Have extremely high expectations of your potential
Have extremely high expectations that you will eventually get things right
AND you will get it right faster than anyone else
BUT have extremely low expectations of your ability to get things right in a single try or even two
And you will be able to do anything
Volatility, Return, and Sharpe ratio lines for all beta-hedged factors in the K. French library. Long-short and long-only on the extreme deciles since 1963.
The momentum and volatility factors are the outliers with strongest returns and Sharpe. But these are also hardest to trade.
Net share issuance with strong sharpe but weaker return in absolute terms.
The edge of most long-only factors is weak, short term reversal even flipped negative.
A stretched pairs spread looks like free money. Before you fade it, ask: did the relationship break, or just deviate? Most stat arb mispricings are regime changes wearing a mean-reversion costume. The edge isn't spotting the gap, it's knowing it closes.
AI loops well when feedback is cheap and the metric doesn’t degrade. Markets break both. Every backtest iteration on one history overfits. Every live trade eats the capacity it measures. The signal dies as you optimise it. Most ML alphas don’t survive deployment.
The problem is that a stop loss treats risk as a property of price when risk is actually a property of exposure over time. So a stop loss is answering a question the market isn’t asking. It’s a number you invented that feels like it constrains your loss, but what it mainly does is add randomness.
Stop losses are conceptually wrong. Not 100% useless, but wrong. You better look at how volatile what you’re buying is and size the position so that it is acceptable.
Paradox of skill...the smarter markets are the more random it feels.
If lines to a game are well set you win some, you lose some and either way you pay the vig
The market not making sense ...makes sense
Your making money shouldn't depend on it making sense because if it did it would violate the idea that most people cannot make money trading (assuming the notion of sense was something shared)
This feels like some corollary to trading broadly...trading is about making money in the absence of knowing what is going to happen.
Trading is a practice that be adapted to any environment. Sometimes you inherit a departed trader's position. You deal with it. You manage the risk. Your ability to do this shouldn't depend on the market behaving according to your opinions.
I'm guessing that the needs to make sense crowd sees the market like a physics or cause and effect problem rather than what it is. Positions and flows
(In the long run whatever that means it probably does make sense but nobody wants long run edge because it has long feedback loops and doesn't maximize throughput of an actual edge like higher turnover, better sharp strats. But short term movements have no reason to make sense in any economic or textbook ways)
Anyway just my reaction to the word sense
🚦 The Sharpe gap in trend following lives in position sizing.
Zakamulin shows that regime-dependent position sizing, not the signal, is where most of the Sharpe comes from in trend strategies.
Fixed (static) sizing:
→ US equities: Sharpe 0.41–0.57
→ International equities: Sharpe 0.05
→ Diversified portfolio: Sharpe 0.21
Regime-optimal sizing:
→ US equities: Sharpe 0.56–0.73
→ International equities: Sharpe 0.30
→ Diversified portfolio: Sharpe 0.51
The jump on international markets is the most striking — from near zero to 0.30. Same signal, completely different exposure calibration.
I've been thinking about this since we redesigned our position sizing framework at Noax. The signal identification problem gets most of the attention. The allocation problem gets underestimated.
The practical difficulty: defining regimes out-of-sample is harder than any backtest suggests. But the direction is clear: static sizing is the wrong default most of the time.
📄Paper: https://t.co/dMA6Cweru0
→ Join 3,000+ readers: https://t.co/Xtg63ha48q
@therobotjames Are you linking people to this article? I’ve never built a serious sports betting model (I built plenty of shitty ones). But if I was going to, I’d basically base it on the system in this pdf: https://t.co/daas0OOMPk
oh also the #1 advice for breaking into quant trading for undergrads is to TA something like discrete math
having a >2SD ability to articulate/teach/empathize is 10x more valuable to your performance on a trading floor than technical tricks, quant clubs, or mid projects
What Claude Code has revealed is that most people either have mediocre ideas or no ideas at all. The tool is a force multiplier for those who already know what they want to build and how to think through it systematically; it elevates competence, rewards clarity, and accelerates execution for people who would have gotten there anyway, just slower. If you have a sharp vision and can break it into coherent steps, Claude Code becomes an extension of your own capability.
But there's another mode of use entirely. For people without that clarity, the appeal is precisely that the input can stay vague; you gesture at something, hit enter, and wait to see what comes out. This is structurally identical to a slot machine: low effort, variable reward, and that intermittent reinforcement loop that hooks the susceptible. So the same tool that elevates the focused and capable is also manufacturing a kind of gambling behavior in people prone to it.
Street kwants have to approach the problem differently
We suck at coding. Have very little money to start. No infra. No team. Good people wouldn't work for us at the start
Also simply not as smart as real kwants. Can't math
When you recognize those constraints magic happens