All in @openforage. I thrived in all of the largest hedge funds managing systematic investment processes.
Joined April 2024
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sysls retweeted
Lots of very smart people are appropriately concerned about regulatory capture from top two AI players. And there are many scary press releases but no real due process.
If OpenAI violated Hugging Face in a way that “demands” new regulation; let’s start with a formal criminal investigation. With a proper third party investigation. And sincere liability.
It can’t be “so super serious” and only analyzed by the defendant. Thats ludicrous.
And why would we write new regulation if the crime we are supposedly protecting against isn’t even prosecuted?
This stuff makes no sense.
sysls retweeted
I’m in love with this sentence:
“Everyone knew it was impossible, until a fool who didn't know came along and did it.”
sysls retweeted
Game theory pretty much proves that the long game is not a strategy most people can execute at all. That's because it tends to require a negative short-term position in exchange for a real advantage later. Most people cannot commit to this because their threat-detection system reads current loss as an existential failure. And that's vicious short-sightedness. It leads them to optimize for visible progress and sacrifice their real position. The people who constantly win rarely have better information. Instead, they accept that losing now will pay off later. Never quit a game before it starts.
sysls retweeted
Low-agency: “Can I do this?”
High-agency: “I’m doing this unless someone stops me.”
The high-agency person has realized that most permissions are granted retroactively. It’s easier to get forgiveness than permission because once something is already done, the default switches from “no” to “well, I guess it’s fine.”
sysls retweeted
Given the increasing prevalence of this type of supply chain attack, starting to feel like users should delay software updates on everything except OS and browser
🛑 WARNING: Bitwarden CLI was compromised in a supply chain attack.
@bitwarden/[email protected] included malicious code after attackers hijacked GitHub Actions, stole secrets, and pushed a tampered version to npm.
🔗 Learn how the attack worked → thehackernews.com/2026/04/bi…
sysls retweeted
School is a 12+ year conditioning program in "wait for instructions, ask before you act, there's a right answer and someone else knows it".
The hard part is deprogramming the voice that says "you need permission first".
Most people are stuck in permission mode because that's what school trained into you. It's low-agency by default.
Possibility mode is inherently high-agency. You're taking reality as the only real constraint. If physics allows it and you can figure out how, it's on the table. Everything else is just social convention that can be navigated or ignored.
sysls retweeted
If you’re a hyperactive, high agency type of guy, the only path where you don’t go insane is entrepreneurship. It’s the only life that will stimulate you enough and put you in different situations and problems that actually make your brain function. The more you try to tame that energy the less you will feel alive. Some of us were made for complexity and ambiguity. The safe path is the most dangerous one. You know deep down you’re made for something different. Business is what gives you that. Avoid traditional jobs at all costs. Of course the price is high stress, uncertainty and lots of ups and downs… but let’s be honest, would you have it any other way? No. It’s too boring.
sysls retweeted
It is one of the best, if not the best book on matters of institutional systematic investing. It is a tad on the more mathematical side, but truth be told it has a lot of very good insights, even if you completely glaze over the mathematics.
My top 3 recommendations (for institutional systematic trading):
1. Quantitative Portfolio Management By Isichenko
2. Elements of Quantitative Investing By Gappy
3. Finding Alphas By WorldQuant (if you're into statarb)
To get started and before going into any of that, read Trading & Exchanges by Larry Harris
As a supplementary, bathroom reading, try Into The Black Box By Rishi K Narang
sysls retweeted
Imagine you're playing a guessing game with candies. Sharpe (your winning score) = how good you are at guessing (IC) times the square root of how many guesses you make (N).
If someone claims a super high score but only makes a few guesses, they must be amazingly good at guessing—which is super rare and often not true. So, be suspicious! It's a way to spot tricks in trading.
sysls retweeted
Third thought of the day. Say that you are actively looking for an idea for a startup. Then you will be ruthless and discard all but very few ideas. But say you are an employee of a large company. Then you will propose all sort of ideas and be rewarded for it. There is hardly any incentive in saying “hmm, this stuff won’t work”.
I would summarize this thought with the statement “It’s hard out there for a pimp.” The pimp here is the firm, and the hoes are the employees with misaligned incentives.
Damn, it’s not even 7AM and I already had three thoughts.
sysls retweeted
Second thought of the day. The payoff of any investment is more heavy-tailed than everyone thinks ex ante. But the probability of success is small. Successful entrepreneurs can boost it by removing from candidate investments some of the very likely failures. Awareness of these facts can separate an ok business from an exceptional one.
I reckon smartasses would coin a term for this, like “engineering convexity”. But it’s basically “don’t do stupid shit and aim for the stars.” This concept is everywhere in “The Prince” of Machiavelli, and aspiring quants should read *that* rather than posts by anons on X.
I remember Taleb saying somewhere in the distant past, when he was still exceptionally sane, something like "When you can do a few thing very well, you can afford a lot of mistakes". I came to appreciate this heavy-tailedness of positive payoffs only later. *Every single firm* I have worked at was dysfunctional, in the precise sense that goals that were part of their core mission were obviously, scandalously fumbled. Stuff like "let's start a business in <X>, for which were are completely unsuited!" or "let's fix the risk department by doubling its size!" and so on. All of this, by executives who were also obviously very intelligent and well-intentioned. How can this be? Because they had a core at which they were among the top three in the world. Even when they ignored that core competency, it saved them over and over again.
sysls retweeted
Thought of the day. Understanding why something failed after the fact is nearly worthless. Knowing why something *will* fail before the fact is extremely valuable, even if there are infinite ways to fail. Especially when the “something” is a $100+ m investment.
Many such cases.
Develop a good taste for the left tail.
A few years ago, I was having lunch with a friend, who had spent year in a startup that eventually failed. "But you learned a lot, no?". "No. I learned nothing." "Why?". "Because there are infinite ways to fail, and only a very small number of ways to succeed."
It came to my mind because in past weeks I think I was too preoccupied with VBI-"Very Bad Ideas" (Sortino Ratio, DJIA, power utility functions, limits to arbitrage, some Ziemba finding). But there's no point in doing it. There's a near-infinite supply of bad ideas, and only a handful of good ones. I swear to stop shittin' on bad papers by finance professors. Please don't trigger me by linking to some of these papers. The Pet Peeves subgenre doesn't need another contributor.
A coda: the friend was Hungarian. Hungarians are the bestest, funniest cosmic pessimists on the planet and they need to be loved, cherished and protected.
