[NoboruWataya]

This would assume a linear growth in users I guess? I'd be interested to know if this is the case. I have followed Levine for a few years but I feel like he kind of exploded in popularity at some stage over the last couple of years.

[giraffe_lady]

I think 2018 maybe? There was that wave of deranged crypto hype with like every single company announcing a "pivot to blockchain" or ICO or whatever. He consistently handled that very well; a lot of humor but he did also evaluate them as serious financial products and got to nerd out about and compare them to highly technical traditional finance instruments. Which honestly that is when he's at his best anyway.

There weren't a lot of sources back then that were informed enough, accessible enough, and took those announcements as seriously as they deserved but no more.

Anyway I was working in tech but nowhere near crypto at that time and started seeing his newsletter shared around a lot among coworkers and my peer groups around then. Not surprising if he picked up a lot of long term readers from it.

[akozak]

I revisit his "Are Index Funds Communist?" piece from 2016 often, definitely what got me hooked. https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2016-08-24/are-in...

[JacKTrocinskI]

The socialist calculation problem has arguably been solved, check out the Medallion fund by Renaissance Technologies. It has had an average return rate of 74% since 1994. Carl Icahn, Buffet, no one comes close. They have a "robot" that can essentially predict the market, good luck getting them to take your money though.

[bostik]

Medallion has been closed for new investors since ... a long time ago. Nobody has an explanation how they can sustain such an absurd return, but there are a few theories floating around.

Subjectively the one that appeals most to me, is that the fund has an investment strategy built around their ability to identify and capture very specific types of opportunities - and that there are only so many of them globally in any given year. This puts an upper bound to how much the fund even can invest, because their strategy works for scenarios that are limited both in size and frequency.

[JacKTrocinskI]

I think that makes sense and it also shows that an algorithm can in practice reliably find market inefficiencies and solve them in some scenarios. In those cases a free market can exist but the robot will always beat it and eventually discourage all other market participants from participating, essentially creating a sort of communist economic system for that particular market.