Dirty Texas Hedge
@HedgeDirty
Followers
21K
Following
2K
Media
618
Statuses
10K
Just here to say things which are true but too unprofessional to put my name on #EFT "I've been ballin' since we had to take the TAAS test" - Lil Flip
Gilley's
Joined April 2020
I think there's a massive unexplored gap between people who think "work-life balance" means working 50 hrs/wk instead of 60 and people who think it means working 28 hrs/wk instead of 35.
100
377
13K
A competent GOP would cut a campaign ad that's just alternating clips of protestors at 60k+ tuition schools and clips of biden promising loan forgiveness and blanket it to every middle-middle to lower-middle class demo.
116
1K
8K
A GENTLEMAN’S PRIMER ON SHORTING INSOLVENT SHITCOS. So you’ve found a ShitCo. It’s such an ugly zombie it couldn’t be an extra in season 19 of The Walking Dead .But it’s still got a $185m cap.And you want to be the one to mung the last rancid, putrefying drops out of that corpse.
189
1K
7K
Michael Lewis may have fallen from previous esteem, but the detail in The Big Short about Lehman's mortgage model being in excel and unable to input a negative change in home values has been confirmed to me by someone with direct knowledge of it.
what single excel file lead to the most destroyed capital in human history?.
16
372
6K
There is no privilege like British Accent privilege. Americans will grant you 20 IQ points for nothing.
259
330
5K
Either you ration with price or you ration with time. There's a real price for everything even if it's not quoted in currency.
peak Canadian healthcare is lining up in the cold for 2 hrs at 7am just to get a spot for the day
44
578
5K
Guys, anyone born to the American upper middle class believes that a state flagship college and a nice house in a nice neighborhood is their birthright as an American. Pointing out that this involves a misunderstanding of the past is pointless. It's an utterly inflexible demand.
90
156
5K
Ok, real talk: .I've known people who have run for congress and lost (which is always the modal outcome for a non-incumbent), and watched the process closely because once upon I time I thought I might want to do it myself. Here's how it really works:.(1/n).
If you want congress to be less corrupt you have to pay sitting congressmen more than they'd get as an ex-congressman lobbyist.
46
310
3K
Any Millennial who looked at their peers with open, cold eyes saw this coming 15 years ago.
NEW: my column this week is about the coming vibe shift, from Boomers vs Millennials to huge wealth inequality *between* Millennials. Current discourse centres on how the average Millennial is worse-off than the average Boomer was, but the richest millennials are loaded 💸🚀
23
351
3K
There are only 3 phases of life where NYC beats generic suburbia:. - early/mid 20s either entering a high-powered career or with high-powered parental subsidies. - married, pre-kids with 2X professional income. - wealthy empty nester.
71
133
3K
Being comfortable placing a 20-year irrevocable bet against inflation for somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 your lifetime earnings is maybe the most Japanese thing ever.
Ohtani, per @TheAthletic, is deferring $68 of his $70 million dollar salary every yr of his contract. It will be paid out w/o interest from '34 to '43. It's much cheaper for the @Dodgers than it at first appeared. Remarkable, but I wouldn't worry abt Ohtani given endorsement $$$.
36
122
3K
I really hope Westerners understand that Russians protesting the war are taking risks 99% of Western protestors would get an aneurysm thinking about.
34
135
2K
Lobbying is probably the topic on which my political views have been most changed by age and experience. 1. Corporatist lobbying, for all its very real and very gross sliminess, is the most moderate and moderating force in American politics, at all levels of government.
Bernie Sanders: “Take a wild guess, how many lobbyists are there from the drug companies in Washington, DC?”. Lex Fridman: “Over 1,000?”. Sanders: “Over 1,000. There are 100 members of the Senate, 435 members of the House. There are 1,800 well-paid lobbyists representing the drug
49
127
2K
Perhaps my most middle-aged, grow-up-and-accept-responsibilty opinion:. If you personally make >$200k, you are high class. You should accept the personal, professional, institutional, and social leadership obligations that come with being high class.
115
72
2K
I'll be honest, if my choices are big pharma or rfk jr, I'll take big pharma without hesitation.
63
116
3K
To put it another way, Americans demand to maintain their social class with ordinary, unexceptional effort. Actual hard work and striving--which they do very much admire--they expect to *only* be required of people seeking to rise in the world, not for mere maintenance.
