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hendzen

5,630 karma · joined February 5, 2010

Digital swiss army knife. Interested in finance & technology.

If you want to reach out reply to my most recent comment with your contact info.

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hendzen··on Apex Protocol – An open MCP-based standard for AI agent trading
Neat idea but this is clearly vibecoded slop.

also, apex clearing is gonna send you an angry letter asking you to change the name pretty soon.

hendzen··on Dario Amodei calls OpenAI’s messaging around military deal ‘straight up lies’
@pg on @sama: "you could parachute him into an island full of cannibals and come back in 5 years and he'd be the king."

In retrospect this quote comes across as way more foreboding given what we've learned about the scale of his ambitions and his willingness to lie and bend reality to gain power.

Dario on the other hand seems to have an integrity that's particularly rare in this era. I hope he remains strong in the face of the regime.

hendzen··on Takeaways from the Jane Street bond prospectus
Jane Street made 4.4bn net income in Q1 2024 w/ 2600 employees.

Tether made 4.5bn net income in Q1 2024 w/ probably <50 employees.

hendzen··on Urgent: Sign the petition now
I would be happy to support a bailout of SVB in exchange for some reasonable concessions to American taxpayers.

1) Skin in the game - GPs of YC / a16z / Sequoia / Founders Fund / etc put in some equity in to a joint venture to acquire SVB's assets and make depositors whole. Government will backstop some portion of it.

2) YC / a16z / Sequoia / Founders Fund / etc agree to support ending the carried interest tax exemption

hendzen··on TabFS – a browser extension that mounts the browser tabs as a filesystem
This is really cool. Great work
hendzen··on The anatomy of an ML-powered stock picking engine
I know a bit about this industry and I have worked on some profitable systems. Honestly not a bad effort for someone working on their own with low-cost data. Don’t let the haters get you down. I would recommend you to pick up a more recent textbook on portfolio construction like Isichenko’s recent book.
hendzen··on VC Meltdown
Not quite. The market is pricing in a certain trajectory of rate hikes - basically another four 50bp increases with terminal rates around 2.5-3%. If inflation doesn’t start coming down that trajectory will change and the market will adjust accordingly.
hendzen··on Index funds officially overtake active managers
Exactly, the relative weights are often proportional to the market cap. So if I invest $1M in the S&P that doesn't actually change the relative weights of the stocks in the index (mostly), since the impact on all of the underlying stock market caps should be roughly even as more money flows in to the stocks with higher market cap and smaller sums flow in to the stocks with lower market cap.

So in the case that say Meta's metaverse initiatives suddenly start taking off with the general population, it will take active investors to invest more in FB to increase FB's marketcap relative to the other stocks in the index so that passive investors are "correctly" allocating to stocks in proportion to their earnings potential.

Obviously there are some caveats here. Passive investors still have to choose an index to invest in, and inflows in to one narrow index (i.e. QQQ) will affect the weights of particular stocks in broader indexes. But the point stands that the relative marketcap ranking between stocks in the index is not affected much by in/outflows in to a particular index, and in some sense indexes are outsourcing their stock picking to active investors that actually try to accurately value individual stocks on an absolute and relative basis.

hendzen··on Index funds officially overtake active managers
my personal theory is that active management can still produce market-beating returns but the good active managers will rapidly grow their capital base to huge levels where they don't need much outside investment.

On the other hand - now we have a situation where most investment savings by individual investors are tracking passive indexes. But if everyone is indexing - what determines the relative weight of each stock in the index?

The answer is active investors. But with an increasingly smaller field of increasingly skilled investors (with more discretionary capital), we end up with the valuations of companies (and thus how societal time is allocated) competitively determined by a fierce prediction competition between the top active managers (Renaissance, DE Shaw, Citadel, etc).

hendzen··on Afghan President Ghani relinquishes power, Taliban form interim gov't
Have they considered raising VC?
hendzen··on Y Combinator entrepreneurs say they were kicked out of the accelerator
YC is not some magic fantasy organization. Like any other org you should probably discuss things your upset about internally with relevant stakeholders before complaining on Twitter. That said telling other people how to circumvent vaccine queues is clearly unethical and someone high up should have loudly squashed that immediately.
hendzen··on Semantic Satiation
Somebody watched Ted Lasso recently
hendzen··on The Battle of GameStop
I'm happy that guy did well. But one guy taking a negative expected value bet and winning big doesn't really help all the other little guys on WSB who got roped in to buying GME at 100+ today or might even be ITM on their calls but will get crushed by insane spreads, theta decay due to halts and don't have the capital to exercise.

I'm not spiteful of KG and the other people who are making the real money off all the crowds at the option casino, if anything I respect their shrewdness - Citadel prints insane money on these option premiums, and as a bonus KG gets to invest in Melvin at firesale prices and probably gets to extract insane terms.

