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which tools?

Saying “we gotta get Greenland” when the people in Greenland say they don’t want to join the US. Then refusing to rule out using force. If you want to say that no exact act of treachery has been committed, then substitute “treacherous words”, which also harms alliances.

The problem isn't using OneDrive. The problem is not using it. If you try to not use it, the dark patterns the article references appear.

Heads up on this media source: part of Hunterbrook's business model to give investment funds early access to the news, so they can trade ahead of it [1].

Now that is not to say that this story is false, or even that the business model is necessarily bad, I will leave that up to you to decide. But this media source has a different set of motivations than most readers are used to. You'll notice that the news is about two US companies that are easily shortable, DHI and LEN.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hunterbrook

What information sources do you use to find the cheap + growing things?

Not the person you’re responding to, but my email is in my profile

I agree that it is not economics, or at least that their argument about economics does not suffice.

This is not a challenge and I am genuinely curious to hear your perspective: in what way does Greece teach their youngest generation to not want to have children?

Would you mind continuing your tangent? I have a set of friends who really like Oster and I don’t know much about her. Feel free to email me (address is in my profile) if you don’t want to discuss in these comments.

There’s some nuance/caveats, but here’s a study showing humans lost height during the switch from hunting/gathering to agriculture:

https://modernfarmer.com/2022/04/farming-made-our-ancestors-...

You have the best post on this thread. One question, since you seem pretty knowledgable: I thought margin accounts were covered under SIPC? Can you send me a link on how with a margin account we are unsecured creditors? I found this one but it didn't really mention being unsecured: https://www.sipc.org/for-investors/investor-faqs#how-are-mar...

Thanks and great post!

Good to point that out, although I was still surprised by how high the percentage was even taking that into account.

List of public holdings, for the curious: https://whalewisdom.com/filer/berkshire-hathaway-inc

I'd be pretty interested to see how cash account is treated differently; I couldn't find a better reference either. But one advantage over the coinbase situation is at least the margin account falls under SIPC.

Did you ever get into Augur?

I can't download the paper. I'm sorry, but reading the abstract, I don't see how that paper supports your argument.

"Highlights

• Chronic Pb exposure could result in a lower weight gain in rats and a higher Pb content in the brain of model rats.

• Pb exposure reduced activities of key enzymes of glucose metabolism in the brain.

• Pb exposure could disrupt the insulin signaling pathway in the hippocampus of rats."

The paper picks 1980 as the start year…interesting because the recent HN article about obesity-caused-by-contamination post also picked 1980: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27936016

Perhaps spurious, but could be seen as more evidence for the contamination theory, since depression and weight gain are correlated.

“ In seven days, the over 100 nuclear power reactors run out of emergency power and go Fukushima, spreading radioactive plumes over the most populous half of the United States. ”

I didn’t see in the article, but why can’t the nuclear power plants shut down well before they ‘go Fukushima’?

I’ve never played here but this is what I’ve heard: https://www.playdiplomacy.com/

It is feasible, although I would be surprised if it something like this were at play. For one thing the other CEO Brown and Simons himself are on the opposite side of the political spectrum. That's not any guarantee but my point is that these organizations aren't monolithic...if there were geopolitical impacts hopefully someone would leak. But even if rentech were completely amoral, they probably still wouldn't do it just because the risk/reward asymmetry is too great. Sounds like it'd fall more to the FBI than SEC; much higher penalties. Too much of the rest of the business is profitable. These people have a lot to lose. And when hedge funds engage in bad behavior, it tends to look more like this [1]. Perfectly legal, yet still harming society, in my (less informed) opinion.

What keeps me up at night is not rentech but state actors, like you said, hostile foreign nations. They have the resources to pull it off and plenty of motivation...trading profits would just be icing on the cake, really.

Here's an amateur-level manipulation example you may find interesting [2]. Could rentech do this more subtly with 10x impact? Like I was saying, it may be feasible...still kinda doubt it. If this happens my guess it would be a fund that was no longer profitable, on it's way out, they have nothing left to lose, all this computing power laying around...

