There wasn't market manipulation here on GDAX's part. The people they are compensating are those who got wiped because they were trading on margin (if anyone is not familiar, this adds much more risk). These people already had their portfolios auto-liquidated via the margin call so stopping trading afterwards had no impact. Same with stop loss orders, although there's a different mechanism at play there.
From GDAX's point of view the tradeoff boiled down to whether to invest in PR / brand today or risk a moral hazard problem in the future (users expecting bailouts so they take more risk).
There isn't a lot of substance but the Enron comparison is awfully loaded. The article specifically calls out the use of off balance sheet entities to hide costs-- for people who follow this stuff, that immediately triggers memories of Enron's use of special purpose entities and Lehman's Repo 105 off balance sheet shenanigans.
Yea, I think the industry seems to have been caught off guard by how aggressive the mutual funds have been with their mark-to-market valuations. This public data will likely have to be factored into the valuation methodologies of the private investors in these deals. Absent of this, Unicorn valuations were probably going to take a much longer time to deflate.
This might be a little off topic but I heard on the other hand that Stanford's business school was an underdog pre 1990s. Do you know if there's any truth to that?
I've heard discussion amongst the adtech crowd that it's "viewability tracking" products that are creating a lot of the slowness we feel today on the web.
I've seen buildings with separate doors and some without that have low income units. Even in the same building, the low income units are not as nice (e.g. no in-unit washer dryer, no stainless steel appliances, cheaper fixtures). Also, some buildings only provide keys to the gym and other common areas for non-low income. But I think they got in trouble for that and may have stopped.
For those who care, the Gmail app still has the option to not load images. It's why I still use it over Dropbox Mailbox, Google Inbox, and Microsoft Outlook (Acompli).
From the LP pov, it boils down to capital concentration. Most LPs I've spoken with are not that different from Michael Kim (LP from the article) in that they are for capital concentration. It is the most controversial part of the offering.
Yeah, not only that but it's not easy for an org as big as Google to experiment with stuff like this when they have a huge advertising operation that's trying to sell more ads, not less. Moves like this have to be top down driven by a strong leader.
Remember the Bloomberg terminal snooping controversy from last year? Reporters at Bloomberg News had access to terminal meta data that allowed them to view user contact information and monitor login activity.
When the activity was disclosed, Goldman and a few other banks were trying to figure out ways to replicate some of the features (including chat). I'm not sure where those projects stand today but my point is that their biggest clients desired to sponsor the unbundling of some of the terminal's core features.