Goshawk Trades
@GoshawkTrades • 74,124 subscribers
Algorithmic trader | 7 years live | 10+ algos in production Helping traders go algorithmic (300+ so far). Co-founder @AskEdgarIO (AI agents for funds).
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Jane Street just showed the inside of their AI training data center in Texas. 4,032 GPUs. 56 racks. 8,000 km of fiber. liquid cooling running through every server because air cooling can't handle the heat anymore. but the part that got me was the origin story. Ron Minsky, who co-heads their technology group. said their first compute cluster was literally six Dell boxes stacked on top of each other at the end of a desk row. they called it "the hive." the trading systems sat out in the room with the traders because they wanted to be able to unplug them if something went wrong. at one point, someone vacuuming the office unplugged a live trading system in the middle of the day. from six Dell boxes and a vacuum cleaner incident to a liquid-cooled GPU data center processing trades in under 100 nanoseconds. that's a 20-year arc.
Goshawk Trades2,272,453 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
Lloyd Blankfein, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, broke down his entire personal trading setup: portfolio: 98% risky assets. 75-90% single stocks. mostly big tech hyperscalers plus "second tier" names slightly below blue chip. "i invest in risky assets. that's what's fun for me." "do you have a team? oh, just me." hardware: no computer. an iPad and a phone. information source: texting and calling people. "somebody will text me. i'll text them. then i'll get tired of tapping things out because of my fat fingers. so i just call people up." frequency: trades every single day. multiple times. "it's taking a lot of discipline not to look at my screen while i'm talking to you right now." "some people listen to music. to me, the market is like music. it's out there. it's going on." has he outperformed the market? "yes, i have for a while. it's because of where i focused, tech, energy, and financial services. i know a lot about financial services having been in financial services." the former CEO of Goldman Sachs. manages his own money. on an iPad. alone. focused on three sectors he actually knows. and beats the market. sometimes the edge isn't the model. it's 40 years of pattern recognition and a phone full of the right contacts.
Goshawk Trades1,067,710 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger were asked about Jim Simons' Medallion fund, ~39% a year, net of fees, for three decades, and whether Berkshire would ever hire a quant to trade like that. Their answer is a masterclass: "we're not trying to make money trading stocks. we don't think we know how to do it. if we knew how, we'd probably be trading stocks too. but we don't, and we really don't trust anybody else to do it for us." two of the greatest investors, plainly saying: that's not our edge, so we don't play there. then Munger explained why even Renaissance had a ceiling: "if they tried to do it too much, they destroyed their own advantage. there was a limit on the amount they could make." the better the edge, the smaller it often is. the most inefficient, hardest-to-find opportunities pay the most per dollar, which is exactly why most edges of those kinda can't scale that aggressively. capacity and edge trade off against each other. none of which takes away from what Simons built. it just explains why it didn't scale to manage $1 trillion.
Goshawk Trades81,675 görüntüleme • 6 gün önce
Ken Griffin on the single factor he looks for when hiring at Citadel: "show me an athlete who did well academically." "an athlete because they know what it takes to win and they've had to experience loss." talent is everywhere. what's rare is someone who knows how to lose, recover, and still perform at a high level. same thing separates profitable traders from everyone else.
Goshawk Trades1,214,575 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
Ken Griffin, founder of Citadel, the most profitable hedge fund in history, on the moment that left him "shocked and depressed" about AI: "one of our team members built an agentic AI system to recreate academic papers in finance." "we have a legion of young masters and PhDs doing this work. it takes roughly six to eight weeks to reproduce a paper." "my colleague built an AI system that would read a paper, reproduce it, verify the results, produce the results on out of sample data — in about two to three hours per paper." "this is not just a white collar job. this is a master's or PhD-level job. six weeks of work turned into two to three hours." "and then OpenAI just solved a math problem that no one had solved for eighty years." "competitive moats are being filled in at lightning speed." the founder of Citadel watching PhD-level work get compressed from six weeks to two hours. and his response wasn't to cut headcount, it was "i will take every single productivity gain i can get because with the talented people we have, we just have more to go after."
