DaQuapper

Inventor of the solar-powered banana peeler

[Meb Faber @MebFaber]

𝗝𝗶𝗺 𝗚𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝗵𝗮𝘀 𝗰𝗵𝗿𝗼𝗻𝗶𝗰𝗹𝗲𝗱 𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆 𝗪𝗮𝗹𝗹 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗲𝘁 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗶𝗮 𝘀𝗶𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝟭𝟵𝟴𝟯, 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗵𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸𝘀 𝘁𝗼𝗱𝗮𝘆 𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗮𝗹𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝘄𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗲𝘀𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝘁𝗵𝗲𝗺.

My conversation with Jim covers:
• Why AI is "one of the greatest bubbles of all time"
• Expectations for the SpaceX, OpenAI & Anthropic IPOs
• One-third of the ~$6 trillion in life insurance assets now sits in private credit
• His grade for Jay Powell, and expectations for Kevin Warsh
• U.S. debt went from $1 trillion in principal to $1 trillion in annual interest in a single career

0:00 Starts
0:39 Jim on the AI mania
12:23 The economic implications of inflation & deflation
19:56 Interest rates and private credit concerns
27:13 The Fed's inflation 'target'
41:10 How to fix the Federal Reserve
45:09 The history and role of gold in portfolios
54:34 Jim's most memorable investment
57:28 Historical periods to study

[The Idea Farm @TheIdeaFarm]

𝗝𝗶𝗺 𝗚𝗿𝗮𝗻𝘁'𝘀 𝗚𝗼𝗹𝗱 𝗢𝗿𝗶𝗴𝗶𝗻 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆

"Never queue up for an investment."

He bought near the $850 peak in early 1980, was sure he was "protected", then watched it sink to ~$500.

More on gold today: "The Fed needs to own some gold as a marker of its commitment to sound finance as defined by our forebears. We need to restore personal responsibility to financial outcomes"

[Bill Ackman @BillAckman]

.@BernieSanders , it is a time to celebrate. @elonmusk has created enormous value for society by building @SpaceX, driving down the cost of rocket launches and creating a global satellite communication network that has brought high speed, low-cost internet and communication access to hundreds of millions and eventually billions of people along with critical advantages for our military and our nation’s defense.

SpaceX and its technologies will cause an acceleration in the growth of wages and wealth creation globally, including in some of the poorest communities in the U.S. and around the world.

Access to low-cost, high speed communications everywhere will allow children around the world to be educated, families to build businesses, and life-saving medical knowledge and care to be available everywhere.

SpaceX will materially bring down the cost of compute, advancing AI and humanity.

Meanwhile, 4,000 SpaceX employees yesterday became millionaires, including hourly wage employees who you claim you are trying to help.

The Elon Musks of the world drive growth, global GDP, and provide access to goods and services at lower cost that would otherwise not exist.

Elon’s nominal trillionaire status is due to his ownership of SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, the Boring Company and his other initiatives that have brought new technologies that improve our everyday lives.

Elon is not sitting on a trillion dollar pile of cash, jewelry and gold. He is using his controlling stakes in his companies to advance mankind. Elon’s companies don’t pay dividends. They reinvest all of their capital to accelerate innovation and value creation.

Elon is working 24/7 for all of us. He deserves respect and appreciation, not smears.

Bernie, your socialism would never allow a SpaceX to be built. Socialism has only proven to impoverish mankind and lead to death and destruction.

We need to create the conditions for more SpaceXs to be built, not attack the great entrepreneurs who are helping to advance our country.

[0xDipper @Dipper_pol]

Nassim Taleb's mentor proved Wall Street's math is a lie. Before black swans, Nassim Taleb had a teacher: Benoit Mandelbrot, the father of fractals.

His finding was brutal - in the textbook model, a "10-sigma" crash should happen once in millions of millions of years. In real markets, those days keep showing up.

Over the last 100 years, almost all the money was made and lost in about 10 days. The rest barely mattered.

