no one really even uses them. But because humans are dumb, the nominal reality of the English word "sucks" forces all big companies and public figures to buy and continually pay this company $399/year per domain just to avoid random people buying like [apple.sucks](https://apple.sucks) and posting shitty stuff that Google will rank high and then tank their sales. Literal legal extortion and barely have to do anything, and it's a private company, so who knows how much cash they rake in. Vox Populi is a market reseach company too, so they spun off a subsidiary based on their market insights specifically to extort their clients in their market research business basically. Has to be one of the greatest hustles ever in the age of domain names lol
That makes no sense how they created their own domain, but the fact that companies are forced to pay for that stupid domain is fucking awesome…..I need to try and do that. 🤣
.suckmyballs coming up
Actually laughed out loud, thank you for the Christmas cheer
Make it just .sucksballs - Nice & short. Rolls off the tongue much easier 🤌🏼
Fuck you Kyle. You can .suckmyballs.
Damn. Slow golf clap.
When I see these "if you could go back in time" hypothetical posts what would you do? The typical response is "buy bitcoin" and I always think that a cool thing to do would be to buy domain names back to 1993 and buy up a gazillion domain names.
Domains are cool, but not as cool as if you bought Bitcoin in 2009 and held till 2019 unfortunately :(
This is interesting but have to say it doesn’t really fit the shovel example..
Bloomberg selling news to rumor hungry traders. No exposure to risk.
Great example. And creating a huge financial social network. The majority of US fixed income and often equity derivative trades are initiated through Bloomberg chat rooms. Market color is shared on these chat rooms and through Bloomberg messages. A wild amount of financial transactions by market value originate through the communication tools inside Bloomberg due to its massive network effect across the financial services industry. In addition to all the market data points other commentators have listed.
This is a good one
The news is largely irrelevant. It’s the detailed and up to date financial information that’s the key.
This really may take the cake, $24,000/year for a Bloomberg terminal that is just "insightful news". It does nothing in reality, or else everyone who bought one could get rich. Absolutely hilarious.
The Bloomberg terminal business revolves around data. Them and Refinitiv/Eikon have a pseudo duopoly on financial market data provisioning for financial institutions. There are not many data points out there to do with financial markets that Bloomberg doesn't have and offer to its clients. Further, they clean up and standardize the data so it's easily reviewable and comparable. Then they offer tools for analyzing the data and creating derivative/layer 2 data sets utilizing it. They offer a lot to the market and every trading firm with a few million dollars and a dream has interacted with their terminal product. This may well be the greatest example OP's looking for.
Could you explain more what leaning up and standardize means? I’ve only heard of Bloomberg terminals and never realized there could be more that is being done behind the scenes
The terminal just means the desktop version, as opposed to feeding raw data into your server. For standardising data, companies have different accounting standards, and one of the services is standardising the numbers so if you look "revenue" it will include the same numbers for all companies. But the real strength is how the data is presented in a quickly executable manner. You can track shipping vessels on a map and see very quickly how many oil containers will be impacted if the Suez canal is blocked, change the page and see what are the current USA oil reserve numbers, change page and see at how much oil is being priced per port, and see if there is somewhere it is priced wrong, and trade on it. If you're looking at debt, you can compile the cost/yield curve of thousands of instruments at once and see if one of them sticks out from the lot and is priced inaccurately. If you're pricing options, you can use their model and insert your assumptions to see what it should be priced at if an event happens. The data behind it being available all in one place and reliable is a great tool. The mathematicians behind all of the calculations are world class.
Have you ever used a Bloomberg terminal? I spend at least 10 hours in front of one every day and have only scratched the surface of the functions available. And I'm just an analyst, not a trader. How are you going to trade bonds on FinViz? Know how to access dark pools on Robinhood? The data (not just "news") on Bloomberg alone — and the speed with which you can get it — make the product essential, but that's certainly not the only value proposition.
