1/ I love learning about the markets. There are some brilliant people I’ve found on Twitter who have provided great insights (among others):

@JeffSnider_AIP
@LynAldenContact
@LukeGromen

But this thread is (mostly) about @profplum99

👇👇👇👇👇

2/ Mike has an encyclopedic knowledge of market history. This interview by @DiMartinoBooth (who I also have a lot of respect for) puts that on clear display.

https://t.co/4hSd2TG4du

Mike’s explanation of passive investing and its effects on the markets was eye-opening.
3/ According to research conducted by Anadu et al for the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, passive funds made up 48% of US equity assets under management in March 2020. That number was just 14% in 2005. Meaning 8.6% annualized growth over 15 years.

https://t.co/ReuBiCAcPn
4/ Per Mike, “passive funds have this really simple algorithm: if you give me cash, I buy.” No fundamental valuation, just buying the current market-weighted index, which means a stock gets greater representation in your fund the higher its current market value.
5/ Employers and pension fund managers are predictably contributing to IRAs through fixed salary percentages on a monthly basis. And passive funds typically hold tens of basis points of cash on the sidelines because, per Mike, “it’s toxic to their business model.”
6/ I called one of my best friends, an investment advisor who I’ve known since grade 7 and said, “I gotta get a number—give me a number!” He immediately responded, “4”—his hockey jersey number—and then proceeded to tell me that active funds have four to 16% of their AUM in cash.
7/ So, thousands of percentage points higher than passive funds. Meaning trillions of dollars are being inefficiently (from an EMH perspective) pumped into the markets through a sheer desire to reduce fees—delaminating price from fundamental reality in an exponential function.
8/ All fuelled by MMT, negative real interest rates, towering debt levels, hyper-financialization, and millennials YOLOing stimulus checks into whatever the hell they want because they’re fed up with a system that appears unlikely to ever afford them a house with a fenced yard.
9/ Short interest is at an all-time high but the shorts are getting bankrupted because the whole thing is strapped to @elonmusk’s rockets 🚀—so far, the #Challenger hasn’t exploded yet, just Melvin Capital Management in its battle with #reddit traders over the value of #GME
10/ Took some #Bitcoin off the table a couple days ago. Thanks @profplum99. Need to attempt rationality in this market. The numbers are too big in the #USDT debacle and I don’t have any good reason to believe reserves are even close to backed 1:1.

Still a Bitcoin believer though
11/ With high volatility and variance/polarization, the markets and citizenry spend little time at the mean, but the older I get the more I realize #balance is important, as eloquently put by one of the best investors of 2020, @chamath, in his interview last year with @RaoulGMI
12/ I watched Mike’s debate with @nic__carter and came away convinced that my #Bitcoin thesis was still right. I immediately wrote a summary of the interview, mostly detailing my objections to Mike’s points (supported strongly by Nic’s great performance). https://t.co/zaDGja6433
13/ Only after I wrote that thread and declared my bias confirmed did I read the Crypto Anonymous paper and watch recent interviews with the executives at #Tether and #Deltec. “Hmm,” I thought, “why are so few Bitcoiners taking this seriously?”

Maybe Mike had a point...
14/ The likely Tether fraud absolutely needs to be taken seriously, but I still believe in #Bitcoin. The deeper I go in my study of the markets, the more I see relativism—ie, comparing one unhinged thing to another—and the less I see any fundamental grounding to economic reality.
15/ It’s like we went from a #Newtonian understanding of the world where gravity kept things in check to an #Einsteinian one where things now go boom in atomic positive feedback loops—eg, the only way out of a gargantuan debt bubble is by issuing exponentially more.
16/ I believe #Bitcoin can theoretically solve this, acting as a ballast in this wildly unstable economic experiment. @nic__carter was right: we have only been on this pure #fiat experiment for 50 years.
17/ In sum, thank you @profplum99. I’m learning a lot from you and will continue to listen with an open mind.

More from Trading

Many of you have seen the famous Westrum Organizational Typology model, so prominently featured in State of DevOps Research, Accelerate, DevOps Handbook, etc.

This model was created Dr. Ron Westrum, a widely-cited sociologist who studied the impact of culture on safety


Thanks to Dr. @nicolefv, I was able to interview him for an upcoming episode of the Idealcast! 🤯

It was a very heady experience, and while preparing to interview him, I was startled to discover how much work he's done in healthcare, aviation, spaceflight, but also innovation.

I've read 4+ of his papers, so I thought I was familiar with his work. (Here's one paper:
https://t.co/7X00O67VgS)

I was startled to learn he has also studied in depth what enables innovation. He wrote a wonderful book "Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake"


Dr. Westrum writes about China Lake Research Labs: "its design and structure had one purpose: to foster technical creativity. It did; China Lake operated far outside the normal envelope... Sidewinder & others were "impossible" accomplishments,

I love this book because it describes traits of organizations that routinely create and maintain greatness: US space program (Mercury, Gemini, Apollo), US Naval Reactors, Toyota, Team of Teams, Tesla, the tech giants (Amazon, Google, Netflix, Google)

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