Max Long

[Patrick OShaughnessy @patrick_oshag]

Three years ago, two Harvard dropouts set out to build a better AI chip than the largest companies in the world.

Almost everyone I called at the time said it was impossible.

Today, Etched (@Etched) comes out of stealth with $800M total raised, $1B in signed customer contracts, and a working next-gen AI chip.

This was my excuse to ask the two founders, @UbertiGavin and @robertwachen, every question I have about compute and inference.

We discuss:
- Why they built an entire rack and not just a chip
- The two technical bets behind their architecture no one else has tried
- How two founders in their twenties recruited industry legends
- The night they nearly ran out of money
- Why whoever produces the most tokens wins

If you care about the future of compute, Gavin and Rob are two people to know. I think you will find the story of what they have built hard to forget.

Enjoy!

TIMESTAMPS
0:00 Intro
1:00 Why Nobody Believed Etched Would Work
14:06 Why Inference Is the Bottleneck
22:27 Gavin and Rob’s Origin Stories
33:24 Taking Huge Risks to Move Faster
49:43 Kernels, Compilers, and the AI Stack
1:02:08 Raising $100M to Survive
1:16:00 The Future of Models, Agents, and Intelligence

[ludoonchart @ludoonchart]

Barry Sternlicht on how to actually catch massive runners:

"pay attention to the big themes because that's what will help you earn ten times your money."

most guys get chewed up by the daily noise. they stare at the 1 minute chart trying to scalp pennies, fight algos, and burn their brains out on random chop

the big guys do not trade the noise. they trade the actual trend

Sternlicht made his money by zooming out. instead of fighting for scraps, he looks for huge market shifts where the big money has to go over the next few years

you do not get a 10x return by clicking buttons all day. you get it by finding a massive wave before the crowd wakes up, sizing up, and just sitting on your hands

stop trying to outsmart the daily chop. find the big theme and just let it run

bookmark and watch him break it down here

[Luc @investingluc]

I'm asking you to think in bigger percentages.

I used be the guy saying "I'll just squeeze a quick +5% out of this and move on with my week". Easy money right.

So draining. Usually bites you. Waste of time/energy. You MUST protect your mental capital.

I anchor high now:
> be selective
> can this stock run 100%+ in the next ~6mo?
> if yes, why? what's the catalyst?
> is the story strong?
> are we in a good environment?
> im in

Oftentimes, you won't get the full 100% moves... but you should be mentally prepared to let the big picture play out. Make it the expectation.

Your only job after that is to manage the position...move stops up to protect gains. If you get stopped out for +25% (or even flat), great! If it goes for 200%, even better! Because you were mentally prepared to actually hold it.

I'd rather sell 10% too late than 100% too early.

[Will @athcanft]

https://t.co/6iHh132Ys2

[Sean Frank @Seanfrank]

phone background until I hit 100m in ebitda per year (2028)

[Luc @investingluc]

Craft your "for you page" on X to be almost entirely non-trading.

I click on business stuff, fitness, hockey videos, startups...literally anything but trading.

If I value an investor's opinion, thoughts, or research on markets, I already follow them. If not, I don't care.

Most ppl are dumb...less noise = better.

[Goshawk Trades @GoshawkTrades]

a former quant PM at Tudor Investment Corp and Moore Capital, 35 years in institutional finance.

on why trying to predict the biggest market moves is the worst possible use of your time:

"an early analyst will look at a price chart and say, some days it moves up a little or down a little, but some days it really moves up a lot. there's three of those days a year. if i could just predict those, i'll make a huge amount of money."

"and what they don't realize is that the reason those days are so big is because no one was able to predict them."

"that's what a market does when something happens that no one else expected, that no one had already put a position on or hedged for. it shows you a great big move."

"so they've just spent who knows how much energy trying to predict the thing that is least predictable, all because they're drawn to it for excitement's sake."

the big moves are big precisely because they're unpredictable. if they were predictable, positions would already exist and the move would be smaller. the size of the move IS the proof that nobody saw it coming.

(clip from: Odds on Open")

[Goshawk Trades @GoshawkTrades]

an important concept in trading that nobody wants to hear:

if a strategy is super comfortable to hold, the returns have probably already been arbitraged mostly away.

risk premiums exist precisely because they're painful. momentum works because holding through extended drawdowns and whipsaws is brutal. carry works because you're exposed to blowups. mean reversion works because you're buying things that look like they're going to zero.

the return is part of the compensation for enduring the pain.

this is why so many traders build a strategy, hit the first real drawdown, and abandon it, they didn't realize the drawdown wasn't a bug. it was the price of admission.

no pain, no premium.