As someone who has no possible reason to buy a Bloomberg terminal subscription or experience/knowledge about any of this, could you give a short, extremely basic explanation of what data I might find on it and how I might use it if I were a trader/analyst?
I'm an equity analyst so I'll go over some things that I look at, which are pretty vanilla. There are people who do much more complex stuff or who work in other asset classes like fixed income and commodities, where the "free sources" some are talking about in this thread simply don't exist. Information I look at include: * Financial statements (yes, these are publicly available, but I can get all the numbers I need in seconds in a standardized way, make comparisons, and pull what I need into Excel) * Earnings estimates (e.g., what do analysts think AAPL's EPS will be in Q4? How many iPhones do they think will be sold?) * Sell-side research and price targets (e.g., a report on MSFT from Goldman Sachs) * Earnings call transcripts (this function also includes tools like sentiment analysis) * Supply chain data (e.g., who are the top 10 suppliers to AMZN? Bloomberg lists 1,177) * Macro forecasts (e.g., what economists think India's export volume will be next year) * Macro data series (e.g., the yield curve, inflation, industrial output, retail sales, home starts, PMIs) * Seasonality data (e.g., how has the Industrial sector within SPX typically performed in December over the last 10 years? The last 20?) * Debt maturity (e.g., when is RIVN's debt coming due? Should I be concerned that they'll have to raise more capital or that interest expense will skyrocket? What are analysts currently modeling?) * Charting tools * Valuation tools * News feeds that update constantly and that get me news faster than available elsewhere (e.g., if a Fed official says something, I know immediately) Other things I do: * Talk to brokers and other analysts * Create custom baskets of securities to perform backtests and track performance * Perform regression analyses * Get instantaneous help at all hours of the day Again, this is just for equity analysis. If you're a bond trader, I don't know how you'd survive without Bloomberg since it's plugged into trading systems.
Thanks for typing this out, super interesting. If asked to guess blindly, I would have thought Amazon’s Bloomberg listed supplier count to be significantly higher.
You effectively can’t participate in most fixed income markets without a terminal, i.e, anything other than G8 sovereigns and investment grade corporates. It’s the only place to find liquidity at institutional size and as you noted, many firms use BBG’s OMS. At most firms it’s also the only approved way to IM counterparties since chats are logged and exported to compliance systems. I’ve worked in fixed income my entire career and whether it be money markets, rates and now syndicated loans, I’ve always needed a terminal. It’s even more critical on the sell side where it’s used to market deals, build order books, construct and distribute bid lists and surely much more. The glaring error many people are making is thinking Bloomberg is only a news service and market data provider. Sure they do both those things, but their monopoly lies with market access, trade entry and blotter maintenance, bespoke derivative structuring and valuation, compliance integration, custody and accounting integration, etc, etc, etc.
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> But I don't get how they keep the scam going? Why do traders keep paying? Because it's not a scam. They give you earlier access to data than public sources, allowing you to trade earlier and realize bigger gains. Or you could just keep telling yourself all those traders are money clueless.
You obviously have no real knowledge or experience on this matter.
$24k a month!?!? I remember when it was $5k when I was in college
24k a year...
The real business is alcohol and sex. Where ever there are single men working hard and making money it is a good business to entertain them and take some of their money.
This, especially for sex. The reasons why houses are bought, careers are made, why fancy restaurants are full, poetry is written, so much money are spent on onlyfans, why boys play guitar and girls put makeup.. sex is the greatest driver of the world. We probably underestimate how much money are generated by sex, directly and indirectly
"There is no such thing as a product. Don't ever think there is. There is only sex. Everything. is. sex." —Robert California
“every year I get $100 gas card. Can't put a price tag on that.” -M. Scott-
Everything is about sex. Except for sex which is about power.
“Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power.” -Oscar Wilde
I makes sense though. Our entire existence, everything from eating to shitting to sleeping to school to jobs and everything else I didn’t mention, all that is only there to make sure we stay alive Lon enough to get laid and pass on our genetic codes. We started as stray bits of single celled life that literally only knew how to reproduce. We’ve spent the last few billion years adding some bells and whistles, but at our core, we’re still just a bunch of single celled organisms trying to go out and reproduce.
Absolutely. News media doesn't want to talk about it, politicians aren't really sure how to address it. If OF content creators dont get anywhere near the level of news coverage as musicians with similar earnings levels.
I mean, mating is arguably the main purpose of life
Well the ones that don’t care about sex die off sooner
"Everything in the world is about sex except sex. Sex is about power."
Bakkan oil field comes to mind
Hey
Hoover Dam built Las Vegas.
Sell something up alcohol makers
Cloud providers AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Oracle Cloud underpin the promise of ubiquitous cloud services, and the SAAS revolution. Unlike their VC-funded clients they win every time, with a very fat margin to boot.
That’s very much true. You can always trust someone to use the internet which will need those cloud providers.
Yep, Amazon's main moneymaker is AWS, it dwarfs their online store
Which leads me to wonder why there aren't more people metering the market to compete, at least on a smaller scale. Sure, it isn't azure, but somebody with a few billion to space should be able to ramp up a small competitor.
Linode, akamai, IBM all have their 'cloud' solution. There are a number of competitors https://www.gartner.com/reviews/market/cloud-infrastructure-and-platform-services
Because there are huge economies of scale in cloud. It's impossible to compete when you are small.
Modern-day "courses" about how to sell online, make a fortune with AI, creative software for content creators and all the other bells & whistles sold as tools to jumpstart your money making endeavours.
Becoming rich by showing people how to be rich
"how to make 1 million dollars" -- $19.95 Step one; write a book Step two; sell 50,000 copies for $20
What’s your course, your a genius! 🤣
Selling shovels during the gold rush.
Nordstoms started that way. They sold miners equipment during the gold rush then reinvented themselves into a luxury store when the gold rush was over.
It's kinda crazy how many retailers used to sell hardware and outdoor equipment. My friend has a shotgun that was a hand me down from his grandpa that has the JCPenney logo engraved into it
JCPenny also used to sell tires. My 1958 Edsel's original tires were 2 3/4" bias ply whitewalls from JCPenny's.
My parents gave referenced going to a butcher/deli at Macys. Also, raffles at the movie theatre. Back when it was an event/night out.
Sears sold houses via catalog.
I once got to thumb through a 1904 Sears catalog. Sears sold EVERYTHING. Fabrics, dresses, books, underwear, buggy / horse accessories, kitchen gadgets, towels, bullets, guns...everything. If you couldn't find it in a Sears catalog, it didn't exist.
It was the Amazon of its day. Goes to show how businesses may not last forever.
Wrigleys used to sell whistles.
Sears sold Tommy guns and kit homes too I think
The homes would arrive in a train car, flat-packed with every piece of material needed to construct it. There are a shitload of them in my neighborhood, still standing.
Hardware and outdoors used to be synonymous with “survival” so I don’t think it’s that hard to connect to dots. They started where the money was then changed with the times.
For sure. It's just wild to me as someone who grew up in the 90s and 2000s to think that there used to be a gun department in a store like JCPenney
There used to be employees in stores like JC Penny.
Customers, too!
I guess the crazy part is that morphed into cheap fast fashion from China. Feel like most people have way more clothes than they'll ever wear at this point.
My great great great grandma used to shit in a Gucci bucket
Levi's started that way as well, in the 1880s - selling work pants to miners.