As far as 'jealous fucks working miserable engineering jobs' - I think you might be projecting a bit there :)

hendzen··on The Battle of GameStop
The only person really winning here is Ken Griffin.
hendzen··on Stan is a state-of-the-art platform for statistical modeling
Stan used to only be able to parallelize across chains but they introduced within-chain parallelism this year. Even then some of the work is still serial so I don’t think you can expect linear speedups past a certain point.
hendzen··on Stan is a state-of-the-art platform for statistical modeling
If you want to learn Stan I highly recommend the book Statistical Rethinking (2nd Ed) by Richard McElreath. It’s a pedagogical masterpiece and light years away the best resource I’ve found on learning Bayesian inference.
hendzen··on MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, says she gave $4.2B to charity
Her generosity notwithstanding, she probably hired a great PR agency.
hendzen··on Palantir S-1
Cloudera... you mean the same Cloudera that has basically traded below the IPO price for years?
hendzen··on The Case of the Top Secret iPod
Guessing some kind of device for stealthy Van Eck Phreaking.
hendzen··on How popular media portrays the employability of older software developers
In fairness the CME/conference circuit is basically a way for physicians to legally embezzle a free vacation. Many of those conferences are held at places like Jackson Hole, the Bahamas, etc, with relatively short amount of hours per day spent in talks and the rest skiing/relaxing/drinking etc on the hospital dime.
hendzen··on Show HN: IPOs.fyi – Missing Out on IPOs Was Frustrating, So I Fixed It
there is an ETF that does this, at 2 years rather than 10. https://www.renaissancecapital.com/IPO-Investing/US-IPO-ETF. Performance ITD has been worse than SPY until very recently when a lot of tech companies (incl IPOs) have had very strong performance... which is obviously why this thread is even happening.
hendzen··on The largest unknown Bitcoin wallet moved nearly $1B for $0.48 in fees
Is the average person in our society better off in a world where anyone can move $1B anonymously? Why do you think regulators might want to take an interest in such transfers?
hendzen··on You download the app and it doesn’t work
Apple takes a 30% cut of all IAP.

Google scrapes info and displays it in widgets above links to the actual content. Google charges trademark holders AdWords ransom to protect searches for their own brands.

Amazon kills OSS business models by offering managed OSS services on AWS at an unbeatable cost. Amazon picks off the best performing market place categories with Amazon Basics ‘recommended’ competitors.

The list goes on and on.

Tech is an industry defined on building scale and then collecting rents. Apple IAP is just the current outrage but the entire industry is working towards building the next ‘platform’ for others to sharecrop on.

hendzen··on A Crash in the Dollar Is Coming
Overly simplistic view that misses out on a lot of nuances about who in the US benefits and who is harmed by the dollar system. For a much better essay see here: https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-class-politics-of-t...
hendzen··on HFT in My Backyard (2014)
The aggressive liquidity taking strategies cause wider spreads and shallower books as liquidity providers are forced to quote wider and smaller to avoid those adversely selected orders. This essentially is a small tax (or rent) collected from all other market participants.
hendzen··on HFT in My Backyard (2014)
I think it’s more nuanced in reality. There are liquidity providing HFT strategies that profit off the spread - this is good for people moving big size like Vanguard. Then there are liquidity taking strategies that profit by picking off quotes in anticipation of a probable price move. I don’t see how those strategies help Vanguard. Also, most HFT firms do a mix of both types strategies...
hendzen··on Show HN: Stock Performance of US Senators
probably makes sense to use a few different metrics of information ratio vs $SPY, t-bills and a 60/40 portfolio.
hendzen··on Show HN: Stock Performance of US Senators
adjusted close prices aren't what you want, when a dividend occurs the adjusted close price is reduced by the dividend amount. you want total returns.
hendzen··on What Facebook doesn’t understand about the Facebook walkout
> we absolutely do not want Mark Zuckerberg or his employees to make decisions on what is or isn’t newsworthy.

The problem is that they already ARE making decisions on what is newsworthy. It is not possible for them to be neutral.

Today the FB News Feed algorithm optimizes for user engagement. That is an editorial decision! It just so happens that it results in having the entire population get their news through a skinner box that reinforces and worsens their most harmful biases.

Like it or not, demagogues around the world (not just the US) are exploiting this mechanic to gain power in ways that are harmful to society. Should Facebook be the arbiter of truth? That's the wrong question. They already are. At this point all we can hope is that they choose to arbitrate the truth in a less damaging way.

hendzen··on San Francisco, Silicon Valley rents plunge amid downturn
Streeteasy data [0] shows a drop in listings but no fall in asking rents. However there has been a sharp rise in concessions - i.e. free month upon new lease signing. My guess is landlords are currently keeping apartments off the market rather lock in lower rents, and when they do need to move a unit they use concessions since they look better from an accounting basis. I think eventually we will see a fall in gross rents but it may take longer than expected.

[0] - https://streeteasy.com/blog/data-dashboard

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