Credit Suisse. Below I will summarize what has happened and what I think the implications are.
1/ Credit Suisse options price an explosive equity move over the next 3 months. Implied vol of 61 at decade highs imply moves 2x US financials. Bonds and CDS paint a similar story.
The SEC Charged Zack Morris and other "FinTwitters" with security price manipulation. $100m in fines.
Key list of things not to do based on the filing:
1/ Non Disclosed Dumping. Selling stock you’ve promoted without informing followers you have done so
I just read an interesting thread by
@RaoulGMI
talking about techno utopianism and how we are all going to make it.
1/ We are in what I believe is the final stage of the Super Bubble. The Super Bubble is the misconception that bailout capitalism is actually a free market.
People don't understand Bryan Johnson. So I'm going to engage in the terrible Twitter thread format to explain his work.
1/ He sold Venmo/Braintree to PayPal and made FU money. "what's the point of making FU money if you don't say FU?" He's also ex-Mormon. Explains tweet below
Michael Platt of Bluecrest made 50% in 2016, 54% in '17, 25% in '18 and 50% in '19. Rumored up big in 2020. Per Market Wizards 2012, he averaged 14% years with a 5% max drawdown. When a billionaire trader doubles his profitability, it merits study.
A thread of "Plattitudes":
In 1991 Japan hadn’t crashed before, and the Japanese believed their own hype
In 1997, Emerging Markets hadn’t gone haywire and their sovereign wealth funds were betting on themselves
In 2001, Tech hadn’t crashed before and many of today’s billionaires held to zero
I've shorted Microsoft here
you don't fire a celebrity CEO after a demo day into a low liquidity Thanksgiving week on a Friday afternoon if something truly bleak didn't occur
stock has run 12% into this -- and like I said. low liquidity week. not advice
AMC, Gamestop, Bitcoin, 2021 - the whole thing
it was truly the Test Pump
The test for what, you ask?
Testing the manifestation of group attention into the coalescence of capitalized consciousness
The birth of a financialized God
Do you understand?
A dude I know 5xed his net worth / made generational wealth shorting crypto. He’s active on Twitter - has measured takes on risk reward. Nothing sensational.
Doesn’t dunk on anyone. Isn’t running hindsight Capital shilling some crappy Econ thought piece
Maybe wisdom there
"I want to trade so I don't have a boss"
now you have a new boss that's the invisible preferences of a bunch of psychos
he controls your mood, thoughts, wakes you up in the middle of the night
prevents you from traveling or being truly present
congrats on your freedom
On May 29, 2022 Treasury Direct's quarterly website traffic surpassed Ethereum's. Now it is 1.8x larger.
Very exciting project. Congratulations to the team
11/ Simple recap:
A] Do not use followers as exit liquidity
B] Do not collude or provide 'early' signals to friends
C] Do not discuss the materiality of your statements to price action privately or publicly
D] Do not flex, or entice others to do your trades
E] Do not lie
Cheers
Saturday morning trading thread. Got a DM from a guy trying to restart his life after doing jail time and he wants to trade.
1/ My first advice is. Don't. Do. It. Seriously - start a real business. Follow that self storage guy. Go to a coding boot camp and work in data science
The CPI isn't accurate? Jim Cramer makes bad calls? Cathie Wood's portfolio is down? Airbnb provides less value than hotels? ESG is a grift? European power prices are up? ETH is down? Crypto yield schemes are a scam?
wow you're so on top of things! how do you do it?
To people asking you if I can teach you to trade, unfortunately, I can't. What I can do - is tell you some common Failures to avoid. A thread 👇
1/ To start, a little inverse Anna Karenina. All bad traders are alike, but every good trader is good in her own way.
The reason why max pain is higher is because there's a generation of people who worshipped The Big Short as the way to get rich expressing that the system is a scam
they refuse to worship at the altar of The Big Long, at the Church of Saylor. Deep down they'd rather stay poor
“I’m up 80%”
“What percent of your net worth is invested?”
“10%”
No. You’re up 8%. And by representing yourself as up 80% you are only denoting yourself as a charlatan. There is no such thing as “an account”. There is your total investment exposure.
You only have 1 net worth.
longer form thoughts on crypto. Lots of bearishness.
I remain bullish. Why:
1. If Trump is elected, all bets are off - SEC runs on a skeleton staff, Gensler is fired, he intervenes in the Fed to cut rates. Odds are at least 50% Trump wins. Any concern about Trump's stance
The Big Whoosh (disclaimer, long read)
When you really boil down the entirety of what’s going on - the current state of the market boils down to one simple observation. The people buying the highs of the 1999 tech bubble were right. But they were too early.
Sama’s most recent
2008 wasn't some cataclysm only a few geniuses saw coming. There were relentless bearish headlines for years (starting in 2006).