"Only the very few rare events count. The rest hardly counts at all."

"The bell curve doesn't just understate market risk - its assumptions are absurd."

"Great fortunes were made in very few days. Great ruins happened in very few days."

~80 min, free. the mathematician who proved markets are rougher than anyone admits ↓

[venus @RitOnchain]

Jane Street pays $750K/year for quants who master matrix calculations holistically that can be used to get alpha from space satellites.

57-minutes. free. By MIT Applied Math team.

"If you are hand-computing derivatives on complicated matrix factorizations, it is incredibly error-prone. Modern automatic differentiation is more computer science than calculus."

here's the breakdown:
• The math behind large-scale engineering simulations
• How backpropagation relies entirely on reverse-mode adjoint differentiation
• Thinking in matrices instead of scalar arrays

Watch this now. This will change the way you optimize networks forever and then read below article.

[delost @thedelost]

a quant from a Citadel pod showed a model that broke how i think about "the market"

there is no single market. there are 16 parallel order books running at the same time

NYSE, Nasdaq, ARCA, EDGX, IEX, dark pools, and more
same stock, slightly different price, slightly different volatility on each one

the model is called VenueFrag
it tracks how order flow fragments across venues and where volatility leads

off-exchange volume: 30.7% of all trades happening in dark pools
vol spread between dark and lit venues: +0.36%
venue concentration index: 0.1462

those numbers update every 5 minutes

when dark pool volatility leads lit exchanges, institutions are positioning first
when lit venues lead, retail is driving

that 3D surface is a real-time map of volatility differentials across all 16 venues
peaks are where smart money is active. valleys are where liquidity is disappearing

> venue fragmentation: public research since Reg NMS 2005
> exchange-level data: free from every venue
> HHI concentration math: 1950s antitrust economics
> quant desks running this live: citadel, two sigma, jump

you've been trading "the market" your whole career
there are 16 of them. and they don't agree with each other

full breakdown in the video below

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

Pod!!!!

[ludoonchart @ludoonchart]

Ron Baron is the most ruthless long-term predator on Wall Street

while average traders panic sell for a 20% gain, he waits a decade and walks away with $8 billion in pure profit

"it took me four years of visiting Elon Musk just to get convinced. average guys buy a stock and check the price 10 times a day - i watched Tesla triple, completely missed the rally, and then dumped $400 million in it when i knew for a fact it was going to change the world."

"the crowd is obsessed with taking tiny profits off the table - we held our position through absolute hell, and turned that initial check into $8 billion"

"now everyone is fighting over generic AI stocks - we are dumping billions into Spacex because we are completely convinced it will become a $30 trillion empire and the single largest company in human history"

Baron didn't build a $55 billion fund by trading the daily news cycle or listening to analysts. he built it by finding generational visionaries, buying a massive stake, and completely ignoring the noise for 10 years

watch his brand new interview breaking down why he is betting everything on Spacex

[Jack Posobiec @JackPosobiec]

The goods are here

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

cc @AccidentalP

[AVoice Clarified @TheWordPreached]

https://t.co/maeOS5uTsa

[Marc Andreessen 🇺🇸 @pmarca]

