Hiden

Interview, stories about big money, legendary people

[Hiden @Hiden0x]

College ate his parents' life savings in 6 months. Then Steve Jobs quit.

The school cost almost as much as Stanford. After half a year he still had no idea what he wanted, and no idea how the degree would help.

He walked 7 miles on Sundays for one good meal. He took a class on drawing letters because every poster on campus was done by hand. He said none of it had even a hope of being useful.

Ten years later he was building the Macintosh. That class came back. The Mac did not look like a typewriter. It looked designed.

He said: "You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards."

The diploma had a price and no map. The class with no job attached later showed up in the Mac.

[Hiden @Hiden0x]

Warren Buffett said: "You want to pick a spouse that's a little bit better than you are. Then he or she, you hope they don't figure it out too fast."

Not as a compliment. As a capital rule. You can sell a stock in a minute. You live inside this position.

Most people will study a ticker for a weekend and pick a household on a feeling. Then they wonder why the money never sits still.

His rule fits on a napkin. "You'll go in the direction of the people that you associate with." You cannot pick your parents. You do pick who you copy. For most people that copy lives in the house.

A partner in business can wreck a firm. "The partner in life is the most important." Same leak. Different container.

That second line is the tell. If they figure it out too fast, you are already the weaker allocator at the table.

The money mistake is treating the household as a vibe and the ticker as the job. You will dump a position after one ugly quarter. You will fund a room that keeps you busy, loud, and broke for a career.

Stop adding the next trade, the next house, or the next job inside a household you would not copy. If the person across the table pulls you toward activity, you are not investing. You are paying for a leak.

Almost none of them price this before they add.

[Neuro @0xNeuroBlue]

https://t.co/6bJ460527Y

[Hiden @Hiden0x]

Naval Ravikant told why even $500 an hour still leaves you poor.

"You're not going to get rich renting out your time. Even lawyers and doctors who are charging three, four, 500 an hour, they're not getting rich."

Lifestyle slowly ramps with income. They are not saving enough. They never get the ability to retire.

The amateur keeps selling the hour and calling the invoice wealth.

The professional buys a piece of a business. Equity. Owner, investor, shareholder. Or a brand that accrues to you when you sleep.

If somebody can tell you when to be at work and what to wear, you are not actually rich. You are a high-priced rental.

Stop treating the next fifty dollars on the hour as the plan.

Stop letting this year's lifestyle eat last year's raise.

Buy the piece that pays when you are not in the chair. Until that line exists, $500 an hour is still a rental.

He also hits why 9 to 5 is for machines, why retirement is not a check at 65, and why the work you cannot lose looks like play.

Save this video and watch it later.

[Hiden @Hiden0x]

@senmarketjp Yes, but it's hard to believe that $500 an hour wouldn't make you rich 😅

[Hiden @Hiden0x]

Naval Ravikant told why even $500 an hour still leaves you poor.

"You're not going to get rich renting out your time. Even lawyers and doctors who are charging three, four, 500 an hour, they're not getting rich."

Lifestyle slowly ramps with income. They are not saving enough. They never get the ability to retire.

The amateur keeps selling the hour and calling the invoice wealth.

The professional buys a piece of a business. Equity. Owner, investor, shareholder. Or a brand that accrues to you when you sleep.

If somebody can tell you when to be at work and what to wear, you are not actually rich. You are a high-priced rental.

Stop treating the next fifty dollars on the hour as the plan.

Stop letting this year's lifestyle eat last year's raise.

Buy the piece that pays when you are not in the chair. Until that line exists, $500 an hour is still a rental.

He also hits why 9 to 5 is for machines, why retirement is not a check at 65, and why the work you cannot lose looks like play.

Save this video and watch it later.

[Superior @andreysuperior]

https://t.co/rUN1cPDY65

[Hiden @Hiden0x]

@senmarketjp florence had the same four engines your paycheck is still only one of them

[Hiden @Hiden0x]

@0xNeuroBlue people quote ackman on activism and skip the hour where he teaches what a firm is

[Hiden @Hiden0x]

Peter Lynch told investors how not to buy a stock just because it fell from $100 to $3.

He ran Magellan at Fidelity. In a 1994 lecture he said the same call kept coming in.

It's three dollars. How much can I lose.

He told the room they might need a piece of paper. Put $20,000 into a stock at $50. Put the same $20,000 into it at $3. Send both to zero. You lose exactly the same amount of money.

The fact that a stock is three down from 100 does not mean you should buy it.

The people still selling that ticket are not dumping Walmart or Home Depot. They short a name already down from 80 to 7, then 6, then 5, then 4, then 3. A short needs a buyer. That buyer is the person waiting for the bounce.

Polaroid came in from 135 to 100 and people said a great company never stays under 100. Within a year it was 18.

Lynch bought Kaiser Industries on the same reflex. It had already fallen from 26 to 16. How much lower can it go. Then 10. Then 6. Then 5. Then 4. Then 3.

Only at $3 did he look at the company. No debt. Steel, aluminum, cement, Jeep. Hard to go bankrupt with no debt. That one later paid about $50 a share. The people who only owned the drop never knew what to do at 9, or 8, or 7.