[Ted Zhang @TedHZhang]

The best way to use X is to put your favorite accounts into an X list and scroll that list comprehensively a few times a day.

With this, you can create a master mind of the best investors, entrepreneurs, news accounts, technologists, and leading thinkers in one area.

[Fireside Alpha @firesidealpha]

Steve Mandel (Lone Pine) sat down on Joys of Compounding to discuss the building of his fund.

Mandel spent thirty years protecting one rare skill, judging what a business is worth years out, which he thinks is only getting more valuable.

Lessons learned w/ more in the article:

1/ Duration was engineered, not hoped for. Most funds promise a long horizon and then take monthly redemptions, so a multi-year thesis can get pulled at the worst moment. Mandel built Lone Pine the other way around, so the capital stays committed as long as the thesis needs rather than getting cut short by a redemption.

"We want to own this company, 20 years is a long time, but we can think in three to five year type of increments in terms of where this company is going to be. And in order to realize that, you have to stay invested."

2/ Read the people first, the lesson he took from Julian. He treats a company as a living thing whose future is set by the people at the top, so judging management and capital allocation is inseparable from judging the business.

"These are living, breathing organisms, companies that we are dealing with. And the course of those companies, the future of those companies is determined by the decisions that people at the top make about capital allocation, about strategy, about the people they hire."

3/ Invest behind change, and never marry a position. Fundamental work on businesses in motion, with no loyalty to a name once the thesis has played out.

"You can't be married to a company or an industry because things change and they change rapidly." and "Wireless was our biggest thing in our first few years. We haven't invested a single thing in wireless in probably 20 years. Google didn't exist, Amazon didn't exist."

4/ The structural edge widens as price discovery thins. Passive funds and the multi-manager platforms have grown into the two largest pools of capital, and neither prices what a business is worth three to five years out, which hands that question to the few still willing to answer it.

"There's no notion about what the value three to five years from now is going to be for any of those securities for either passive investors or the platforms, which leads us to believe that if the market has fewer and fewer people doing real true price discovery about what a business should be worth, that that should play to the advantage of those people who are trying to."

5/ The proof he is proudest of is not a return. He built the firm so no single person becomes indispensable, and spread ownership so wide that the number he points to with pride is a retirement balance vs a track record.

"If we're all sitting here and it's the same group 10 years from now, we've done something wrong because that will not allow others to rise."

"We have the highest 401k balance per employee of any firm in the United States."

[Ethan Kho @ethanrkho]

If you're young, your savings are the smallest piece of your real net worth:

@ElmWealth explains:

"A young person might have $200k saved — and $5 million of human capital."

"Their future earnings dwarf the portfolio. The savings are a tiny slice of total wealth."

"So they could take 50% risk on that $200k and it's still small against $5.2M."

"That's exactly why 'take more risk when you're young' is true."

"But it has to be systematic risk — and there's a real limit on how far you can lever it."

"Because the cost of leverage is just ridiculously high."

[Сarm1ne @carm1nee]

Izzy Englander started Millennium with $35 million in 1989 - today it manages $84 billion - and has lost money in only one year out of 35

his only interview ever - how he built the most consistent hedge fund in history from a specialist desk on the floor of the American Stock Exchange

"in the land of the blind the one-eyed is king - the options market was in its infancy - and it just produced a lot of business"

"the primary piece is the ability to deliver what you say you're going to deliver - from there you need to control risk - risk becomes very very critical"

bookmark & watch the full conversation ↓

[Ethan Kho @ethanrkho]

Ex-Citadel Quant Researcher on Trading Power & Gas — One of the Most Asymmetric Markets in the World

Neel Somani (@neelsomani) — ex-Citadel commodities QR. Built the models the discretionary traders used to price power.

"It's table stakes to put down seven figures of collateral in order to seriously trade power."