44
74
2K
Shooting -5 on a day you had a mugshot taken at 7 AM will be an impossible standard held over the heads of every junior finance person for a generation.
2
47
2K
today is probably the time I've been most disgusted with a rally in the stock market.
70
51
1K
In 1994 Ukraine became the only country ever to give up nuclear weapons (~2000 of them), in part because the United States guaranteed its territorial integrity. what country would take that deal today?.
45
96
1K
@mister_shroom Why does that surprise or disturb you? The MBA degree is literally "Master of Business Administration". The entire point of the degree is to teach people how to be managers of businesses, not individual contributors to them. That's literally what an "MBA type" is supposed to be.
19
8
1K
Never let yourself get out of shape one you hit ~30 or ~32. The road back gets harder and harder.
44
23
1K
holy shit closing a refi 8 weeks ago really was catching the last chopper out of saigon.
24
30
1K
2. The power of lobbying derives *NOT* from money but from information. Congressmen-- and more importantly, congressional staffs-- are overwhelmingly ignorant of the basic structures and practical realities of industries, but usually earnest in their desire to learn.
7
28
949
No sane person does this. You have to *really* *really* believe in it to do that sort of thing. Or you have to already have FU money. Or you have to be a complete mediocrity who thinks getting paid $175k for that is a good deal.
15
18
933
I can't think of a single time a CEO losing his cool against a sell-side analyst in an earnings call has ever had a good outcome for the CEO. Even if it's the most insufferable twerp imaginable, the takeaway is always 'temper loss means stress, means something must be really bad'.
30
25
905
wheat limit up again on CME open.reminder: this is way scarier for the world than $125 oil
13
165
878
@Steinernomics When someone evades taxes, treasury stops collecting revenue. That's it. Nothing else happens and it has no discernable effect on anyone except the tax evader other than the tax evader having more money to spend, save, or invest. NO ONE ELSE PAYS FOR IT. Not you. Not me. NO ONE.
18
9
867
Beware any company whose CEO is 6'3" or taller. 6'3" is the 96-97th %ile of adult men (and 98-99th of men+women). If a CEO is that tall it's probably because the company promotes people for the wrong reasons.
147
37
815
If you ever feel like an idiot, just remember: there are professional investors who loaned $CVNA $750m sr unsecured at 4.875 in August of 2021.
19
47
756
This is how you tell every insurer who already left that they made the right decision and that they shouldn't come back.
BREAKING: California Insurance Commissioner @RicardoLara4CA has issued a mandatory one-year moratorium that will prohibit insurance companies from enacting non-renewals and cancellations of coverage for home owners within the perimeters or adjoining ZIP Codes of the Palisades and.
15
53
750
So. You want to mung ShitCo’s twitching corpse .Your options:.1: Short it knowing it will be 931 days until Justice.2: Short it in denial and become a divorced, anti-Semitic, Xanax-addled lunatic.3: Light your money on fire avoiding short gamma.4: Leave it be. Happy Hunting.
75
28
698
I'll take the contra: Adam Neumann took nothing from "society". He took money from SoftBank, who gave it to with their eyes open. He defrauded zero mom & pop retail investors, and indeed "society" successfully thwarted his attempt when the S-1 was laughed into oblivion.
31
30
698
I think one of the basic life expectations problems professional class Millenials have is that because their professional class parents waited longer to have kids, their childhood memories only start when their parents were early-mid 40s, at the peak of their earnings power.
25
34
690
You can either meet the demand or suffer their wrath. No other options.
8
11
697
If you want congress to be less corrupt you have to pay sitting congressmen more than they'd get as an ex-congressman lobbyist.
26
50
703
3. The reason lobbying is the most moderate influence in politics is that 80% of the time the content of lobbying is more or less "this proposed idea from [ideologically motivated activist group] would be bad, not just for the industry, but also for the consumer".
6
20
682
And the role of the lobbyist is primarily to educate on the practical consequences of proposed rules, but because of the knowledge asymmetry gets to nudge the interpretations to the industry's benefit within bounds of plausibility.
3
16
669
In six months, you will go from normal, well-adjusted, shrewd investor to garden variety antisocial cynic to Rand Paul crazy to Ron Paul crazy to Zerohedge crazy to Alex Jones crazy and then into darker, really unsavory types of crazy.
20
30
622
I'm generally not a 'you're paying attention to the wrong thing' guy, but at current prices:.-oil is a 'rich countries have below trend growth' problem.-Euro gas is a 'whole sectors shut down & ppl die next winter bc no heat' problem.-Ags is a 'how revolutions start' problem.
