DREW

There will be a lot more to this website longer term. And eventually we'll hire a dedicated design guy. But we have the first version of the militia.com website up!

If you lose momentum, you die

All technical things are a lot easier than you think they are

The Militia Long/Short Equity ETF has launched! The ticker symbol is $ORR and it just began trading. The strategy is similar to my hedge fund, investing in global stocks up to 150% long and 100% short. This strategy will typically have lower correlation and beta to the market than most public investments. This means that during a strong bull run $ORR will have a tough time keeping up. But in a weak market $ORR is expected to outperform. My reasons for launching $ORR rather than growing my hedge fund: Many of the investments in my hedge fund are illiquid and I won’t be able to trade them if my hedge fund grows too big. This is why I’ve been turning away new investors. However, well over half of my bets scale well and $ORR will invest in that portion. The $ORR ETF will have a lower edge due to its larger scale, and thus it has a much lower fee to match. I have a strong opinion that hedge fund fees are incompatible with large AUM generally, not just for my fund. Most people don’t know it but Buffett pointed out that even Berkshire’s track record would have been mediocre with hedge fund type fees. This is by far the biggest reason I want to launch an ETF. I want to do right for the people investing with me, who are trusting me with their money, rather than sell out like most other hedge fund managers do. The $ORR ETF has less risk than my hedge fund because it uses less leverage and isn’t short many microcap stocks, which can have extreme volatility. This is a more appealing product to risk averse investors. The ETF vehicle has many benefits: Simplified, favorable taxes for the ETF holder. Can be owned on margin and in retirement accounts. Daily liquidity. Due diligence on ETFs is simpler than hedge funds, convenient for institutional investors. Compliance isn’t an issue for institutional investors. Allows me to rebalance longs without a tax hit. Both very small and very large investors can join, neither of which could invest in my hedge fund. Expenses stated in the prospectus: The 1.3% management fee is accurate, which is around .65%/year fee per 100% gross leverage managed. The 18.84% gross expense ratio is very misleading. These items cause the stated expenses to be very high but are not real economic costs: 1. When a stock or ETF that I’m short pays a dividend it gets counted as an expense. In reality, whenever dividends are paid the underlying stock or ETF drops by roughly the same amount. Thus, the real economics are neutral. The ETF will be heavily short high dividend investments at the start. 2. When I short a stock or an ETF, I am paying to borrow the shares. On average, my larger scale shorts cost 1%/year to borrow. This is considered an expense. However, when I short sell I am simultaneously borrowing shares from one guy and selling them to someone else. That someone else pays cash for these shares, which the ETF holder earns interest on. Thus, I will be earning a positive carry on that short. But the way the “expense” gets calculated, the interest earned from being short does not offset the cost of borrowing. 3. The margin interest paid for being over 100% gross long. Unlike the first two items, this is a real expense but the expected return of the stocks we own is higher than the interest cost. Frankly, the way the expense ratio gets calculated in the ETF prospectus is nonsensical. Regulators should update this number to better reflect reality. But since they don’t, and since most people do not understand this, ETF managers are reluctant to do anything in their portfolio that causes this official number to go up. Well, I say to hell with that. I’m just going to do whatever I think has the maximum expected value even if this hurts marketing to many potential investors. Points about the $ORR ETF at launch: * Until the ETF reaches ~$50-$150 million AUM, I will not be able to short more than 10 individual stocks or ETFs. This is due to the unusual mechanics of short selling in an ETF vehicle and associated implied cost. Thus, $ORR will be shorting mostly bad ETFs in its early days. This isn’t so bad. There’s a big edge in shorting some of these bad ETFs and I even make these same big bets in my hedge fund. But I want to be transparent: the ETF won’t have its full edge until we hit a bit larger scale. * While the ETF has low AUM you should be careful with trade execution. Do not use market orders. You will get the best fills if you use limit orders and buy between 10 AM and 3:30 PM ET. If you're buying in large size, contact your broker and do a Request for Quote (RFQ) to get best execution. Also, if you want to invest >$10 million and want more liquidity, you can reach out to me and I can help coordinate with a market maker. Regulation on public posts, or why I haven’t posted about the ETF until now: Every post I make about the ETF needs to get approval, including replies to questions in this thread. The turnaround time for approval is 5 days and costs money. Thus, I won’t be able to reply to your questions here. Instead, I will gather a list of questions and write up a FAQ. Oddly, I am allowed to reply to questions on podcasts. If you run a podcast and want to discuss the ETF, I’d like to go on. - Thanks to Sam Lee @svrnco for partnering with me on this. Besides financially backing it, there was an awful lot of overhead work and other hurdles when launching an ETF. He did a great job handling most of that work so that I could focus on investing. For more information about ORR ETF, a prospectus, fees and risks militiaetf.com

ADHD mfs with unrestricted access to Claude

It's so over. Anthropic just sent patches for FFmpeg supposedly using their latest model, Claude Mythos. The code quality is indistinguishable from top level engineers. If these really were found and written by AI, things are about to get really weird, really fast.

No Claude, this isn’t a 3-month project. We will finish it today.

