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Andrew Bramo
@itsbramo
21yo finance × AI × crypto creator
Las Vegas, NV 🎰
Joined August 2026
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https://t.co/8CfQ3XljVq
A Nobel Prize-winning economist built the formula every pension fund on Earth now runs on. He personally ignored it with his own retirement money, and told the story himself, laughing, for the rest of his life.
His name is Harry Markowitz. In 1952, at 25, he published a paper that changed how every pension fund and bank builds a portfolio. Before him, investing advice was a feeling. After him, it was a formula.
He wrote it as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, under a committee that included Milton Friedman. At the defense, Friedman told him the dissertation wasn't economics, math, or business administration. Nobody could figure out which department it belonged to. It won the Nobel Prize anyway, 38 years later.
Here's the part almost nobody knows. A friend once asked Markowitz how he'd personally invested his own retirement money. He admitted he'd simply split it 50/50, no formula, nothing close to the model that made him famous. The friend laughed and told him: even Harry Markowitz doesn't use Portfolio Theory. I don't think that makes him a hypocrite. I think it's the most honest thing in this entire story.
What he actually proved was simple enough to survive being taught to a freshman. Two investments that don't move together are worth more combined than either one alone. Combine enough of them right and you get more return for the same risk, for free.
He called it the only free lunch in investing. By the time he died in 2023, that idea was running an estimated tens of trillions of dollars.
He told the 50/50 story himself, laughing every time. The formula was never the hard part. Living inside it was.
@0xMfox knowing the formula and trusting it with your own money are different things
A Nobel Prize-winning economist built the formula every pension fund on Earth now runs on. He personally ignored it with his own retirement money, and told the story himself, laughing, for the rest of his life.
His name is Harry Markowitz. In 1952, at 25, he published a paper that changed how every pension fund and bank builds a portfolio. Before him, investing advice was a feeling. After him, it was a formula.
He wrote it as a graduate student at the University of Chicago, under a committee that included Milton Friedman. At the defense, Friedman told him the dissertation wasn't economics, math, or business administration. Nobody could figure out which department it belonged to. It won the Nobel Prize anyway, 38 years later.
Here's the part almost nobody knows. A friend once asked Markowitz how he'd personally invested his own retirement money. He admitted he'd simply split it 50/50, no formula, nothing close to the model that made him famous. The friend laughed and told him: even Harry Markowitz doesn't use Portfolio Theory. I don't think that makes him a hypocrite. I think it's the most honest thing in this entire story.
What he actually proved was simple enough to survive being taught to a freshman. Two investments that don't move together are worth more combined than either one alone. Combine enough of them right and you get more return for the same risk, for free.
He called it the only free lunch in investing. By the time he died in 2023, that idea was running an estimated tens of trillions of dollars.
He told the 50/50 story himself, laughing every time. The formula was never the hard part. Living inside it was.
https://t.co/8CfQ3XljVq
He broke Soviet codes for the government, got fired for criticizing the Vietnam War, and then built a trading record nobody has matched since. Andrew Lo, who has interviewed some of the biggest names in finance, calls this one interview the highlight of his career.
His name is Jim Simons. He never worked a single day on Wall Street before founding Renaissance Technologies.
He spent his twenties breaking Soviet codes for the Institute for Defense Analyses, got fired for that op-ed, then chaired the math department at Stony Brook by 30 and co-developed a theorem still used in string theory today.
At 44, he started a hedge fund and refused to hire anyone with Wall Street experience. He wanted physicists, cryptographers, astronomers.
The fund's flagship, Medallion, returned an average of 66% a year from 1988 to 2023. Annualized. Nobody in the history of public markets has matched that run.
He's never once explained how. Employees sign a lifetime non-disclosure agreement. When MIT gave him a fellowship and asked him to speak in 2019, Lo moderated the finance session himself and still didn't get the formula out of him. What he got instead: Simons never tried to predict where the market was going. He looked for relationships nobody else was looking for.
"Luck is largely responsible for my reputation for genius," he told a room of investors once. He was joking. He wasn't.
The talks are free on YouTube. The best trading record in modern finance, and the man behind it spent his life proving finance was never the subject. Pattern recognition was.
@cartmanx404 right, thats what made the whole approach work
He broke Soviet codes for the government, got fired for criticizing the Vietnam War, and then built a trading record nobody has matched since. Andrew Lo, who has interviewed some of the biggest names in finance, calls this one interview the highlight of his career.
