This isn’t even remotely true. $AMZN went public in 1997 at a $450M valuation, or 3x revenues. $GOOGL went public in 2004 at a $23B valuation and at 7x revenues. $META had a $104B valuation in 2012 at 20x revenues(and immediately sold off almost 50%). SpaceX dwarfs these numbers.
I have been working on The Almighty Dollar, a 500-year history of the world's most powerful money, for seven years. It changed the way I thought about money. It will be available on May 19th. People who have read it seem to like it. https://t.co/NJzoUMaS8k
Stick Your Tongue Out: The Silent Release
Dr. Elena Vasquez had seen thousands of patients at Mount Sinai, but Marcus was different.
A 42 year old software engineer, he arrived with shoulders permanently hunched, eyes shadowed by perpetual exhaustion, and cortisol levels deep in the clinical anxiety range.
Therapy and medication adjustments brought little change. His body was locked in a silent civil war.
One afternoon, after reviewing his latest scans, Elena made an unusual request.
“Stick out your tongue,” she said. “As far as you can. Hold it for forty seconds.”
Marcus blinked. “Is this a test?”
“Consider it an experiment,” she replied, her voice calm but certain.
He complied, feeling ridiculous at first. The muscle strained, unfamiliar and awkward. His jaw trembled. His neck, usually rigid from years at a desk, began to burn with a deep, releasing ache. Forty seconds felt eternal.
“Do this twice a day,” Elena instructed. “Morning and evening. That’s all.”
Marcus left skeptical. But he tried it anyway.
The first few days brought nothing but mild soreness. Then, on day six, he noticed something strange during his morning routine: his shoulders dropped an inch without effort. The constant low hum of background tension, the one he had lived with so long he forgot it existed, had quieted.
By day twelve, his wife commented that he seemed lighter. Less reactive to traffic, to deadlines, to the thousand small irritations that once wound him tight. When he returned for bloodwork two weeks later, the numbers confirmed what he already felt: his cortisol had plummeted from dangerously high to the middle of the normal range. No medication changes. No new therapy. Just the daily tongue extension.
Elena was not surprised. She had studied the hidden architecture of chronic stress for years.
The neck carries an enormous burden, often 60 to 80 percent of the body’s accumulated tension. That tension does not stay polite. It compresses the vagus nerve, the body’s master regulator of calm.
It restricts the gentle flow of cerebrospinal fluid that bathes the brain. It keeps the entire nervous system whispering danger even when the world is quiet.
The tongue, surprisingly, is the key. It connects directly to the hyoid bone, that floating anchor for the deep muscles of the throat and neck.
When you extend the tongue fully, you create a gentle but powerful traction through the fascial chains, those webs of connective tissue running from jaw to chest. Like loosening a knot that has been pulling on everything downstream.
One simple movement. Forty seconds. Twice a day.
Marcus became her quiet advocate. He taught the technique to his overworked colleagues, his stressed sister, even his skeptical father. Some felt nothing. Others, like him, experienced a profound unwinding.
Years later, when people asked Elena about her most elegant intervention, she would smile and say:
“The brain is rarely the villain. More often, it is simply what is wrapped around it, layer after layer of unnoticed armor. Sometimes the most powerful medicine is learning how to take it off.”
And in those moments, she would remember Marcus: the man who learned to release what he did not even know he was holding.
For related research on vagus nerve stimulation and stress reduction mechanisms, see: https://t.co/kxOsZBU3bQ
@jbulltard1@davevermilion I feel like sometimes the CEO's and other insiders may buy the stock all the way down...like a captain staying with a sinking ship.
For the third consecutive year, our research has been recognized by @quantpedia.
This award is particularly meaningful because it comes from an organization that has spent years promoting rigorous quantitative research and helping bridge the gap between academic insights and practical investment applications.
It is a recognition not only of this paper, but also of @ConcretumR 's ongoing commitment to conducting high-quality research and sharing it openly with the broader trading and investment community.
A special thank you goes to my co-authors, Professor @anmele and @BearBullTraders.
By combining academic rigor, market experience, and practical trading knowledge, we were able to develop the research paper:
The Volatility Edge: A Dual Approach for VIX ETNs Trading
For anyone interested in volatility trading, VIX products, and systematic strategies, I highly recommend reading the paper.
You can find the link in the first comment below.
