TRUMP PUMP FACTOR
cc: @lokoyacap
*very rigorous quant process by my team…. 100 years of data, cross sectional, deep learning … or just his pressers
YTD: “roofing”
INTC
PLTR
DELL
AAPL
TMO
MU
GE
BA
NVDA
IBM (latest edition)
right monitor is 20 codex instances. left monitor has situational awareness on autoscroll. center monitor is my word doc mainfesto. two keyboards, one for both hands. left airpod is dwarkesh x eric jang, 3x speed. right airpod tchaikovsky. meta quest 3 overlays my HUD: heart rate, words per minute, blood caffeine content. one assistant hooks me to an iv of chinese peptides, cocktail. the other feeds me kimchi. my unitree robot steps in when my posture slouches. blue light beams down on me in my herman miller chair. efficiency. no wasted movement. no wasted thoughts. think you can keep up with me? good luck. this is just for my morning emails.
Trump just flatly stated he believes $IBM stock is "gonna go up a lot more." While the retail crowd treats this like a passing headline, the smart money recognizes the administration is signaling the ultimate national champion of the post-silicon era.
This is not empty rhetoric. The Commerce Department recently finalized a massive two billion dollar quantum computing package where the federal government is taking direct equity stakes in critical domestic infrastructure. $IBM single-handedly locked down half of that entire allocation. The company is taking its one billion dollar federal award and matching it with one billion of its own cash to spin off Anderon, a standalone pure-play quantum wafer foundry in Albany.
When the state takes a literal equity position on your cap table and the president publicly backs the stock, traditional valuation models become completely obsolete. $IBM is not a slow-moving legacy enterprise play anymore. It has been designated as a state-underwritten chokepoint that will control the foundational fabrication rules and standards for the next century of computing.
With fifteen billion dollars in annual free cash flow, $IBM never needed government survival capital. This is a calculated geopolitical alliance to monopolize the quantum supply chain before foreign adversaries can even close the gap. The structural bottleneck has been chosen, and the institutional re-rating is just getting started.
NFA, do your own DD
I spent the last 5 years asking 400 people a single question. It changed how I think about generating an edge in trading.
The question: Name a president that you don't think other people will name, keeping in mind that other people are also trying to name a president that others won't name.
Take a moment to answer before reading on.
The results map directly onto how I think about alpha.
Bucket the 45 presidents into 6 tiers by name recognition with Tier 1 being the most famous and Tier 6 the most obscure. The results show a clear bias toward obscurity—selections rise steadily from Tier 2 through Tier 6—with a sharp reverse-psychology spike back up at Tier 1. People favor going obscure ("Who would think of Millard Fillmore?") but many deploy maximum reverse psychology ("Washington is too obvious. Nobody will say him"). In reality, Washington and Fillmore are the two most common answers. [sorry, @dumborambo_, it is true]
The sweet spot is Tier 2: Clinton, JFK, Jefferson, both Bushes, Nixon, LBJ. Household names, but not top-of-mindnames. Out of 407 respondents, only 20 picked from this group. That is 16% of presidents, under 5% of selections. Most people are genuinely shocked to learn these are the best answers. [Maybe except for @Rigatohni, who picked the last unnamed president (George W. Bush)].
This is how I approach every market I've traded. Sports betting, options, commodities, prediction markets.
Tier 1 alpha ("Google has the best search engine," "Nvidia makes the chips") is real but saturated. The edge is gone before you arrive. Tier 6 alpha (tracking flight delays to beat sportsbooks, exotic statistical arbitrage) sounds clever but is almost always fruitless for the same reason: everyone who thinks they're being original is being original in the same direction.
Tier 2 alpha is the sweet spot. It is never complicated and does not require a Harvard PhD, but it is also never obvious enough that the crowd has caught on.
The smartest people I know have failed in trading because they couldn't believe Tier 2 alpha existed. Anything approachable, they assumed, had already been found by someone smarter. When I showed them edges that were statistically irrefutable, they called me a blind squirrel.
I used to half-believe them. But the more edges I find, the more the pattern holds. The best alpha is Tier 2. Once you see it, you'll wonder why you didn't see it sooner.
for all you know, this could be your last summer.
as homer wrote, you will never be lovelier than you are right now. so tell her she has a pretty smile. get lean or become a unit. find wonder in boarding the airplane. drink more coffee than you need. walk on the beach until your feet hurt. write your girlfriend a note on a tuesday. waste money because its not all about retirement. pull over at the lookout. ask the uber driver about his life. tell the woman in the elevator you like her shoes and mean it. call your mother. ask the waiter his favorite thing on the menu and order that.
theres so much life in the slow moments, and you sprint past it chasing the next thing. but at any time, in any situation, you can find the good. smile. be happy. recognize it for a one of one life experience. what good is walking around a curmudgeon when tomorrow could be curtains.
for heavens sake, flirt with the world.
This is gonna get so much worse
It’s an industry led by historically unpopular people, loudly saying everyone will lose their jobs, during a plutocratic corrupt time
@based16z@thedigipo Yea exactly if someone told you a coin is rigged but they didn’t know how and flipped it in the air, you are both indifferent between calling heads and tails. No info about how it is rigged makes it equivalent to a normal 50/50 coin in this case
@based16z@thedigipo If neither person has any info about the probability of heads, then doing just a normal flip would be “fair”. If P(heads) in the rigged coin is a random unknown variable, whoever chooses heads has an equal chance of on the disadvantaged side as being on the advantaged side
Only way to limit coming AI backlash is to start shifting taxes from labor to compute. The average voter needs to see salient benefits from AI. Today we tax labor > compute (income vs corp tax, depreciation for machines not education, payroll tax, etc). This will have to invert.
Over the weekend a large US military operation was launched inside Iran, close to where some believe the 60 percent enriched uranium is stored.
The stated goal was to retrieve F-15 pilots who were shot down in the area. But nothing at all adds up.
Did the CIA or Mossad or someone else convince the US President that he could snatch Iran's uranium like he snatched Maduro out of Venezuela?
Whatever the case, the operation was a spectacular failure, with at least six US military aircraft shot down. Will we learn the truth about what happened?
Watch @RonPaul & @DanielLMcAdams below:
iran thoughts:
flipped on ceasefire pretty well last night. sold my Y at 5.5c, 19c, 29c, and 46c respectively. i was away at an easter party all day so i missed the perfect exit :(
am big on N for april 15 atm. i don’t think iran is ready to let trump leave just yet, at least not without getting more than trump’s able to offer right now.
but i am still a fan of the longer dated strikes for Y (may); i think this weekend did show that there is willingness to end this from both parties, and even if these negotiations fail, the fv for those dates isn’t affected much (there’s a small chance it increases tbh)
also kinda off topic but in general a lot of ppl are biased either by antisemitism or by the way the war began (the reason doesn’t really matter) and are overpricing israel’s role in ending the war. yes, they will be included in a ceasefire but they don’t really have much of a say in it.
if trump tells israel to stop they will oblige… so ppl telling you “muh a ceasefire will take a long time because le regional players!” are wrong