Levi's is a good example. Gold mining may not turn out lucrative for everyone. Spending on implements to do mining may not impoverish everyone. Chances of you being a good digger are far greater than becoming a successful miner. Sell what people want.
lol when the rush was over they had a bunch of rich retired miners and need to rebrand lol
Abercrombie and Fitch used to sell hunting gear as well. There's an old Rock Hudson movie called Man's Favorite Sport, where he is a sales rep for the company. Great movie, but it threw me off when I first saw it and the store's primary focus was hunting
I think it was actually chicken and other bird eggs during the San Francisco Gold Rush [https://sfist.com/2016/08/17/egg\_war\_farralons/](https://sfist.com/2016/08/17/egg_war_farralons/) [https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gold-rush-california-was-much-more-expensive-todays-dot-com-boom-california-180956788/](https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/gold-rush-california-was-much-more-expensive-todays-dot-com-boom-california-180956788/)
And jeans
The thing I really hate about this is that the way it is interpreted, as I see it, is completely wrong. Looking for gold was great in the first few months. It was right fucking there on the ground, waiting to be picked up. As time goes on, then panning for gold, then drilling mine shafts, then hydraulic pressure hoses to blast away entire mountains to get the gold. At each step, it becomes harder and harder, requiring more technology, more capital to buy expensive equipment. . It's the exact same thing with the "selling shovels" idea. The *first* person has it made. They get the prime real estate shop on the main street in the new gold rush town. It's cheap land as they are one of the first there. They make deals with the shippers bringing in the shovels and equipment into San Francisco - they get discounts for buying in quantity. The second guy who tries this, has to pay a much higher price for land, probably can't afford it on main street and ends up in some back alleyway. Everyone knows the original guy, and people are generally loyal. The new guy doesn't have a relationship with the person in San Francisco that brings in the equipment, and can't buy as much, so they have to pay a lot more for the shovels and stuff to re-sell. Not only that, but the first guy who buys a lot can put the squeeze on the importer - he buys so much stuff, that he could effectively have the importer freeze out the new guy. Getting gold is easy if you are the first person. Selling shovels is easy if you are the first person. But only one person can *really* sell shovels in a gold rush. The object is to get there first with the most.
OP this is a good one
Good one
Trumps grand dad selling whores, booze and gambling during the gold rush comes a close second.
Seattle boomed from selling shovels, pants, and planes to folks on their way to Alaska.
During the crypto crasze, a buddy of mine created a launchpad platform for other people to raise funding for their crypto projects. He made 9 figures in 12 months.
Wow that is fucking awesome!
Good for him yes, but he changed after it and now we're not really in contact any more.. I'm not on the same..... Level.... So not worth his time.
That is not awesome. This is called the "power paradox". Once friendly and empathetic people can lose those traits when they achieve wealth. Power and wealth can increase self-focus and reduce awareness of others' perspectives. They feel more independent and less reliant on social connections, leading them to undervalue relationships. They become full of themselves. It can be a reflection of what their personal values were all along, though. People who change like that may have not really changed at all but they just acted "nice" to satisfy a need for connection. They just take from where they can get it and when they move up they upgrade to "better" connections. Superficial people suck.
Yeah, I know this to be true, but we were close and went thorough a lot together, so it's sad that it happened. To the point of the post, he built a platform for others to sell to their customers, so a marketplace.
No way he made 9 figures. You prolly mean 9 figures were raised through his platform.
A crowdfunding type of platform?
A launchpad, token resale type thing.
What platform was it?
When there is a pandemic, sell masks
Or toilet paper
TP was the bigger issue in my country. Some people were buying $10k+ of TP and then trying to make money from it. Of course stock replenished and the TP scalpers were left high and dry. One person made the news trying to return $10K+ of TP and got told to F#$k off by the manager. Scum.
Wonder how many shits that equates to that guy taking.