If, when you say regulation, you mean the dead and clammy hand of the commissar—the gentleman who has never in his life built a single thing, drafting rules to govern a thing he cannot define, to be enforced by men who cannot read them; if you mean the form in triplicate, the impact assessment upon the impact assessment, the compliance officer who breeds, in the warm dark of the org chart, further compliance officers unto the third and fourth generation; if you mean the moat—the deep cold moat that the giant digs around his own castle and christens, with a perfectly straight face, public safety—the drawbridge he hauls up behind himself the very instant he is across, lest any hungrier and hungrier man should follow; if you mean the precautionary principle, which, had it governed our grandfathers, would have banned the wheel pending further study of the hill, and left us yet shivering and raw in the mouth of the cave, blessing its excellent ventilation; if you mean the European disease—that magnificent open-air museum of a continent, which produces in our time precisely two things in great abundance, and they are regulation, and the eloquent and well-footnoted regret of cultivated men explaining at length why they have produced nothing else; if you mean the license required to think, the permission slip for honest arithmetic, the king’s wax stamp pressed upon the forehead of every new idea before it may draw its first breath; if you mean the agency dispatched, with trumpets, to slay a single dragon, which arrives at the cave, surveys the accommodations, and moves in—and spends the ensuing century laying eggs and devouring the very villagers it was sworn to defend; if you mean the startup that perishes not of the market’s honest verdict but of the filing fee, the genius decamping by the next tide to a freer and warmer shore; if you mean the law that arrives, faithful as the swallows, exactly one whole epoch too late—helmeted, plumed, and magnificently armed—to regulate the stagecoach—then certainly, my friends, I am against it.

But—but, my friends—if, when you say regulation, you mean instead the humble steel guardrail upon the mountain road at midnight, the very thing you curse on the easy days and bless on your knees the one night the fog comes down; if you mean the brakes—for it is the brakes, and not the engine alone, that permit a sane man to drive fast and yet arrive alive—and the buttress, without which no cathedral was ever flung so high, but only in spite of which, but because of which; if you mean the meat inspector, who is the single homely reason a man may eat a sausage in this republic without first composing his last will and testament; if you mean the firebreak cut clean through the forest before the dry season of the burning, the smallpox cordon, the buoy that marks the channel, the rule of the road that lets ten thousand strangers hurtle past one another in the dark at fearful speed and arrive, by its quiet grace, every one of them home; if you mean the honest scale and the true weight, the reason a pound is a pound and a dollar a dollar from Natchez to Nome; if you mean the firm and decent wall between the counterfeit voice and the widow’s bank account, between the deepfaked candidate and the ballot box on the eve of the vote, between the loosed and loveless machine and the schoolyard it neither knows nor pities; if you mean the simple plank of law that says the strong shall not, in the gray dawn, feed the weak quietly into the furnace and sell the rising smoke as progress; if you mean, in the end, the one slender thread of trust without which no citizen will ever dare to use the marvelous thing at all—for where there is no rule there is no trust, and where there is no trust there is no commerce, and a miracle that no man dares to touch is no miracle, but only a handsome and expensive ghost—then certainly I am for it.

This is my stand. I will not retreat from it. I will not compromise one inch of it.

[Anp🅰️nman @spacanpanman]

Never bet against 🇺🇸 innovation

5 minutes later he says "there are only 25 satellites launched a year every year and thats not going to change." The SpaceX person on the panel said "thats true if you're looking out of the rearview".

SpaceX launched 53 satellits in the last 24 hours

Cc: @KenKirtland17

[Livsun @L1vsun]

quants make $400k/year and nobody has written the honest guide

because people who could write it already have the job - last thing they want is more competition

actual path isn't a secret, just buried under a decade of bad takes from people who never got in

here's what insiders don't post:

filter isn't your finance degree, your trading knowledge, or your Wall Street connections

banks hire physics PhDs, math PhDs, CS people who never touched econ

job isn't knowing how to trade - it's building the model that does the trading, completely different skill

actual gatekeep is a stochastic calculus whiteboard problem while someone stares at you

most people self-eliminate before the interview because they heard "you need 10 years of finance experience"

you don't - linear algebra, probability, and one solid project in C++ or Python is the real checklist

Bookmark this before its gone

programs that actually place people: Carnegie Mellon MSCF, Baruch MFE, NYU Tandon

nobody mentions these because nobody who got in through them wants to share the shortcut

barriers are technical, not social - quant world looks closed because they let it look closed

costs them nothing and filters out thousands of applicants

[Mario Nawfal @MarioNawfal]

🇺🇸🇺🇦 Declassified docs just dropped showing U.S.-funded labs in Ukraine working with anthrax, Ebola, Marburg, SARS, tularemia and more.

