Saang Lee (이상선)

@johnjdagostino @Bonecondor @TheTranscript_ My point was more: Perhaps airlines (different than say before 2014~2015 before the massive secular growth in global travel demand) don't see the need to hedge since there will be relatively little demand destruction even if flight costs go up massively.

@saanglee @Bonecondor @TheTranscript_ Then all the more reason to hedge right? If they can amortize that cost across the customer base? Or am I missing your point.

$UAL CEO: "The reality is, jet fuel prices have more than doubled in the last three weeks. If prices stayed at this level, it would mean an extra $11B in annual expense just for jet fuel. For perspective, in United’s best year ever, we made less than $5B"

@johnjdagostino @Bonecondor @TheTranscript_ And to be fair, global demand for flights has been so inelastic the past decade (minus covid) or so that I wouldn't be surprised if most of the increase in costs are able to be pushed to customers (while having the option to keep prices sticky even if fuel costs drop).

@johnjdagostino @Bonecondor @TheTranscript_ I'm not disagreeing with you here... but it cuts both ways, right? If crude spikes up, you look like a genius; if it plummets, shareholders ask why you're the only airline that "lost" money. Kinda like how uninformed investors want beta going up and alpha coming down...

@johnjdagostino @Bonecondor @TheTranscript_ Looks like they've since rolled back their aggressive hedging after a $1.1bn loss on their hedge positions in 2015.

@johnjdagostino @Bonecondor @TheTranscript_ I actually did this analysis like a decade ago. Iirc the Asian airlines hedged their fuel costs the most. I think it was Cathy Pacific that had the largest amount hedged.

One of the things that annoys me about some new entrepreneurs is that they don’t carry about a passion for the problem they’re trying to solve. It’s almost this disease where they’ll do anything to get funding. Like change their entire product or idea on a whim if that means that’ll get them funded. Obviously then, their goal here is that they want to be a “entrepreneur/founder” more than they want to bring their idea into life. Because if they are willing to abandon their idea at the first point of friction they must not be very passionate about it. Imo, building anything from 0 to 1 is so egregiously difficult that unless you’re willing to chew glass for it, the chances of you being able to generate enough escape velocity to be relevant is almost 0. Be passionate. It’s an endlessly renewable source of fuel.

@systematicls This is why I hate the term "serial entrepreneur"

@robstephens_ @robstephens_ are you doing mostly privates/VC these days?

10/ I've spent my career at this intersection. A decade on the ground investing and advising through peak U.S.-China tensions. Now investing across VC, Deep Tech, Space, Defense, Energy, and Natural Resources. The opportunity set is the best I've seen. And it's still early. If you're building or investing in this space, I'd love to chat.

7/ Here's what makes this cycle different. Every sector on China's 15th Five Year Plan list is also a US industrial policy priority. Two of the world's largest economies are directing state capital into the same sectors simultaneously. That's not a coincidence. That's your investment playbook.

@macrocephalopod @therobotjames @kai_xbt Yep. Should be three out of three amirite

@therobotjames @kai_xbt The idea that two of your three buckets should be for crypto is absolutely insane lmao

Flood explains why you should separate your capital into 3 different buckets if you're trading for a living "You should separate it between this is my actively deployed trading capital, this is my long term buy and hold portfolio if I go through periods where I don't have alpha and I don't know it, which is very scary, and then you should also have capital set aside for living expenses, that way you're not commingling the 3.” “I think a lot people put themselves under unnecessary duress because they're not able to bifurcate their capital into different buckets."

@__paleologo @TheSpeculator0 Any materials/papers you can share wrt (2) Understanding and capturing risk appetite by investors?

It's a very reasonable reaction, but it's just not true. Even for Sharpe-10 strategies. 1. Sharpe Ratio and volatility do not tell the whole story about risk and performance. Worst-case risk is not captured well and requires a *lot* of domain-specific knowledge. This is extremely important. 2. Understanding and capturing risk appetite by investors and converting it into firm risk, and then credibly enforcing it is very hard. 3. For firms not running capacity-constrained strategies, capital allocation is important. I can't provide counterexamples to falsify the statements. But they are out there with a little research.

Oftentimes, I read from retail traders dismissive comments about risk manage(ment|rs). Risk management is the most useful skill you can learn when trading on your PA or managing a $3b book (and it’s learnable). And a good Chief Risk Officer is the 2nd most important and useful person in a top hedge fund. I know, it’s obvious. But in years like this, a good self-reminder.

@kchoudhu Sure, perhaps a bit icky b/c $, but tbh someone taking an opportunity to market luxury products and Red Bull to China is way far down the list of things I think are worth the outrage... vs say industry experts who are getting paid 10/100's of millions to set up new industries...

@kchoudhu Not sure if I agree on this one sir. Iirc something like 10% of US Olympic athletes are naturalized: see Joel Embiid. And tons of US coaches who take foreign national team jobs.

Actually, it absolutely does matter and Eileen Gu should be excoriated for the choices she made.

@stevehou @luke_veil You don't look a day over 50!

@luke_veil I was a teenager back then

The stock market is starting to give me 1929 vibes tbh.

@HighyieldHarry I have spoken to 200 CEOs in the last 200 hours; all of them with 20,000-500,000 employees. Each of them is planning a minimum 200% headcount reduction. Said with great concern; this is about to get very real for labour markets.

I have spoken to 55 CEOs in the last 55 hours; all of them with 5,000-100,000 employees. Each of them is planning a minimum 55% headcount reduction. Said with great concern; this is about to get very real for labour markets.

@kchoudhu Stay safe sir!

Thanks, Claude!

If vibe coding works so well, why are all the big foundation model companies still making multi-billion dollar acquisitions instead of vibe coding something in-house?

Bloomberg is cooked. I just asked Perplexity AI to vibe code a Bloomberg Terminal replacement. 3 hours and 80,000 lines of code later, Perplexity rebuilt the Terminal in one shot: Real-time market dashboards Equity & FX charts with technical overlays Earnings summaries Macro calendar Company profiles AI-generated research briefs News feed with sentiment tags A dark-mode UI that looked… expensive None of it worked. Data sources weren’t normalized. Tickers mismatched across exchanges. Some numbers were… creative. But boy was that dark-mode beautiful.

@macrocephalopod @YuriWerewolf Have you found that you prefer one over the other?

@YuriWerewolf Claude Code and Codex in a terminal

A neat side effect of using AI coding tools is that I now spend more time writing detailed specs, and often the process of writing the spec clarifies my understanding of the problem to the level that I feel like I don’t really need the AI coding tool any more (I still use it, because it’s faster than writing the code myself, but it’s just writing the code I would have written anyway which makes it easier to check that the output is correct).

@choffstein Calling it “AI slop” misses the point. People have always outsourced thinking — quoting books, citing experts, Googling counterarguments. An LLM is just a faster version. The issue isn’t the tool. It’s whether the person actually understands and stands behind what they paste.

there's a new form of AI slop where people argue with you by copy pasting your reply into an LLM and then copy/pasting the LLM's reply back to you. when this happens to me, i just start doing the same thing back and we're basically playing LLM argument pong.

@kchoudhu Mostly did local cuisine (though I'm sure some were probably tourist traps). Seafood was great, especially since Austria is devoid of it. Didn't have an opportunity to do the super expensive stuff, though I'd love to try a few high end places the next time I go.

@saanglee Yeah if you're willing to pay up, there are world class experiences to be had. The middle is bad, and then it gets really, really good with the super cheap stuff.

The only misstep here was choosing Chinese food in Dubai, but leadership simply has to be effectiveness, not flawless.