Alex Sharp

The Bloomberg Terminal literally has an entire command just for finance bros to know we’re to aura farm for dinner. DINE <GO> is tailored for busy finance professionals seeking quick insights on where to eat, network, or entertain clients. Filter by location, cuisine, & price!

adhd people are the best because we never actually forget anything, you just have to say the right words to activate us like a sleeper cell and then we awaken with all the details on a super random subject that we studied for 3 months straight 6 years ago

AMD Senior AI Director confirms Claude has been nerfed. She analyzed Claude's session logs from Janurary to March: > median thinking dropped from ~2,200 to ~600 chars > API requests went up 80x from Feb to Mar. less thinking and failed attempts meaning more retries, burning more tokens, and spending more on tokens > reads-per-edit dropped from 6.6x → 2.0x. model stops researching code before touching it. > model tried to bail out or ask "should i continue" 173 times in 17 days (0 times before March 8). > self-contradiction in reasoning ("oh wait, actually...") tripled. > conventions like CLAUDE.md get ignored because there's less thinking budget to cross-check edits > 5pm and 7pm PST are the worst hours, late night is significantly better. this means the thinking allocation is most likely GPU-load-sensitive.

Everyone wants free stock market data. But free or cheap data has hidden costs. Cheap data providers have no revenue incentive to fix errors and no QA pipelines to catch them. Worse, your usage data is the actual product being sold to other customers. Hedge funds don't build on free data for the same reason they don't trade on free research. One bad data point and your portfolio is gone.

What free plugins/APIs do you use with Claude to get access to historical market data?

LiteLLM HAS BEEN COMPROMISED, DO NOT UPDATE. We just discovered that LiteLLM pypi release 1.82.8. It has been compromised, it contains litellm_init.pth with base64 encoded instructions to send all the credentials it can find to remote server + self-replicate. link below

Equity bears are at the brink of insanity given resilience in the indices, but odds of a breakdown are increasing now. Equities top slowly as passive flows and rotational dynamics can hold up indices for a long time. There are many structural forces rigged to push them higher, and thus it takes a lot to make them go down. Over the course of an equity bull market, buy-the-dip behavior continually gets reinforced, and the majority of capital will be controlled by adherents to this mantra. In theory, the longer prices remain coiled, the larger the move once they exit the range. This nuke in gold suggests there are liquidity issues brewing under the surface. It feels like a preview of what is going to happen to crowded trades. My theory is the Middle East is selling gold to shore up capital, as they have lost their revenue, and have many expenses around defence. They will also need to rebuild lost energy infra, and eventually, new pipelines to reroute around Hormuz. The buyback window is starting to close, and the sugar rush of higher-than-usual tax refunds is starting to fade. Retail has been a key marginal buyer of equities in these past weeks, and the fading of the tax refund tailwind is critical. The market is gradually coming to terms with the fact that this conflict may last for a long time. On a conventional level, the US and Israel have completely dominated Iran, but Iran has an asymmetric edge when it comes to controlling world oil prices through Hormuz. Trump can still end it, but the issue is that the US cannot simply leave, a ceasefire with Iran must be struck in order to guarantee that Hormuz is reopened. In order to strike a ceasefire, Iran wants to see a guarantee that the US and Israel won't attack them again (at a bare minimum), and it will be difficult for the US to get Israel to agree to that. Trump is used to being able to quickly maneuver according to his whims, as he did with tariffs, but the complex interlocking physical realities of war are different. Oil shocks often contribute to the end of bull markets, since they constrain consumer spending, hit manufacturing, and lower the ability of central banks to offer support. Indeed, the Fed came out slightly hawkish yesterday, and Powell also hinted that he may stay in his Governor seat post his role as Chair ending, which would constrain Trump's plans to unleash liquidity. We have a stronger dollar and long duration bond yields are going up over the world, which tightens liquidity. The Middle East is tight on money now and they were the marginal bidder in many assets. In particular, they were a key funder for AI capex through their investments in the frontier labs. They've been 40-50% of recent big rounds. Remember other deep pockets like Softbank are close to being tapped out. Any dollar that goes into these rounds will have to come out of something else, like liquid stocks (look at my pinned post for this broader thesis). And if we have any signs of risk to AI capex expectations, this will be a major shift that the market needs to contemplate. I've said this before, but puts are a difficult way to express bearish equity views because timing is so uncertain. Equities can hold on for a long time, because they are structurally rigged to go higher. Easier expressions are simply being in cash, or gradually shorting cash stocks over time, which helps avoid getting chopped. This is a very difficult market, stay safe out there.