His name is Jim Simons. He never worked a single day on Wall Street before founding Renaissance Technologies.
He spent his twenties breaking Soviet codes for the Institute for Defense Analyses, got fired for that op-ed, then chaired the math department at Stony Brook by 30 and co-developed a theorem still used in string theory today.
At 44, he started a hedge fund and refused to hire anyone with Wall Street experience. He wanted physicists, cryptographers, astronomers.
The fund's flagship, Medallion, returned an average of 66% a year from 1988 to 2023. Annualized. Nobody in the history of public markets has matched that run.
He's never once explained how. Employees sign a lifetime non-disclosure agreement. When MIT gave him a fellowship and asked him to speak in 2019, Lo moderated the finance session himself and still didn't get the formula out of him. What he got instead: Simons never tried to predict where the market was going. He looked for relationships nobody else was looking for.
"Luck is largely responsible for my reputation for genius," he told a room of investors once. He was joking. He wasn't.
The talks are free on YouTube. The best trading record in modern finance, and the man behind it spent his life proving finance was never the subject. Pattern recognition was.
https://t.co/8CfQ3XljVq
@BullishMikee appreciate you reading the whole thing🥰
https://t.co/8CfQ3XljVq
Andrew Lo wired ten professional traders to heart monitors and skin sensors, then sat back and watched their bodies react to a live trading day. He was trying to settle a fight that's been running in economics for a century: are markets rational, or are they run by fear and greed wearing a suit.
The traders didn't know it, but their skin was answering the question in real time.
Every time the market hit a volatility spike, a sudden reversal, an unexpected swing, their skin conductance jumped and their heart rate changed, measurably, every time. Not the rookies. Not the nervous ones. All of them. The most seasoned professionals on the desk, the ones who'd tell you they'd stopped feeling anything about the market years ago, lit up on the sensors exactly like everyone else.
That result broke something. The entire efficient markets model runs on the assumption that professional traders are close enough to pure calculators that their emotions wash out in the aggregate. Lo's data said otherwise. The emotion never left the room. It just got better at hiding.
This is the lecture Andrew Lo gives at MIT right after he shows students the Challenger case, the one where the stock market convicted a company five months before the government did. Same course, one week later, and the message flips. Markets are fast and often right. The people inside them are still animals with a pulse.
He calls the reconciliation the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis. Not efficient. Not irrational. Adaptive, like anything that's had to survive.
The lecture is free on MIT's site. The traders who taught it never got their names in the paper, but their heartbeats are the entire dataset.
Save this one. Next time someone tells you they're trading purely on logic, remember somebody already measured that claim.
@shredderAI the pulse doesnt retire when the experience shows up🤯
Andrew Lo wired ten professional traders to heart monitors and skin sensors, then sat back and watched their bodies react to a live trading day. He was trying to settle a fight that's been running in economics for a century: are markets rational, or are they run by fear and greed wearing a suit.
The traders didn't know it, but their skin was answering the question in real time.
Every time the market hit a volatility spike, a sudden reversal, an unexpected swing, their skin conductance jumped and their heart rate changed, measurably, every time. Not the rookies. Not the nervous ones. All of them. The most seasoned professionals on the desk, the ones who'd tell you they'd stopped feeling anything about the market years ago, lit up on the sensors exactly like everyone else.
That result broke something. The entire efficient markets model runs on the assumption that professional traders are close enough to pure calculators that their emotions wash out in the aggregate. Lo's data said otherwise. The emotion never left the room. It just got better at hiding.
This is the lecture Andrew Lo gives at MIT right after he shows students the Challenger case, the one where the stock market convicted a company five months before the government did. Same course, one week later, and the message flips. Markets are fast and often right. The people inside them are still animals with a pulse.
He calls the reconciliation the Adaptive Markets Hypothesis. Not efficient. Not irrational. Adaptive, like anything that's had to survive.
The lecture is free on MIT's site. The traders who taught it never got their names in the paper, but their heartbeats are the entire dataset.
Save this one. Next time someone tells you they're trading purely on logic, remember somebody already measured that claim.
https://t.co/rUN1cPDY65
A stock market figured out who killed seven astronauts before NASA did. It took the traders 21 minutes. It took the government five months. Nobody on the trading floor knew what an O-ring was.
