96 · Ears Full of Alpha

Podcasts — general knowledge, self-improvement, deep thinking. The Jay Shetty Podcast: mental health, wisdom, celebrity interviews. Chris Williamson: self-improvement and psychology — highly recommend. Diary of a CEO with Steven Bartlett: business and life philosophy in long-form two-to-three-hour interviews. Alex Hormozi: entrepreneurship and execution. Leila Hormozi: operations and leadership. Ed Mylett: performance and personal growth. Jordan Peterson: Christianity, politics, philosophy. Iced Coffee Hour: entrepreneurship, investing, business stories. Lex Fridman: AI, philosophy, computer science, intellectual interviews. Patrick Bet-David: US politics, investing, entrepreneurship, finance.

Educational platforms. LinkedIn Learning for professional skills and certificates. Coursera Plus for university-level courses from Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge — with certificates. MIT OpenCourseWare: free STEM courses taught by MIT professors — highly recommend buying Coursera Plus and consistently taking courses on both. Khan Academy for fundamentals. Udemy for skill-based learning with high ROI. Notion for productivity — take it or leave it. TED-Ed for short educational videos. YouTube's select channels for academic lectures and explainers.

Corporate and finance news — high-quality sources: the Financial Times, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, CNBC, Reuters and Investing.com for market summaries, Nikkei Asia, MarketWatch, TechCrunch for startup tech, Morning Brew as a daily digest, Stratechery for tech strategy, The Information for Silicon Valley journalism. Macro and data-driven sources: the Bank of England, the Bank for International Settlements, the IMF, FRED, Trading Economics, the PBOC, the WDR reports, the FRB websites. Finance tools: Koyfin, TradingView, Finviz, Algo Puzzles for quant thinking.

Websites for deep learning and thinking: Oxford Union lectures — world leaders invited into deep intellectual discourse; Imperial College London lectures; TEDx; Crunchbase for startup intelligence; the Stratechery archives; academic institutions' news pages — the Mathematical Institute at Oxford, the CS departments. Refinitiv Eikon, the Bloomberg Terminal, the data streams, HPC clusters, Wharton Research Data Services — the type of thing you'll access at university, so put them on the further timeline along with the Goldman 10-K deep dives. For now, the vital focus is the foundational repetition of the small range of books at home — the pillars for the further endeavours.

Now you want to get into the nitty gritty: accumulating the small, minute details, picking up unorthodox expressions you're not yet using in your speech. Once you're in university you'll be ingesting corporate annual reports in sheer volume. Successful people give out massive lists of websites, books, textbooks and data sources. In the early phases of your twenties, process as much as humanly possible — there is no limit to how much data can be processed daily.

Veritasium, MIT OpenCourseWare, freeCodeCamp, 3Blue1Brown, Big Think, QuantPy, Coding Jesus, Dimitri Bianco, The Pursuit of Wonder — the channels I'm watching these days. If your entire existence for the next decade is fully deep in the endeavour of quant finance, I can guarantee that even if you fail, you'll probably be set for life post-doctorate. You get this chance once. Choose the deep end, fall in love with what captivates you, and give it a decade.

There are only five or six YouTubers who talk about quantitative finance in real depth. Funny enough, each has around 60,000 subscribers — small, niche audiences — but each has a thousand videos that are all genuine alpha. Master the knowledge and skills they mention and it's going to be insane. And with freeCodeCamp and the rest, there's always some random genius in his parents' basement with a full fifty-hour course teaching Python — everything is online, technically free, which is just dope.