It's not that nobody saw it coming. It's that after years of bearish headlines and the market going up, nobody took the bears seriously.
"stupid youth, betting on digital coins, because they want a 1/100 chance to afford a family in a city where they want to live
they should just work in factories we shipped overseas"
people don't realize how they sound or that it ends in a 2nd Trump term. I don't think they care
noticing a bit of an interesting pattern. Have scraped Glassdoor for a long time (5 years+). Most of the companies that got torched in past 12 months, people loved working at. Got lots of stock too. The companies with growth / fcf generation all look like hard, unpleasant work
Teladoc guides net loss per share of $43 per share. (rubs eyes, and checks after market). Yes, the stock is only $34.8 per share.
Who on earth owns this thing? Ah right. Cathie Wood is the number 1 holder, owns 12% of the shares. I am sure it's the Fed's fault somehow
Things I did routinely at a hedge fund I’d never do with my own money. A thread 👇
1/ Run at 4x leverage or higher. Seems self explanatory but this is common. My current leverage is 2x. I’m up mid teens so far this year so plenty of Vol.
20/ am I jumping up and down to 'fade the CS panic'?
no
Is it Lehman?
no. Lehman was the cause, CS is a casualty
Could the stock go to zero bc of bond market liquidity issues compounding its asset sale plan?
yes - which is probably relevant to 'financial stability' narrative
In 2012, I was tasked with using a large scale transaction database to find the forward leading behavior that would have predicted the 2008 crash and cohort level economic declines. The answer? "credit checks". This is key to understanding the bull case for stocks. Thread 👇
With Yolo-ers on Spring Break, call options are getting cheaper. Some friends and I made a tool to find the "Dankest" call options - those that are cheapest given a stock's historical price movement.
Here are 10 plays that are interesting. A thread 👇
Fat personal trainers
Poor financial advisors
Ugly sex symbols
Depressed therapists
Unpresidential presidents
Low inflation affordability crises
Full employment recession
Do you understand?
The Mo
Below I explore the idea of “the Mo” - or being in tune with the universe, in a useful way that allows you to take larger risks and do better work - but only in short bursts.
Famous fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller has stated that the most fundamental job of a trader
11] On hiring: "I look for the type of guy in London who wakes up at 7 o'clock on Sunday morning while his kids are in bed and logs onto a poker site so that he can pick off the US drunks coming home on a Saturday night. You want someone who understands an edge."
I got on Fintwit to study data around my own trade ideas, but get so many requests about resources to learn how to trade, & don't have time to answer them.
I've assembled a crash course for novices. A thread 👇
1/ First, culture and lingo.
I’ve no idea how this ends but I think the problem we are seeing isn’t a markets problem, it’s a society problem. People are losing faith in the system and the leaders who brought us to this place. A monetary “put” wouldn’t fix this even if it were there. And I don’t think it is
Was asking myself this morning, “has the music stopped?”
And my first thought was Shopify announcing a share split to attract retail investors and then dropping 40% in a straight line isn’t the type of thing that happens while the music is playing
George Soros wrote a book more people should read, “The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The 2008 Crash and What It Means”.
I’ll summarize the salient points here and apply it to what’s happening with my own interpretation.
Soros thought that his “Theory of Reflexivity” was
probably most relevant to much of the wine/ mansion poasting here - the SEC specifically noted lifestyle pictures (mostly lambos) denoting wealth as an implied 'this is financial advice'.
Kind of wonder how 6 figure NFT profile pics fit in here but I digress
18] On trading criteria: "There are 3 things you need to make money in a market. You need a decent fundamental story, a good trend that looks like it will carry on, and the market handling news the way you think it should. Bull markets ignore any bad news."
How to get ahead of 99.9% of retail investors
1/ Split your strategies up. You have one type of trade where you research a company and hold it for a long time? You also buy options into earnings calls? You also own 'safe high div stocks'. These are all strategies. Measure them
5.3% 2-year yield: we need to be thinking about the solvency of the financial system and sustainability of US debt
4.6% 2-year yield: have you heard of a "quek" - it's a type of non-fungible token native to Solana. Some big accounts have made *a lot* of money on them
Three AI coin betas
1] An AGI is default unbanked. Will be larger than existing unbanked market. will use crypto to store $ bc it's machine native & censored
2] Proof of Humanity / Data veracity. Enterprise & govt use cases
3] Utilities. Rendering, storage, compute, training
The Fed denied the rumored "pivot" this week, increasing corporate borrowing costs. Below I will explore implications
1/ Stocks offer the worst value to high grade bonds in nearly 10 yrs both in the US and internationally. Reversion to mean would imply a ~20% drop in the S&P 500
Fintwit uses words like "beta", "Factor exposure", "value", "rotation", "momentum", "yield". The funds who use these words are happy with 8% a year that doesn't correlate with stocks. Is that your goal?
