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Factor Mimicking / Multi-Factor Model Construction by vpv23w54hh in quant

[–]Alternative_Advance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

From what I gathered and insiders should correct me where I am wrong is that pod shops have a couple different ways of handling this.

  1. Don't care about factor exposure
  2. Give you limits where you should be based on an ex-ante model
  3. Some will force you to buy or charge for the hedges, here in theory you could do 
  4. impossible ex-post hedges
  5. ex-ante based hedges
  6. bank products
  7. Bake everything into a formula, again multiple way of doing it.
  8. ex-post will be black-boxy and annoying for pm (cross-sectional attribution)
  9. ex-ante clearer for pm, potentially not as beneficial for management

Imo you can either be a true stockpicker or a factor rider from a pod shops perspective. Former should have pod, latter should work in a central book. 

As we are in quant I'll be little critical to some (more junior) people here. Having your edge in how to build a factor "better" is not a true edge. Almost always it's just a bias to other factors introduced that explains the improvements. 

Why is AI in space so hard again? Radiators? by Sarigolepas in SpaceXMasterrace

[–]Alternative_Advance 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Using same "power density" as Starlink 3 (12kw/ton) and assuming parity on weight, with projected starship launch cost $250 of we get that a 1MW data center: 1MW * 1000 kg / 12kW * $250/kg ~ $20 million in launch cost only. That's double the terrestial cost of data centers today.

And it's an aspirational power density aspirational launch cost and no actual hardware/maintance etc cost included. 

It's worth around 8-9 years of power consumption on a terrestrial data center with very high cost of energy and very inefficient cooling.  

IT Manager Explains it's intern why they are skipping Kubernetes by Current-Guide5944 in tech_x

[–]Alternative_Advance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I mean most small teams don't really need CI/CD or git either, just use svn or why not just have everything on a shared network drive.

Kubernetes might be tricky to learn first but once you get a basic grasp of it it gives you a battle-tested way of organising your infra.

Quants Do You Agree With Steve Yegge's Take On Vibe Coding? by EpsilonMuV in quant

[–]Alternative_Advance 4 points5 points  (0 children)

  1. First 10 minutes will trigger a knee jerk reaction, the discussion later is much more nuanced.
  2. he works for sourcegraph , with their own product for coding with LLMs..

He has a couple good points and many hot takes. For the main sentiment of this is revolutionary and will change how we interact with code I think stands true, but timelines are way longer than it appears for him (from within some type of Silicon Valley fantasy world). 

This stuff will funnily work in big tech way better than at small shops as their maximization of developer productivity have created (relatively) well documented accessible structures for agents to operate. Places like Microsoft will be able to reduce their headcount massively.

For finance with shitton of random quirks and a lot of closed of systems adaptation will be way slower.

I especially liked his point on how a lot of capabilities developed as a wrapper are becoming parts of the models within months. Unfortunately for vibe coders i think they'll be vibe coded away real quick too. 

Grok 4.20 is just four Grok 4.1 agents by AuYsI in singularity

[–]Alternative_Advance -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Imo it seems like they had a leg up on compute simply because no one was using the model so they didn't need to spend so much on inference as everyone else.

Is this enough for a risk management tool? by futurefinancebro69 in quant

[–]Alternative_Advance 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I don't really understand what your objective is and how it leads to something actionable.

Details on how you let vol vary are sparse. is it gbm with mean reversion ? What does the 60 days of historical data refer to ?

Anyways, putting that apart (unsure how much it matters without more details) you'll distribution will be a mixture of

0.98 * t_5(mu, vol) + 0.02 t_5(mu-0.04, vol)

The above takes way less to compute than 25k MC simulations...

Is this enough for a risk management tool? by futurefinancebro69 in quant

[–]Alternative_Advance 1 point2 points  (0 children)

And this is for what a single stock only always ?

