25 · Diamond Hands Armada

This thing called the GameStop short squeeze — a bunch of random Reddit retail investors going against hedge funds — these people are geniuses. If you short more shares than exist, eventually you have to buy them back. And if everyone who owns them refuses to sell until you're desperate... These people would rather go down together than let the hedge funds win — some Titanic-level stuff. Eventually the hedge funds' pride cost them billions off one company, because when you short a ship you think is sinking, you eventually have to buy back, and the more Reddit held as an aggregate and refused to sell, the more the whole thing became a true comedic movie.

Each individual makes an individual choice with free will — so how come a pattern manifests across the aggregate of individuals? That question sits under everything: markets, psychology, faith.

When you look at how the market moves, you need to understand who owns how much of the trading volume. Market sentiment is only one factor. Forums and social media give a sense of the retail consensus, but retail is only around twenty percent. There are publicly released reports from the hedge funds and investment banks — where are they invested, and how do I know? What is the sentiment of the big entities? And the governments, the geopolitical figures — how do they play in? You can quantify the data: verbal information converts into numerical data, and the product of that gradient and the share each player holds in a stock's total volume changes the picture. These variables are intricately correlated, so it's never just A% times a variable, summed out.

To be a true investor you need to be deeply good at everything. Prestigious, high-salary jobs can be the training ground for starting a personal fund and quant firm afterwards — zero to little bureaucracy, intellectually stimulating, no corporate meetings, exploratory work, high freedom, hours and hours of maths, physics, statistics and code poured into models.

Know that not entering a trade is also a trade.

Why are you not going to the direct source material? New York Stock Exchange: roughly $25–31 trillion. Nasdaq: $20–29 trillion. Shanghai: $6.5–7 trillion. Euronext: about $6 trillion. Japan Exchange Group: $5.7–6.9 trillion. Shenzhen: $4.3–4.6 trillion. Hong Kong: $4.1–5.2 trillion. NSE India: $3.5–5.2 trillion. LSE Group: $3.4–5.9 trillion. Saudi Tadawul: around $3 trillion. Go to the websites directly and monitor the data and research outputs. In today's day and age, alpha is usually out there — you just need to find it and pick it up. But there's a time limit: it decays.

Data distribution is slow. Something I saw on reels and some random news article shows up in mainstream media weeks later. Don't forget — you are already in alpha territory.