More on Zillow and House flipping
Oops I do not want to say that losing a lot of money on a trade is as good as making a lot of money on a trade. It is not. For one thing, if you make a lot of money on a trade, then you have money, which can be used to buy goods and services. For another thing, if you make a lot of money on a trade, then you were at least in some rough sense correct about the trade, and being correct often about big questions is a valuable skill in finance and life. If you lose a lot of money on a trade, neither of those things are true. And yet there is a certain prestige to it? Being correct is not the whole ballgame. Being important is important. “Important people like to deal with important people,” the Goldman Sachs commandment goes; “are you one?” The most famous JPMorgan Chase & Co. trader of the last decade, the one JPMorgan trader whom many people know by name or at least by nickname, is Bruno Iksil, the London Whale , who is famous for losing $6.2 billion of the bank’s money.