Four companies built the Challenger shuttle. Rockwell built the ship and engines. Lockheed ran ground support. Martin Marietta made the fuel tank. Morton Thiokol built the solid rocket boosters. All four stocks started falling within minutes of the news hitting the wire.
Here's the part that gets me. By 21 minutes in, Lockheed was down 5%, Martin Marietta down 3%, Rockwell down 6%. Roughly even. Then Morton Thiokol's stock got hit so hard, so fast, that the NYSE halted trading in it entirely. When it reopened almost an hour later, it was down 6%. By the close, nearly 12%. The other three had already started crawling back up to around 3% each.
The market had singled out Morton Thiokol, alone, within hours.
NASA's official investigation took five months. A commission led by a former Secretary of State interviewed thousands of engineers, tested hundreds of parts, reconstructed debris. On June 9, 1986, they confirmed it: Morton Thiokol's O-rings failed in the cold. Cause of death, exactly what the market had already priced in before lunch on day one.
This is the case Andrew Lo opens his MIT lecture on market efficiency with. Not a textbook definition. A room full of traders, none of them knowing what an O-ring was, pricing in a verdict five months before the experts announced it.
Save this one. Next time someone says markets are dumber than the people running them, send them this.
@biektive price knows before the reason does
A stock market figured out who killed seven astronauts before NASA did. It took the traders 21 minutes. It took the government five months. Nobody on the trading floor knew what an O-ring was.
Four companies built the Challenger shuttle. Rockwell built the ship and engines. Lockheed ran ground support. Martin Marietta made the fuel tank. Morton Thiokol built the solid rocket boosters. All four stocks started falling within minutes of the news hitting the wire.
Here's the part that gets me. By 21 minutes in, Lockheed was down 5%, Martin Marietta down 3%, Rockwell down 6%. Roughly even. Then Morton Thiokol's stock got hit so hard, so fast, that the NYSE halted trading in it entirely. When it reopened almost an hour later, it was down 6%. By the close, nearly 12%. The other three had already started crawling back up to around 3% each.
The market had singled out Morton Thiokol, alone, within hours.
NASA's official investigation took five months. A commission led by a former Secretary of State interviewed thousands of engineers, tested hundreds of parts, reconstructed debris. On June 9, 1986, they confirmed it: Morton Thiokol's O-rings failed in the cold. Cause of death, exactly what the market had already priced in before lunch on day one.
This is the case Andrew Lo opens his MIT lecture on market efficiency with. Not a textbook definition. A room full of traders, none of them knowing what an O-ring was, pricing in a verdict five months before the experts announced it.
Save this one. Next time someone says markets are dumber than the people running them, send them this.
https://t.co/rUN1cPDY65
A Yale professor ran an auction for eight football tickets in the middle of the worst financial crisis in eighty years. His own hedge fund had almost died weeks earlier.
I watched the lecture expecting a classroom demo. It wasn't one.
His name is John Geanakoplos. Before Yale brought him back to teach, he ran Fixed Income Research at Kidder Peabody, then co-founded a mortgage hedge fund in 1994 that bought the exact securities his old desk used to sell. When subprime blew up in 2008, his fund was one of the few still standing.
Here's the part that got me. Sixteen students. Eight held secret numbers for what a ticket was worth to them. Eight more held secret numbers for what they'd sell one for. Nobody said a price out loud. Nobody knew what anyone else was holding.
Two minutes later, no auctioneer, no central authority, the tickets were sitting almost exactly in the hands of the eight people who valued them most.
That's the two-hundred-year-old problem economists still argue about. Adam Smith stood in Glasgow asking why water is nearly free and diamonds aren't, and never fully solved it.
Geanakoplos pulls the thread back further than the whiteboard. Babylon ran auctions in 500 BC. Rome once auctioned off the entire empire, and the winning bidder was dead within weeks. The first five securities ever traded in New York were Revolutionary War bonds, settled over a private dinner between Hamilton and Jefferson. Prices were doing the work in silence long before anyone had a model that explained why.
The lecture is free on Yale's site. Nobody has to be in charge for the price to already know the answer.
Save this one. Next time someone tells you a market needs a regulator to find the right number, send them this.
@nice_impuls no auctioneer needed, just sixteen people and deadline
A Yale professor ran an auction for eight football tickets in the middle of the worst financial crisis in eighty years. His own hedge fund had almost died weeks earlier.
