I am going to experiment with Twitter and use it as a platform to discuss tech trends, industry dynamics, and the experiences of starting my own hedge fund in a competitive technology space. I will talk about the concerns of single managers and the secularly impaired hedge fund
I have covered software my whole career… yesterday was a +7σ move and worst since 2003. Top 10 worst days all time. A couple reflections as I gear up for the day
1. There is real fear of AI disruption in software. Like all things some companies will adapt… most will bleed
Math is an awesome discipline. Toni is one of the best. For you young analysts and aspiring analysts… you should read and write down every question Toni has asked over the last 25 years.
FACTOR ROTATIONS
There has been a lot of talk on factor rotations on here. Punch line early… no one knows how long they last and no risk model is perfect. That’s what makes them so exciting and dangerous.
What is a "factor"? My own definition is “any attribute that you can
FACTOR ROTATIONS
There has been a lot of talk on factor rotations on here. Punch line early… no one knows how long they last and no risk model is perfect. That’s what makes them so exciting and dangerous.
What is a "factor"? My own definition is “any attribute that you can
@BSonnone
UF players were trying to walk away before FSU players started bumping them. Fine, defend their teammate. That trainer was way too chirpy and was instigator. Bad take B.
@davidbelle_
Hot take: online coaches / influencers/ ridiculous click couples are the biggest bubble in last century. Haven’t figured out how to directly short this trend
EARNINGS SEASON
I’ve been posting a lot on factors and risk lately. Always hard to take off my old fundamental analyst hat going into big earnings weeks.
Professional investors at HFs take earnings very serious. It’s their Super Bowl. I’ve seen the prep take multiple
TACKLING OUR BIG QUANT ISSUES: We have a glass board in our office that keeps our BIGGEST problems we are tackling. An LP came in and asked us about it… was a great discussion piece. Myself and the engineering team devote 150% of our time to these issues. I have many battle
@MaldenDriveCap
Money is non-linear. I moved to NYC with $5,000. Lived off 75% of my salary and always saved bonus money. No Hampton’s trips. No table service. No car. Stack your cash and give yourself years of runway. The more you save the more optionality you have… you give yourself the
WEEKEND PROCESS 🧵:
I’ve been fortunate to see how the absolute best approach the weekends. Your weekend process evolves Analyst -> PM -> Fund Owner
This thread will be geared towards Sr Analysts / PMs
What’s the goal of the weekend? Goal is to THINK and reflect. The biggest
@DTSpann
lol. Trying not to be political. Right. Here is a novel idea. Go watch the whole clip of what was said instead of reposting someone’s deceptive post. Does anyone think for themselves anymore?
Watching my son boogie board so here goes… the market is different. Shorts are different. There has been a change the last 10 years, but statistically and qualitatively since COVID. A structural break point.
What most people don’t understand is there are very few ( less than a
@bucketshopcap
I’m waiting for a Michael Lewis style book to explain why shorting has changed fundamentally the last decade. Jason karp has gone on many podcasts talking about how he legit enjoyed shorting stocks/was a good source of alpha but something fundamentally made it too dangerous
I think you are touching on 2 key areas… 1) what happened at Coatue? 2) the more interesting one… where does the intersection of Quant and Fundamental collide in the future (or present)?
ONE: On the first issue, it’s near impossible to know what happened without the data. I do
Study Steven A. Cohen.
Study SAC Capital.
Study options arbitrage at Gruntal & Co.
None of you have shit over the biggest mfering gangster of all time. A true legend, chad, and trading visionary of the the last century.
Stevie would've been in a menace in the Binance
@ChairliftCap
That’s my point. I think every investor especially tech investors need to be doing 2 things outside of core “duties”. 1 they need to be playing with the tech …. Oh LLM this… go build one. 2. Come up with a weekly template and fill it out. Journaling sounds dumb. Think of it
@FundamentEdge
I thought this was great. TLDR:
1. Keep talent
2. Time arbitrage
3. Concentrate
4. Risk awareness
5. Catalysts
6. Compete in smaller corners of market
7. Fade VOL
8. Competitive landscape
I would slightly tweak… can’t give away the whole playbook…. But where are
@SwagnShades
Looks like a young pitching coach. No reason to ever put your hands on a player. Coaches want players to be mentally tough and not lose control… then they do this. Could be been a good teaching moment for the pitcher, instead this will be the focus. Pitching coach and player
Invest SuperPowers Pt3: Management Meetings
For any fundamental investor, talking with management has to be a critical component of your process. There is a magic formula to it that most get wrong… and it all comes down to this… asking the wrong person the wrong questions.
