Whenever you have some instrument attacking Wall Street (in this case, the IPO itself), papers come out trying to protect them. This does not mention drawbacks of the IPO the SPAC is getting rid of - the 6-7% investment banking fee, the hassle of doing several roadshows, the near 100% IPO pop due to which the company raises half of what it would have (amounting to a 50% fee so to say which goes into the pockets of institutional investors) amid other things. It is sad that critical reasoning is dead on HN. Nothing is ever purely good or purely bad. An impartial cost-benefit analysis needs to be done which is sadly impossible for someone whose funding comes from the deep pockets of Wall Street and institutional investors.
I have not even begun diving into the benefits of SPACs - some of which are the opportunity for audacious bets like Virgin Galactic holdings which Wall Street would assume to be a loss making company, benefits of PIPEs in SPACs (which would be the topic for a whole new post), the speed of going public.
>An impartial cost-benefit analysis needs to be done which is sadly impossible for someone whose funding comes from the deep pockets of Wall Street and institutional investors.
The link is to an academic paper that literally performs an impartial cost-benefit analysis of SPACs based on publicly available information, and concludes that the way SPACs are currently structured are a pretty crap deal apart from those who are able to get in early.
You mention underwriting fees, and the paper makes a big emphasis to emphasize the implicit costs of SPACs (i.e. all of the dilution) that people ignore.
Also, I'm not sure where the idea comes that SPACs are 'anti-wall street'. The sponsors and investors are some of the largest Wall Street Institutions out there (large Hedge Funds)
However, there are different ways of doing SPACs and the paper mentions a recent SPAC that gets rid of some of the excesses that end up screwing over the post-merger investors
I'm pretty sure "anti-wall street" is just the financial version of "doctors hate him", i.e. clickbait. Last week it was buying into the GME bubble that was marketed as "anti-wall street" and look how that turned out.
That is a good point but this is temporary. SPAC lords will reduce these margins soon enough. It is in their direct incentive to do so. This is a speculative assertion by me (one that I'm quite confident about), but I'm not sure one can be certain about the future
> Whenever you have some instrument attacking Wall Street [...] papers come out trying to protect them. This does not mention drawbacks of the IPO the SPAC is getting rid of - the 6-7% investment banking fee, [...] the near 100% IPO pop due to which the company raises half of what it would have (amounting to a 50% fee so to say which goes into the pockets of institutional investors) amid other things.
SPACs have hefty investment banking fees, and, frequently, their own enormous pop. In the case of Nikola, the SPAC sold shares for $10 that traded up to $34 on the first day of trading, a 240% pop, and many other recent SPACs have had large pops. Every effort I've seen to evaluate the costs of SPACs has found them to be at least as expensive as IPOs. How could they not be? SPACs have to do their own IPO just to get started (with hefty fees), then they conduct a merger (with hefty fees), then there may be the sponsor promote, then there's the widely documented fact that most of the cash raised is returned to investors via redeptions, etc.
> An impartial cost-benefit analysis needs to be done which is sadly impossible for someone whose funding comes from the deep pockets of Wall Street
You literally wrote that in a comment on a paper doing an impartial cost-benefit analysis which was not funded by Wall Street.
Whatever advantages SPACs have, or may have in the future, the ones happening today are very expensive.
An IPO pop is considered favorable versus the converse. You don't sell the whole company, so you still make money on the non-offered shares and you get an optically desirable price bump that can contribute to further positivity about the stock.
Affirm priced around $12B (but now trades over $25B), yet they only raised about 10% of that. So yeah they left some money on the table but who's to say the stock would have generated such a pop if the IPO had priced higher?
There's a lot of virtue in being long-term greedy, and sometimes that means leaving money on the table.
The fees and dilution companies take on when doing a SPAC are typically higher than if they had done an IPO. SPACs also can and often do pop up just like IPOs.
When you go with a SPAC you are basically paying more fees in exchange for a faster route to go public and more price certainty. In most cases high flying companies with great numbers are better off doing a direct listing or IPO than a SPAC.
