Ayaz Shabutdinov was detained for insufficient success, and the St. Petersburg Exchange was covered with sanctions
The king of information traders was arrested
Ayaz Shabutdinov is a modest kid from Kueda who came to success (they write that he earns about 600+ million rubles a year – that is, ~$6 million bucks, my respects). But Ayaz is not greedy, so he shares his secrets of success with everyone at the school of future billionaires called “Like Center” for modest amounts from 100k to a couple of million rubles.
True, not all of his students turned out to be as capable: some were not able to penetrate enough into the spirit of business thinking to earn their own kilomillions – here are eight such unlucky dudes (who paid ~5 million rubles for “training”) and complained against him to law enforcement agencies. As a result, Ayaz was detained and put in a pre-trial detention center in order to stitch up a beautiful case against him for fraud on an especially large scale as part of an organized group (up to 10 years in prison).
I know almost nothing about Ayaz – but from the outside, of course, it seems that he has created for himself the image of a person with whom it is very difficult to feel sympathy. However, it is not immediately obvious to me that he should be put behind bars for fraud. Well, that is – apparently, he really was selling some game with inadequate promises for people with reduced cognitive responsibility; but maybe they can just add fines for incorrect advertising for this, huh?
Otherwise, it’s difficult for me to say where to draw the line on this approach of “jail for failure to keep promises.” If I study for a couple of years at a top MBA program for $150k, and then decide that they taught me some nonsense there, and in general I didn’t earn more from all this, then the director of the hypothetical Harvard should also be sent to the bunk? Well, that’s it.
Meanwhile, writewhat Ayaz seems to be the founders of Qiwi, SkyEng, SkillBox, and a number of other companies.
On Twitter, however, writethat there are advantages in this whole situation: finally, the call centers of “bank security services” in the zone will be able to upgrade their business processes and use Ayaz’s expertise to improve the selling power of their scripts.
Trading of American shares on the St. Petersburg Exchange is covered with a copper basin
November 2 Americans rolled out a new package of sanctions against Russia: several Russian banks were targeted (the most famous are Post Bank, Russian Standard, Absolut Bank and Home Bank), as well as AFK Sistema and Bauman Moscow State Technical University.
But the headliner of this sanctions list was, of course, SPB Exchange. Despite all the hints from the Universe over the past year and a half that Russian investors should not try to invest in foreign assets of “unfriendly” countries through Russian infrastructure, a huge number of people continued to do this with enviable enthusiasm. Well, here we are!
The exchange itself has only suspended trading in American securities for the past Thursday-Friday, but on Monday it vowed to resume everything. At the same time, as representatives of the exchange stated, “the imposed sanctions will not affect clients’ assets.” Here I would immediately like to sarcastically add “…but the clients themselves may also no longer be able to touch their assets,” but what exactly the new sanctions will mean for ordinary investors is not yet completely clear.
Considering that the complete infrastructure of ownership of foreign securities purchased on the St. Petersburg Exchange is not particularly publicly disclosed, it is difficult to accurately assess all the risks and consequences from the outside. Expert opinions here are divided: some say that the terms of the sanctions will allow all transactions with American securities to be completed calmly by 01/31/2024; and some are afraid that all shares will certainly be blocked, as happened earlier with securities at NSD.
In short, if trading in shares on the St. Petersburg Exchange does open (when you read this text, this will already be clear) – then you will probably see a fairly large flow of securities sales, which could lead to a deviation of transaction prices from the so-called “ fair prices (recalculated based on quotes on the American stock exchange using the USD/RUB exchange rate). So far, the immediate direct effect of sanctions has been a fall shares of the St. Petersburg Exchange itself by 20+%, as well as suspense trading in a bunch of Tinkoff funds that were tied to securities traded on this exchange.
Comrade major from the Ministry of Internal Affairs now wants to look every Russian with foreign citizenship in person in the face
On October 26, new rules on notifying the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation about obtaining foreign citizenship or a residence permit came into effect (I remind you that according to Russian laws, violating this procedure can theoretically be punishable by criminal charges).