15
98
624
Long gamma traders know in their bones tail events are not only more likely but will happen sooner. Bleeding theta doesn’t bother them because the asshole on the other side is a complacent laxbro who will get what’s coming. They have contrarian streaks and Taleb shrines.
4
44
589
Long theta traders know in their bones neurotic pussies overpay for metaphysically impossible tail risks. Short gamma doesn’t bother them because the asshole on the other side is an over-Zerohedged paranoiac. They have colossal egos and insurance execs for fathers.
3
32
562
Why on earth would a company whose debt trades at 80 still have any equity cushion left?.Because the equity has become an option, and options retain value until they expire, no matter how far out of the money they are.
3
34
546
4. The existence of large numbers of well paid lobbyists representing one industry indicates not a powerful industry running an influence-buying operation but a protection racket run by powerful politicians against an unpopular and politically vulnerable industry.
4
21
554
Among my many pet theories is that Musk is trying to sell as much TSLA as he can in ways that make it look like he is 'forced to' in order to avoid the bad look.
46
26
530
The truly interesting bitcoin failure case is not "price falls, paper hands get liquidated". The interesting bitcoin failure case is "price falls far below breakeven mining costs, becomes totally illiquid becuase there aren't enough miners to clear transactions".
91
50
526
@inglouriouscap There used to be a joke that Canada was a country whose history gave it the option to have British Culture, French cuisine, and American technology, but it somehow ended up with American culture, British cuisine, and French technology.
8
25
553
It will be hilarious as hell when investors realize cannabis is inherently destined to be a low-margin ag business with high taxes and a lot of long-term legal liability and then it all gets rolled up into Philip Morris, Altria, and BAT.
35
41
513
If you have a high leverage career you need to be living a low leverage lifestyle.
14
19
526
Interesting fact: $AMZN has been a public company since 1997 . Cumulatively, of its entire corporate history, it has brought in 52% of revenue, 81% of earnings, and 87% of FCF in the past three years.
10
54
508
WHY YOU SHOULD NEVER HOLD LEVERED ETFS.This one is actually pretty simple and can be reduced to a straightforward math statement:. 1.03 * 0.97 < 1.02 * 0.98 < 1.01 * 0.99 < 1.
19
70
477
The power of Excel is the enormous number of things it does adequately without requiring knowing a programming language. For any particular thing you want to do there is a better tool, but none of them have anywhere close to the breadth of use Excel has.
"Why Microsoft Excel won’t die" > because it has long been, and remains, the best piece of software ever written. I am always deeply sceptical of Excel haterz.
11
17
491
@NateSilver538 I'd have to think the most value an ordinary person (say, HS-quality athlete) could add on an NBA court is to just foul the first 6 drives in the lane and then watch the rest of the game from the locker room.
7
0
481
An interesting feature about AI is how dramatically more capital intensive it is vs nearly any other software. Among the reasons software can/could/did produce such huge investment returns was because of how little capex it needed.
Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei says compute is more than 80% of their expenses on a podcast. Salaries of 600 employees are much smaller expense.
9
41
462
I will once again get on a hobby horse of mine: paying someone else to supervise young children is inherently a high class luxury. There are no economies of scale. The economic value depends on a giant wage spread between parent and caregiver. Subsidy only creates a baumol beast.
Make no mistake: President @JoeBiden and I intend to cap child care costs at $10 a day for the average family and make preschool free for all four-year-olds. To do that, we need Congress to act.
17
21
457
If you want, as an American, to have a European material standard of living with a European quantity of vacation & leisure, that option is available to you: become a schoolteacher.
Americans: Working 60 hour work weeks until they inevitably get laid off. Europeans: Already on their 4th “holiday” of the summer.
12
13
452
The hardest pill that liberals have still yet to swallow about the past several years is that their self-image was premised on the idea they were ruling by love and accumulating goodwill when in reality they were ruling by fear and accumulating anger.
Well, or he was hesitant to do it when the WH might have retaliated against Meta, and/or it would have caused a big public backlash in a more left-wing era. The politics aren't one-sided here. It's incredibly naive to think Biden's politics were pure as the driven snow.
10
34
466
This is the prize for *winning*. This is what the fulfilment of all your noble aspirations of public service looks like in day to day reality. This is what you lit $1m of NPV on fire for. This is what you are depriving your kids of 2/3 of a parent for.
