in the next few years, individual investors will outperform Wall St. the best individual investors have the same conviction as active managers -- and none of the shackles. with streaming and social clout, it compounds: the best pickers can now attract flows directly. there's a paper that proves the mechanism [1] these guys took every US active fund, 1983–2018...and they asked: forget the whole portfolio, how do managers' highest-conviction picks actually perform? their findings summarised by claude: 1. managers' best ideas beat the market by 2.8–4.5% a year. and it's permanent — no reversal even a decade later. these stocks were genuinely underpriced. 2. everything else in the portfolio adds nothing. the average fund holds ~160 stocks. the "all holdings" portfolio earns 6bps of alpha. statistically zero. 3. alpha declines monotonically from idea #1# to #10#. only the top ~5 matter. the other 155 positions are filler. --- OK, so stock-picking skill is still a thing. so why do funds still lose to the index? because the wrapper forces managers to bury their 5 good ideas under 155 mediocre ones: - fees are on AUM. diversify to scale, capture your own alpha as fees. manager wins, client pays alpha fees for closet beta. - career risk. one concentrated bad year gets you fired. nobody gets fired for humping the index. - morningstar and sharpe ratios punish concentration. flows chase stars (for boomers), stars require blandness (until ansem, threadguy etc take over). - lawyers. "prudent man" rules treat conviction as a liability. - the kicker: SIZE KILLS ALPHA. best ideas of small hedge funds beat those of 10B+ giants by ~15% a year. the individual investor has the smallest AUM of all. here's how to win based on this paper: 1. concentrate. your top 5 ideas, sized like you mean it. 8 stocks capture 80% of all diversification benefit anyway. 2. buy cheap beta for the rest. diversification costs nothing thanks to vanguard. alpha costs everything. never pay active fees for filler. 3. go where the funds can't: illiquid, small or weird. that's where best ideas outperform most. 4. do the work. the catch is that conviction without research is just gambling -- these managers earned their alpha, they just weren't allowed to act on it. you have to be both the analyst and the allocator. 5. build distribution. the fund's moat was never stock-picking, it was gathering assets. streaming and social flip that: audience is the new AUM. tools to responsibly monetise that will emerge. wall st. can't hold its own best ideas -- but you can -- and that's the edge. [1] "Best Ideas" -- Antón, Cohen & Polk:

lol this is epic... atoms is being built from all of uber’s roads not taken - a16z is the investor that missed uber - ben taking the board seat marc never did - eric meyhofer and anthony levandowski - both former uber autonomy chads back at atoms - dara at uber investing in the very bets he sold uber and atoms aren't two random companies with the same characters atoms sees the physical world as a computer -- manufacturing is compute, real estate is storage, transport is the network. uber is the network, atoms is the rest of the computer... its one thing. in summary: - the missed investor is back - the abandoned roadmap is back - the autonomy team is back - even uber is back just one missing piece to complete the round trip😉

capital markets are about to turn active -- because of Solana, @Backpack and @sunrise (i'm unemployed and lazy, so i used ai to clean it up but its a summary of my tweets from the past year) here's the thesis: active will make a comeback -- not as a promise that stock-pickers beat the market (in aggregate they can’t), but as a category that captures flows and fee revenue at internet scale. why? because the investable universe of assets is expanding faster than indices can absorb it, distribution is collapsing into a one internet native layer, and tokenized equities on Solana are the rail where it converges. the passive default is cracking. the mag7 are ~35–40% of the S&P 500 at ~31x forward earnings vs ~20x for the other 493 — “the index” is now a concentrated bet on seven names. capital is already rotating ex-US (+32% vs +17% in 2025). the rails already exist, and the prize is huge. stablecoins are a ~$300B dollar network sitting in pockets worldwide; tokenized stocks are simply the next asset on rails that already move trillions. against ~$154T of global equity sit ~5bn smartphones and only a few hundred million brokerage accounts -- that access gap = the opportunity. the frontier is active by construction. you cannot index pre-IPO names, un-listed foreign firms, or long-tail equities that have no index yet -- participating in them is active by necessity. Solana already carries ~97% of tokenized-equity volume, and it compounds: a token is one shared object every app, AMM, and frontend can plug into. distribution becomes a commodity. once a stock is a token, any fintech app can be Robinhood and any creator can be BlackRock -- spin up a basket, earn a recurring AUM fee. the supply of active products explodes. the swarm is structural. gamestop was a preview... retail is ~21% of US equity volume and growing, and the coordination machinery is getting smoother - Reddit/X to trade in one click is the end state. capital formation becomes national security. in a fragmented, higher-rate world, states compete to pull global capital into domestic assets -- the UK’s digital gilt, Hong Kong’s digital bonds, and the US using stablecoins to fund its own treasuries. the state will get out of the way and accelerate this for a change. tldr: passive weakens, the investable universe expands beyond indices, distribution commoditizes, the internet-native investor base grows, and states accelerate the rails. active investing comes back -- not as one manager beating the market, but as the category that absorbs the next wave of assets, flows, products, and fees. the prize is the rail where it converges.

the next 100x is rebuilding the physical world Tech convinced itself it has transcended a few things: - i have spent nearly all my adult life in tech/startups, and have been a relentless optimist in the face of people seeking safety and stability - i have no skills to survive the world that is coming, and so have no outside incentive to post this stuff. i'm interested in truthseeking and speculation based off of that - i’m also not emotional about this like many on this app are. people have used words like doomerism, depressed, psychosis, etc to describe a bear case on the globalized future if we don’t adapt to obvious structural shifts happening in front of us change your lens from “doomer” to “there’s always a bull market somewhere” and it'll read much easier. many tech people have lost epistemological humility - caught up in their own hubris -- and the belief that a single multi-decade anomaly is the default state of civilization. that we have invented our way out of the physical world and preoccupation with it is -- primitive, paranoid or beneath them. most people here have only known an era of cheap energy, cheap capital, stable geopolitics, infinite leverage, and functioning global supply chains. most of us haven't even seen a real bear mkt in our adult life. the conditions we grew up in are not the natural order of the world unless you think we've turned a corner in history ie., this time is different. i've spent a lot of time talking investors who are over 60, operators and investors in real world businesses -- and find them to be much more in touch with reality. tech people live in a different world from them. those industries have spent yrs dealing with an aging workforce, low investment, tight margins, cyclical commodity prices, and the reality that atoms don’t care about narratives. meanwhile tech existed inside the greatest capital abundance regime in modern history (lowest interest rates in 5000 years lol) and started believing that software was the economy instead of a layer on top of it. with the stability of the real world in question again, i think we'll get a massive repricing event. the next era probably rewards resilience, production, people and businesses that can operate under constraint. food, energy, commodities, etc. look at my pinned tweet - we're speedrunning through all of that. tech will eventually adapt but only after they're hit in the face with reality. crypto is already adapting (perhaps because it has seen cycles of underfunding) -- with RWA and commodities taking off - super promising. the point isn’t to panic. the point is to stop assuming the future automatically works itself out. there will still be enormous opportunities ahead -- just not necessarily in the places the current priesthood expects. and that's the opportunity.