We cover:
- What a commodities QR actually does — building models traders use, sitting in PM meetings & how "slope" (your real cut of P&L) works
- Where power edge comes from: congestion — the physics of a wire that heats up, droops, and can't carry more
- How a hub trade gets built from the ground up: weather → demand → which units switch on → your price vs. the market's
- Why blindly going long power is a structurally losing trade — skew assets always price above expected value
- The anatomy of a blow-up: doubling down into the Feb 2021 Texas freeze as the price ran to $9,000/MWh
- Why hedge funds trade power & gas but mostly steer clear of oil — geopolitics & risk you can't model
- "Binding constraints" — the pricing model he carried off the grid and into startups, AI & supply chains
- Why the guys who take risk for a living buy index funds with their own money

Highlights:
(00:00) Intro
(01:12) Quant researcher execution models within multi-manager hedge funds
(07:35) How transmission line congestion drives alpha in power markets
(13:24) Capital intensity and managing risk profiles of high-skew assets
(19:19) Why commodity desks prefer domestic power over geopolitical oil risk
(22:55) Portfolio construction and risk mitigation during tail-risk freeze events
(31:36) Capitalizing on the physical infrastructure constraints of AI data centers
(36:25) How agentic architecture redefines software engineering and technical moats
(43:04) Quant career opportunity cost relative to the AI paradigm shift
(56:15) Variant views on venture multiples and agentic customer acquisition economics

[Gregory Blotnick @gregoryblotnick]

bunch of frameworks + model portfolio template ideas in here -- different ways to think about L/S, both top-down and bottom-up, different ways to sort and force-rank a universe of long and short ideas

-- probability weightings, risk/reward weightings, ways to think about upside vs. downside, ways to think about ranges of outcomes, ways to bucket variables

no right or wrong. just the various schools of thought to choose from

-- ways to think about exposure as an output instead of an input, dynamic adjustments driven by the mkt and by valuations, where you focus on bottoms-up ideas and let them dictate the top-down

-- all from several angles, mostly an individual or a single-mgr. the multi-mgr factor-neutral model is sort of its own universe...one which is overly complex, difficult to duplicate, and has a time horizon measured in days

imo, only a fool would say "I'm going to pick a fight with the toughest competition, I'm going to do it on their turf, and I'm going to do it on their terms"

so idk what benefit there is in writing about it or about factors in general...capital duration is a real source of edge, these short-term drivers of price should prob be avoided rather than embraced

there's a lot in here, but it will 100% help u think differently... that is all I promise, and nothing more 🎁

[ludoonchart @ludoonchart]

David Tepper explained what actually builds your career in the markets. and it's definitely not a perfect track record

talking to students, he was straight up: your success just depends on how you bounce back from taking a hit

"if i go through my career, it was a lot of disappointments. there's a lot of things that didn't go right. but that's not what's gonna define you. what's gonna define you is how you recover from those things and how you move on. you just never stop."

another solid lesson from Tepper is about staying true to yourself. when he was at Goldman Sachs, the head of M&A told him to buy a stock that was on the firm's restricted list. Tepper just flat out refused to do the trade. because of that, the guy killed Tepper's chance of making partner later on. but he has zero regrets: if someone tells you to do something sketchy, just don't do it, even if it hurts your career

the takeaway: the markets will inevitably punch you in the face. the key is not to get stuck, learn from it, and keep moving forward

bookmark and watch the full talk here

[Gregory Blotnick @gregoryblotnick]

pages 4-6 below (Q&A with Ainslie and Lasry)

6 pgs total, 1-3 were in QT (Ainslie on L/S)...nada mas

[Gregory Blotnick @gregoryblotnick]

"Love your losers like you love your winners"

[Gregory Blotnick @gregoryblotnick]

one of the many definitions of risk, in five parts (from BRK 1993)

1) The certainty with which the long-term economic characteristics of the business can be evaluated

2) The certainty with which management can be evaluated, both to its ability to realize the full potential of the business and to wisely employ its cash flows

3) The certainty with which management can be counted on to channel the rewards from the business to the shareholders rather than to itself

4) The purchase price of the business

5) The levels of taxation and inflation that will be experienced and that will determine the degree by which an investor's purchasing power return is reduced from his gross return.

[Roan @RohOnChain]

this is f*cking dangerous

build hedge fund using "loop engineering" that prints alpha 24/7 (Full Guide)

if I had this a year ago, I would've built my hedge fund in a week instead of a year

bookmark before someone takes it down

[Сarm1ne @carm1nee]

Three hedge fund founders managing a combined $120 billion - Steve Cohen - Dmitri Balyasny - Mike Rockefeller - sat down with the woman who told them the brutal truth about their own industry

what separates the funds that survive from the thousands that die - why the smartest people in the room eventually leave - and what LPs actually look for before writing a check

"peel back the curtain at a $30 billion fund - it's the same one or two people driving returns year after year - after a while you start questioning whether you're in the right room"

"you can forget about alpha if you cannot attract and retain a winning team - talent is everything"

"if you have people you have problems - pure and simple"

bookmark & watch the full conversation ↓