[YetAnotherNick]

> The average rank and file employee at any BigTech company knows only a minuscule more than the general public.

They know the clients, the contracts, hiring, cost cutting way before the general public does. The problem is that many BigTech is sum of many units which might not be correlated, but for say Nvidia or Apple I would assume the employees would be a good people to take the stock advice from.

[raw_anon_1111]

And this is again an obviously naive assumption. Your average developer at Apple has no idea how many iPhones Apple sold in China. Nor do Nvidia employees they know how many GPUs NVidia sold. Your random Amazon developer didn’t know Jassy was going to announce at the earnings call that Amazon was going to announce that they were going to spend more this year on Capex for AI related hardware than they’d free cash flow tanking their stock.

Again, I worked at AWS and we had no insider knowledge

[YetAnotherNick]

> Your average developer at Apple has no idea how many iPhones Apple sold in China.

But if anyone is connected to few friends across team, they would know they are hiring for China sales team(or dependent team like internal tooling for sales etc.) aggressively or firing them.

[raw_anon_1111]

As large as any big tech company is and as a silo’d few employees have friends across teams. Besides that, at every tech company, all information like that is a need to know and isn’t shared with “friends” - especially information that can move markets.

[YetAnotherNick]

I don't know if you ever worked on big tech? Everyone knows this through gossips, referrals, friends of friends etc. The hard part is to figure out how actionable this information is.

> information that can move markets.

That's the hardest part to figure out. Stocks aren't very correlated with anything. Slight changes in this quarter's iPhone sales in China doesn't move the share price very much if it is within range of expectation.

[raw_anon_1111]

Yes I have.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47622584

I have worked at Amazon. I can guarantee you that no one on the Amazon Retail side had any clue what went on at AWS or vice versa.

Do you think that any of the rank and file knew that Jassy was going to announce mass layoffs or that Amazon was going to spend so much on Capex for AI that the stock would go down?

[saghm]

> but for say Nvidia or Apple I would assume the employees would be a good people to take the stock advice from

Isn't Apple pretty famously secretive even internally around stuff like product launches? I would expect a company that runs a tight ship to have rank-and-file employees who would have less potentially actionable info than ones at companies that don't control information as well.

[bluGill]

In a tiny company this is true. In any medium (much less large) company you don't know much more than anyone else on the street - and the independent analysts who just watch public information closely usually know more than you do about all that. (it is their job to read the data from China and figure out what that means for the companies involved).