Retail investor w/ a stretch goal of 2 Sharpe + 30% CAGR. Please DM me if you have fund recommendations. Live portfolio and track record on my website.
Joined May 2024
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I take a lot of active risk and run 300% gross leverage (~100% net) in my IBKR account, BUT I only have ~25% of my net worth in there.
The rest is in a mix of passive equities/bonds, real estate, private investments, and cash. I don't think I'll ever go higher than 25% in an account with leverage that high unless I have so much money losing 50% wouldn't hurt me much.
Farmer retweeted
Saturday Poll.
The next 100 points for the S&P?
50%UP
50%DOWN
1,507 votes • Final resultsExcellent, short article by one of the GOATs.
wsj.com/opinion/theres-no-su…
Long Apollo, short $PSP or similar is probably a good forever trade
Building off @GiraffeNoExist's broader list, here's publicly available base pay data. Bonus could be more or less than base pay depending on firm and performance.
I can attest to the rapid upskilling. I've seen a 21 year old go from junior trader to trader to senior trader on one of the more profitable trading desks at one of these firms in just 9 months.
I disagree! There are plenty of firms that will teach you to trade. If we’re going to stick to grey box trading, you have
- Jane Street
- SIG
- Optiver
- IMC
- Flow Traders
- DRW
- Five Rings
- CTC
- Maven
- Da Vinci
- Wolverine
- Old Mission
- Akuna
- Belvedere
I’ve deliberately listed a mix of tier 1/tier 2 firms, so it’s not limited to elite places that only hire from MIT. There are probably 700-800 grad places per year between the firms above.
Then every major investment bank has a grad trading program. They are less prestigious but also easier to get into and there are opportunities to jump into the big prop firms after a year or two if you’re good. Probably another 500-1000 places here.
The pay ranges from $200-750k/year for grads. It’s a lot of money so obviously they aren’t going to silo you into low value data monkey work. They need to upskill you quickly so you can start making money for them!
If we’re expand from grey box trading firms to HFT/quant/systematic — where you won’t learn “trading” per se but you’ll learn how to analyse a signal, build an alpha model, build a risk model, build a portfolio optimiser, run execution algorithms etc — then there are probably another 1000-2000 seats at places like HRT, Headlands, CitSec, DE Shaw, Quadrature, Two Sigma, PDT, or central quant teams at big multistrats like Citadel, Point72 etc.
Investment banks also make grad quant hires for similar roles (again slightly less prestigious, slightly less pay, easier to get into and opportunities for moving to buy side if you’re good).
Farmer retweeted
Saba Capital's founder Boaz Weinstein on the risk building up in multi-strategy platforms:
"They're using so many turns of leverage because of their diversification."
"What happens if they all lose money at the same time, and the deleveraging, and the internal rules around stopping out?"
"I'm not a chicken little about it. But I do think that too much money has gone into the same strategies with the same rules around when to stop out of them, with the same very high leverage."
"So far nothing bad has happened. But those are famous last words."
"The expense ratio is so high and it's grown too big. And I think that it's due for correction."
Farmer retweeted
momentum falling back to the long-term trendline.
The story of 2026. Extreme to extreme.
From a 5-sigma overshoot in Momentum relative to Low Volatility in June... to the absolute carnage we've seen in Momentum stocks... one of the worst drawdowns on RECORD for Momo basket now.
Remarkable how quickly the pendulum can swing from one extreme to the other.
Farmer retweeted
speaking of worth:
- earlier this year i got a SemiAnalysis sub. $500/year
- i wanted to see if i was getting my money's worth, so i sampled 343 blogs across 2020–26.
- split $500 across inferred trades from those blog posts (for instance, shorting GOOGL when Dylan said their "odds of reaching SOTA again have dropped to zero")
SemiAnalysis: $927.47
S&P: $1,175.22
the Semi“Analysis” alpha is worth exactly −$247.75. you'd be better off putting your sub in the s&p.
chart below.
Farmer retweeted
Pre-deal SPAC commons now trading at up to a low 200s spread to treasuries and up to a 35c discount to cash in trust for the lowest dollar price common. This is the widest they've traded since the massive flood of issuance in 2021-2022. If you are a fund manager with excess balance sheet, a risk less way to pick up a nice spread. And, there's pull to par potential on a deal announcement and additional upside on a good deal.
cc: @SPACuity
To add some color, in the current market structure whenever the brakes get tapped hard on a popular factor, the resulting deleveraging delivers these extreme moves.
During the tariff tantrum I thought the stock price drop would cause the mega caps to pull back on capex which would tip us over into a recession. Always possible there's some mechanism for contagion like that.
My current fear is the debt market have been turned off and the 2028 contracts that are "guaranteeing" profits for memory companies, etc don't get honored.
Farmer retweeted
There's a lot to focus on right now, but "The richest man to ever live just spent $200 million to support the Republican Senate candidate in Texas, and his man lost by double-digits in a statewide wipeout" is a completely insane sentence.
Put another way, the most expensive US Senate race before 2020 was $200 million. *One guy* spent that amount in Texas, and it doesn't seem to have made any difference. It might have hurt in a kind of Streisand effect way, in that the spending level was seen as obscene to people sympathetic to the argument that billionaires shouldn't "buy" elections.
The implications here seem pretty interesting! Especially re the limits of billionaire political power and/or the diminishing returns of money in politics.
Farmer retweeted
Big question now is whether Sundar, Satya and Zuck are really AI pilled the way Sam and Dario are.