I watched the lecture expecting a classroom demo. It wasn't one.
His name is John Geanakoplos. Before Yale brought him back to teach, he ran Fixed Income Research at Kidder Peabody, then co-founded a mortgage hedge fund in 1994 that bought the exact securities his old desk used to sell. When subprime blew up in 2008, his fund was one of the few still standing.
Here's the part that got me. Sixteen students. Eight held secret numbers for what a ticket was worth to them. Eight more held secret numbers for what they'd sell one for. Nobody said a price out loud. Nobody knew what anyone else was holding.
Two minutes later, no auctioneer, no central authority, the tickets were sitting almost exactly in the hands of the eight people who valued them most.
That's the two-hundred-year-old problem economists still argue about. Adam Smith stood in Glasgow asking why water is nearly free and diamonds aren't, and never fully solved it.
Geanakoplos pulls the thread back further than the whiteboard. Babylon ran auctions in 500 BC. Rome once auctioned off the entire empire, and the winning bidder was dead within weeks. The first five securities ever traded in New York were Revolutionary War bonds, settled over a private dinner between Hamilton and Jefferson. Prices were doing the work in silence long before anyone had a model that explained why.
The lecture is free on Yale's site. Nobody has to be in charge for the price to already know the answer.
Save this one. Next time someone tells you a market needs a regulator to find the right number, send them this.
https://t.co/rUN1cPDY65
Stephen Schwarzman and a former US Commerce Secretary started a firm in 1985 with $400,000 between them. Forty years later that firm manages more money than the GDP of every country on Earth except about four.
He walked into Robert Shiller's Yale classroom in the fall of 2008, weeks into the worst financial crisis in eighty years, to explain how he'd gotten there.
Shiller's introduction that day made the connection himself: Schwarzman and David Swensen, whose lecture the same class had already sat through that semester, were doing versions of the same thing. Both looking at assets nobody else wanted to touch. Both building an edge out of being willing to hold what everyone else was forced to sell.
Blackstone started as a two-man M&A advisory shop with no institutional backing, no track record, and a name built by literally translating its founders' surnames into German and Greek and gluing them together. Schwarzman graduated Yale in 1969 and Harvard Business School in 1972, made managing director at Lehman by 31, ran their global M&A desk, then walked away from all of it to start over from nothing with his old boss.
By 2007, before the crisis even hit, that nothing was already $88 billion under management. Today it's past a trillion.
In the lecture, a student asks him where the industry's returns are actually going to come from over the next five years. He doesn't dodge it. He just answers like a man who has been doing this since before most of the room was born, and has no reason to perform certainty he doesn't have.
The lecture is free on Yale's site, transcript included. The part almost nobody copies isn't the returns. It's forty years of being willing to buy the thing everyone else was scared to hold.
@will_i__amm the info is public, the willingness to act on it isnt
Stephen Schwarzman and a former US Commerce Secretary started a firm in 1985 with $400,000 between them. Forty years later that firm manages more money than the GDP of every country on Earth except about four.
He walked into Robert Shiller's Yale classroom in the fall of 2008, weeks into the worst financial crisis in eighty years, to explain how he'd gotten there.
Shiller's introduction that day made the connection himself: Schwarzman and David Swensen, whose lecture the same class had already sat through that semester, were doing versions of the same thing. Both looking at assets nobody else wanted to touch. Both building an edge out of being willing to hold what everyone else was forced to sell.
Blackstone started as a two-man M&A advisory shop with no institutional backing, no track record, and a name built by literally translating its founders' surnames into German and Greek and gluing them together. Schwarzman graduated Yale in 1969 and Harvard Business School in 1972, made managing director at Lehman by 31, ran their global M&A desk, then walked away from all of it to start over from nothing with his old boss.
By 2007, before the crisis even hit, that nothing was already $88 billion under management. Today it's past a trillion.
In the lecture, a student asks him where the industry's returns are actually going to come from over the next five years. He doesn't dodge it. He just answers like a man who has been doing this since before most of the room was born, and has no reason to perform certainty he doesn't have.
The lecture is free on Yale's site, transcript included. The part almost nobody copies isn't the returns. It's forty years of being willing to buy the thing everyone else was scared to hold.
https://t.co/Ye9wCJ9Jiv
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