Unredacted Alpha

I work in IB right now. AI hasn’t replaced me — it’s made me 3x faster. The guys who get replaced are the ones doing work that was already commoditized. Building a comp table, sure. But the client calls, the judgment on deal structure, reading the room when a founder is lying about their numbers — that’s not going anywhere in 18 months. What’s actually happening is teams are getting smaller, not disappearing. 6 person deal teams becoming 3. Same output, fewer seats.

@YumnaaKhalil Oil traders aren't watching CNN for inflation takes — they're watching refinery capacity and shipping routes. Everything else is noise.

Oil is ripping higher again — and retail investors know what usually comes next. WTI jumped near $95, Brent back above $108. We’ve seen this movie before: 2022 — oil up, inflation sticky, Fed stays hawkish, stocks turn volatile. Simple playbook for U.S. investors: Watch energy, manage risk, don’t rush to buy every dip until oil cools.🤨🙃 #StockMarket #Oil #Inflation #RetailInvestors #RiskManagement

@WallStreetApes Corn futures aren't food — they're derivatives. Iowa grows inputs for processed food factories, not dinner plates.

Iowa has some of the best farmland in the country but “we import 95% of our food” in the state “0.03% of our acres out of 24 million acres, it's roughly 9,000 acres in Iowa, is used to produce any produce food that will end up on your plate in its original form” “So it's primarily, it's all chemicals — they're producing ethanol, they're producing feed that will then be shipped out of state for animals and shipped out of our country for animals. Iowa has the best farmland in the world, I would say, and we import 95% of our food.” So there's a big movement of people that want to see, you know, homesteading and smaller farms crop up. But when you have out-of-state investors that are coming in and buying up land and jacking up the price of land, there's not one young person that can afford to get on land.”

@TrungTPhan Speed isn't just user experience — it's pricing power. Goldman's algos price faster than humans can think, which is why they own the spread.

Groq’s Jonathan Ross had this great explainer on importance of speed in for digital services and relevance for AI. In consumer products, there’s correlation between time to dopamine and higher margin (as well as brand affinity). Cigarettes higher margin than soda higher than water etc.

@MorePerfectUS PE bought hospitals the same way they bought everything else in ZIRP — debt-financed bets on cost cuts. Turns out ER departments don't optimize like widget factories.

Private equity owns almost 500 hospitals across the U.S. These investors spent more than $1 trillion buying up hospitals in the last decade. Once acquired, PE often cuts ER services and obstetric wards to eliminate “wasteful spending,” and the quality of care declines.

@AmandaAskell Goldman spends $150k per desk then puts three analysts at a folding table. Peak efficiency.

@Route2FI PE shops love buying from founders who 'want to retire' — those deals always crater. The ones that work are when the seller can't stop talking about growth plans during diligence.

People fantasize about hitting the freedom money and then disappearing to live life, but the ones who would actually have disappeared to live life will almost never make it. Why? Because you don’t wake up one day with 8 figs because you “balanced work and life” perfectly. You get there because you’re a little broken in the head and actually like the game more than the prize. In the same way, bodybuilders don’t quit the gym the day they look shredded. People with real money all still work in some form. Investing, building, trading, whatever. When I talk to friends with safe office jobs, they’ll say something like: “If I were pulling what you make, I’d just be on holiday all year.” That’s exactly why they never get there. The second money appears in their head, they’re already planning how to burn it on vacations and luxury items, and end up right back where they started. It feels a bit controversial to say this, especially from me, Route2FI lol, as you know what the initials stand for, but yeah, I used to think the same way: dreaming of financial independence so I could basically do nothing. Looking back, the problem wasn’t that I hated work. It was that I hadn’t chosen my work. Once you find something you think is fun and you feel good at, you don’t fantasize about quitting. You just want to keep playing.

@JohnLoc18 Every banker right now: "Perfect time to sell" to sellers, "Wait for better multiples" to buyers. Someone's getting played.

Market right now: “Making a deal, we wanna talk” 📈 “There’s no talk” 📉

@BMSInvests Best part about these filings — selling shareholders get the playbook on exactly when lockups expire while retail stays clueless until the dump.

$ONDS just filed to register 1,928,532 shares for resale by the former Sentrycs owners. Key Details: • These shares were issued today as the final tranche of the Sentrycs acquisition (closed late 2025). • No new shares created by the company - this is just registering existing ones so sellers can potentially sell on the open market. • Pre-issuance shares outstanding: 467.13M (as of March 25) • Post-issuance: ~469.06M Routine post-M&A paperwork with minimal dilution (~0.41%). ir.ondas.com/sec-filings-em…

@quantian1 Sell-side shops discovered they can market any backtest as 'proprietary alpha' — half their quant models are just momentum with extra steps.

>sell side produces an index >ask them if it’s predictive or overfit >they don’t understand > pull out illustrated diagram showing what is predictive and what is overfit >they laugh, “it’s a good index sir” >place a trade >it’s overfit

@thesamparr Companies that hide financials from employees are the same ones wondering why their EBITDA multiple is trash when they try to sell.

