Dr. Mathhattan

Ex-academic turned systematic trader.

[Dr. Mathhattan @mathhattan]

@JackGordon81309 Agree, I think Billy Beane ran Oakland on this exact logic

[Dr. Mathhattan @mathhattan]

$10,000 handed to this man in 1965 would be $1,000,000 in a matter of years, and this is the only time he gave the whole method away in one sitting.

His name is Warren Buffett, and in this video he names the one quality that matters the most in investing, and it is not intelligence.
It comes out in a single word, then he spends the rest of the tape on why almost nobody has it.

6 minutes, and what he gives away in them:

- the test that tells you whether you are actually investing, and most people fail it

- why the smartest people in finance are structurally unable to do what he does?

- what 50 people whispering in your ear every afternoon is actually costing you?

- the baseball image that explains how he manages to sit on cash for years

This video was filmed in 1985, and it is the first time Buffett let anyone into his office.
He never explained it this plainly again.

Watch it before you buy another share of anything.

[Dr. Mathhattan @mathhattan]

@rugikkk corporate US pays more for a guy who can name your trauma than for anyone who can fix your balance sheet lol

[Dr. Mathhattan @mathhattan]

@AI__Avenger the envelope trick alone should be mandatory before anyone's allowed to model a cap table

[Dr. Mathhattan @mathhattan]

@triiiam spending the first half hour on the no before he ever gets to the edge is the actual alpha, saved

[Dr. Mathhattan @mathhattan]

@kaienphase Magelland went from $18m to $14b under Lynch

insane part is that he was running it solo picking 1000+ stocks, kinda the opposite of the 'stay simple' advice everyone quotes from him

[Dr. Mathhattan @mathhattan]

@Allx032 never averaging down on a loser is the one rule everyone knows and nobody follows - saved

[Dr. Mathhattan @mathhattan]

@m444k_ the surgeon case is where it always breaks people

same math, completely different gut

[Dr. Mathhattan @mathhattan]

@vovweb3 how'd he actually lose the $70m after the crash? wasn't it a fraud fund that took the rest of it?

[Dr. Mathhattan @mathhattan]

@orinforxb Mets were partly comfortable with 8% because bernie madoff was managing their money at the time

they thought they'd easily beat that return, that aged badly haha

[Dr. Mathhattan @mathhattan]

@Primee32 the read edge was not the model but knowing most people won't read a 2001 paper lol

[Dr. Mathhattan @mathhattan]

@rookiezor same people who sold CDO² to pension funds are now charging $2M to help hospitals 'develop an AI strategy'

[Dr. Mathhattan @mathhattan]

Robert Shiller called the top of the dot com bubble with five days to spare, then called the housing bubble two years early, and both calls were in print before the fall.

Nasdaq closed at 5,048.62 on March 10, 2000. Irrational Exuberance reached stores on March 15.
The index would not touch that level again until 2015.

In 2005 he added a chapter on housing to the second edition.

In 2013 the Nobel committee gave him the prize for the empirical analysis of asset prices.

This is 47 minutes of him at the Aspen Institute, sitting in a chair, taking apart how the machine actually takes your money.

His argument is that you are not the one making the bad decision. There is a professional class whose whole job is to get you to make it.

- The lottery ticket is a sure loss and he says so flatly, and the seller is your own government, still selling because nobody has ever marched against it.

- The mortgage brokers of the boom were never licensed, so a man could walk out of prison on Friday and write loans on Monday, and they routinely told borrowers to look at the income line again.

- The candy sits at your child's eye level because the store clears 2 percent, and the manager who refuses to do it goes under.

47 minutes, and he is not describing bad luck.

He is describing a system that pays people to trick you.

[Dr. Mathhattan @mathhattan]

@0xkumaa prisoner's dilemma with the extra steps huh

good content, saved

[Dr. Mathhattan @mathhattan]

@FSantellan88579 the book never gives a date, it gives a price. those three years are the cost of being early

it is worth noting that his argument was never about selling, but about understanding exactly what you have in your hands

[Dr. Mathhattan @mathhattan]

@koaxbt the quantum fund compounded at ~30% annually through 1980

Roger's actual edge was cross border commodity arbitrage before Reuters had real-time price, so inefficiency was rather structural, than behavioral

[Dr. Mathhattan @mathhattan]

@CudworthRa52531 welp, being right on direction and getting liquidated on the way there are not mutually exclusive

[Dr. Mathhattan @mathhattan]

@koaxbt appreciate the support Koa, glad u liked it!

[Dr. Mathhattan @mathhattan]

How to beat a casino was settled in 1992 by a school dropout who learned cards on ships.

His name is Persi Diaconis.

He walked out of school at fourteen to follow a sleight of hand man named Dai Vernon, learned to control a deck by feel, and ended up a professor of statistics at Stanford.

What he and Dave Bayer published is one number.

Seven.

That is how many riffle shuffles a 52 card deck needs before every arrangement is equally likely.

Dealers were doing far fewer. Under seven the deck still remembers the order it went in, and a man who knows what went in can read what is coming out of it.

So a manufacturer paid him to test their new shuffling machine. He and Susan Holmes found a rule that fits in one sentence: if the next card is one higher, keep reading up, if it drops, read down. One card in five. Chance gives you one in twelve.

The executives wrote back. "We are not pleased with your conclusions, but we believe them and that's what we hired you for."

The machine was shelved.

This is 55 minutes of him at a blackboard in Berkeley, on the mathematics that makes all of that work. February 1999, no slides, a room of people who already knew what he was.

He never had to take a casino for a dollar. They paid him to prove that he could.