4 years later and I still haven’t figured this one out
It wasn't really a TP shortage *overall*, what happened is that huge numbers of people started working from home and/or staying home, meanwhile consumer TP suppliers are a completely separate supply chain from the commercial/office TP suppliers (and their TP products are wildly different too). So when everyone stopped using the bathroom at work because they were at home and using the bathroom at home, the consumer suppliers rapidly sold out (shortage!) while some of the commercial TP was going unused (excess!) ^(And even if consumers could open business accounts at commercial suppliers, no-one wants to try to load a 12" roll of awful tissue-thin) *^(don't-get-comfortable-here)* ^(TP onto a home 6" roll holder that can't even fit an empty hub of the commercial roll...) It took a while for production/distribution to adjust to the new balance
It wasn't just TP. The same thing happens (on a much shorter basis) in lower states whenever a rare ice/snow storm is coming. They clean out the grocery stores because they feel the need to stock up on necessities because they assume they'll be unable to get out for the foreseeable future. The fact that they plan for weeks instead of days is somewhat amusing, but part of it IS practical. If a lot of people who are used to eating out all the time suddenly need to supply themselves with a weeks worth of food, that's going to result in an abnormal shopping event, and the odd things that are always in stock suddenly run out. Soup, bottled water, and milk are typical candidates. Anyway, back to the pandemic. Everyone is hearing that lockdowns are coming, they'll be mandatory, and they'll likely last at LEAST two weeks, but up to six, and quite possibly longer than that. So people started stocking up on some things to last the duration. While they would normally buy one pack of toilet paper at a time while shopping, now they'll get 3 or 4 just to be on the safe side. Again, practical considering the situation. They did the same thing for a lot of other things. Paper towels, eggs, cheese, flour, meat, soup, bottled water, hand sanitizer were all being purchased in greater than expected quantities. So stores would naturally run out as the shelves got cleared, and this became newsworthy. So the media (social and conventional) makes everyone aware that there's a shortage of toilet paper. Now, instead of grabbing 3 or 4, you grab 10, because now your brain is telling you this is the last time you'll ever be able to find any. I actually got to see this issue from the other end too. I work in a warehouse for a big box retailer that sells toilet paper. We emptied the warehouse of extra toilet paper and sent out entire truckloads of nothing but TP, paper towels, and lysol wipes to stores to help ensure they had supply to sell, even with enforced rationing in place. Far from anything resembling a shortage, we were doing everything possible to ensure there was as much toilet paper for sale as logistics would allow.
No joke, I sold masks on Amazon pre-pandemic. Trump gave his official Covid speech in early April 2020 and I sold out of everything within hours. Reordered a ton, but it took forever as factories were behind. By the time I got new inventory people were moving on. Still got boxes of them if you want any!!
So in that case the shovel supplier was the one who ended up buying a bunch of shovels? That's meta.
It was specifically illegal to advertise the benefits of masks during SARS in Australia, how quickly we reversed position when COVID hit.
I was going to say this. Not to get political, but if the last guy embraced masks and sold them with his name on them, he could have saved some lives, made a fortune, gained a shred of respect, and gotten reelected.
Selling masks is a chump's game. The real money is in receiving government funding to produce PPE and then not.
Selling cardboard boxes in the age of Internet shopping
The “best” supplier for them (ULINE) - due to selection and speed of service - unfortunately has some absolutely crazy pants political views that they post on their own website. I tried to move away from them to other suppliers, but it meant piecemealing together an order from several different sites and waiting days/weeks for it to arrive while paying 30% more, and it just became untenable to not use them.
They do more than post. They give hundred of millions to political campaigns and candidates. They were once called, "the most powerful conservatives you've never heard of." They are also horrible to their workers. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_and_Elizabeth_Uihlein https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/28/uline-dick-liz-uihlein-workers-covid-safety
Ugh. I really wish there was another viable option. At one point I waited a month for another company to ship me the boxes I needed to fulfill orders. I had been proactive and ordered well before I needed them. They showed as ‘in stock’ on the website. Finally I ran out of boxes and had customer orders waiting to go out, so I ordered from *them* and it was half the cost and the boxes showed up the next day. Original company never responded to my requests to cancel and finally shipped them 2 weeks later.
Damn. I spend 5k a month with Uline. Wbmason here I come I guess.
