ham_sandwich

5 ms·

1.
by ham_sandwich 6y ago
ah yes, a nice discussion of the central bank toolkit when policy rates are at their effective lower bound wait, what's this? Bitcoin and ethereum tickers at the top of the page? A section titled 'Helicopter Money on Blockchain&#x
2.
by ham_sandwich 7y ago
Quant is a pretty broad term. Some would say it’s often working on nonlinear desks to implement/calibrate volatility surfaces and things like that or working more on the risk management side. There’s also the whole HFT world (Jane St,
3.
by ham_sandwich 7y ago
Is an HFT arms race necessarily a bad thing? Doesn’t the market in general benefit from these firms viciously competing to grind out spreads+inefficiencies? I know very little about HFT, but it seems like we’ve gone past “peak HFT margins”.
4.
by ham_sandwich 7y ago
A famous anecdote along these lines are the whatsapp founders. I haven’t done so personally yet but it’s starting to look like I might consider this route. Several years ago, I would have leaned toward a SaaS business targeting some super n
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by ham_sandwich 7y ago
It seems like Tesla is at a pivotal moment. On one hand there are hyper-bulls who claim Tesla is a $4000 stock and the future of transportation. On the other, hyper-bears claim the equity should trade around $0-$10. There seems to be no mid
6.
by ham_sandwich 7y ago
Isn’t it just one big misunderstanding between them? Taleb thinks 538’s probabilities represent a binary option price on the event, in which case, yes, the probabilities should stay very close to 50% because the vol is so high. Whereas Silv
7.
by ham_sandwich 7y ago
I don’t work at FAANG, but the general sense I get is that while there is no doubt top DL talent that should command mid six to seven figure salaries, it seems that with AI programs stuffed at both the undergrad and grad levels that things
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by ham_sandwich 7y ago
Looking at that odds chart got me in a betting mood. I think those Yang odds in the article could be steep given the exuberance of some in his online following, however there could be interesting arb plays with an outsider like Yang like go
9.
by ham_sandwich 8y ago
You’re right. Like a lot of other engineers, I once thought “ML+High level team info=$$$$” but quickly learned that you really can’t get an edge unless you’re digging into that more granular data and even then it’s really tough. It can be v
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by ham_sandwich 8y ago
I just heard about this on Patrick O’Shaughnessy podcast. As a coffee-fiend, I really should look into becoming a customer, and am also interested to see what offerings come next. Reminds me of a Whitehead quote that I like that can also se
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by ham_sandwich 8y ago
My votes are for: -the use of fire -the number 0. (Although we can debate if this was invented or discovered)
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by ham_sandwich 8y ago
Wouldn’t large banks and other institutions be in favor of more regulations to deepen their moats? I could see why they’d want to get rid of Volckler though, so the big I-banks can return to the serious pre-crisis trading revenues they were
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by ham_sandwich 8y ago
I’ve been interested in learning about topological data analysis, haven’t dug in too deep yet, but it definitely looks like an interesting direction to zig in while the field at large zags with ever larger deep learning architectures. UMAP
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by ham_sandwich 8y ago
With the rise of lambda+managed services, I think we’ll start seeing finance and development start to blend and merge. Besides giving businesses more legibility into what specific parts of their business logic cost to operate vs. the value
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by ham_sandwich 8y ago
I think it is possible for that culture to exist on teams if it’s instilled by the coach. I have been on teams with more disciplined, formal coaches and people certainly weren’t as open about it. It would probably be frowned upon if brought
16.
by ham_sandwich 8y ago
When you’re in the water that much, I think you just end up getting desensitized to it. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Teammates going to a corner and openly declaring “don’t come over here I’m peeing.” Coaches literally enco
17.
by ham_sandwich 8y ago
As a longtime swimmer and water polo player, my eyes have been absolutely wrecked by harsh pools many, many times. However, I don’t think it’s pee. First off, every swimmer pees in the pool. I have been a part of tens of thousands of man-ho
18.
by ham_sandwich 8y ago
This is a good point. There is some sentiment in this thread, and among the public in general, that Hollywood has lost its touch and is unoriginal with the deluge of remakes and superhero movies. I don’t work in the industry, but I think Ho
19.
by ham_sandwich 8y ago
Yes, from the looks of it, they are well behind in self-driving tech. If it’s inevitable that self-driving will bankrupt them, why would anyone invest in them at all? The two scenarios I can see are 1). That their ride-matching platform wil
20.
by ham_sandwich 8y ago
I think it’s inevitable. Cloud providers will continue to move up the stack so other firms can focus more resources on their unique and differentiated offerings. It just seems like in the future most companies shouldn’t have any notion of s
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by ham_sandwich 8y ago
Another consideration is that FB would have to reorient their culture to sell to and service the enterprise customer. You could argue that Google is having that very problem with their cloud offering. Despite having superior engineering and
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by ham_sandwich 8y ago
Urban combat tactics are fascinating. I’m reminded of this post that explains how the IDF in the early 2000s would try to “walk through walls” in urban combat. It also discusses how the film ‘Die Hard’ is a study of architecture. [0] The un
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by ham_sandwich 8y ago
Always mind boggling to see those margins on that sort of volume. It’s no question FB is one of the greatest money-printing machines ever built. Where does the growth come next though? Do they need to diversify their revenue streams away fr
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by ham_sandwich 8y ago
In what sense did Facebook ‘happen’? People chose to join; they weren’t forced to. Facebook qua social network is a valuable tool for many people. Now you can perhaps make the case that their effort to monetize was an unethical bait-and-swi
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by ham_sandwich 8y ago
I think you’re specifically thinking of covered interest rate arbitrage, in which a trader borrows in one currency at a cheap rate, lends in another currency at a more expensive rate and uses a currency forward to hedge out the exchange rat
26.
by ham_sandwich 8y ago
I often wonder how much climate change is priced in. If climate change is a given, wouldn’t we see it reflected e.g. in the implied vols of super long-dated options or real estate in Miami? VCs would be placing bets like crazy on solutions.
27.
by ham_sandwich 8y ago
In a straddle/strangle you have unlimited upside on both legs (up and down/call and put). It’s a matter of determining if the long gamma+long volatility position is worth the price you pay in option premium up front and decay ther
28.
by ham_sandwich 8y ago
This idea forms the basis of a crackpot theory I have about business and economics which is that value accrues to firms that find new ways to “alter the constraints of the game. “ To steal an example from Ben Thompson, the internet enabled
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by ham_sandwich 8y ago
Yes, that’s one way of putting it. In general, by ‘deeper’, I mean it’s more abstracted away from the final customer, that it is ‘further away’ from them. For example, if you sell toasters, you better hope that electricity has been commodi
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by ham_sandwich 8y ago
I think the key is to commoditize the complement when the complement is embedded deeper in the value chain than your product.

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