1
8
459
The best risk mgr I ever worked with said "in a crisis, all correlations go to 1".
I've made this point before, but it seems likely that as crypto becomes a greater component of institutional/diversified portfolios, its correlation with other assets will grow, particularly in risk-off periods when investors need to raise cash by selling whatever's available.
9
18
437
If you are launching a primary challenge against a same-party incumbent, your odds top out at 1/3 in the best case. Incumbents only lose when they are deeply crippled by scandal or have built up many years of grievance by pissing off local interests.
2
2
444
Insider Power in politics is all about personal loyalty within a patronage network. For obvious reasons this all has to be off-balance sheet and off-the books, and getting your people cushy lobbying gigs is one of the off-balance-sheet ways to finance your patronage network.
6
11
435
It's not a "fossil fuel". it's aged, organic, all-natural, solar energy.
14
38
423
Random bit of career advice: one of the things you need to know--really know-- about yourself is how much you expect/want to be rewarded for effort and how much for results.
10
22
436
@mister_shroom Yes. You have correctly described the MBA Type. I am not a fan of this type, nor am I defending them. I'm just saying that expecting anything different from them is like going into a bar and being upset at how hard it is to find teetotalers.
1
1
415
DC is famously a high cost of living town. Your DC apartment is probably an additional 3k/mo, and that's a personal cost. No charging that months campaign. It's expensive enough that somewhere between 10-20% of congress sleeps on cots in their office.
5
9
433
The job itself is, contra common belief, a ton of work. It's not a 9-5. It's a whole-identity 24/7/365 job. Sure you may only be in DC in committee meetings Tue-Thu, but you are *always* on the clock. Fundraising, meeting various interested groups, staying in touch with your dist.
1
10
424
The absolute best case is that because your father is a widely liked bigwig or because you've spent 10 years donating, volunteering, and building relationships, you start as the party favorite. Even that best case there's a 50% chance an anti-establishment populist beats you.
3
2
420
Remember: . McKinsey does not sell advice. McKinsey sells permission.
McKinsey upped their data center forecast: now expect "83GW is up from ~56GW in from the prior September 2023 modeling. Overall McKinsey now forecasts US data center energy consumption in terawatt hours (TWh) rising to 606TWh in 2030, representing 12% of total US power demand.
5
27
415
You will blame everyone except your own self for being unprepared for short gamma.And before you know it you will be mining ReichCoin with your 3rd videocard and shitposting Rothschild memes on 8chan while spaced out on the Xanax you stole from your teenage daughter’s hot friend.
4
25
390
And then of course there's your own staff, ~25ish or so, whom you must hire and manage. In practice your chief of staff does a lot of the managing but you have to make time for facetime with all of them, because they worship and fear you like a pagan deity.
2
5
418
First: ex-ante, what are your odds of winning?. There are 4 basic configurations of running as a 1st-timer. 1. Open seat, partisan-safe (your team).2. Open seat, partisan-competive.3. Primary challenge, partisan-safe.4. Primary challenge, partisan-competitive.
2
6
409
So the starting point is: your expected outcome is losing. You can't ever *admit* that, because then you're a self-fullfilling-prophecy loser, but if you're even in the neighborhood of rational you know it. Outside of exceptional Favorite Son cases, your odds top out at 1/3.
2
6
397
I'll make this party agnostic, becauseehile the parties are definitely not mirror images of each other it's not *that* different, procedurally.
1
2
395
This does not stop being true if you live in a high-cost city. This does not stop being true if your social circle makes more than you. This does not stop being true if you are 'behind' where your parents were at your age.
5
6
372
Political campaigns are exceptionally terrible credit risks. Most-even winners- end up in the hole and default to a bunch of their vendors. Losing campaigns are *always* broke. You have to assume the first $100k you put in is toast.
2
6
396
Any sportswriter who does not vote for Ichiro should have their ballot revoked.
1
13
384
It's so bizarre seeing nuclear power going from unreasonable negative fear vibes to unreasonably positive solve-all-problems vibes in 2-3 years without anyone at all explaining how the construction costs and timelines are going to be brought under control.
37
16
379
What's most jawdropping about the Ackman/BI fight is that Ackman was *this* close to overplaying his hand and being Petty Rich Jerk and now there's almost nothing he can do to look like the bad guy. When you have a beef with a man and you pick on his *wife* it's Deguello time.