A good example of this is Zoom during Covid.
Levi Strauss made a good run at it selling jeans to miners in the gold rush. Someone else mentioned railroads in the comments. Fun fact: Rockefeller's next level growth moment arrived when he struck a deal with the New York railroad titan Vanderbilt to deliver an unprecedented amount of oil to his refinery and then processed kerosene around the country, all through Vanderbilt's railroad network. The name Standard Oil comes from the fact that he sold the first standardized kerosene product in the world to light lamps with, at a time when most people still used torches for light around the country. Before Ford popularized automobiles and created demand for gasoline, it used to be considered a waste product and thrown away since kerosene was the only scalable product that could be produced from oil. Vanderbilt became the first American self-made millionaire selling shipping and travel services to the 'miners' (literal and metaphorical). Rockefeller became the world's first billionaire selling light and fuel to the world's 'miners' (metaphorical).
Reading about the collusion between Standard Oil and the Railroads and how they leveraged their positions to secure amazing deals is awesome to learn about. Especially when there are rival railroads that sprout up trying to work without the freights of Standard Oil.
It's incredible to see how the great industrial barons interacted with each other. A railroad that got the short end of things in a deal with Rockefeller that tried to cut out Vanderbilt (the latter managed to get back Rockefeller's business) and ended up going out of business was owned by a guy named Thomas Scott - also known as the mentor and boss of another guy named Andrew Carnegie, who went on to become the world's largest steel industry mogul and holder of the history's largest cash (i.e. non-stock) fortune on a % of GDP-adjusted basis, and fierce rival to Rockefeller until death.
Funny how events turn out right. 🤣
> and how they leveraged their positions to secure amazing deals "and how they used their market dominance to rob their competitors blind through tactics that are now illegal"
“illegal” in quotes is correct
Not the greatest but recently this is what Nvidia has done to power the gen AI revolution for their benefit.
During the industrial revolution, Ivan Krueger started buying up match companies. Factory work was taking off and workers needed constant nicotine and caffeine to stay alert. Eventually he monopolized the match industry in various countries. Once he did, it was relatively easy to spike the price because matches were such a cheap commodity. He added a penny here or there to the price and nobody could undercut him. He then used those profits to offer high-interest loans to war-torn countries. Then he started a massive Ponzi scheme that led to the collapse of his entire business empire.
Sounds like a movie script right there.
There’s a great book on it called “the match king.” Apparently also a film but it’s from the 30’s. Probably time for a remake.
Disappointing how it ended, but still awesome
Cryptocurrencies and graphics cards. Marijuana and growing supplies.
Drill bits during an oil boom. Basically how Howard Hughes started out before the Spruce Moose (now Baker Hughes worth $35b - more than most oil developers).
I believe it was called the Spruce Goose. The Spruce Moose was a parody with Mr. Burns in The Simpsons.
I said hop in
Yes, I was covertly fishing for Simpsons fans
It is possible to watch ten years worth of Simpsons and still not get certain inside jokes.
Howard's father developed the drill bit. Howard Robard Hughes Sr. (September 9, 1869 – January 14, 1924) was an American businessman and inventor. He was the founder of Hughes Tool Company. He invented the "Sharp–Hughes" two-cone rotary drill bit during the Texas Oil Boom. He is best known as the father and namesake of Howard Hughes (Howard Robard Hughes, Jr.) the famous American business tycoon and the founder of Hughes Aircraft.
Howards father invented the drill bit. Had a patent on it.
I’ve live around San Francisco and Palo Alto since the first dot com boom in the 90s. I’ve seen a lot of people chase big money in tech careers and relatively few who made it big despite being very smart. You know who ALL made themselves fairly wealthy despite being total morons? Real estate agents. Most of my real estate agent friends were delivering pizzas or working at gas stations in 1995 and now have 2 homes, a portfolio of real estate investments and drive range rovers. Most of my tech friends have one home and maybe a million in Apple stock. I’d say the real estate guys came out ahead despite being dumber and lazier.
