I read a lot of hacker news, and I've noticed something: HN is a better judge of Substack quality than the Substack's subscriber count (even paid subscribers). To test this, I built MetaStack. It works as follows:
1. Collect HN submissions that link to substack domains.
2. Calculate the HN affinity of each Substack, i.e. "how much does HN like this compared to Substack users?"
3. Using this HN affinity, create an implied HN score for all posts in the Substack (even those never posted to HN).
4. From here, I manually trim down to substacks with a high signal-to-noise ratio, and send them to you as a weekly roundup.
This gives you a slice of the best independent writers, weighted towards what hackers find interesting.
mantula: a small parasitic stinging insect that feeds on ants, flies, and other small insects, native to leafy lawns and shrubs.
"mantulas are widely grown as food"
You could do some great auto-worldbuilding in a dwarf fortress type game with this. Maybe constraining the input data to "bio" and "historical" definitions.
Uber is currently worth more than Stripe, Spotify and Dropbox combined. I'd easily rather own those 3 outright than Uber. Wonder what the market knows that I'm missing.
The products are ranked according to the "Popularity score" which uses # comments with distinct authors and positive karma. Amazon links in a comment usually = endorsement
Instead of market cap/GDP, wouldn't market cap/earnings (p/e ratio) more directly capture "market overvaluation" and "how much the stock market costs vs how much it is providing"?
If so, it seems like we're at a fairly average place for the last 30 years:
I wonder what makes them think the stock market is overvalued. Increasing inequality combined with market saturation and the current difficulty to start a competitive business means it makes perfect sense that stock prices are historically high. Combine with the fact that passive index investing has become the norm, and it seems like it will be a new normal.
It explains each of the indicators on the page. Click the "Market Overvaluation" button (albeit with a pretty poor UI and terrible URL support so I can't link it).
It's basically the value of US companies on the stock market divided by the GDP, $27 trillion / $20 trillion = 135%.
Although it makes you wonder about if all that stashed money overseas is having a significant impact on that.
Wouldn’t companies with a strong international presence (e.g. Apple) contribute to that? It seems like increased globalization could explain that high ratio rather than “overvaluation.”
Exports contribute to GDP but sales between foreign subsidiaries do not. So a Toyota made in Toyota-owned Kentucky factory contributes to the US GDP. This is in contrast to GNP; that US-made Toyota would count towards Japan's GNP.
It is my understanding that the value of a stock should be equal to present value of future cash flows. If those future cash flows are growing faster than the discount rate then a value higher than 100% of GDP is to be expected.
Agreed. I've never come across this particular metric before, but intuitively I would have expected something more akin to a P/E ratio in the 10's or even 20's, not a factor of 1x.
Can anyone explain here why the stock market cap isn't much, much higher than a single year's GDP?
Is it because GDP is essentially "revenue" while market cap is "discounted future profits" -- and thus 20 years of 5% profit is going to be on the same order of magnitude of 1 year of revenue?
There are only ~5,000 publicly traded companies in the U.S. There are about 25 Million small businesses in the U.S. The stock market cap represents a tiny portion of the entire U.S. economy.
Is market cap / GDP really a right measure for overvaluation? So it looks like current stocks are 7% more overvalued than dot com peak with this measure! In fact current market is likely more overvalued than any other time in the history of stock market.
"Market cap as % of GDP" is a pretty strange way to determine whether the stock market is over/undervalued. The usual yardstick is Price/Earnings ratio. In that regard we are a little above average right now, but certainly not in outlier or "DEFCON 2" territory. http://www.multpl.com/
"Public Debt" is not an issue. It is probably one of the biggest economic advantages the US has. US dollars(which all US debt is denominated in) are issued by the US government. This means that it is impossible to "default", unless the government willingly chooses to default. The US doesn't owe anyone "real" resources. On the other hand, the US has acquired huge amounts of real resources(cars, services, electronics, clothing...) from (foreign) holders of US debt like China, Japan etc.
Yes, these dollars are capable of purchasing any resources available for sale in the US, but again, as a sovereign nation, the US is capable of imposing customs and taxes to regulate this flow as they see fit.
Debt issued by a sovereign nation which controls its own currency is completely unlike household debt. The US government is not revenue constrained. This means that it does not need to collect taxes in order to spend. Indeed, since all US dollars come from the government, the US government must spend first in order that there be any money to tax away.
Sort of, it's not an issue until becomes one. They way out historically is run away inflation, aggressive taxation, war, and/or violent societal reorg. These all really suck compared to just living within your means like most working households try to do.
Actually the opposite lol. I'd like to get more books, for instance, on a certain topic, since I'm an avid reader and would like to get the most out of this tool.
For instance, people interested ONLY in startups, don't care about the other categories, but STARTUPS, so getting the top, let's say 50 books on startups would be their use case.
Additional feature request: update the URL for each category so that I can easily share a particular list (e.g., https://redditfavorites.com/drawing). Thanks!