I want more. Words have power. Time for a new vocabulary. A thread👇
17/ as an investor- I think his ideas are worth understanding. It could very well be that the AI era is the end of the McDonald's / self harm era. And the possibility of defeating death is a bit like Pascal's wager.
If there's a small % chance he's right, the payoff is infinite
it's weird. my most profitable quant strategy has flatlined for a couple months and suddenly I'm far less knowledgeable on eastern philosophy, the history of sovereign debt and joint-friendly exercise routines
the MS analyst who upgraded Tesla and added $90b to the stock today bc of its Dojo Supercomputer (which has been out for over a year) upgraded Tesla in 2015 bc it was going to make a ride sharing app to compete with Uber
this marketplace still doesn't exist
do you get it yet?
15] On losses: "Losing money is what kills you. It's not the actual loss. It's the fact it messes up your psychology. You lose the bullets in your gun. Then the elephant walks by when your gun's not loaded. In this game, you want to be there when the great trades come along."
3/ The basic thesis underlying a lot of what he does, is that it's really silly that we've deployed huge tech resources on how to addict ourselves to consumer products.
And it'd be better to apply the same kind of rigor to measuring, and enhancing the human mind and body
so wait - the entire bull run was a vast unfunded fiscal transfer to the private sector rammed through by special interests? and now there's a run on government debt?
Owning volatility is expensive - about 11%/ yr to hedge a stock portfolio. Since $VXX came out, this would have eaten your whole return. Meh.
In this thread I'll explore what I think are better, more delightful "negative risk premia"👇
1/ A visual of stocks hedged with $VXX
Exxon Mobile generated $31B of cash flow from operations over the last 9 months while Amazon generated $24B while Amazon is 6.5x larger. Exxon had everyone divesting their stock / regulatory interference. Amazon had once in generation event to add users to its platform. Hmm
5/ A key quote on Disclaimers: "The defendants each included on their Twitter accounts that they were not providing stock recommendations or financial advice. But they intended for their followers to act on their promotional tweets and understood their followers would do so”
3/ Flexing Implying Financial Advice. Highlight dollar P&L, wealthy lifestyle, and victory lapping trades to convince followers you are providing financial advice
"you banked it with me, nice man"
most of life's problems come from some mix of not lifting enough weights, not doing enough cardio, spending too much time on your phone, ingesting mood altering substances, eating processed foods and working in obsolete/competitive fields
easier stated than fixed.
While in e-commerce I met:
- A woman working 4 hrs a week making $2m/y on hairbrushes
- A guy selling hula hoops netting $500k
- A 25 y.o who built $10m supplement brand while pregnant
Many were Mormon/Orthodox Jews with odd hours. In trading, I've never seen anything like that.
Bitcoin should scare you
if you look at the bull cases that are being validated by price action they include
1] Fiscal profligacy resulting in collapse in the currency's value
2] Front running CBDC authoritarianism
3] AGI preferring uncensorable machine currency
not good
The basic heuristic for markets post 08 is that politicians destroy the value of the currency to finance spending bills nobody reads and are written by their friends
This periodically inflates bubbles which crash. These crashes then are used as excuses to do more of the same
Tesla has more options open interest than AMZN, AAPL, GOOG, and META combined and correlates more with GameStop, AMC and MicroStrategy than it does with Ford and GM. Over the past month it has traded 60% as much as the entire S&P 500 ETF, $SPY.
So glad fundamentals are back.
I have change my macro view on bonds to be quite bullish. Shorting bonds was a large PNL driver for me for the past year and I've been delighted about the inflation meme as its hypercharged slowing foreign inflows to tank $TLT
But all good things must come to an end. Thread 👇
Going to talk a bit about my understanding of the growth unwind
1/ let’s start with the obvious absurdity - negative 30 year yields do not force you to buy mongoDb stock. Why? The more volatile a stock and its outlook is the less relevant government borrowing costs are. And yet
the purpose of this forum is simple and underappreciated
if everyone works well together, with a bit of tech augmentation and help from X, it will be possible to take huge amounts of money ($10-50 billion) from hedge funds and passive investors, completely legally
you can do whatever mental gymnastics you want
you're not smarter than momentum
momentum in a world without meaning is the fundamentals
momentum keeps you safe. when it flags you sell. rises, you buy.
momentum can set you free or chain you to a life of regret. your choice
Took .75% position in Chainlink $LINK at 25.941. I think it has asymmetric risk reward into a humiliating defeat for Biden in the midterm elections. This will remove Gensler's sword of Damocles hanging above Chainlink's Oracle TAM.
1/ Republican sweep odds just broke 50%
people are ignoring five basic realities
1] Bitcoin is crashing upwards
2] It's doing so in a way uncorrelated with equities
3] The Bitcoin network is not much better than it was in 2018
4] The guys who executed QE for the Fed are marketing the BTC ETF
5] The DOJ thanked Tether
Have seen some young traders have very unrealistic expectations about their returns. A thread to knowing how much edge you realistically need to trade full time.