@ankurnagpal
This isn’t so cut and dry. According to tax code, has to be driven 100% for business related reasons. Taking kids to school. Nope. Grocery store. No. This is an easy way to get the IRS on you. Have seen people say “slap a logo on it and it’s advertising”. Nope. Be careful people.
Investing Superpowers 5: Networking & Attitude. I am going to take a break from charts, data, books and do another topic that is near and dear to me. A question I get a lot is “how did you get into the HF industry?” Story time…
I was an All-American baseball player, my dream
@BucknSF
I’ve tried to compile a list over years:
1. Military board members
2. No notable VCs on cap table
3. Significant other or brother involved
4. Majority revenue from govt
5. CEO collects cash from ACV deals EOY
6. COO leaves within 12 months of IPO
7. Many meaningless press
Been talking about this for years… the fusion of systematic quant + discretionary will be a seismic shift in active management.
This is a change in religion and requires a new tech stack.
This is my mission.
A couple thoughts here:
I get it. You are trying to break into the industry and it’s HARD. There is a saying with some of our 3 letter agencies… “you can’t go there unless you have already been”. What it’s like in the HF world. I did a post on my non traditional path…. You
I find the average candidate grossly overestimates how much value they can bring to the table.
I love you all but realize that even if you are a top student in a top program from a top university, its still negative ev post tx cost to onboard you, at least for the first year.
FACTORS TODAY
Three things I am looking at; my baskets, relative spreads, and Intra Day Range %’s. One thing I really focus on when VOL picks up is the INTRA DAY Range %.... it usually tells me a lot about what is receiving flows and what is losing flows. Today is really
@ChairliftCap
No one spends enough time thinking and writing. Like if I asked you right now… what are the 3 biggest themes in equities right now that have most upside to numbers…. Do you have exposure to all 3 what would you say?
@BioLayne
Serious question… why not rethink how you are lifting given all those injuries. The Olympic lifts are catastrophic and could be replicated in a lower risk way
So I looked at a late private round and worked on their IPO. Some thoughts:
1. John maxed out credit cards early on to bring this idea to life. Give him a ton of credit as an entrepreneur. That’s. HARD.
2. Their valuation got away from them with HF cross overs doing later
🚨PELOTON’S FORMER CEO SAYS HE’S LOST "EVERYTHING"
John Foley, who rode the pandemic wave to a $1.9 billion fortune, says Peloton’s stock collapse wiped him out.
After overestimating demand and a shocking “Sex and the City” episode hurting its image, Foley was forced to sell
I spend a lot of time thinking about regimes and structural break points as they relate to my world views. In 2020 there was a significant structural change in the markets. I'm not even sure if data prior to 2020 matters? Here is a visualization of it. 3rd chart is the one you
D is thoughtful, has vision, and always “all in”. When I asked him for advice… he told me to pick my LPs carefully and don’t scale too fast. Big fan of his. A lot of my friends manage money there.
These numbers (if true) are eye popping. My first PM I worked for got a high
EXCLUSIVE: Billionaire Dmitry Balyasny's hedge fund is spending more than $200 million in payouts to recruit senior portfolio managers from rivals as the expensive war for trading talent rages. Story with
@Burtonkathy
&
@GillianTan
via
@business
If you are a fundamental investor … there are no less than 10 projects that come out of this article you should be spending all your time on… there are some monster trades to be made the next 12-18 months
@bucketshopcap
@ChairliftCap
💯… pendulum has swung too far for analysts … all the channel checks, conferences, q/q math… there is a place for all those things.