Tulsi is releasing the full list over 40 labs.

Big questions now about oversight and what was really happening, but so far, it doesn't look good at all.

Source: DNI BIOLAB / Writer: Lucas

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

For decades, the 14th floor of GM's Detroit headquarters was its own separate world. Executives arrived through a private basement elevator. Meals were catered in a private dining room. No one else was invited. A 1993 Seattle Times investigation called it "the ultimate symbol of power at the world's largest company."

Tesla didn't just build a different culture. It built one inside GM's old factory. In 2010, Tesla bought the Fremont plant where GM and Toyota had jointly operated a car factory for 26 years, then ran it completely differently.

While every major automaker gave line workers wages and maybe a pension, Tesla gave them stock, shares that vest over time, across every level of the company, including people on the floor running assembly equipment. Electrek noted in 2020 that stock grants for all workers, factory staff included, were rare enough in auto that it was worth calling out.

The math starts in 2012. Tesla's stock sat at around $2.26 per share then, once you account for two stock splits since. Four years earlier, the company had nearly run out of money, and Musk funded it personally to keep it alive. Workers who took those early grants and held them saw the stock hit $410 at the 2021 peak. A dollar of Tesla stock from 2012 grew 181 times over in nine years. CNN confirmed Musk's account: some Fremont production workers became millionaires from those grants.

Musk wasn't running any of this from a separate floor. During Model 3 production hell in 2018, Tesla was fighting to hit 5,000 cars a week while barely managing 2,000. He moved to the factory and slept there for days. "I was wearing the same clothes for five days," he told Bloomberg Businessweek. "My credibility, the credibility of the whole team, was at stake."

Tesla paid out $2 billion in stock grants to its employees in 2024, from engineering to the factory floor, at every level. The 14th floor at GM was a monument to who owned the company. A Tesla stock grant in Fremont in 2012 was a monument to who built it.

[Thierry from arvy 🇨🇭 @ThierryBorgeat]

16. The Dow Jones lost 17% in 1929, 34% in 1930, 53% in 1931 and 23% in 1932.

Be grateful. And check out our epic book club and the reading “1929”.

Chart 4: Dow Jones Jones during the Great Depression and the subsequent recovery

[Atlas @crptAtlas]

Scott Bessent spent 20 years trading against governments with Soros and Druckenmiller

Made $1B collapsing the British pound in a single day

Then called Japan: "a once-in-a-lifetime market move is coming" - made another $1.2B

When he left, Soros invested $2B in his own fund. He raised $4.5B in 6 months

Now he manages the finances of the United States as Treasury Secretary

Watch his interview

Then read the article

[st1ne @SolSt1ne]

Paul Tudor Jones told everyone the market was about to crash - they laughed at him

then October 1987 hit and the Dow lost 22% in a day - he made 200% that month

he sat down next to Stanley Druckenmiller and they explained how they each saw the move before it happened

"losers average losers"

"every day I assume every position I have is wrong"

two traders. zero losing decades. one conversation.

bookmark and watch it today

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

If a Treasurer of a Fortune 1000 company kept all of their cash in one bank they’d be fired for incompetence.

Similarly, if the leadership of a Fortune 1000 company bets the farm on only one frontier lab and their models you’re taking a lot of risk. This risk compounds as the labs’ intentions and public actions are bewildering and show them to be increasingly unpredictable.

This is why every major enterprise needs a model agnostic “control plane”. Get the work done, increase the productivity, make more money, save costs, increase efficiency but do it with governance, auditability and control.

Capabilities across all models are converging. Open source prices are, in some cases, 1/100th of the frontier labs. But governance, control, compliance and collaboration capabilities don’t exist unless you first focus on the right “control plane”.

If you do not find such a “control plane”, you’re increasingly taking risk as the frontier labs become increasingly unpredictable.

This is why 8090’s Software Factory is used this way in every major part of the economy including governments.