Look at the comments below which mention 1 bullet point and do not look holistically at the problem and the solution. I have been finding this to be the case on a lot of HN comments recently
I do not claim to be making an impartial analysis myself. Just putting out some points which have been omitted by the Wall Street-funded academic paper
Good point. Unfortunately, I couldn't find where their funding comes from from a quick cursory search (and I don't just mean the funding for graduate students, or salaries). If anyone could provide details about this, I would much appreciate it
I'm not quite sure that SIMD is a relevant benchmark for comparing the processors. Wouldn't the GPU and/or neural engine take care of SIMD on the ARM Macbook?
You can still benefit from AVX for short workloads, the latency of them is no more than other instructions.
Running things on some accelerator (gpu, etc.) usually involves writing a specific kernel in a language subset, manually copying data and generally long latencies. Unless there is a lot of data it won't be faster.
With AVX in the best case the compiler can just vectorize some loop, speeding it up 5x without any added latency or source code changes.
SIMD and ie Nvidia WARP are not the same. Idk about Apple’s GPU, but for example there is no GPU alternative to the SQRTPD instruction (Square root of double precision). Also, when there is branch divergence across threads, CPUs still do a much better job than GPUs.
Curious to think about how unified memory may change the ratio of flops/memory access when it makes sense to shift job from CPU (better for low number) to GPU (better for high ratio)
I think it might be a great business model for movie theaters to offer themselves. This would be true especially if their gains from selling subscriptions (and from selling food) outperforms their marginal loss on opening up more shows in theaters. I think the margin loss on opening up shows should be quite low, assuming real estate and buying permission to screen movies be the main cost. I believe the marginal cost of more shows - hiring employees to clean up the seats, manage crowds (including entry / ticket checking), and wear and tear of seats might be relatively lower.
The business model just doesn't make sense if you're buying seats at a high cost from cinema theaters, and selling subscription passes. The trump card here would be to get movie chains to offer unlimited seats on your platform in return for a high percentage of the subscription fee. Negotiation skills matter!
I have similar experience while reading any other material as well or while watching a TV show like Billions. However, I currently believe that is part of the value and not majorly a distraction. That exploration leads me to discover directions which the author has not taken, tie the story to my own experiences, think about it further and internalize what I have read if it is important.
I don't think there is a remote possibility of this happening in the near future (10-20 years). I work in one of the best deep learning research groups in the world. We were discussing this. And the first question one of my friends asked was- "so the Google assistant knows how to book appointments between 10 and 12pm". Meaning, if you change even a few conditions in the request which is not present in the training data, the call won't go as expected.
However, there is a risk of the AI manipulating us. This is only due to the mistakes by Google engineers not because of the AI becoming "smart".
I always wonder (seriously, not joking) if some computer will pass the Turing test because we are getting dumber and adapting to the way apps understand us instead of the reverse. Personally, I double check when I send text or voice instructions to bots.
It will be people using Google Assistant to create a manipulation capable virtual-voiced individual. The software and "AI" behind Google Assistant is an idiot savant, but in the hands of clever, manipulating humans intent on fraud - it's a great tool. The danger here is not from AI, it is from the cute tool being in the hands of fraud intent humans.
I am not saying there is no risk. What I am saying is it is nearly impossible with the machine learning/deep learning technology we have now (AI simply isn't smart enough). The training data Google obtained could be from Google voice calls by people which is available for free in the US (I am not sure about this).
What I am sure about is that the current AI will fail badly without the training data.
Imagine if all the data for training they had were public emails from mailing lists. We would instead be worried about how the AI would be turning us into insensitive trolls.
What if some already-aware computer continually realizes it's undergoing a Turing test and decides to play dumb because it knows the person behind the test will feed it even more data trying to get it there...
Right now I have the assistant hooked up to my home automation and it has trouble getting that right... this conversational agent is more marketing and less actual substance. The truth is that Google makes most of it's revenue from search, everything else is to make it look like they have something else going on to boost the stock price... I was very underwhelmed by the keynote.
Googles business model is selling manipulation as a service.
The idea that google is doing all this work on AI to make the bait through which they collect your data more attractive but won't then use AI technology to make their _core sellable service_ better for their paying customers is weird.
Of course they will do machine learning to provide an 'optimal price API' so businesses can gouge you more effectively.
Of course they will do machine learning to find recovering alcoholics to target your booze more effectively.
This type of thing is Googles reason to exist and since we're all so cheerful about unconstrained capital if they don't do it someone else will.