1/ Here's the expectancy of 1,000 traders with no edge trading leveraged instruments (stocks, gold, oil). Why so bad?
People seem to enjoy threads about learning to trade. A thread about my journey and advice for my past self 👇
1/ In 2010 I realized credit default swaps anticipated dividend cuts and other bad things likely due to being OTC & less regulated. By 2013, I quit my job to trade it.
2/ CDS are a bit hard to understand, so instead I'll focus on the bonds. The 2025 Credit Suisse bonds pictured below trade at 6.4%. Compare this, for example to Ukraine 2025 debt trading at 67%.
Talking about Ukrainian debt default makes sense. CS debt default - less so.
the price of crypto is mooning because every institution is in on the joke
the joke is that debt and fiscal profligacy matters and that purchasing power is going to get debased to nothing by reckless, old politicians who are going to be dead before any of the consequences come
6/ Privately Discuss Your Scams.
Participate in group chats where you discuss profiting off your followers. These were heavily monitored, recorded and submitted to the SEC. The court filing repeatedly mentioned "Private chats ad surreptitiously recorded convos”
Let's talk about Warren Buffett. A thread. 1/ I grew up in Omaha, born and raised. All I ever wanted to do was escape. I loved hedge funds. Hated Buffett. The one day someone told me Buffett used to be the wildest fund manager of all. I didn't believe at first, but I learned.
The ARK Genomics ETF and the ARK Financial Technology ETF have realized an 88% correlation over the past year despite having no overlapping holdings and the companies therein having totally different biz models and end markets.
In the end, it is all the same trade.
Putting some reflections on this year down before I go on my annual pilgrimage to the wilderness.
1/ This year has been a good, professionally. I went from a 3 to a ~5 Sharpe. Some past investments paid out. I can talk about Crypto again at Xmas. But I have a bad feeling. Why?
there's only one "trading course"
George Soros documented his process for 4 decades. Druckenmiller (head PM), (quant) Niederhoffer and analyst (Rogers) documented theirs too
No other legendary PM and his analysts have drawn such a long, robust guide to speculation
Study Soros
Principles of rigorous backtesting. I'm at the point where I think backtesting has no positive edge - but failing to do it well can lose you a lot of money. See a lot of examples of absolute amateur hour backtesting on this site. A thread:
13/ But "grind culture" (Ala Elon sleeping in the factory) and consumer capitalism, as well as Calvinist Christianity are basically death cults.
We are encouraged to sacrifice ourselves for wealth, for our countries, for our families and so forth. But AI makes this obsolete
A Product Document for Individual Traders (Trigger Warning: Long Post)
It makes me happy when people unplug from the system and go trade their own money. Trading has been my passion since 16 years of age. I find that most information on the subject is terrible and wanted to try
Tiger, Melvin and macro fund blowups + the rise of Millenium / BlueCrest prove that plugging multiple traders into a risk managed process generates superior risk adjusted returns
The problem is we are pathologically attracted to heroes, even though heroes rarely survive
3/ CS bonds are not pricing a pending credit event because as of the July Quarter, CS's CET1 capital adequacy was at 13.5% - within the bank's own target and well above the 8% intl regulatory requirement or the 10% Swiss hurdle.
In the pre 08' era, sub 5% CET1s were common.
To the ppl who shorted me
I’ve been grinding in a watery cage for 2 years barely leaving my room letting the remainder of my youth fade to ash
You’re about to get motherfuckign margin called
Wanted to look at S&P performance one week after 4+ standard deviation up moves in the US 2 year yield (we saw a 7+ sigma move today). The results are noise. I predict a brigade of weaponized muppets will predict a Lehman moment though without data.
Brockman bull tweeting about GPT4 5 hours before iPhone note lower case resignation
Looks like a bunch of snakes who have never shipped something in their lives running a palace coup
This is what happens when u hire ppl for optics. Ppl good at optics excel at betrayal
The whole point of secular growth stocks was that their growth was not supposed to depend on macroeconomic conditions
If Snapchat, a top Gen Z app, is guiding down due to macroeconomic conditions it’s not just a credibility problem. it’s a definition problem for many companies
After that, what happened was like a Greatest Hits of Financial Bubbles. We literally had all of them. EM, real estate, tech, crypto, spacs. It’s not an accident. Cynical operators dusted off all the old play books to make as much as possible while the punch bowl was out
Worldcoin (Sam Altman's crypto project and my preferred AI coin long) is starting to skyrocket again - now clearing the previous highs. Its fully diluted market cap is $50b
This extreme valuation is contra to much of the market (such as companies like Accenture) pricing in the