2D crypto data-dog;
IRL applied AI/ML/LLMs in academic medicine;
1x winner of the late Bloomberg podcast What Goes Up's "Craziest Things in Markets This Week"
Ex-Man AHL ($70B firm) fixed-income head on breaking into quant:
"You've got a much better chance of being hired by the world's best hedge fund from a non-target school with no qualifications than by trading your own money."
Rob Carver (@investingidiocy) — ex-Man AHL, ran a multi-billion systematic fixed-income book | now a one-man shop across 200+ futures markets
"I don't really believe I've found any inefficiency — basically all the money I make is risk premia."
We cover:
- The career myth that won't die — getting "noticed" by trading your own money is a one-in-a-billion event
- Why he insists he's found zero market inefficiencies — it's public risk premia anyone can harvest
- Skepticism as the #1 trait — every career error he's seen traces back to overconfidence in a backtest
- Why "the best quants come from physics" is mostly path dependence — the Yale-historians thought experiment
- His actual process: ~1 new strategy a year, a 1-in-5 strike rate — & he thinks more research would lower it
- The real innovation of his last decade — running 200+ futures on a small account, not finding edge
- Why he'd never join a pod shop — even though he reckons he could land an offer every couple of weeks
Highlights:
(00:50) The $1B loss week — why the desk stayed calm
(02:45) Why he turned off his P&L email
(06:40) Do the best quants really come from STEM? He pushes back
(09:55) The Yale-historians trap — path dependence in quant hiring
(11:35) The one trait that matters most — skepticism
(13:00) The Sharpe ratio's blind spots — & the LTCM case
(15:55) Geometric return vs Sharpe — the leverage catch
(17:40) Avoiding overfitting — explicit vs implicit fitting
(21:55) Why an honest backtest should look worse
(23:05) Alpha decay by trading speed — HFT vs slow systems
(25:35) Inside the portfolio — the full 10-rule suite
(30:30) The career myth — trading your own money won't get you hired
(31:55) Why he calls his returns risk premia, not inefficiency
(33:55) His real innovation — 200+ futures on a small account
(35:40) How Man AHL reviewed, vetoed & shipped new strategies
(39:30) Will capital consolidate at Citadel & Millennium?
(41:45) "My DMs are open" — & why he'd still never join a pod shop
(42:45) The AI talent-war parallel — who you actually want to hire
NVIDIA just released Nemotron 3 Ultra on Hugging Face
550B total params,
55B active,
hybrid Mamba-2 MoE Transformer,
1M token context,
and SOTA on MMLU, code, and long-context benchmarks.
Nice little gem on thematic investing from Marc Hart, @Tyler_Neville_’s former boss, on Forward Guidance.
Thematic Investing Formula:
▪️Access
▪️Attention
▪️Patina — basically lindyness / maturity
▪️TAM
▪️Use of leverage
$BTC in the early 2020s is a clean example.
Access improved through ETFs, public vehicles, DATs, exchanges, custody, and institutional rails.
Attention exploded.
Patina improved as BTC went from internet money to macro asset.
TAM expanded from “crypto” to “digital gold / treasury reserve / institutional allocation.”
Leverage entered through futures, options, miners, MSTR, ETFs, and structured products.
The theme went from niche to reflexive during the period
hyperliquid:native is definitely ticking a lot of these boxes now and looks like it is entering its own thematic cycle.
$NVIDIA / AI already hitting all the boxes.
Humanoids, Space, and Quantum are still earlier on access, but blockbuster IPOs could be the start of the attention cycle.
Once access + attention meet a huge TAM, the market starts building the leverage layer.
That is usually when the theme gets interesting.
https://t.co/Xx4o69zT66
This is it.
Everything learned spending millions on longevity.
From: Your Immortal Unc and Auntie.
To: Our Immortal nieces and nephews.
0. Sleep is the world's most powerful drug.
1. Be in your bed for 8 hours
2. Same bedtime every night, any time before midnight
3. Don’t eat right before bed
4. Calm foods for dinner
5. No screens 1 hour before bed
6. Avoid added sugar (be aware it’s in everything)
7. Avoid all things in an American convenience store
8. Avoid fried foods
9. Shoes off at the door
10. Eat whole foods, particularly veggies fruits nuts legumes berries
11. Walk a little after meals or air squats
12. Get your heart rate high routinely
13. Lift heavy things
14. Stretch daily
15. Water pik, floss, brush, tongue scrape, morning and night
16. Make an effort to drink water
17. Get sunlight when you wake up (UV is low)
18. Protect skin in midday sun
19. Stand up straight
20. See at least one friend once a week
21. Avoid plastic where you can (in all things)
22. Circulate air in rooms
23. When stressed, breathe, learn to calm your body
24. Go to the dentist
25. Avoid sitting for long times
26. Protect your hearing, the world is too loud
27. Alcohol is bad for you
28. Finish coffee before noon
29. Avoid bright lights after sunset
30. If obese, look into a GLP
31. Sleep in a cold room
32. Texting while driving is dangerous
33. Turn off all notifications
34. Limit social media use
35. Don’t smoke anything
36. If you struggle to sleep, read a physical book before bed
37. 1 hour before bed have a calm wind down routine: bath, read, light walk, listen to music
38. The body is a clock and loves routine. Have a daily morning and evening schedule.
39. Avoid long distance travel where you can
40. Baby steps first: incorporate new things slowly
41. Do less… most things don’t work.
Bonus points if you get your blood checked.
Start here, it will change your life.
16gb ram seems to be an interesting step jump in pricing (8 and 12gb ram seem a bit less desirable).
My main PC is at 64gb so I'm a bit out of touch for contemporary RAM requirements, but 8-12 gb seems sufficient if we're running headless servers and LLM APIs like Codex?
Has anyone tried Hermes Agent? I've put off setting up an OpenClaw box, but I've been a fan of Nous Research and have been tempted to setup an Hermes Agent box.
Got a Beelink S13 for a low power headless server. Sadly almost 2x the cost of what it was last year.
@TheStalwart Academic writing is about passing the gauntlet of ivory tower critics who will often critique the slightest misuse of terminology or force one to elaborate a completely defensibly correct thought chain. The strategy is to get published somewhere big and then explain later
@Stoiiic It's been a while, but IIRC a lot of people preferred HDBSCAN (as an improvement over parameter tuning DBSCAN) as being a bit easier to use / less fiddly