flood's trading partner was asked how he'd turn $100k into $1 million. his answer: "get a job" kyle soska says a $100k portfolio is too small to devote your entire working life to compounding. at $1 million, his answer changes. keep living costs under control, take smaller opportunities and wait for the rare trade worth sizing up. people do often underestimate how capital intensive trading is.

agustin lebron spent five years at jane street. his test for a trading edge fits in one sentence: “If you can’t explain your edge in five minutes, you don’t have a very good one.” the page below makes it concrete: what do you understand, and what can you actually do, that the person taking the other side can't? from the laws of trading book.

flood and kyle soska went from heavily exposed to ethereum to zero ETH exposure within 48 hours, according to kyle. the trigger was a twitter space. he says someone involved with eigenlayer described struggling to find yield for $11 billion of deposits. kyle called flood: "Look, we have to talk right now. Like, this cannot wait." he remembers their exit around $3,800. flood had been looking at miami property when the call came.

an ex-susquehanna options trader told MIT students that if they're interviewing at a place like SIG, they'll get questions like this: you and your opponent each ante $1. a coin is flipped, only you see it. heads you win. you can bet $1 or check. your opponent can only call or fold. how often should they call? how often should you bluff? answer in the clip below:

the most expensive form of self-sabotage in trading: needing to be seen as great. martin shkreli says that's what put him in prison: "I had a hard time admitting I was not the best hedge fund manager in the world, but I was a wonderful entrepreneur. that simple refusal to admit that put me in prison." "I didn't realize how petrified I was of not being seen as a great trader. what a stupid thing."

everyone jokes about inverse cramer. martin shkreli started at jim cramer's hedge fund when he was 16, and says the joke is wrong at the time: "cramer was actually a tremendously effective and skilled trader" "cramer's idea of investing was to buy and sell all day, every day, everything. and he somehow squeezed profits out of it... he actually made 23% a year, net of fees."

read 67 trading books. five of them changed how I trade. new video on those five, the lessons I still use from each, and why the books beginners buy first cost me $3,000 in my first year. give it a watch this weekend:

alexandr wang spent his 19th birthday as an MIT freshman on a winter internship at hudson river trading. around the table: jeff yan, who went on to start hyperliquid (~$20B) scott wu, who went on to start cognition ($48B) jesse zhang, who went on to start decagon ($4.5B) and wang, who started scale AI, got $14.3B from meta for 49% of it, and now runs meta's superintelligence lab. when HRT's founder told him they were starting to do private investments: "just invest into the interns. all the interns get seed checks." another wonderful episode from David Senra.

you can have a great year at bridgewater and still get a zero bonus. greg jensen, co-cio of the $150 billion hedge fund, on the rule he brought in around 2012: if what you learned isn't written down in plain english and turned into code inside what they call the "secure garden", it doesn't count. "you don't get any bonus. nothing that you did. I don't care how great your results were. I don't care what happened... it does not count. zero. you get nothing." why most firms never manage it: "it just takes so much goddamn discipline and people are lazy" the result is 50 years of every rule bridgewater has believed about markets, every time it changed and why, in one place a human can read and a computer can run.

poker is one of the most important cheat codes in trading. greg jensen, co-cio of the world's largest hedge fund, won a world series of poker bracelet. his edge at the table came from the machines: "I had an edge for a while, particularly when the machines had learned more about poker than humans had and many humans hadn't caught up" "this is a bold statement, but there was definitely a time when I think I was in the top couple hundred people at poker" he says his edge came from noticing something almost nobody at the table knew: "machines got better at poker than people and most people didn't know it. and that was a huge opportunity" "people have played poker for hundreds of years... people had no idea what they were doing"

bill ackman on why large, boring companies now drop 25% in a day, something he says almost never happened when he started: "a quarter of every american business, plus or minus, is owned by some combination of vanguard, state street and northern trust. when you shrink the float of a public company, the marginal buyer and seller is going to have more impact on the stock price." "the marginal buyer and seller today is a citadel or a millennium. they operate with a large amount of leverage, very large gross books, and they're increasingly short-term." "most investors are very short-term focused because they're compensated that way. they won't invest in a company unless they're confident the price is going to be higher on december 31st." passive owns the float, pods set the price, and both are structurally unable to hold through a bad quarter. that inability is the opportunity.

david einhorn has run greenlight since 1996 and compounded at 12.7% net on more than $3 billion. he was asked what would surprise someone who sat beside him for a month watching every decision: "I think you'd be surprised how few decisions I actually make. my ratio between trading decisions and naps is much higher towards naps than people would expect." "when the data checks out but your gut says no I make the more conservative decision. [and in reverse] again, I'll choose the more conservative decision, whichever that is, if I'm conflicted."

The most expensive thing in systematic trading is often not a losing strategy. It's the two years you spent not being in the market. Everyone underestimates this because time doesn't show up anywhere in your P&L. A blown account is visible and painful and you learn from it fast. Three years spent building a custom machine learning backtest engine, a feature pipeline and an ML framework before you've placed a single live trade costs you *far* more, and the damage is completely invisible. And the cruel part is that the building genuinely feels like progress. You're learning, you're solving real problems, you're getting better at something. But you're getting feedback about your code, not about the market. You only get it by being on the field. Meanwhile the thing you were going to build usually already exists in a simpler form for almost nothing. If you want trend, start with a basic 12 month lookback and a monthly rebalance. That's your first sleeve done in an afternoon, live, compounding, teaching you things. Then every afternoon after that goes into the second sleeve, and the third. Five boring strategies stacked together will beat the one brilliant one you're still building, because their drawdowns land in different places. So before you build anything, ask what you can do *right now*, with the tools you already have, that is likely to make money. Do that this week. Complexity comes later, if the simple version genuinely can't harness the edge.