Goshawk Trades183,828 görüntüleme • 20 gün önce
Ken Griffin, CEO of Citadel, on how he handled the AI hype inside a $60 billion hedge fund: "i said, 'i want a list of all the GenAI-based projects that we have at Citadel.' he came back with 200 projects." "i said, 'no, no. five. we're going to do five.'" "'what about the other 195?'" "'we're going to kill all those. we're going to do five. we're going to push them really hard. we're going to see what works and what doesn't.'" "we can't afford to let everybody be pursuing random ad hoc projects. it's too expensive. it's too much of a distraction." "of the five that we pursued, we had real success with just over half." "i don't think we incurred any cost of killing 195 projects." this is one of the most important lessons in strategy development too. you don't need 200 ideas in research. you need 5 that you push hard enough to actually validate. most traders spread themselves across too many ideas and end up with none that are live.
Goshawk Trades296,740 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
the guy who runs the world's largest sovereign wealth fund, $2 trillion, says the hardest part of the job is doing nothing. Nicolai Tangen has a rule he calls the "inertia analysis": take your portfolio from january 1st. calculate what it would've returned if you never touched it again. then compare it to what you actually did all year. "so often you actually have detracted from your performance by the things you've done." every system you build is fighting the same urge. often the edge isn't the next trade. it's the trades you talk yourself out of.
Goshawk Trades125,056 görüntüleme • 18 gün önce
Druckenmiller on why most investors can't sell losers: "if the reason i bought a stock is no longer the case, i don't care what i paid for it." "if i bought it at 60 and it's 50 because the market discovered the problem before me, i have no emotion whatsoever." "after a while you develop enough confidence that you're not afraid to clean the slate and start over. because you have the confidence that you'll be successful again." "you're not going to sit there in a lazy position that you're not that sure about anymore. just clean house." "i don't care what i paid for a stock. it's absolutely irrelevant to my investment process going forward." then on buying back higher than he sold: "i don't like it. but i'm perfectly willing to buy something back higher than i sold it. some people can't get themselves to do it. i can." this is the exact same principle behind properly managing strategies. if the edge isn't there anymore, turn it off. don't sit in it hoping it recovers just because you spent three months building it. clean house. start fresh. the next opportunity doesn't care about your sunk costs.
Goshawk Trades216,445 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
this guy won a World Series of Poker bracelet, then became a quant at Susquehanna (a firm with over $500B in market making). here he breaks down the decision process behind every trade of theirs: incomplete information, time, and EV. this clip is worth 3 minutes of your day.
Goshawk Trades558,049 görüntüleme • 3 ay önce
Druckenmiller's advice to young people who want to get into finance: "if they're going in it for the money, they should go elsewhere." "there's too many people in the business like me that just love the game and the passion. and they're not going to be able to outwork the people that are passionate." "and it's not a fun game if you're losing." the people who survive long enough to compound real returns are the ones who genuinely enjoy the research, the building, the debugging at 2 AM. if you're only here for the P&L, the first extended drawdown will end you.
Goshawk Trades177,318 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
When Russia invaded Ukraine, BP, Shell, and Vitol ran from Russian oil. A 27-year-old trader ran toward it. Three years later, Christopher Eppinger made $250 million, owns a €7M villa on the French Riviera, and a private jet. The full story of how he did it below:
Goshawk Trades519,235 görüntüleme • 3 ay önce
the founder of one of the world's biggest quant funds says that in the 1980s, a simple two-and-twenty-day moving average crossover would've made you "like a bandit." David Harding, co-founder of Man AHL, founder of Winton: today that exact system is worthless. it's beta, "anyone could do it, you can do it at home." Harding uses this to explain why markets never stay solved: "the efficient market theorists think markets are like atoms in a box. I don't. I think they're more like a jungle, in which creatures emerge and thrive and eat each other and the whole system evolves." the edge didn't vanish. it got competed away as everyone piled in, and moved somewhere else. every strategy is on this clock. the one printing money now becomes the free indicator later. you don't find one edge. you keep finding the next one.
