Nearly time to bid farewell to 2020. Never been prouder to be a @FT science writer - nor more grateful to be able to carry on working. A short, indulgent (sorry!) thread on writing covid...

Starting on Jan 8 with a mystery pneumonia https://t.co/d21b1e3gr4 via @financialtimes

A realisation at the end of Jan that this could be ‘the one’...

https://t.co/DXYLW44NZt
...and that healthcare might need rationing. Except I thought this would be a one-off in the spring first wave. Never dreamed we’d be in a worse place nearly a year later.

Remember, we have yet to pay the ‘Xmas mixing’ dividend 😔

https://t.co/uYs5j7HsM6
But at least a vaccine was in the works. The road was shorter than I thought 😂...free to read)

https://t.co/m8lSRwoPIi
...but, until it arrived, we had to learn to operate in a new landscape of risk (free to read)

https://t.co/ZVRPVK0l2U
Public trust is vital in a pandemic but in summer the U.K. govt was losing it over schools.

Again, can’t believe we are fighting this one all over again. The worst ever Groundhog Day...
https://t.co/FbwTdljNju
...and in the summer we were still debating how the virus spread, particularly whether aerosols mattered.

https://t.co/0i3kBjaf9N
The vaccines were ticking along nicely in the autumn but we still didn’t have a good evidence base on behavioural science & non-drug measures like masks, 10pm curfews. fear we have not seen the last of these, even after vaccination...

https://t.co/hjdakvC19Y
...partly because we might need to spread vaccine doses a bit more thinly than we’d like (and while I opined this 👇🏽in mid-Dec, I didn’t think it would actually end up happening)

https://t.co/uTa5DPICVI
I could not have survived it without fab @FT colleagues like @brookeamasters & @clivecookson @donatopmancini & many more, but most of all...
...I am so very very grateful to the frontline health workers - nurses, docs, support staff - that have given *everything* to keep the rest of us safe, at great risk to themselves....
...plus the school & uni staff who ensured my children were still educated *in a pandemic*....and the food industry & supermarket workers who kept us fed *in a pandemic*....
...and the transport staff who kept London moving *in a pandemic*....and the delivery drivers who kept us supplied *in a pandemic*...
...and it is out of sincere respect and gratitude to them, and to so many others, that I will be staying indoors tonight for the first NYE I can remember. With copious amounts of Prosecco I will toast my dad, who died alone in hospital (not of #covid)
...this year because we, like so many bereaved families, could not see him. I only wish he could have lived long enough to see the vaccines rolled out: Dad always believed that science was a powerful force for good in the world, a conviction I share.
So, my final thank you: to the scientists, drug companies and manufacturers, and clinical trial volunteers that have brought us such hope for the future. I cannot wait to get my jab. 💉

Here’s to a happier and healthier 2021 🎉 🍸

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Last week Hizbollah's finance institution Al Qard el Hasan was hacked by Spiderz. A group of people took that Data and tried to make sense out of it. Below are the findings

https://t.co/eGLqvb28o5


Loans are provided to borrowers for gold deposits or other guarantees, to the association's members and to unsecured applicants.

AQAH had a carried forward loan balance of $450 million as of December 31, 2019. This balance has been increasing at a yearly rate of 13.4%.


AQAH laundered around $475 million in 2019 in the form of disbursed loans paid to more than 20,000 borrower accounts; mostly to borrowers with gold deposits.

Deposits accounts have been offered to 307,000 members of the association, 83,000 contributors as well as to 600 companies. AQAH closed 2019 with an overall depositors accounts balance of around $500 million.
Ok here is the explanation. Grab a cup of coffee and read on. If you have not read/noticed this, you will see intraday options movement in a new light.


Say we have two options, one 50 delta ATM options and another 30 delta OTM option. Normally for a 100 point move, the ATM option will move 50 points and the OTM option will move 30 points. But in a high volatile environment, the OTM option will also move nearly 50 points

To understand why this happens, first understand why an ATM option is 50 delta. An ATM option has the probability of 50% of expiring as ITM. The price just has to close a rupee above the strike for the CE to be ITM and vice versa for PEs

Now think of a highly volatile day like today. If someone is asked where the BNF will close for the day or expiry, no one can answer. BNF can close freakin anywhere, That makes every option of an equal probability of being ITM. So all options have a 50% probability of being ITM

Hence, when a huge volatile move starts, all OTM options behave like ATM options. This phenomenon was first observed in the Black Monday crash of 1987 at Wall Street, which also gave rise to the volatility skew/smirk

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Funny, before the election I recall lefties muttering the caravan must have been a Trump setup because it made the open borders crowd look so bad. Why would the pro-migrant crowd engineer a crisis that played into Trump's hands? THIS is why. THESE are the "optics" they wanted.


This media manipulation effort was inspired by the success of the "kids in cages" freakout, a 100% Stalinist propaganda drive that required people to forget about Obama putting migrant children in cells. It worked, so now they want pics of Trump "gassing children on the border."

There's a heavy air of Pallywood around the whole thing as well. If the Palestinians can stage huge theatrical performances of victimhood with the willing cooperation of Western media, why shouldn't the migrant caravan organizers expect the same?

It's business as usual for Anarchy, Inc. - the worldwide shredding of national sovereignty to increase the power of transnational organizations and left-wing ideology. Many in the media are true believers. Others just cannot resist the narrative of "change" and "social justice."

The product sold by Anarchy, Inc. is victimhood. It always boils down to the same formula: once the existing order can be painted as oppressors and children as their victims, chaos wins and order loses. Look at the lefties shrieking in unison about "Trump gassing children" today.