spoof

@tleilax___ speed/free option > accuracy

I heard from a friend in HFT that the algos trading on headlines are a bit more basic that I thought. No LLMs, more like old-school Vader, and the main reason is latency. That might be one of the key reasons they are very "first degree" thinkers and quit gullible to fake news. I guess not a lot of nuance can be extracted within microseconds, but they are working on it.

2026 them: "have you implemented semantic feature engineering to refine signals?" me: "have you tried daytrading with charts?"

i really think finding a minor winning framework is the entire game for retail. it doesnt have to be what i did (short term, long/short, daily stop). leverage and scalability are not constraints for retail. as a 105iq deluded degenerate this was more than enough for me ...

if you start with 10k and get to 2mm, goalposts will shift. first 3.5mm, then 5mm. why stop? dont be insane. do you hate money? and that assumes not nuking the account along the way because one day an enemy said something that made you feel inadequate. ...

@hamijuuu awful. yet it crystallized that i needed to walk away at the next opportune time. this game isnt forever

@pnlcorrect cant imagine how this one felt

allocated everything to the pros end of an era quit while ahead

@hamijuuu no longer active after 2023

@pnlcorrect havent gotten the 2024 and 2025

Others have done way more I can do way more if I stick around But in this game, quit while ahead

@plur_daddy hfs which regularly took opposing views converged towards the same business model

What actually makes the stock market go up and down? I was chatting with friends who were frustrated with the market's resilience despite what they viewed as adverse datapoints. There has been tremendous confusion over the market's recent action, and in an attempt to organize my own thoughts about it, I went through the exercise of breaking it down to its underlying drivers. At the most foundational level, equities are obviously driven by earnings times multiples. Earnings are straightforward and driven by factors such as broader economic conditions and the performance of the underlying business. Multiples are more complex to unpack but I posit they are a function of liquidity conditions + flows. Liquidity conditions are driven by central banks, fiscal stimulus, the movement of liquidity between the real economy and financial assets (the demand for liquidity, see my pinned post), market-based elements (such as DXY and the MOVE index), market plumbing, and other factors. Flows can be broken down between passive and discretionary flows. The boom in passive flows have been one of the biggest changes in the market during my lifetime, and have radically changed the way the indices trade. If you look back at market history, you will see that significant declines in the indices were much more common in the past. Part of that comes from the will of the free market once being more dominant, and since the GFC, factors such as the Fed put and direct government management of the market becoming a greater force. The reality is that the stock market has become the economy, and the government has a massive incentive to find ways to manage it higher. The other main change has been passive flows. Today true passive flows like 401ks are roughly $2-3bn in flows per day on average, while corporate buybacks are another $2-3bn per day (outside of the blackout window). This is an incredible tailwind that shifts the odds of market performance towards being long, and this has correspondingly affected market participant behavior significantly. Ironically, the least sophisticated normies seem to have absorbed this lesson to the greatest degree (perma long index). So once you factor in these market tailwinds, it takes a greater proportion of discretionary flows to make the market go down. Discretionary flows are driven by psychology. Yet this psychology is also heavily influenced by the passive flows, since they make the index a comfy hold. You can argue this is like the bell curve meme, where the left curve simplistically believes stocks only go up, while the right curve understands passive and the reflexive impact of those flows on psychology as synergistically driving an environment where it is +EV to staying long most of the time. I am saying this partially in jest, and personally find it difficult to stay perma long equities, despite understanding these dynamics intellectually. So this is a reminder for myself as much as it is sharing this view with you all. What drives psychology? Greed and fear. Yet more so than greed, what seems to be driving the market currently is fear, but not fear of the potential economic impact of the war and shortages caused by an extended blockade of the Strait of Hormuz. No, the real fear is of being sidelined through a painful rally like last year. That incident deeply imprinted market participants. We did have some real fear of the blockade, but at the first hint of Trump showing a willingness to deal, psychology firmly shifted over to fear of being sidelined. The reality is that the market is allowing itself to be trained, like a snake charmer with a king cobra. The market is believing more and more in Trump's ability to jawbone the market higher, and as people throw in the towel and stop fighting it, it becomes a progressively more powerful force. It's memetic consensus at its finest. Everyone agrees that Trump can manipulate the market up, and because they believe it, the markets respond accordingly. Now with the market having gotten over its prior fear of Hormuz and the war, I question whether going back to the prior state of play pre-negotiations, would have the same ability to drive fear. The market has become de-sensitized and would require much greater intensity to get back to the same level. We saw the same thing with tariffs and Covid once the initial fever broke. Yet despite everything I've just said, I'm having trouble being balls long here. So I have been gradually buying favored single stocks and trying to reduce the number of decisions I'm making. I often find commodities easier to trade than equity indices because they are a pure distillation of supply and demand. In commodities you can get a trending market when there is a clear supply shortage and inelastic buyers, and these conditions can persist for an extended period of time. The game becomes more about finding hidden sources of demand and supply, and understanding how they are impacted at various price levels. When a commodity market doesn't do what you expect, it always boils down to misunderstanding the actual levels of supply and demand, and the embedded reaction functions. However I don't see many home runs in commodities at the moment. Usually great opportunities only come around a couple times a year at best. So in the meantime I believe that grinding out single stocks is the best place to play.

@dampedspring eq and xau both rich, ust doesnt perform short of sudden demand shock. the solution is trend but it gets chopped by inorganic tweets

The great failure of 60/40 and risk parity was holding bonds at ZIRP "for portfolio diversification benefit". Pricing matters. Today Gold and commodities have saved every portfolio that was smart enough to hold them. Daily you hear about the essential need for holding these assets "for portfolio diversification benefit" At DampedSpring we are currently quite concerned that pricing matters and these assets are now priced like bonds at ZIRP

@StockOperator56 ill writeup something short on this cuz it helped me a lot

@StockOperator56 build a large sample size, aim for consistency in a repeatable structured setting. dont worry about absolute returns or how other ppl are doing