Feed

“You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever." - Steve Jobs (2011) You've got to wonder if the founders of Jane Street Group, which began as a subsidiary of Henry Capital prior to 2001, had any inclination that the "dots" would connect as they have when they were first starting out. [...]

"Research is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing." - Wernher von Braun In the hierarchy of preferred trade types, the riskless trade sits at the top. Capturing a perfectly hedged spread or pricing anamoly, or performing a round turn across the spread and back to flat in some temporal duration measured in micro- or even nanoseconds are examples of riskless trades. Like poker's rare royal flush hand, a mechanism to persistently discover and then [...]

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, the just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while” – Steve Jobs For Mitch (1957 - 2018) Let's start this one close to where we left off in The Privatization of Alpha: "He’s a dubious character – and, he maintains specific distinction as my all-time strangest interview; sitting there in [...]

"To create something exceptional, your mindset must be relentlessly focused on the smallest detail." - Giorgio Armani Taken out of context, one might legitimately jump to the conclusion that today's installment on the Feed is about 11-time kickboxing champion, Don "The Dragon" Wilson. Or, better yet, that the initials "DRW" represent the greatest hockey team of all time, the Detroit Red Wings... However, unfortunately for Mr. Dragon and my Wings - and given the context of the mythological [...]

In the riverfront level of the 600 W. Chicago building (which is in Chicago) - the famed concrete fortress originally home to Montgomery Ward's mail order business - there used to be the trendy, over-priced hotspot known as Japonais. Japonais is gone now - after an eviction lawsuit from 2015, which apparently means they weren't high-priced enough - but, I was just thinking how much I could go for one of their blueberry saketini's about now, which is [...]

Image Credit: Brad Trent / The Times "Treat your life like a game." - Ray Dalio Before we get to the overview of our recent modeling of famed hedge fund leader, Bridgewater Associates and its founder, Ray Dalio, we need to set the stage for why this particular profiling is so important. It starts with what we have been calling personal alpha... Personal Alpha Ray Dalio is a singular phenomenon in the modern financial world. For starters, he's [...]

Last week, in timely fashion, the SEC published the 13F securities list for Q4 2018. Here is our breakdown of the quarterly change in product categories. Refer to the original US Stock Market Made of These! (or below) for the full history:   In August 2018, I did what I rarely do anymore: Cut an article out of a newspaper. The title and topic caught my eye, and eventually became the catalyst for some of the analysis presented [...]

Image Credit: Liu Bolin, Museo Enzo Ferrari ~ There is infinitely more than just the devil in the details. ~ Ludwig Mies van der Rohe It is so often said, offhandedly and seemingly without much regard for the underlying meaning, that the devil is in the details. Ever wonder about the origin of this saying? I suppose this might be a silly question for those of you who commonly say things without thinking, but it's still one worth [...]