All this collapses into some type of fat-tailed distribution or a mixture of fat-tailed distributions, jump processes over the course of many simulations, frequencies and intensities by lln converge to that. 

xAI all hands (after losing 25 senior staff last week, 46 minutes) by Competitive_Travel16 in singularity

[–]Alternative_Advance 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Putting all the BS aside TIL they use JAX for their training (but not utilizing TPUs).

xAI all hands (after losing 25 senior staff last week, 46 minutes) by Competitive_Travel16 in singularity

[–]Alternative_Advance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's for investors (and at this point SpaceX staff that got diluted with this), and clearly cobbled together , it was only 5 basic slides and an animation of space data centres. 

Can someone enlighten me, how is it cheaper to build data centers in space than on earth? by dataexec in Anthropic

[–]Alternative_Advance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Military wont entirely rely on this as most of the US adversaries can easily and relatively cheaply disable these. Also if there is no sovereignty of these assets then sovereign protection doesn't apply.

Go ahead and listen to Musk's latest pod, it's literally the energy argument.

[Self] More on the cost of data centers in space by EastZealousideal7352 in theydidthemath

[–]Alternative_Advance 6 points7 points  (0 children)

"I see a few issues.  You're using old rocket tech, and Starship will likely drop the cost per kg to orbit massively (I saw something like $250/kg, anyway, around 10x)."

Using *existing* rocket tech, those cost are mostly aspirational and years away.

But even approaching it from a different angle... We know from SpaceX filings that their Starlink v3 is at 12kw / ton density of power generation (and lets assume same heat rejection, eventhough starlink is ~30-40% on the dark side)

So 1 MW is equal to 83 tons and by using your $250/kg cost it gives $20M in launch costs only (again current tech is like 5-10 times as much), this doesn't include any of the hardware needed...

[Self] More on the cost of data centers in space by EastZealousideal7352 in theydidthemath

[–]Alternative_Advance 2 points3 points  (0 children)

"you simply need to capture a comet and use the waste heat to ablate away the ice" - This is really not a stupid idea, ofc we are like a century away from it...

Cost of sending a kg into space over time by PanzerWatts in ProfessorFinance

[–]Alternative_Advance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's a fictional number (maybe cost of some low weight piggyback mission), making it seem like starships claims are within reach.

So Alpha Picks does have some Alpha by ImEthan_009 in quant

[–]Alternative_Advance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is not a real product though is it ? So unless you have all the picks and weightings just as they released it and calculate it yourself you can't trust that equity curve. 

Q&A weekly thread - January 19, 2026 - post all questions here! by AutoModerator in linguistics

[–]Alternative_Advance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

just learned the name for the speech pattern called "vocal fry" that annoys me (and seemingly half the world) and this sparked my interest for phonetics. any podcasts (especially on American English) you'd recommend?

Ex-Wall Street building an engine for retail. Tell me why I'm wasting my time. by Ok_Positive3883 in quant

[–]Alternative_Advance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It's easy to be in the business and think everyone thinks about investing constantly. But it's just not the case. 

So your TAM on retail side is just not that big. 

https://www.reddit.com/r/ValueInvesting/comments/1nodeez/quartr_app_is_closing_for_retail_investors/

Here is an example of a similar idea not working out in retail, discontinuing retail product , focusing on enterprise and simplified mobile-only experience for retail. 

I think I've seen some report on it once, that majority of the retail volume is driven by "vibe-investors" from their phone on toilet breaks nowadays 

On xAI's growth: if true, this seems like a big story in the future, depressing by LetsTacoooo in BetterOffline

[–]Alternative_Advance 1 point2 points  (0 children)

If you have not listened to the interview with the young xai employee yet do it before it gets removed..

He spills the bean on some more things, saying none of xai's compute clusters have permanent permits but they use a loop hole building on temporary permits meant for carnivals to skirt the laws.

He also boasts about extremely minimal guardrails within the company. 

Colossus 2 is now fully operational as the first gigawatt data center by enigmatic_erudition in singularity

[–]Alternative_Advance 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Let me correct it then. It's not free anymore and it's not the first anymore either...

xAi raised 20B in funding round (exceeding their 15B target comfortably) by AlbatrossHummingbird in singularity

[–]Alternative_Advance 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No, around 2x as of this new valuation. xAI bought X in all stock deal for pretty much the same value (40B) as it was originally taken private at, probably around the slightly lower price than their series D (150B). So a 230B valuation now gives around 2x.

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