TLDR: Think more. Write more. Alpha more.
@chamath
For now. Next big architecture shift will be when small datasets produce exponential accuracy results. Think of toddlers. They don’t need to see 5m cats to know a cat… we are just in the beginning of this technology. What will be the most valuable in the future? The fastest most
@WhitlockJason
Surprised you are so negative on him. Opportunity for those young men to face some adversity and grow. Coach Prime needs to level up also. You don’t level up through wins. Only through pain and losses
Story time…
So at my previous employer I spent a lot of time meeting late stage companies before going public. It was a critical part of my process. My boss really encouraged me which pushed me in this area to get outside my comfort zone.
Meeting with privates served multiple
Vista Equity Partners has written off the entire equity value of its investment in tech learning platform Pluralsight, three years after taking it private for $3.5 billion, Axios has learned.
Despite improved performance, this was due to $1.3bn of debt and rising interest rates.
I think about this a lot. It’s interesting I’ve found the more I climb the ladder of goals… the more I try to feed my future. Reflecting back, so much wasted time… chalk it up to immaturity, inexperience, whatever you want to call it.
The only thing I think Alex is off on…
9-5 you work to feed your present.
5-9 you work to feed your future.
Mon-Fri you work to feed your present.
Sat-Sun you risk to feed your future.
To get ahead, you gotta work like you’re coming up from behind.
Because you are.
Good read by the team at Bridgewater on past cycles of Champions. When I was at Adage we did a similar study in 2016. The ONE insight that really stood out then was how the business models got progressively so much better… asset light, lower customer acquisition costs,
Gave a talk to an investment club and got a lot of questions on books… my wife is making me purge my library. Here are the books that have significantly impacted my life 🧵🪡🧶
Life of David (V1 & 2) -> highs / lows of a man after Gods own heart
Gospel of John -> full look at
Investing SuperPowers 7: Saturday Mornings. Saturday mornings are one of the most important days for me. It would be easy after a long week to have some cocktails on a Friday night and want to sleep in Saturday. That won’t get me or you to where you want to go. My Saturday
CFO: This is a tricky one because some CFOs will talk to the 3rd decimal and some will just want to talk strategy. The key here is to be super prepared with your understanding of how the business works and you use the opportunity with CFO to understand a CRITICAL piece that can
@SaveYourSons
I felt the same way. Best advice? She needs to be treated differently than the boys. Shows her how a man should really treat her… so one day she knows the good ones from the punks. Enjoy it. My little girl is my princess.
@FundamentEdge
What an awesome thread. Everyone’s input is fantastic. A couple more for you since you got me going …
1.NETS & GROSS: the Achilles heal of the pod model is the high leverage and tight drawdown limits for teams. I’ve seen more books get taken off in November because they are
Feels like end of an era with Slootman. Story time… I was a young analyst covering the NOW ipo. I remember Gartner sized the TAM at “$900m”… total. I met with Frank and Mike… I asked Frank about it. He laughed so hard and told me he is turning his guns on the whole industry.
@TheRealJunto
I’ll play you 5v5… my squad
Mike Anderson
Luke Sager
Jon Thompson
Tariq Chaudhri
Jared Sleeper
(Your list of guys are really good…nothing against them)
When I fell into the hedge fund industry at HBS… I was the most junior guy at SAC Capital. I had no idea what I was doing. Steve had one message for me… Scared Money Don’t Make Money…and DONT. BE. WRONG. I think about this wall and his lessons often.
@systematicls
From a fund level … it has to be a cultural absolute. It starts at the top. The “leader” has to take extreme ownership of everything. That will permeate down. Usually people early on in careers or big egos do not want others to see them get things wrong. It’s a major issue and
Technical Tuesday
#2
: Regime models are a core part of my process and I’m always looking for different methods for R&D projects. This caught my attention. The "Regime Switching Model Using Gated Recurrent Nets" introduces a GRSTU model. The author tested it on S&P500 data from
@gatorcapital
I had a famous CEO one time … after getting peppered on sequential growth metrics… ask the junior analyst if he had any important questions ☠️☠️☠️☠️
Tail events are nasty. I see a lot of these posts on fintwit “but XYZ is factor neutral so rotations don’t matter” …. That’s not the real world. I believe there is a real opportunity for multi-strat 2.0 where at least talented PMs will have more optionality.
