0xDipper
@Dipper_pol • 6,478 subscribers
Researcher AI x finance. builders and legends, in their own words @zscdao
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ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs just explained how he spotted the 2008 crisis from a movie theater on his BlackBerry "something moved 6% that was only supposed to move 4 basis points - I said excuse me I have to go to the bathroom - and started making calls" "I don't care what you think is going to happen - I only want to know what could possibly happen - even with low probability - and what we're doing about it" "we were very good contingency planners - when that remote contingency happens you get off the block so quickly people think you anticipated the gun - we just heard it and acted quicker" bookmark & watch the full conversation ↓
0xDipper664,126 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Stan Druckenmiller told Alex Karp the market could remain flat for a decade, just as it did from 1966 to 1982: “it’s like driving a Porsche at 200 miles an hour and not just taking your foot off the gas, but slamming on the brakes” this is him explaining which businesses can still thrive in a decade like that, the rule that led him to buy Palantir before almost anyone else, and why Karp believes the company’s defense products matter “there were companies that did extremely well in that environment. Apple Computer and Home Depot were founded during that period, while coal, energy and chemical companies made a lot of money throughout the 1970s” “one of the cardinal rules I learned early in venture capital was to look where the kids are going. I bought your stock in 2008, and I did my homework - you were a magnet for talent” “I did quite well financially, but to tell you the truth, I’ve never been more proud to own a company” bookmark & watch the full conversation ↓
0xDipper350,876 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Nassim Taleb sat down with Daniel Kahneman - two of the sharpest minds on risk ever - and the takeaway was blunt: stop trying to be smart Kahneman's prospect theory explains why almost nobody can do what Taleb does We're wired to hate the steady trickle of small losses his strategy needs - even when one huge win more than pays for all of them So you structure it the other way: tiny safe bets plus a few wild ones, never the comfortable middle. "You'd rather be antifragile than intelligent - any time." "Trial and error is really just trial with small error." "Make your gains in small bites. Take your losses all at once." ~1 hr, free. two legends on risk, prediction, and how to win without forecasting ↓
0xDipper1,414,350 görüntüleme • 4 ay önce
Daniel Kahneman - the psychologist who won a Nobel in economics - spent his life proving one thing: your confidence is lying to you A bat and a ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. The answer "10 cents" jumps to mind instantly. It's wrong (it's 5 cents) - and ~50% of students at Harvard, MIT and Princeton say it without checking. That gap is his whole point: the fast, intuitive mind builds a clean story from almost nothing, and the feeling of certainty has nothing to do with being right. "Confidence is a feeling, not a judgment." "Stock pickers can't develop intuition - there isn't enough regularity for it to form." "You can build a very coherent story out of very little information." ~45 min, free. how your mind fools you - from a man who studied it for 50 years ↓
0xDipper1,247,914 görüntüleme • 4 ay önce
Josh Brown removed every tech company from the S&P 500 to see what was really driving the market: “even without tech, you’re looking at 28.3% earnings growth. add tech back and it becomes 32%. that’s outrageous” this is him explaining why the bearish narratives surrounding this market keep losing money, why comparing today’s valuation multiples with those from decades ago makes no sense, and what the executives running these companies survived to reach this point “ten of the eleven sectors are seeing profit growth. the stories that it’s all AI, that the market is too narrow or too concentrated - throw them all in the garbage. they’re money-losing narratives” “net income margins were revised from 15% to 15.6%. sales growth is 15.2% - more than 300 basis points above what analysts expected just two months ago” “is 20 times earnings cheap? no. but why should it trade lower? why should this group of companies trade at 16 times earnings just because that was the multiple in 1994? it makes no sense - these are the Michael Jordans of every sector” “they survived record inflation, the pandemic, an impossible hiring environment and then the tariff uncertainty - the people running these companies are absolute warriors” bookmark & watch the full conversation, then read the article below ↓
0xDipper285,240 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Jim Simons: “I told him, if you lose 30% - stop. if you multiply the money by 10 - stop. nine months later, he had multiplied our money by 10” this is the man behind 66% annual returns explaining how he went from knowing almost nothing about investing to building the most profitable trading system in history - and the rules he followed from the beginning “I told him: if you lose 30%, you stop. if you multiply our money by 10, you stop. nine months later, he had multiplied our money by a factor of 10. $100,000 became $1 million” their advantage wasn’t intuition or a single brilliant trade - it was data, testing, and only trusting signals that survived the numbers “we had a tremendous amount of data. someone would think, ‘maybe this is a predictive signal,’ then test it across 10 years. if it was statistically significant, it went into the system” bookmark & watch the full conversation ↓
