In many areas of life, the sharpest people in a given field often won’t explain the tricks of the trade to the general public. Sometimes it’s the case that the publicly-available information on a subject is second-rate. Take Warren Buffett for example. His derivatives deals are brilliant because he is getting paid to borrow money. Of course, he does not fully explain his deals because he doesn’t want others copying his trades. In shareholder letters, he does not explain how his counterparties were inappropriately modeling equity-equity correlations. He only discussed the trades on a superficial level because GAAP accounting of the derivatives were causing people to misunderstand Berkshire’s intrinsic value. Buffett likely avoids explaining Berkshire’s credit default contracts for similar reasons.
Most of the time nobody will explain the game to you
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