My sincere thanks also to the Quantpedia team and to the members of the Expert Committee (@quantpedia, @alphaarchitect, @HanauerMatthias, @QuantConnect, ...) for their support, time, and appreciation of our work.
#QuantFinance #SystematicTrading #VolatilityTrading #VIX #AlgorithmicTrading #QuantResearch #PortfolioManagement #TradingStrategies #Finance #InvestmentResearch
"There's so much wisdom in books for investing."
Dan Loeb's (@DanielSLoeb1) book recommendations:
1) You Can Be a Stock Market Genius, Joel Greenblatt
"The best book about event-driven investing, and it's still relevant today. Most of the people I know in that world use it as their framework."
2) Quality Investing, Lawrence A. Cunningham
"The most influential and eye-opening book. It lays out the idea of super high-quality businesses with good moats and high return on capital that you might want to own for many, many years."
3) Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, Edwin Lefèvre
"One of my favorite books. It quotes Ecclesiastes as saying there's nothing new under the sun. And the question is, will AI take human nature and the flaws in human emotion out of the investment process? It will test the theory that there's nothing new under the sun."
4) Essentialism, Greg McKeown (h/t @altcap)
"With the pace of change brought about by AI, it's even more important to adopt this idea of essentialism because you can't do it all. You have to figure out the things that are most important to what you do."
5) The Outsiders, Will Thorndike
"To understand capital allocation along with great operations. So companies like Danaher, TransDigm, and others."
Dan on why semis, cap equipment, and hyperscalers are the most attractive sector in the market, and why Nvidia is still cheap:
"The SOXX is up 40%. I don't think I've ever seen an event like that.
You can still buy Nvidia –– maybe the multiple's slightly higher right now –– at 15 times '27, 12 times '28 for the most dominant, very fast-growing company at its size.
I looked through our whole semis, cap equipment, and hyperscaler portfolio.
My instinct was we've gotta take profits here. But I looked at the valuations and the growth rates.
Unless you think the AI world is going to roll over in 2031 or 2032, it's the most attractive sector.
It's where the bulk of our capital is invested."
The Verdict: The data shows the claim is directionally correct, but the impact is small. The "red flag" is actually just a yellow flag.
Mean forward returns after divergent new highs are positive at every horizon.
The takeaway? It's a tilt, not a trigger. $SPX
The S&P 500 recently hit a fresh high, but the cumulative A/D line peaked back on Feb 27. Is this breadth divergence the massive "red flag" many claim it to be? $SPY
We ran a 28-year backtest (1998-present) to separate narrative from numbers. A thread. 🧵
(See attached chart)
The Hard Data: How do forward returns look when breadth diverges vs. when it confirms a new high?
(Mean Returns 1998-Present)
• 1M: +0.08% (Divergence) vs +0.34% (Confirmed)
• 3M: +1.41% vs +1.76%
• 6M: +3.71% vs +4.32%
• 12M: +8.28% vs +8.76%
THE WHALEY FOUR QTR S&P BREAKDOWN
With much discussion this time of year as to the merits of trimming your portfolio come May, it has been my observation that the year's performance can conveniently be divided into four rolling Qtrs beginning with Oct27-Jan27 which is 59-18 since 1950 for an avg 4.69% gain and the following three Qtrs then slowly degrading to 2.73, 1.75 & then finally a fractional 0.14% loss for the July27-Oct27 time frame which brings up the rear.
Most of us spend years trying to change outcomes without examining the internal framework producing them.
This article gets to the root by examining and then stripping away the conditioning that keeps you from becoming fully yourself and finding your bliss.
Great read @thedankoe !
Lo más interesante del paper, en mi opinión, más allá de la fórmula, es la lectura conceptual que aporta. Lo que muestra es que el precio normalizado del call no es solamente el promedio descontado del payoff, sino que también representa una probabilidad, pero medida en términos de varianza en vez de retornos. La volatilidad implícita, entonces, no es solamente lo que te tira un solver: es el cuantil correspondiente a ese nivel de probabilidad. Una traducción directa del precio de mercado a volatilidad implícita.
Traducido del marciano: hasta ahora pensábamos la VI como el número que hace dar a Black-Scholes el precio de mercado, y se calculaba por prueba y error. Ahora se puede pensar como una traducción directa entre precio y volatilidad, sin un paso numérico en el medio.
El paper: https://t.co/Uwvi0YHb7Z
(5/5)