0xDipper285,716 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
George Soros gave Ron Baron $5 million in 1976 alongside five other analysts - the other five traded constantly, while Baron barely touched his positions: “my $5 million became $10 million with very little trading, which surprised them. but it was the best performance of the group” that $10 million became the foundation of Baron Capital in 1982 - a firm that now manages $69 billion this is him explaining what he believes Starlink alone could eventually be worth, what SpaceX is currently charging Anthropic and Google for compute capacity, and why he thinks no competitor can match its economics “we think Starlink can generate $1 trillion in annual revenue within ten years and $700 to $800 billion in profit. that would make Starlink alone worth around $14 trillion, while the entire company is valued below $2 trillion today” “we sold capacity to Anthropic for $1.25 billion a month. then Google said it needed compute too - another $900 million a month. that’s roughly $30 billion a year from assets that were previously producing nothing” bookmark & watch the full conversation, then read the article below ↓
0xDipper220,138 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Nassim Taleb: the richest man in the Roman Empire woke up every morning pretending he was poor. Seneca had more to lose than to gain from his wealth - so he rehearsed losing it. Every so often he'd live on bread and water as if shipwrecked, just to make the downside familiar and harmless. That's the whole game, Taleb says: arrange your life so you have far more upside than downside - then randomness stops scaring you. "Make more when you're right than you lose when you're wrong - that's antifragile." "Always keep more upside than downside from random events." "The Stoics aren't unmoved by the world - only by bad events." ~70 min, free. the oldest trick for surviving a world you can't predict ↓
0xDipper700,638 görüntüleme • 3 ay önce
Nassim Taleb: pick two people at random If their combined height is 4.1m, it's basically 2.05 + 2.05. If their combined wealth is $36M, it's almost never 18 + 18 - it's ~$1,000 and ~$36M. Height lives in "Mediocristan," where the average tells you everything. Wealth - and markets - live in "Extremistan," where one event dominates the whole picture. Ruin there never comes from a string of bad days. It comes from a single one. ~1hr lecture, free. The Black Swan author at Cambridge on why the statistics you were taught break exactly where it matters. Being right on average means nothing if one tail empties the account.
0xDipper728,251 görüntüleme • 4 ay önce
Jim Chanos called Enron before it collapsed - by reading the one page everyone skipped. now he says the same trick is hiding in plain sight again. the trick: in a spending boom, one dollar gets counted twice. booked as profit by the company selling the gear - quietly depreciated by the one buying it. earnings look unstoppable… until the spending stops. his receipt: S&P 500 earnings rose ~30% into 2000, then cratered ~40% in twelve months. no recession did that. the telecom buildout just froze - firms had ordered 10,000 routers and needed 2,000. he says the AI infrastructure boom runs on identical mechanics. ~20-min interview, free. the man who saw Enron in the footnotes on how every boom hides its own bust ↓
0xDipper435,394 görüntüleme • 3 ay önce
Daniel Kahneman: the day Saddam Hussein was captured, the same news "explained" both the bond market going up and going down. Treasuries rose - Bloomberg's headline said the capture made the world safer. Half an hour later treasuries fell -the new headline said the capture boosted appetite for risk. Same event, opposite stories. The market moved first; the pundits reverse-engineered a reason. That, he says, is how financial commentary actually works. "Our confidence comes from the coherence of the story - not the evidence behind it." "The conclusion comes first. Then we believe the arguments that support it." "System 1 is largely indifferent to the quality and amount of evidence." ~55 min, free. why the market's "explanations" are stories told after the fact ↓
0xDipper545,244 görüntüleme • 3 ay önce
Bill Ackman on what the AI trading arms race means for regular investors - and his take is the opposite of scary as AI gets faster, he says, investing gets more short-term. a company files a 10-K, the fastest model reads it in seconds and fires a trade. everyone races to react inside a minute. add the "pod shops" running tight stop-losses, and index funds quietly pulling stock off the market. the result: a market with almost no patience. "that presents very good opportunities for probably most of the people in this room." when the crowd dumps a great company on one short-term headline, it gets stupidly cheap - and stays there just long enough for someone with a multi-year view to buy. his real edge isn't a faster model. it's permanent capital - money that can't be yanked in a panic - and a horizon "longer than a minute." ~20-min talk, free. Ackman on why the AI speed race is a gift to patient investors ↓
0xDipper408,751 görüntüleme • 3 ay önce
Taleb: the worst single-day loss in market history was "a small setback." Nvidia shed $589B in a day on the DeepSeek scare - the biggest one-day wipeout ever. his take: that's noise. the stock was up an order of magnitude. giving back 17% means nothing. the real lesson - the whole AI trade leaned on one chip, one story. and people only notice the falls, never the rises. "Something goes from 1 to 10, goes back to 9, people freak out." "now it's no longer flawless. You have a small little chip on the glass." "Google came out of nowhere and displaced Alta Vista." ~4 min, Taleb on why the crash is "the beginning," not the bottom ↓