@orrdavid @MikeFritzell Yep best thing for coding, research, general info. It’s easy to transfer all your data/memory through their settings from ChatGPT to Claude. Gemini for image generation. Perplexity for Power points, Slides, etc.

@MikeFritzell Is anthropic the best thing and I'm missing out?

Bullshit detection rate by AI model (source: PeterGPT)

Exclusive from @citrini x @hntrbrkmedia: A fishing vessel is ablaze in the Persian Gulf just off the Strait of Hormuz.

If I had a fund or a research firm and was in a position to hire staff, I’d go out and hire neurodivergents, give them a cool, quiet, dimly lit office to themselves, a Claude max pro subscription, a fridge full of caffeine/bowl full of zyns, make sure they have no administrative work or social interaction, and let them loose to follow their interest and make me money with clearly defined output expectations at set intervals. Does anyone do this?

Even the very best investors I know regret trying to time the market more often than not. The only people I know who do well timing the market are short term *trading* specialists. They are traders first, not investors. Know the game that you're playing!

@orrdavid Often aren’t independent thinkers and are sheep. You meet many that never have an opposing view. If they don’t have both right and left views even a tiny bit, I know they can’t form their own opinion without social pressure and usually not true to themself.

I don't like woke people on either side. To me, they are detached from reality. They have extreme moral relativism, or are outright bad people. Often these views stem from failings in their own lives.

The mainstream American left and right both agree that Iran shouldn't have nukes. They just disagree on how to prevent Iran getting them, which is healthy. The woke American left and right are both fine with Iran having nukes. They are a loud but small minority.

@blondesnmoney $TCPC

@GordonGekko420 Rolex Land-Dweller, need so much AD history to land one. Solid watch still

Also one kid in one pic is wearing a Daytona? So brother comes from money not just banking, or he got 1 good bonus as an1 and blew it

If one of my analysts did this lol brother would be unemployed by EOD

we're making @blocks smaller today. here's my note to the company. #### today we're making one of the hardest decisions in the history of our company: we're reducing our organization by nearly half, from over 10,000 people to just under 6,000. that means over 4,000 of you are being asked to leave or entering into consultation. i'll be straight about what's happening, why, and what it means for everyone. first off, if you're one of the people affected, you'll receive your salary for 20 weeks + 1 week per year of tenure, equity vested through the end of may, 6 months of health care, your corporate devices, and $5,000 to put toward whatever you need to help you in this transition (if you’re outside the U.S. you’ll receive similar support but exact details are going to vary based on local requirements). i want you to know that before anything else. everyone will be notified today, whether you're being asked to leave, entering consultation, or asked to stay. we're not making this decision because we're in trouble. our business is strong. gross profit continues to grow, we continue to serve more and more customers, and profitability is improving. but something has changed. we're already seeing that the intelligence tools we’re creating and using, paired with smaller and flatter teams, are enabling a new way of working which fundamentally changes what it means to build and run a company. and that's accelerating rapidly. i had two options: cut gradually over months or years as this shift plays out, or be honest about where we are and act on it now. i chose the latter. repeated rounds of cuts are destructive to morale, to focus, and to the trust that customers and shareholders place in our ability to lead. i'd rather take a hard, clear action now and build from a position we believe in than manage a slow reduction of people toward the same outcome. a smaller company also gives us the space to grow our business the right way, on our own terms, instead of constantly reacting to market pressures. a decision at this scale carries risk. but so does standing still. we've done a full review to determine the roles and people we require to reliably grow the business from here, and we've pressure-tested those decisions from multiple angles. i accept that we may have gotten some of them wrong, and we've built in flexibility to account for that, and do the right thing for our customers. we're not going to just disappear people from slack and email and pretend they were never here. communication channels will stay open through thursday evening (pacific) so everyone can say goodbye properly, and share whatever you wish. i'll also be hosting a live video session to thank everyone at 3:35pm pacific. i know doing it this way might feel awkward. i'd rather it feel awkward and human than efficient and cold. to those of you leaving…i’m grateful for you, and i’m sorry to put you through this. you built what this company is today. that's a fact that i'll honor forever. this decision is not a reflection of what you contributed. you will be a great contributor to any organization going forward. to those staying…i made this decision, and i'll own it. what i'm asking of you is to build with me. we're going to build this company with intelligence at the core of everything we do. how we work, how we create, how we serve our customers. our customers will feel this shift too, and we're going to help them navigate it: towards a future where they can build their own features directly, composed of our capabilities and served through our interfaces. that's what i'm focused on now. expect a note from me tomorrow. jack

Introducing Claude Code Security, now in limited research preview. It scans codebases for vulnerabilities and suggests targeted software patches for human review, allowing teams to find and fix issues that traditional tools often miss. Learn more: anthropic.com/news/claude-co…

“Claude, check my code for any security vulnerabilities. Don’t miss anything”

@TylerrJorrdan @Decentarah @unusual_whales x.com/zerohedge/stat…

@Decentarah @unusual_whales And if it wasn’t for us they’d be nuclear missiles

Iran has shot missles at Israel, following the US bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities.

@crsdchkn Have had like 2 close friends pets pass recently too. Really sucks. Keep your head up! Wish you and Omi the best.