📈 Opaque payment fee pools get competed to zero
Chamath's structural claim that fintechs (Stripe et al.) hunt opaque per-transaction revenue pools — interchange, and by analogy payment for order flow — and take them to zero to hand consumers the savings, which compresses the incumbents living off that hidden tax. Early, un-sized version of the thesis he later formalized as the V/MA short.
0
CONVICTION
peaked 35.0 EMBER
EMBER
band
▼ SHORT V
expression · bearish equities
WRONG
result · return -8.8% · vs SPY -22.5%
2022-02-13
born 2021-02-13 (E22) → window closed
⚖ Why this result
fully deterministic — computed from daily closes on the scoring date; nothing below is editable or hand-set
- Window: 2021-02-13 → 2022-02-13 — first mention + 12-month horizon, then the window locks.
- The call: ▼ SHORT V (primary play). V rose 8.8% over the window → return (sign flipped for a SHORT) = -8.8% (the call lost money).
- Benchmark: holding SPY over the same window returned +13.8%
→ vs SPY = -8.8 − (+13.8) = -22.5%
— what this call made or lost against just owning the index. This is the number the result uses.
Direction-only read: +5.0% — did V move the predicted way relative to the market. The two only differ on a SHORT: this call was right about direction relative to the index but still cost money versus holding it.
- Rule fired:
· RIGHT — return ≥ +10% AND beat SPY by 5+· HALF — return ≥ +5% OR beat SPY at all▶ WRONG — everything else
- Credit: supporters of a WRONG earn 0 each, opposers the opposite — this feeds the scoreboard. supported: Chamath
Conviction timeline
bands: green ≥ 65 · watch ≥ 45 · ember ≥ 15
Plays vs SPY · % since first mention (2021-02-13)
Plays
Mention log newest first
Chamath
equities 42% · n=163
· E56 (2021-11-20) · explicit_prediction · strength 2
▶ 1:00:46
SUPPORT
“Amazon is now doing more to actually unwind duopolies and monopolies in markets than the government and the FTC is, you know, see this thing that Amazon is now doing in the UK with Visa, where they basically shut Visa off. ... And so they are looking at and there's a rumor that they may switch the Amazon credit card off of Visa rails and put them on MasterCard rails. But this is another example, Jason, to your point of like, you know, Bernie and the progressive left would probably rail against the duopoly practices of Visa and MasterCard. They can't get anything done.”
Chamath
equities 42% · n=163
· E43 (2021-08-06) · explicit_prediction · strength 2
▶ 1:18:14
SUPPORT
“The comment on this, by the way, the most obvious one here, which I think is interesting, is the Shopify stripe debate. Because if you look inside the P&L of Shopify, an enormous line item now, about 350 million bucks a year is what they're paying to stripe. And, you know, there's going to be a lot of pressure over time to figure out what these big businesses want to do with respect to their payment strategies and do it themselves, because they may be able to save a lot of money.”
Chamath
equities 42% · n=163
· E22 (2021-02-13) · explicit_prediction · strength 2
▶ 38:25
SUPPORT
“Well, I think more people do just because the technology companies that have come around, like Stripe and others, will eventually just try to take it to zero. ... when you find, to your point, these opaque pools of revenue, the innovation is just to give consumers power by taking these costs to zero.”
Who built this conviction
each voice's total push on the score, in conviction points across every mention — supports and opposes · share = % of all mention-driven movement
⏳ decay drained -40.7 over the idea's life — that's time passing, attributed to no one
Score events
| episode | kind | Δ | after | note |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| E22 2021-02-13 | init | +35.0 | 35.0 | E22 born by Chamath (explicit_prediction x2) |
| E23 2021-02-20 | decay | -1.4 | 33.6 | E23 silent |
| E24 2021-03-06 | decay | -1.3 | 32.3 | E24 silent |
| E25 2021-03-13 | decay | -1.3 | 31.0 | E25 silent |
| E26 2021-03-20 | decay | -1.2 | 29.7 | E26 silent |
| E27 2021-03-27 | decay | -1.2 | 28.5 | E27 silent |
| E28 2021-04-01 | decay | -1.1 | 27.4 | E28 silent |
| E29 2021-04-17 | decay | -1.1 | 26.3 | E29 silent |
| E30 2021-04-23 | decay | -1.1 | 25.2 | E30 silent |
| E31 2021-05-01 | decay | -1.0 | 24.2 | E31 silent |
| E32 2021-05-13 | decay | -1.0 | 23.3 | E32 silent |
| E33 2021-05-22 | decay | -0.9 | 22.3 | E33 silent |
| E34 2021-05-31 | decay | -0.9 | 21.4 | E34 silent |
| E35 2021-06-13 | decay | -0.9 | 20.6 | E35 silent |
| E36 2021-06-18 | decay | -0.8 | 19.8 | E36 silent |
| E37 2021-06-25 | decay | -0.8 | 19.0 | E37 silent |
| E38 2021-07-03 | decay | -0.8 | 18.2 | E38 silent |
| E39 2021-07-09 | decay | -0.7 | 17.5 | E39 silent |
| E40 2021-07-16 | decay | -0.7 | 16.8 | E40 silent |
| E41 2021-07-23 | decay | -0.7 | 16.1 | E41 silent |
| E42 2021-07-30 | decay | -0.6 | 15.5 | E42 silent |
| E43 2021-08-06 | reinforce | +12.7 | 28.1 | E43 Chamath support x2 |
| E44 2021-08-28 | decay | -1.1 | 27.0 | E44 silent |
| E45 2021-09-04 | decay | -1.1 | 25.9 | E45 silent |
| E46 2021-09-14 | decay | -1.0 | 24.9 | E46 silent |
| E47 2021-09-18 | decay | -1.0 | 23.9 | E47 silent |
| E49 2021-10-02 | decay | -1.0 | 23.0 | E49 silent |
| E50 2021-10-09 | decay | -0.9 | 22.0 | E50 silent |
| E51 2021-10-16 | decay | -0.9 | 21.2 | E51 silent |
| E52 2021-10-23 | decay | -0.8 | 20.3 | E52 silent |
| E53 2021-10-30 | decay | -0.8 | 19.5 | E53 silent |
| E54 2021-11-06 | decay | -0.8 | 18.7 | E54 silent |
| E55 2021-11-13 | decay | -0.7 | 18.0 | E55 silent |
| E56 2021-11-20 | reinforce | +12.3 | 30.3 | E56 Chamath support x2 |
| E57 2021-12-04 | decay | -1.2 | 29.1 | E57 silent |
| E58 2021-12-11 | decay | -1.2 | 27.9 | E58 silent |
| E59 2021-12-17 | decay | -1.1 | 26.8 | E59 silent |
| E60 2021-12-23 | decay | -1.1 | 25.7 | E60 silent |
| E61 2021-12-29 | decay | -1.0 | 24.7 | E61 silent |
| E62 2022-01-08 | decay | -1.0 | 23.7 | E62 silent |
| E63 2022-01-15 | decay | -0.9 | 22.7 | E63 silent |
| E64 2022-01-22 | decay | -0.9 | 21.8 | E64 silent |
| E65 2022-01-29 | decay | -0.9 | 21.0 | E65 silent |
| E66 2022-02-05 | decay | -0.8 | 20.1 | E66 silent |
| E67 2022-02-12 | decay | -0.8 | 19.3 | E67 silent |