0xDipper446,192 görüntüleme • 3 ay önce
Taleb: "standard deviation is not how much something moves on average." ask anyone - even statisticians, even government agencies - and that's exactly the wrong definition you'll get back. what they're describing is mean absolute deviation. real standard deviation squares the moves first - which quietly hands almost all the weight to the rare extremes. his demo: 1,000,000 numbers, all zero except one. mean deviation ≈ 2. standard deviation ≈ 1,000. same data, a 500× gap. ~10 min, free. why the risk metric everyone trusts falls apart on fat tails ↓
0xDipper414,018 görüntüleme • 3 ay önce
Jon Gray bought Hilton Hotels for $26 billion just before the 2008 financial crisis, taking on $20 billion in debt - then watched revenue fall 20% and cash flow drop 40%. today he runs $1.3 trillion at Blackstone. this is him looking back on the deal he thought might end his career: “it felt like it was career shortening and that I shouldn't be sitting here today” “our largest investment in the firm's history, we wrote down by 71%. I had to go to meetings with investors and say I know we've done this, but it's unrealized, we're going to get through this” at the bottom, Blackstone committed even more capital: “we put in an extra $800 million at the bottom” the advice he now gives his children is the same message he shares across Blackstone: “I always say to my kids and now I say to everyone in Blackstone, stay calm, stay positive, never give up” save this & watch the full conversation ↓
0xDipper142,482 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Michael Milken earned $550 million in a single year - the highest salary in the history of Wall Street at 24 he was sent to run Drexel's entire bond department - "I was 30 for a number of years" because no one would listen to anyone under 30 every bank was chasing 500 investment grade companies - "I had millions of companies and nobody was looking at them - those 500 don't create jobs" he backed Ted Turner, Rupert Murdoch, John Malone before anyone knew their names bookmark & watch the full conversation ↓
0xDipper176,722 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Nassim Taleb on the AI selloff: the pioneers usually aren't the winners. They're more likely to be the losers. He's not betting against AI - someone will make a fortune on the software and hardware. His point is it doesn't have to be today's hot names. History rhymes: the early car makers, the early airlines, the early PC makers mostly got wiped out. His call is blunt: expect bankruptcies in the software space, and much of a rally built on a handful of names getting erased. "The pioneers are not necessarily the winners - they're probably more likely to be the losers." "A lot of the gains in the stock market are going to be eradicated." "Forget current volatility - it's not representative of the real risk we're facing." ~8 min, free. the man who bet on the last crash on where the AI trade actually goes wrong ↓
0xDipper373,701 görüntüleme • 3 ay önce
Nassim Taleb on a bet most people would take: 70% chance to win $1, 30% chance to lose $1 - should you bet? His answer: in most cases no. Not because of risk aversion. Because it's a bad strategy in multi-period reality Same Kelly Criterion math that powers Shannon's information theory - there's a sweet spot, and most behavioral finance papers ignore it Bet too much and the law of large numbers ruins you. Bet too little and you leave returns on the table this is what every quant learns before they touch capital
0xDipper421,515 görüntüleme • 4 ay önce
Gavin Baker on why AI spending isn’t going to slow down: “they all believe whoever reaches super AI first will create tens or hundreds of trillions of dollars in value - and if they lose the race, their company faces mortal risk. as long as one company keeps spending, everyone else has to spend too, even if the ROI starts declining” this is him explaining what has actually happened to returns on capital since the GPU buildout began, why almost nobody believed Elon could connect 100,000 GPUs into one coherent system, and what Jensen Huang said after he pulled it off “the largest GPU buyers are public companies that report every quarter, and their return on invested capital has gone vertical since they increased capex on GPUs - the ROI on AI has been overwhelmingly positive so far, that’s simply a fact” “engineers at Meta and Google were saying it couldn’t be done, there was no way he could do it - that’s why reporters felt comfortable publishing those ridiculous stories all summer. then he did it” “Jensen said what Elon accomplished was superhuman - nobody else could have done it” “you could argue that Elon doing this saved Nvidia from a difficult six-month period while Blackwell was delayed” “startups of the same size now employ fewer people than they would have three years ago — I’d estimate around 50% fewer. that’s the ROI on AI” bookmark & watch the full conversation ↓
0xDipper91,868 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Nassim Taleb: 0.3% of Americans keep kosher. Nearly 100% of drinks in America are kosher anyway. that's the minority rule - a small, intransigent group decides what everyone gets, because the rest don't mind either way. it quietly runs markets, ethics and elections. "If you're bust on day 28, there is no day 29." "Being paranoid isn't irrational. If we weren't paranoid, we wouldn't be here." "Whatever your grandmother tells you is Lindy - it survived the test of time. Most of what psychologists 'discover' won't." bookmark and watch it today - part 2 on minority rule, black swans, and surviving randomness ↓
0xDipper307,540 görüntüleme • 4 ay önce