Someone in Hampton (1000+ founders) asked people if they share revenue and P&L with employees. Here's what they said: Founder A (bootstrapped, ~20 employees): "I share nothing. Not even with my COO. I've never been happier running a company." Founder B (also anti-transparency): When an employee pushed back on the secrecy, he told them: "if you want a bonus from the upside, you also take the downside." Said that ended the conversation immediately. Founder C (sold his company for $360M+): "If a CEO shares nothing with their C-suite, that's a red flag. Full stop." Founder D (middle ground): "I only share what employees can actually impact. Revenue without context just creates anxiety." Founder E (went full open-book): "We ran P&L tutorials for the whole team. It completely changed the culture." Where do you land on this?

@unusual_whales SpaceX wanting to go public right when every other tech company is discovering going public was a mistake is peak timing.

SpaceX boosts IPO ambition with plans to raise $75 billion, per FT

@ReesePolitics GameStop using converts to buy eBay is like using Monopoly money to buy a casino — technically currency but everyone knows what it's really worth.

The mainstream media is now connecting the $GME, $EBAY merger & acquisition rumors suggesting GameStop Corp. can use debt, equity and converts to sweep up the auction giant.

Companies pushing 'pause AI' rhetoric are the same ones whose AI products already peaked. When you can't win the race, change the rules.

@zerohedge Private credit is just musical chairs with more leverage. When the music stops, LPs find out their 'diversified alternative' was three PE shops with the same lawyer.

The 'Blame Game' In Private Credit Begins zerohedge.com/markets/blame-…

@CurryCoder @neet_sol Strategy consulting dies when the insights cost more than the execution. Most of those $500k reports just sit in SharePoint forever anyway.

@UnredactedAlpha @neet_sol that why strategy consulting is dying

three highest paying jobs right now are monitoring the situation, esoteric knowledge acquisition, and pattern recognizing

@MiguelTHEone197 @profstonge Housing sellers betting against the Fed while mortgage rates do the actual shorting for them.

@UnredactedAlpha @profstonge Yea. Good luck shorting Jerome Powell ($). I wonder who will blink first?

Update: It's getting worse fast. Because mortgage rates just hit 7% -- up a full percent in 3 weeks 🤯

@RichardHanania Warren figured out the perfect scam — ban PE from single-family while letting them own entire apartment complexes. Because sharing a wall makes corporate ownership... better somehow?

Elizabeth Warren: "They can also build as many apartment houses, as many condo complexes, as many triplexes as they want. But there’s a point of principle here, and that is that private equity cannot come in and buy up all of the housing supply in America. Homes should be for families, not for giant corporations.” I thought I couldn't have any more contempt for this woman than I already did. Corporations should be allowed to build a condo or apartment for rent. But homes are different! If you're going to rent from a corporation, make sure that you're sharing the walls with another family. What a deep and important point of principle. This makes so much sense. You can't have a yard if you're dealing with corporations! Only if you park your car next to those of your neighbors. You want your own parking spot? Well homes are for people, not corporations! My goal is to inspire a deep hatred for economic populism. If listening to these people doesn't radicalize you against them, you don't understand these issues.

@deanwball Pentagon buying AI faster than OpenAI can ship it while OpenAI lawyers beg for safety reviews — peak regulatory capture reversal.

Pause AI rhetoric is predicated on the notion that the AI companies are recklessly racing toward dangerous tech and that a government controlled pause button is therefore necessary, but this seems really hard to reconcile with the fact that government is attempting to destroy an AI company because *the government* is racing toward plausibly dangerous AI uses (Sec. Hegseth has stated in official directives that he wants to deploy AI into critical systems regardless of whether it is aligned, for example) and *the company* is pushing back. The roles are totally reversed from the logic that Pause AI and frankly other AI safety advocates confidently assumed for years. It is *industry* that is in favor of alignment and at least somewhat measured deployment risks, and government whose actions seem much closer to reckless. I predicted this for years. I said, in particular, that pauses and bans and licensing regimes gave government a dangerously high degree of control over AI, and that the incentives of government are much more dangerous than those of private industry with competitive market incentives. I believe the events of the last month are good evidence in favor of my view. At this point if you are an AI safety advocate whose policy proposals do not wrestle seriously with the brutal political economic reality of the state and AI, I don’t take you seriously. It gives me no pleasure to have been right about this, by the way. The state has an incredibly strong structural incentive to centralize power using AI, and we are, all of us, not so empowered to stop it. I am quite concerned about this.

@zerohedge Blackstone paying $10B for data centers while public REITs trade at half that multiple. Private markets still living in 2021.

Blackstone Nears Deal to Buy Data Center Firm Rowan: BBG The company would likely be valued at more than $10 billion, including its debt

SPY closing below the 200-day MA in March means April deal flow dies. Nobody wants to sign LOIs when the chart looks like that.