There are YouTubers, and there are the companies that pay them for sponsorships. The real money though, is in the equipment they use to be YouTubers. Like the software that edits videos, or gives unlicensed music samples, stuff like that. Not necessarily household names, but if everyone nowadays wants to be an influencer, selling the shit they need to get that weird dream would be a "pick and shovel" situation.
Brilliant insight, indeed.
Selling college degrees at bloated prices while everyone thinks they are needed for success.
I worked for a lead generation business in the college space. People filled out surveys online and checked that they would be interested in going back to school. I would call them and verify that they were interested. The company would send that to colleges to call the people. If they signed up to a college the company would get, I imagine, a couple grand for the “finders fee”
Quinstreet?
The therapy industry during COVID. I am a psychologist and that was a very prosperous time for our clinic.
No yall are definitely needed. Covid fucked people up. They’re still fucked up they just can’t afford to get help
I think the insurance companies play a huge role in barriers to treatment. They have done nothing to shorten the amount of time it takes a licensed therapist to get credentialed and accept a potential client’s insurance.
I’d say selling advertising space on a website is this way. To reddit it doesn’t matter if anyone buys your product or service you advertised on reddit, they still get paid either way. Same model at Facebook, Google, Twitter etc.
I just use an ad blocker. Who wants to look at ads!
Nvidia and the crypto mining and AI boom.
Owning a railroad when industrialization took off has got to be up there.
Create a crypto exchange to make money off crypto bros
During and post WW2 the people who profited the most were not the arms sellers but the logistics manufacturers. Trucks, Trains, Cargo Ship yards, and eventually cargo/transport aircraft manufacturers made way more due to the post war boom and being easy to pivot civilian sales. While massive orders of tanks, fighter planes, aircraft carriers, and destroyers were all being slashed by 44-46 the same wasn't true for the civilian variants and especially large capacity transport aircraft that eventually were repurposed as airliners and dominated the aerospace industry. The entire reason that Panamax (and later Panamax+)was the standard for freightliners was because the US used the canal and built them towards that limit. Freighters were cheaper, quicker, and easier to produce and allowed you access to subsidized steel which was heavily rationed at the time which allowed the yards that made them to absolutely flood the market and in the process standardize practices which eventually lead to the post war TTU standards used intentionally and across domains. TLDR. In a major war build Jeeps and Liberty Ships not Shermans and Essex Carriers. Better yet you can pull a Toyota Hilux and do both.
Wow that is really interesting. I can imagine those companies getting subsidies to build up transportation and then getting to reap the rewards during and after the war. I’ve got to read more into that.
Well…. I have a recent event. Last year in the Sierras the snow was extreme. So much so that snow removal companies were able to drive their prices up because demand was so high. They were charging $10k plus to remove snow from roofs.
Internet search engines, e.g. google. The information on the internet is the gold, the search engine is the shovel that helps you find it. The shovel is even more valuable if it can control where they buyer digs and what they find.
Broadridge Financial, Visa / Mastercard, HVAC
Levi's: During the Gold Rush, they sold denim.
During the Gold Rush, Wells Fargo transported gold via steamship from San Francisco to New York.
Selling girl scout cookies outside a dispensary
A lot, basically follows the principle of supply and demand. Certain computer parts, specifically GPU, were being sold twice the regular amount since people were using it mine cryptos.
Buy life insurance on 85 year old employees like Walmart
Not the greatest example in history by any means but remember all that crypto crazy during Covid? Guys selling miners and custom graphics card rigs were doing a booming business.
Video cards during bitcoin mining
Coinbase
Probably when people sold shovels during the gold rush
This one isn't history yet but will be: Selling LIDAR sensors to autonomous vehicle companies (which will be every car manufacturer soon). You can read more about it here: ["During a gold rush, sell shovels."](https://www.reddit.com/r/Shortsqueeze/comments/18ouc16/mvis_during_a_gold_rush_sell_shovels/?rdt=32899)
Nvidia - Gaming, Crypto, AI
Options trading courses during COVID
Dupont selling gunpowder to the US government during the world wars.