The changes were analyzed in detail by my regular co-author, lawyer Kirill Korshunov. hereI’ll just focus on a couple of points:
It is no longer possible to send a notification by mail (I myself used to do exactly this, because I have little desire to go to the Ministry of Internal Affairs in person once again).
But it became possible to submit a notification online through State Services or at the Russian consulate abroad. True, for some reason both of these methods do not work yet, and when and how exactly they will work is unclear.
Fortunately, the obligation to notify that you have a new citizenship/residence permit still arises only upon entering the Russian Federation (previously you had to do this within 30 days, now 60 days), and you can still send your representative to the Ministry of Internal Affairs if you wish with a power of attorney.
WeWork is considering rebranding to WeWorked
In 2010, Adam Neumann founded the WeWork company – he came up with the idea of renting gigantic office space in bulk at a cheaper price, and renting it out in smaller pieces at a higher price (and, as in that joke, “and live on that 2%”). At that time, the “disruption” of traditional businesses was extremely fashionable (Uber, and all that) – so the idea of starting something revolutionary in real estate seemed brilliant to many. And the Japanese SoftBank actually gave the company a ton of dough, with a total estimate of almost $50 billion.
The talented businessman Adam immediately pocketed a couple of billions, but in general, he was kicked out of the company almost immediately (he was very strange), and questions quickly arose about the business model of the super-successful startup. So far the point is, last week this same WeWork announced that he is mentally ready to go bankrupt.
In short, Vivork’s current market capitalization is approximately $50 million (fifty million dollars) – a thousand times less than what it was valued at a few years ago. The bottom line is that the witty guy Neumann transferred a couple of yards of bucks from the Japanese pocket to his own (and at the same time created a merry fuss on the stock exchange for several years). Talent!
AI will be regulated and regulated, but will it be over-regulated?
Last week was a hot week for artificial intelligence regulation. Almost simultaneously Biden signed decree on AI regulation in the USA and G7 countries released joint memorandum on the principles of a global approach to regulation.
The state document contains, in particular:
An obligation for developers of new large AI models to share the results of their safety testing with the government (which will need to be conducted according to some yet-to-be-developed standards).
In general, they have not yet promised to bomb data centers, but it is already necessary to report new large computing clusters above a certain threshold (see more details). at Kotenkov’s).
Particular attention will be paid to the use of AI in science, and especially in any biosynthesis (they are afraid that they might accidentally create some kind of viral prodigy, for example).
All content from the pen of neural networks will need to be marked (just in case, I’ll immediately state that my texts are not written by ChatGPT!).
They will fight with all their might against discrimination from neural networks, and they will promise all kinds of help to those who have lost their jobs due to over-pumped tins.
Document from G7 in general, a little more abstract, like “for everything good, against everything bad.” Like, let’s all try together to make safe AI, share information with each other, not neglect safety, and develop some standards. Oh, and you should definitely mark everything with watermarks too!
Every hunter wants to know where Fried-Bankman Sam will sit
Over the course of several weeks, the trial of Sam Bankman-Freed proceeded as follows – all his accomplices came to the stand in turn, and each of them drove approximately the following cart: “We all cheated there together, broke the law, made money on suckers, threw hamsters at lave. And that curly-haired guy was in charge of the whole crime process!!”
After that, a couple of days were allocated for a defensive speech and a confrontation with Sam himself. He came out, looked at the jury with sad eyes, and made a speech, the brief essence of which can be boiled down to “Guys, I’m not a thief – I’m just very, very stupid!”
Well, last week the jury carried out my verdict: guilty on all counts. The final term for Bankman-Fried will be set in another six months, only in March 2024. There is a chance to sit down for as long as 115 years.
Good news of the week
There was no good news last week. (If you know one, write in the comments, please, I will be ashamed.)
So, instead of HNN this time it will be link to a good post from Mikhail from our club – in which he shares his experiences on investing in bank deposits (including links to places to monitor the best offers).
More financial news and original analytics in my Telegram channel RationalAnswer.
