"Housing as a vehicle for building wealth and housing becoming unaffordable for the younger generation are two sides of the same coin."
That's a great insight.
It has always surprised me that many technology professionals (and business professionals in general) don't have a strong intuition for the power of sampling. For example, in this case, the author states:
"With 100 samples, our estimates are accurate to within about 5%.
The magic of sampling is that we can derive accurate estimates about a very large population using a relatively small number of samples.
In the last scenario (100 billion M&MS), we have 1% accuracy despite only sampling 0.00001% of the M&Ms."
I bet many would think n=100 would be worthless once the population reaches millions, or especially billions.
One HN-related piece of evidence for that is when I pointed out what margin of error would be for a n=164 survey sample, I got downvoted hard!
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8050801
But I saw this hundreds of times talking to customers when I ran a survey sampling product out of YC.
Yes, I wasn't commenting on the original "taking it seriously" language.
> If the market price reflected the probability, then an arbitrage strategy should not be profitable
> The market doesn't reflect the probability of an event happening.
No, the market's implied probability could be right, on average, across all deals...and the top merger arb funds could absolutely still be profitable by selecting deals when they think the market is mispricing the probability (for the reasons you mention: better experience, knowledge, etc.)
It's like the sports betting market: you can roughly impute a team's win probability from the (opening) betting line...and even if that's right on average, the top gamblers are still profitable.
And, of course, sometimes things with a say, 40% chance of happening do happen...so that doesn't mean the market was "wrong" about the chance (i.e. your LinkedIn mispricing exmaple).
But sounds like we're in full agreement you can't look at the implied probability from the market price and draw some conclusion about it definitely happening, or definitely not happening (e.g. the market not taking it seriously).
> I wouldn't put too much weight into any sort of imputed probability from the price.
It's absolutely fair to impute a rough probability of deal closure from the stock price. The whole "merger arbitrage" industry works around that premise.