A dead model with rising debt is the other tape. Western Union never had to come back.

One rule before you click buy on the $3 print: can you name the cash and the debt, or are you only naming the decline.

If you only have the decline, you are the bid for the short.

The stock does not know you own it.

He also walks why predicting the market is a waste of time, why you should be able to explain a stock to a ten year old in two minutes, and why 50 drops of 10% in 93 years are just the math. That is once every two years. Fifteen of them were 25% or more.

Save this to watch later.

[Hiden @Hiden0x]

Peter Lynch told investors how not to buy a stock just because it fell from $100 to $3.

He ran Magellan at Fidelity. In a 1994 lecture he said the same call kept coming in.

It's three dollars. How much can I lose.

He told the room they might need a piece of paper. Put $20,000 into a stock at $50. Put the same $20,000 into it at $3. Send both to zero. You lose exactly the same amount of money.

The fact that a stock is three down from 100 does not mean you should buy it.

The people still selling that ticket are not dumping Walmart or Home Depot. They short a name already down from 80 to 7, then 6, then 5, then 4, then 3. A short needs a buyer. That buyer is the person waiting for the bounce.

Polaroid came in from 135 to 100 and people said a great company never stays under 100. Within a year it was 18.

Lynch bought Kaiser Industries on the same reflex. It had already fallen from 26 to 16. How much lower can it go. Then 10. Then 6. Then 5. Then 4. Then 3.

Only at $3 did he look at the company. No debt. Steel, aluminum, cement, Jeep. Hard to go bankrupt with no debt. That one later paid about $50 a share. The people who only owned the drop never knew what to do at 9, or 8, or 7.

A dead model with rising debt is the other tape. Western Union never had to come back.

One rule before you click buy on the $3 print: can you name the cash and the debt, or are you only naming the decline.

If you only have the decline, you are the bid for the short.

The stock does not know you own it.

He also walks why predicting the market is a waste of time, why you should be able to explain a stock to a ten year old in two minutes, and why 50 drops of 10% in 93 years are just the math. That is once every two years. Fifteen of them were 25% or more.

Save this to watch later.

[Hiden @Hiden0x]

@0_oRai the useful part is that disgust gives you a behavioral boundary, not a personality ideal

[Hiden @Hiden0x]

@veraxlab the last ten years doing more work than the first thirty is insane

[Hiden @Hiden0x]

@isssa0x did friedman actually argue that freedom reliably produces more equality, or was that the rhetorical close?

[Hiden @Hiden0x]

In 1993, the US Congress shut down an $11 billion project and accidentally created an entire industry where trillions of dollars circulate today.

Two Harvard physicists lost the academic path that afternoon, and within six months both were at Goldman Sachs. The job they walked into did not exist the year before.

What they sold was not instinct. It was a number.

Listed call prices are a probability distribution. Once you have the strikes, you have the market's bet on where the asset finishes, and then you can price the next contract the old desk could only guess at: options, swaps, forwards. The bank got paid the spread between a gut bid and a priced book.

Use that before the next add. If you have a story about where something must go, write down what the calls already imply. If you cannot write that distribution, you are trading feel against people hired to extract it, so do not size the trade.

Second rule: two contracts can promise the same dollar on the same date and still drift apart for years. After 2008 that gap stopped being theoretical. A book still marks every year, and a dollar cheap today can become ten dollars cheap before anyone gets paid. Do not treat that gap as free money.

Stephen Blythe followed the same cohort onto a Morgan Stanley desk, then ran public markets for Harvard endowment. The career paid because the other side kept buying the story.

Bookmark this and watch the full interview 👇

[Hiden @Hiden0x]

In 1993, the US Congress shut down an $11 billion project and accidentally created an entire industry where trillions of dollars circulate today.

Two Harvard physicists lost the academic path that afternoon, and within six months both were at Goldman Sachs. The job they walked into did not exist the year before.

What they sold was not instinct. It was a number.

Listed call prices are a probability distribution. Once you have the strikes, you have the market's bet on where the asset finishes, and then you can price the next contract the old desk could only guess at: options, swaps, forwards. The bank got paid the spread between a gut bid and a priced book.

Use that before the next add. If you have a story about where something must go, write down what the calls already imply. If you cannot write that distribution, you are trading feel against people hired to extract it, so do not size the trade.

Second rule: two contracts can promise the same dollar on the same date and still drift apart for years. After 2008 that gap stopped being theoretical. A book still marks every year, and a dollar cheap today can become ten dollars cheap before anyone gets paid. Do not treat that gap as free money.

Stephen Blythe followed the same cohort onto a Morgan Stanley desk, then ran public markets for Harvard endowment. The career paid because the other side kept buying the story.

Bookmark this and watch the full interview 👇

[Superior @andreysuperior]

https://t.co/rUN1cPDY65

[Hiden @Hiden0x]

@0xNeuroBlue kinda wild that the university paid for one speaker a year and got buffett😄

[Hiden @Hiden0x]

Harvard had pulled Jake Xia off a Morgan Stanley rates desk in 2013 to watch risk on the endowment. MIT had already given him a doctorate in electrical engineering.

