SEPT '26 @SMBCAPITAL TAKEAWAYS 1. The team led by Max Ganik has been absolutely crushing it for a few months now, while other teams have been struggling. This caused me to step back, have convos w Jeff Holden and @mikebellafiore, and reflect on why that is. -Culturally this team has an incredible sense of urgency and dissatisfaction with underperformance. Despite how fast they've grown, they are never satisfied. Max leads from the front by pushing risk and helping the team with idea generation. -A team is ultimately made up of its individual members and every single person on their team is obsessed with trading, works their butt off, and wants to put up the big $$ that Max puts up. There is no C or D player on this team. -They don't make excuses. They look for solutions and implement them faster than others. There is no blaming the market, only full accountability that you alone are responsible for your performance. -On the couple special opps each month, they take on massive risk (that they've earned the right to). This team is taking exponential bet sizing to an extreme. -They're predominantly using options to express their ideas w maximum convexity which keeps their losses contained when a trade doesn't work. 2. The teams that are struggling are not hitting the brakes fast enough when the market environment is not conducive to their strategies. Similarly, most traders do not slam on the gas hard enough when the market is highly conducive to their strategies. 3. Not everything can be codified yet. I see teams overlying relying on AI and simplistic models rather than trusting the decades of collective experience they have as human discretionary traders. I know I've been harping on this for a while, but AI is not the answer if it is distracting you from solving the actual constraints to your trading. I genuinely see that the traders struggling the most are the ones diddling away their time the most on vibe coded projects while avoiding doing the deep hard work that will actually fix their trading. 4. It's funny... Team Max has been the massive outperformer on the desk this year. I'm not sure I've ever heard their team mention AI to me. I don't know that they even use AI (plz correct me if I'm wrong). All they've done is doubled down on their best setups and grown their risk to incredible levels. For how much the world is changing, I don't see the path of the discretionary trader having changed much thus far.