Goshawk Trades34,346 görüntüleme • 8 gün önce
Paul Tudor Jones opens a fireside chat with Druckenmiller by admitting one of his biggest mistakes: "after the crash of '87, i was so worried about debt to GDP that it caused me to be short the stock market for the entire decade of the nineties." an entire decade. one of the greatest bull markets in history. and one of the greatest traders alive sat short through the whole thing because of a macro obsession. then Druckenmiller adds his own version: "the one rule i had for thirty years of trading was never let my obsession with the debt interfere with my trading. because it never had market impact." "and then i looked at the numbers and i threw out my playbook." two of the best macro traders ever, both admitting that the hardest part of their career has been separating what they believe should happen from what the market actually does. until the math finally forces you to act.
Goshawk Trades192,514 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Druckenmiller: 30% annualized returns. zero losing years from 1981 to 2010. his take on contrarianism: "it's overrated." "Soros used to say the crowd's right 80% of the time. you just can't be caught in the other 20%." "i don't care if a trade is crowded if the thesis is right and the trend is with me." most retail traders try to be contrarian on every trade. the best macro investor alive says stop doing that.
Goshawk Trades294,825 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
a former quant PM at Tudor Investment Corp and Moore Capital, two of the most legendary hedge funds ever built. on the trap he's watched destroy traders over and over again: "you can go out there and sell options for the premium and make money 99 days out of 100." "and for 98 of those 99 days, you're sure you're brilliant. you've come up with something totally new." "you don't make much money every day, but you make it every day. so all you need to do is multiply your size by 10,000 and you're going to get rich because it makes money every day." "you think you've cracked the code. you haven't cracked the code." "what you've done is you've compressed your risk. you've traded a half percent gain every day for a 150% loss on the 99th day." "when you average that over years, you're going to be a loser. but on the way up, you get paid." "year one, you get paid. year two, you get paid. year three, you lose more than you made in the last two. maybe you get fired. you go to another shop and do the same thing over again." this is the most common failure in systematic trading. a strategy that wins almost every day feels great, but often it's a time bomb with a fuse you can't see. if your equity curve looks too smooth to be true, you probably found tail risk.
Goshawk Trades107,966 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
a former PM at Citadel and D.E. Shaw, now trains institutional analysts, on where alpha actually exists: "my general prior is that alpha lives in the tails." "80% of stocks are mostly fairly priced. but there's a 10% tail on the right, 10% tail on the left where there's meaningful mispricing." "so the decomposition of generating alpha is finding a differentiated perspective and investing behind that differentiated perspective with conviction." 80% of the market is efficiently priced. the edge isn't in the middle, it's in the extremes that most people avoid because they're uncomfortable. same distribution in trading. most strategy ideas are noise. most parameter combinations are curve fit. few strategies that survive every validation test you throw at them.
Goshawk Trades91,436 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
Lloyd Blankfein. grew up in the projects. became CEO of Goldman Sachs. ran a balance sheet worth hundreds of billions. when asked what separated the traders who made it from the ones who didn't: "the difference between somebody who's really really good and somebody who can't make it is not that great." "you think of a golf tournament and somebody wins by one stroke and there's six people tied for second. that's a very low margin of victory. and a lot of life is like that." "the difference between a great actor who will get any part in Hollywood and the second best one who may have to wait tables at night." "imagine the unfortunate person who's the best athlete his high school ever produced. gets a minor league baseball contract. and from the minor leagues, something like 2% eventually make a living." "you get into very rarefied air when you're talking about people who are the best at what they do, where the market only rewards people who are in the 0.01%." this applies to trading. the gap between a profitable trader and someone who blows up isn't some massive talent difference. it's a handful of small decisions compounded over years, position sizing, validation rigor, patience during drawdowns.
Goshawk Trades113,237 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
How Stanley Druckenmiller (he managed over $12 billion in assets) looks at technical analysis:
Goshawk Trades689,895 görüntüleme • 9 ay önce