In the 2024 classroom he still starts the same way. He passed blank paper down the MIT rows. $10,000 on paper. Write a portfolio. Use your gut. Hand it back.

He had run trading groups in New York, London, and Tokyo. He has taught this class since 2012.

Then he showed why a university cannot hide in bonds. Typical spending is 5% of the fund. Inflation takes another 3%. The nominal target is 8% a year. About 40% of the operating budget now comes from that spend. Grants, he said, have been coming down. The gap has to be earned by the portfolio.

So the blank page is not a stock picking quiz. He asked what a great return even is. 10%? 50%? 100%? Over what horizon? How much of the $10,000 can you afford to lose? Why do you think you have an edge? How many names? Then the question he called the most important: how do you size each line.

One sheet was half an S&P straddle, 30% in VIX ETFs, and dollar futures. Another was 70% bonds and 30% stocks. Different stories. Same unsolved problem. Once you have a list you like, the job is the relative amounts.

The lecture is free. Save it so you do not lose the class.

[Hiden @Hiden0x]

In 2013, Jake Xia warned MIT that finance is not physics.

His evidence was his first day on Morgan Stanley's options desk in the mid-1990s. He asked the desk quant for the Vega report. The quant handed him the training manual for new analysts.

Morgan Stanley called the same risk Kappa. Xia said a footnote claimed Salomon Brothers traders had named it Vega after gambling in Vegas and mistaking it for a Greek letter.

He did not tell that story to mock the old floor. He told it because the trade was still being invented. Options pricing only became standard after Black-Scholes in the 1970s. For years after that, people still reached the desk through the mailroom. By 2013 the same seats wanted advanced math.

The part he wanted the math majors to hear was narrower. In physics you build a model and then test it against the world. In markets the cycle lasts longer than memory. A relationship that looks deterministic is often only statistical. The people, the products, and even the names keep moving.

Math still matters on a trading book. Xia's warning was that it will not settle the way a lab result does.

[Hiden @Hiden0x]

In 2013, Jake Xia warned MIT that finance is not physics.

His evidence was his first day on Morgan Stanley's options desk in the mid-1990s. He asked the desk quant for the Vega report. The quant handed him the training manual for new analysts.

Morgan Stanley called the same risk Kappa. Xia said a footnote claimed Salomon Brothers traders had named it Vega after gambling in Vegas and mistaking it for a Greek letter.

He did not tell that story to mock the old floor. He told it because the trade was still being invented. Options pricing only became standard after Black-Scholes in the 1970s. For years after that, people still reached the desk through the mailroom. By 2013 the same seats wanted advanced math.

The part he wanted the math majors to hear was narrower. In physics you build a model and then test it against the world. In markets the cycle lasts longer than memory. A relationship that looks deterministic is often only statistical. The people, the products, and even the names keep moving.

Math still matters on a trading book. Xia's warning was that it will not settle the way a lab result does.

[Hiden @Hiden0x]

Bitcoin billionaire Michael Saylor says he used AI to make $15 billion in one year.

The most interesting takes from the interview are timestamped below:

> 8:04 "So, let me tell you why you shouldn't buy a house"

> 14:49 "Technology fails until it succeeds"

>19:39 "Consumer goods... will become abundant. But there are always going to be scarce, desirable goods that will not become abundant"

> 27:22 "I used AI. I used AI to make $15 billion last year"

> 33:12 "Can you create something that does everybody's accounting... does the work of a million accountants and sell it for 10 bucks a month?"

> 51:14 "Don't try to outwork the robots"

> 1:15:45 "Bitcoin could fall to $5,000 a coin, we would still be overcollateralized against the debt"

> 1:22:04 "I think it'll appreciate about 30% a year for the next 20 years"

> 1:23:43 "I wouldn't go spend $500,000 on an expensive university education, but I would spend $20 a month on an AI subscription"

The Bitcoin conviction is vintage Saylor. The AI thesis is the part that caught me off guard.

[Hiden @Hiden0x]

Bitcoin billionaire Michael Saylor says he used AI to make $15 billion in one year.

The most interesting takes from the interview are timestamped below:

> 8:04 "So, let me tell you why you shouldn't buy a house"

> 14:49 "Technology fails until it succeeds"

>19:39 "Consumer goods... will become abundant. But there are always going to be scarce, desirable goods that will not become abundant"

> 27:22 "I used AI. I used AI to make $15 billion last year"

> 33:12 "Can you create something that does everybody's accounting... does the work of a million accountants and sell it for 10 bucks a month?"

> 51:14 "Don't try to outwork the robots"

> 1:15:45 "Bitcoin could fall to $5,000 a coin, we would still be overcollateralized against the debt"

> 1:22:04 "I think it'll appreciate about 30% a year for the next 20 years"

> 1:23:43 "I wouldn't go spend $500,000 on an expensive university education, but I would spend $20 a month on an AI subscription"

The Bitcoin conviction is vintage Saylor. The AI thesis is the part that caught me off guard.