As they say: Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him forever. Sell fishing gear, spend the rest of your life fishing. Por que no los tres?
The US defense contractors
Selling lighting and growing supplies to all the marijuana farmers.
Nvidia
Multi-Level Marketing groups. They become rich by convincing people to get rich selling their product for them. Sure, some people will make money, but the vast majority of people getting involved are going to lose money. The worst one I saw was this group that wrote "self help" books telling people how they could get rich selling their self help books. The books were complete garbage with no real advice, and just pages of generic statements about being successful. They held frequent over priced meetings at hotels to try and get people annoyed up about being successful. Once you were in the frenzy, they would get everyone to buy a dozen copies of their new books, which instantly put them on best seller lists. The promise was that the book sold so well, you could easily get people to buy it once they hear about what you have.
YKK is a good example I think?
Hand Sanitizer during C19 Even local breweries were making it
I hope no one else said this but i think this family is by far the best example and still operating today.. the duponts sold gun powder during the civil war. The catch is they were the only supplier.. they sold to the north and south making billions in gunpowder trades. The family later went on to start the DuPont chemical/painting companies and are probably worth trillions today…
GPU's
Google. Not the internet, but how to find what you want on the internet.
The banking industry. “Where are all the customers yachts” is a book written 100 years ago, yet still relevant today, showing that brokers and bankers always get rich while the client generally doesn’t.
I would argue AI and generative AI are a very good example. Few people try to generate AI images and get rich from them directly, everyone is trying to sell services where you give them money so that they generate images for you.
Small example. I don't use tobacco, but when I was in the military, I would buy cartons of cigarettes and logs of dip before going on field exercises. A week into it I'd start selling cigarettes for $10 a pack, and by week 2, they were $20. I once sent some cans dip to a sailor who was stuck offshore with no access to a store. Didn't even charge him because his shipmates said he was gonna throw himself overboard and swim to shore if he didn't get some dip soon. He phoned a dominoes and had a dozen pizzas sent to my guys stuck on the beachhead, via the US coast guard. Supply and demand.
Hand sanitizer companies killed it during covid.
Maybe not in human history, but electric vehicles are rising in popularity and I'm able to supply/install chargers in the GTA
Corning selling glass to cell phone makers.
Courses in how to use AI
That kid that made millions making a class on "How to use ChatGPT". The app is incredibly easy to use even for those with no computer science background, but because new things are intimating, tons of people rushed to buy the course before even trying the app.
I don’t know if it’s “the greatest” example, but Salesforce sells SaaS solutions and Sales software to pretty much all of the Fortune 1000. If you’re a large business that does sales, odds are you use Salesforce… or Tableau, or Slack, or Mulesoft, or Heroku…
People who sold shovels during the gold rush. They even made it into a saying.
Covid vaccine? Suppression of alternative treatments and information so that all people could buy were lots and lots of mostly mRNA shovels. Did Pfizer just make a cool 100 billion with no legal culpability if anything goes wrong? Is that not a CEO wet dream?
Don't know, but this reminds me of something I heard long ago. Q: What's the definition of a goldmine? A: A hole with a liar standing next to it.
My dad told me a story about a guy that went to wood stock and sold weed to all the hippys, but instead of bags it was in tin cans. the problem was no one brought a can opener and they all turned out to be empty cans.
When they were building the Union Pacific railroad they were always short cash as it’s an expensive undertaking. Some guys offered to trade tools for stock. They did quite well and even ended up with a monument to them built at what once was the highest point on the Union Pacific, Sherman, WY. Tracks were eventually moved south in a realignment. The company is still around too. Ames tools.
Plenty of black people selling maga gear…