Mr. Rosé

Tweets are my opinion. If you don't like it? Good, I still love you.

[Brian Roemmele @BrianRoemmele]

The Real McCoy, How The Phrase Started

Steam locomotives in the 1870s were magnificent, loud, and almost comically needy.

They could haul a nation’s freight. They could not, for very long, haul themselves. Every few miles the train had to stop so a man with an oilcan could crawl among axles and bearings and feed the machine by hand.

Leave it hungry and friction cooked the metal. Feed it late and the whole schedule collapsed. American railroads were, in a very literal sense, running on interruptions.

The man who noticed this most clearly was not sitting in a drafting office. He was shoveling coal.

Elijah McCoy was born May 2, 1844, in Colchester, Ontario, the son of George and Mildred McCoy, who had escaped enslavement in Kentucky and reached Canada on the Underground Railroad.

He grew up around machines the way some children grow up around books: taking them apart, putting them back, listening for the click that meant a thing had been understood. At fifteen his parents sent him across the Atlantic to Edinburgh, where he apprenticed in mechanical engineering and came home with credentials that should have opened every shop floor in the industrial North.

They didn’t.

An engineer with Scottish training was still, in the eyes of American railroads, a man they would rather put in the boiler room. Michigan Central hired him as a fireman and oiler: shovel coal, oil the journals, keep the beast from eating itself.

The problem was simple enough to state and hard enough to solve that entire timetables bent around it. Steam engines needed constant lubrication. Stopping to provide it wasted hours, burned money, and wore the iron anyway. McCoy designed a small, stubborn answer: a lubricating cup that used the engine’s own steam pressure to drip oil onto moving parts while the train kept moving. No halt. No oilcan pilgrimage. Just a continuous, measured feed of the one thing that kept steel from grinding steel to powder.

On July 23, 1872, the United States Patent Office issued him Patent No. 129,843 — Improvement in Lubricators for Steam-Engines.

The device was almost insultingly elegant. That was its danger and its fortune. Competitors could copy the idea. They could not, at first, copy the reliability. Cheap cups leaked, starved a bearing, or dumped oil like a drunk. Trains that ran on knockoffs broke. Trains that ran on McCoy’s cup kept going.

So the men who actually had to live with the machinery would be blamed when an axle seized fifty miles from a roundhouse — stopped asking for “a lubricator.” They asked for his. The genuine article. The one that worked when the cheap ones failed.

Railroad lore says they asked for the real McCoy.

Whether that rail-yard demand is the true birthplace of the phrase is a fight etymologists still enjoy. A Scottish whisky slogan, “the real McKay,” was already in print before McCoy’s patent.

McCoy’s lubricator spread from Michigan Central to railroads across the continent, then onto steamships, factory engines, drills, and mines. By the turn of the century, versions of the automatic oiler were ordinary industrial furniture. The man who had been barred from the title of engineer had quietly rewritten the tempo of the industrial age.

Over a lifetime McCoy collected some fifty-seven patents, most of them refinements on the same obsession: how to keep metal moving without destroying itself. In 1916, in his seventies, he patented a graphite lubricator for the hotter superheater locomotives.

He also turned his attention to the domestic world his labor had helped accelerate: a folding ironing board, a lawn-sprinkler design, even an improved rubber heel. In 1920, at seventy-six, he founded the Elijah McCoy Manufacturing Company in Detroit.

The locomotives are museum pieces now. The sentence remains. When someone wants the thing itself — not the lookalike, not the almost, not the version that will do until it doesn’t — they still reach for his name.

Not the copy.
The real McCoy.

[Josh Chambers @JoshChambers]

Steve Kerr says Roger Federer taught his Warriors team the secret to sustained success wasn’t outworking everyone, it was building a life around your craft you never want to escape from

“I’ll tell you a great story about Roger Federer. We were playing in China with the Warriors in 2017. Roger was in Shanghai for the Masters tournament, so we invited him to come speak to the team.”

“Draymond Green asked him, ‘How do you sustain success? How have you managed to win majors 20 years after you first won one?’ Everyone was expecting him to say, ‘I work harder than everybody,’ the will, all the clichés.”

“Roger Federer says, ‘I get up every morning and I make breakfast for my kids. Then I take them to school and drop them off. Then I go practice tennis for about two hours, and I’ve figured out a really good routine where I don’t destroy my body, but I can get all the work in I need.”

“‘Then I go have lunch with my wife. In the evening, we cook dinner together. The kids are all home from school. We ask them about school. There’s so much joy in the house. We put them to bed, and then I put my head on the pillow and go, “Man, that was just a great day.” And I’ve been doing that for 20 years.’”

“And it was like, yes. That’s it. That’s the formula. That’s what leads to sustained success. He loves tennis. He loves his family. He loves life. It’s not outworking everybody and banging your head against the wall, ‘I’m going to be better than everybody.’ It’s allowing your natural talent to shine through with a work ethic, with a great family life, with perspective, with peace, with mindfulness.”

“It’s perspective. It’s joy. It’s passion. It’s mindfulness. It’s an awareness that we are truly lucky. To get the most out of ourselves, it’s our daily rituals and experiences and love and joy.”

[VolSignals @VolSignals]

If you are new to "GEX", or using dealer hedging requirements to predict price movement

Most of your trading improvement will come from understanding (cleanly and accurately) these things:

Gamma
Charm
Pinning

It's just easier to understand with a whiteboard >>

[Mr. Rosé @HodgerBadger5]

@VolSignals Thank you 🙏🏾

[Mr. Rosé @HodgerBadger5]

@VolSignals Where can we apply for a mentorship?

[Mr. Rosé @HodgerBadger5]

@QuiverQuant @grok why are Anthropic's technologies so sought after compared to other similar technologies?

[J. Cole @JColeNC]

MIDNIGHT

[Mr. Rosé @HodgerBadger5]

@jam_croissant Did they use ChatGPT to write this with these em dashes? 🤔

[Mr. Rosé @HodgerBadger5]

@TheBronxViking @unusual_whales @colin_gladman $U

[Mr. Rosé @HodgerBadger5]

@ozzy_livin @grok what does it mean by "vanna and charm flows come back in spades"

[Mr. Rosé @HodgerBadger5]

@jam_croissant @grok why do these two charts mean

[Mr. Rosé @HodgerBadger5]

@jam_croissant @grok explain this to me like I am a 5 year old

[Mr. Rosé @HodgerBadger5]

@Kurt_Steiner @grok when was this picture taken

[Mr. Rosé @HodgerBadger5]

@LibertyLockPod Tell me you don't know the problem without telling me you don't know the problem 🤣🤣🤣

[Mr. Rosé @HodgerBadger5]

@TheBronxViking What books/ what did you study to learn how to read flow?

[Mr. Rosé @HodgerBadger5]

@jam_croissant Can this be recorded 😭😭😭

[Mr. Rosé @HodgerBadger5]

"Some people are trying to make a dent in this world, I am going to remodle it" Blair Hodges

[Mr. Rosé @HodgerBadger5]

@jam_croissant what's the material difference between vix option cycle and quarterly option cycle?

[Mr. Rosé @HodgerBadger5]

@DavidBahnsen Double edge sword here. I understand one should be prepared in an interview. Being prepared prevents embarrassment. However, aren't we supposed to ask questions that we don't know then report what we uncovered to the public? Instead of painting a picture with questions we know?

[Mr. Rosé @HodgerBadger5]

@allstarcharts So risk the child safety to avoid the possibility of a tough conversation? Doesn't sound like good risk management to me.