15
20
390
Second, the first ~$100k of campaign expenses come out of your pocket. Campaign manager, website, data vendors (voter files), graphic design, etc. It's a lot like starting a small business.
2
2
385
@RoyDelfino It is that, and is the principal draw. But my implicit point is: what sort of person values that so highly they look at all that I elaborated and said "oh yea, definitely yes". That's who represents you in this system.
2
6
382
Obligatory Throat Clearing: .You are indeed performing a valuable service.You *do* make capital market more efficient. They *do* need you to function well . You are Righteous Vigilante, policing the bullshit no one else will. But you need to understand the trade you’ve put on.
1
9
353
So add up the cost-cost, opportunity cost, and likely multi-year career sidetrack, and the personal NPV of filing your candidate paperwork is -$500k at best case, and probably more like -$1-1.5m if you are in a high-achieving career.
1
7
382
Ghosting your own supporters is a weak move. Put on a brave face, say there are still votes to count so nothing is decided yet, thank everyone for their effort, and then work the room shaking hands and thanking people for 5-10 min before bailing. Really basic pol skill fail here.
10
5
378
What does it look like to lose?. First, depending on your state's filing deadline, you have to publicly announce ~12 months before the general and ~15 months before you'd take office. When you file publicly you have to de-facto quit your job, so your income goes to zero.
2
6
383
@moseskagan The housing part doesn't even require the government to spend any money. It only requires allowing people to build things the urban planning community finds distasteful.
8
3
380
US median *household* income is ~75k. US median houshold, *conditional on a college degree* is ~120k. 200k is the cutoff threshold for top 12% of households, of which a substantial number are dual-income. If you by yourself are >200 you're well into the top 10%.
7
10
360
Joe Biden is the last vestige of the Kennedy-vintage Democratic party built around a base of blue collar Catholics. For Ds to get knifed by a union when he's on the way out, protected by his nostalgia for a coalition that no longer exists, is symbolically meaningful somehow.
5
28
359
The pager and walkie talkie thing is doubly awesome because not only are a bunch of terrorists getting what they deserve, it makes extremely clear to Americans why nothing made by Huawei should ever be permitted in backbone infrastructure systems.
17
18
362
(This is technically against the rules of decorum but goes unenforced because the people who do it do so because they can't actually afford the additional cost of a DC 2nd residence).
1
3
372
(This is true both for activist groups of the left and of the right).
1
4
361
Third, after you lose, what then? You've been out of your previous job for at least 6 months (lose in primary) and possible 12 (lose in general). In most cases, your old job's been filled, there's no maternity leave rule for loser aspiring politicians.
1
5
370
They don't have any memories of the 20 years it took their parents to get there, and so have a skewed sense of just how long you have to grind before deferred gratification pays off.
4
9
358
"Naked short selling" is a phrase used exclusively by people who do not know what actually it means. What other phrases are like that?.
191
13
350
So, let's say you beat the odds and win. What next?. You start as a backbencher. You are a nobody your first term. You get 1 committee slot in something relevant to your district, maybe 1 in something suited to your personal experience, and then crap like rules or investigations.
3
3
361
So, in your first term, if everything goes well you shake down all your friends for more money, meet a bunch of fellow slimy pols, learn a little policy, and if you're lucky and your party is in power you get 1 favor for a key employer & 1 random amendment to put your name on.
1
6
356
The top reason I am distrustful of the crypto ecosystem is that the promoters either don't realize they are re-inventing long-established features of traditional finance and are ignorant of the problems that will have to be managed, or they do know it and are blase about them.
Stablecoins are room-temperature superconductors for financial services. Thanks to stablecoins, businesses around the world will benefit from significant speed, coverage, and cost improvements in the coming years. Stripe is going to build the world’s best stablecoin.
15
24
346
“Expiry” for an insolvent ShitCo is when they become *illiquid*. Only banks and trade shops go BK immediately because only they become *illiquid* immediately. Normal companies are not like that. Normal companies have fixed debt maturities and revolving lines of credit.
4
12
338
If you are running for an open seat, there will be 10 candidates on paper and at least 3 or 4 serious ones. As one of the serious candidates, again your odds are generically 1/3 or 1/4.
1
2
352
@mister_shroom Nope. I am not an MBA, for this exact reason. My point is merely that if you're looking at MBAs for an individual contributor who wants to earn their stripes, you're fishing in the wrong pond. The whole point of an MBA is to transition into social climbing corporate politics.
3
2
347