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2019-02-27/windst...

[2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-04-21/german-so...

their outsized gains are due to market manipulation, front running, or other insider activities (as in, illegal/unfair).

as a former insider at a different, less successful-than-rentec-but-still-successful firm, I doubt it. They have better data, technology, and employees than most other market participants. So then the question is how did they get there:

No one is smart enough; no algorithm or model is future-proof

I agree with the sentiment, but the way it worked was in the early days, it was much easier for one person or a small team to get those advantages. Then, as the market matured and simple algorithms became less profitable, they made new, more complex ones. It became harder for new entrants to jump-start the whole process from scratch. Simons started rentech in 1982. Teleport that Simons to today and his fund probably wouldn't even get off the ground. He would still be a genius, but a billionaire? I don't think so. As you say, no one is smart enough. It was right place/right time, and they built on their advantages.

Seems like the "cure" comes when you get the sleep deprivation from waking up early, not staying up late. Well it's a little more complicated since they start with a day of total deprivation, but the days after are focused on waking up early. Something I might try.

Yglesias' extreme language always gets me.

> It doesn't give China any leverage over the American government

They get some leverage. China's bond buying lowers rates on everything from mortgages to student loans. I agree that fear mongers overstate this, though.

> the Chinese ... could order enormous quantities of Chipotle burritos and then throw them out. But that would be so hideously wasteful as to become politically untenable.

Even if it were tenable, it would still be a bad idea-- China want to suppress their currency now, but they're smart enough to know they may need to lift it later. That's why they buy US Bonds, similar to how the Fed buys or sells bonds depending on what effect it's going for. We've been in an extended period of buying so people forget that there are extended periods of selling, too. This gives them another tool apart from the usual raising interest rates, etc.

Very interesting stuff. "The Benchmark" is the SP500 I'm guessing? I couldn't find the answer after clicking around for a bit, sorry if I'm dumb. You might list the reference security in the chart, or do something like "SPY (benchmark)" in the key.

Your joke is even better since one of the Intrade contracts was "intrade will no longer exist in X years"

Agree with you on the 49ers example but Intrade had a few contracts that were closer to the ones regulated by the cftc: the price of oil, gold, the DOW, etc.

What do you like to use for your scraping? I used python/BeautifulSoup back in the day but there may be better options now. Did you spoof other browser headers or did people really not care?

I'm sorry if you answered this elsewhere, but why did you stop working in HFT?

If it is not too personal, why did you stop? Also, do you prefer comments here or on your blog? To answer your last question in the blog: yes please keep going!

nope, nevermind, I am double counting money there.

ok I think I figured it out. The key parts were 1) high turnover, people only last a few months, and 2) the company gets 50%.

Suppose the traders have no insight into the market and trade randomly. As a whole they incur losses due to costs. To simplify, suppose there is a 50% chance they will lose 100 bucks, and a 50% chance they will make 90 bucks. The firms money goes down by 10 dollars, but then they take half of the winnings, 45 bucks, and so thus profit 35 dollars. Is my logic sound?

In summary, they could just be taking advantage of the uninformed chinese traders. (It goes without saying: the business could be completely legitimate, can't say for sure from the article. Just seemed a little odd).

It's a little less black and white. Suppose I put a guy with a physics PhD in a dark room for a while and he tells me 'with 99% probability, a stock with a price-to-earnings ratio of under 10 will beat the S&P 500 the next year". So whenever a stock's ratio gets below 10, I buy the stock and short the S&P 500 and wait for the bags of money to arrive. In that case, I'm not really relying on noticing the actions of others who have discovered a good deal. Yet, I am keenly interested in beating anyone to the stock when the ratio gets to 9.99. In reality, the market signals are more complicated statistical relationships, they could just as easily arise from someone being very dumb, instead of very smart. Or just the result of random variation that day.