Matt Hollerbach

When it comes to investing, Lots of people take the curvy road. Lots of people are told to take the curvy road. Many have the curvy road taken for them. Which investing road will you take? breakingthemarket.com/the-road-not-t…

this blew my mind.

Here’s a hard truth about modern society. We don’t practice Capitalism anymore. Rather, for the last 40 years we’ve been conducting a horrific experiment called “neoliberalism”. And we’re near the terminal point in that experiment, a stage I’ve been calling metastatic market fundamentalism. Capitalism is agents organizing to seek profit by serving the needs and wants of customers. Metastatic market fundamentalism treats citizens as feedstock for corporate profits. Social media is a canonical example. It’s established fact that Twitter, TikTok, Facebook, Instagram etc. algorithms, which are tuned to maximize advertising revenues via limbic activation, and produce political division and derangement, depression, and a host of other problems. But regulating against these algorithms might impair corporate profits, so America doesn’t regulate them. Because the system isn’t designed to protect the rights of Americans to not be exploited by corporations for profit. The system is to designed to protect corporations’ rights to extract maximum profit from citizens. This is pathological sociopathy at societal scale. I adore Capitalism. It’s a truly miraculous tool, but shouldn't be used to solve all problems. Take science: it is unequivocally the optimal way to seek empirical truth and model reality. But science can't address which questions are worth asking, or what priorities are most important to citizens under resource constraints. Similarly with Capitalism. It is an unparalleled engine for allocating resources and commercializing innovation, but it is a terrible arbiter of human values. When we ask the market to decide what constitutes a good life or a just society, it defaults to the only answer it knows: whatever is most profitable. That is the metastatic cancer. A functional society knows when to invoke science, or capitalism, or democracy, or the judicial process, or the deliberative bodies that define its public good. The central challenge of governance is to protect the sovereignty of each institutional sphere, ensuring that the logic of the marketplace does not set the curriculum for our schools, write the laws for our courts, or determine the mission of our hospitals. So here’s where we are: We built the most powerful resource allocation machine in history, then let it allocate us. We became the resource. The product. The feedstock. If you think I’m being dramatic, ask yourself - when did we last make a major policy decision that hurt corporate profits but helped actual humans? That silence you hear? That’s the cancer winning.

If you’re spread across infinite universes, by all means, go full expected value. But if you’re stuck living **just** one life like the rest of us, maybe aim to not end up broke 90% of the time. Median matters, multiverse or not. I might disagree with its fatalistic conclusion on capitalism and techno-optimism, but this writing is simply brilliant. “Founders are expected to adopt a linear wealth mindset and take big risks that maximize expected value as cogs in the venture capital machine dependent on power law home runs. The tales of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg risking everything they had and emerging with the largest personal fortunes on planet Earth reinforce the mythos that drives the entire risk taking sector, while survivorship bias conveniently forgets the millions of founders who go to zero.”

@retire_readyinv I periodically buy OTM puts. But I don't really have a system for it, just when I feel like it. Currently through I spend more time selling puts than buying them.

@breakingthemark Fantastic thread, Matt. I have been implementing longbvol now for 12- 18 months with limited success. BTAL being my primary tool, but I have recently transitioned to a more ensemble approach that has more convexity. What is your current approach?

I’m often asked my views on long vol and tail risk hedging and if I’ve looked in it. I haven’t really said much on the topic before, but I have explored it quite a bit. Here’s what I’ve found in my journey into the long vol universe

@goldstein_aa You have a great memory to think back to this thread.

@breakingthemark Uh oh... looks like this didn't work out so well: Bloomberg headline: "Promoter of $100 Million NJ Deli Gets Six Months for Fraud"... "Coker Jr. briefly became a fugitive from the charges and was arrested in hotel room in Phuket, Thailand, in January 2023."

Within a few minuets of posting this, Dogecoin collapsed 20% in price. But don't worry, is' still up 10X as much as Bitcoin over the last 5 years. #storeofvalue #closingfirstmoveradvantage

Stephen A Smith stuns the Bill Maher crowd into silence as he articulates how Democrats have no one left fighting for the American people: SAS: "The man was impeached twice, he was convicted on 34 felony counts. The American people still said 'He's closer to normal than what we're seeing on the left.' He's saying 'I kept my promise' Then you turn around and look at the left and you say 'What promises did you keep?' What voter can look at the Democrat party and say 'There's a voice for us, somebody who speaks for us, that goes up on Capitol Hill and fights the fights that we want them fighting on our behalf. They didn't do that. That's why their behinds are home, and that man is back in the White House. He's doing what he said he was going to do." The American people said 'We'll take the supposed 'felon' over the woman who is telling us men can get pregnant'

The bull market continues and my book is officially the cheapest it's ever been. Get it here: amzn.to/3WMoUW7

Catch-24 You need a rational well-functioning mind to run for president If your mind is slipping, you should withdraw from the race You must have a rational well-functioning mind to realize you should withdraw from the race, therefore you should continue to run for president.

Do you understand Volatility Tax? Winning, optimizing, compounding: These are 3 main focuses for traders trying to optimize their way into super-performance but there is so much more going on under the hood. I invite you to study these 3 fantastic pieces of content on the topic, optimizing your strategy effectively hinges on your understanding of this hidden tax, this is EXTREMELY important: 1) dunham.com/FA/Blog/Posts/… "But this tax – I believe – is the most insidious of them all for investment returns. Because the volatility tax is the hidden tax that occurs from steep portfolio losses that crush long-term compounded returns." 2) @breakingthemark's incredible blog: breakingthemarket.com/the-most-misun… "If you lose 50% of your wealth, it takes a doubling of your wealth to get back to whole. 50% X 200% = 100% Once again this feels odd.  If feels like this trade off should work to your advantage, but it doesn’t." 3) @TheTradeBuster's 2-part short-form podcast episodes: "If you have a chance of ruin, you have no alpha." open.spotify.com/episode/3Ee0Jx… open.spotify.com/episode/7rqzra…

Moontower #227 (link to sub*tack in bio) The Worst Is Always In The Future refs: @paulg @FoundersPodcast @breakingthemark @investingidiocy @__paleologo

there’s an equity risk premium because if there wasn’t everyone would take a riskless rate which would then lower demand for equities, once again creating an equity risk premium

@xmjEE It will be back up soon.

@breakingthemark what happened to your pronghorn analytics website?

@brenorb @hcburger1 @PrestonPysh @WhatBitcoinDid I've been watching it for the last few months. It's working well.

@hcburger1 @PrestonPysh @WhatBitcoinDid @breakingthemark remember when you did TA on bitcoin? Still works.

Thanks @PrestonPysh for presenting my chart on @WhatBitcoinDid and speaking positively about it. You did a great job explaining it and linking it to adoption (a complex subject). I'd like to give some extra background info below. youtube.com/watch?v=IyMKjr…

@Nicholas_Meyers Happy new year Nick.

@Nicholas_Meyers Still active. Website got shut down by mistake, but will be back up soon. I’d like to get back to writing as well.

@BaniaInvestor It’s still alive. Website will be back up soon.

@breakingthemark is pronghorn still alive? Are we going to get a 2023 blog post?

My only addition to @breakingthemark's superb list is aiming for a barbell strategy (equity funds + VC for me) Understand this 14-point decalogue and you'll be in the top 5% of investors

The charts in this piece do a great job showing how over-betting combined with time and repetition can lead to ruin.

"Lewis believes that SBF just got a little unlucky. But, in reality, SBF was always going to crash and burn, it was just a matter of time." New Post: Where Michael Lewis Went Wrong ofdollarsanddata.com/where-michael-…