Alright Xwitter,
I’m hiring. Time to add to the engineering team as we think about big goals for 2024. I have a non-traditional background, so I want everyone who has a non-trad background to get a shot. If you think you have what it takes as an engineer to join our team and
@bucketshopcap
I would say the next gen SM’s have some POTENTIAL big advantages in active L/S.. here is 3 quick ones before I feed my kids:
1. ML / cheap compute brings risks models from obscure quant to mainstream
2. SM can theoretically run variable nets. Who wants to run net neutral in
The Sahm Rule highlights a major issue in finance. More broadly do historical observations hold true in the future? That’s all the Sahm Rule is… an observation that now people are trying to make causal.
Betas. Sahm Rules. 2/10 inversion indicators. Last years Revenue growth.
The Sahm Rule was designed to identify in real time when a recession had begun by measuring an uptick in layoffs.
It has never signaled a recession from unemployment levels this low, or from an increase in Unemployment levels caused by a rise in labor force participation rate
@0xfdf
Market goes up over time.
Here is my question to you. Discretionary manager runs variable nets. +50 raging bull markets. -30 in down markets. Is that skill or beta?
I think the right model for SINGLE MANAGERS is variable net. One of few levers they have to pull against multi
@Value_Ideas
This is going to be different than you wanted….but become an expert in pandas. When I figured out the power of pandas a long time ago, it changed the game. Pandas vs Excel is … well you will find out
1. Download VS Code and learn how to properly set up a VENV
2. Take online
TECHNICAL SUNDAY: Causal Network Representations in Factor Investing
Best paper I read this AM. I have been going down a rabbit hole of “causal algorithms” and causal approaches lately. de Prado has been making this case more recently
Being a Father is the greatest gift and joy of my life. There is no greater calling than to raise little people to be strong, loving, thoughtful adults. To all the dads out there I salute you… and to future dads, you have no idea how awesome it is.
@HustonStreet
Hopefully the kid uses it as an opportunity to reflect and grow. Very hard to find the “give me the ball & I’m not giving it up” attitude with an elite arm. My friend Nick Adenhart had it… one of the few. RIP buddy
Your thoughts are logical, thoughtful, and concise. Let me try to get to some of this because many of these points deserve their own thread (and I need to focus on the open here).
Being a student of the markets / what makes great CEOs … there is a common thread. They are
This post is interesting for two reasons:
1) It exposes the contents of which a fund/pod is concerned about, and
2) It highlights that an often underappreciated aspect of being a fm/pm is resource allocation.
Plenty of books talk about the investment aspects of managing a
This is an awesome clip by
@tobi
investors missize TAMs all the time. Think NFLX streaming, YouTube, smart phones, messenger, UBER, cloud computing etc etc.
His point on unlocking the TAM vs the TAM being fixed is the point. How many people counted Taxi medallions for Uber?
Tobi Lutke explains what the VCs who passed on Shopify got wrong
Tobi recounts pitching Shopify to VCs on Sand Hill Road a few years after founding Shopify.
Investors passed because they thought the addressable market was too small. At the time, there were about 40,000-50,000
Investing SuperPowers Pt 1: Expectations Investing 🧵
Two Parts:
1. The ability to quickly and accurately figure out what is discounted in the market
2. Overlaying your own views on important drivers to figure out degrees of differentiation
Why this is so deeply embedded in the
@Ross__Hendricks
Agree to disagree.I’ve had thousands of IR meetings. Talking to IR is a skill developed over time. Questions have to be planned, thoughtful, and helpful… just asking them “are you seeing more competition” won’t help anyone.
Here is a good experiment. Try it in June and report
With over 10 years of experience in the hedge fund industry working for some of the largest firms, I have come to realize the importance of leveraging AI-driven tools and strategies to make better and faster data-driven decisions. My passion for technology, math, and my