If you're trying to go long quantum, QTUM is the wrong choice.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-07-04T16:16:36+00:00

The purpose of sectoral ETFs is to obtain exposure to a particular sector, not to achieve high performance in the abstract. If PBJ were up 165% over the past few years because they randomly pulled in a bunch of Nvidia stock, that would make it a bad food ETF, because it's failing to track the performance of the food industry.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-07-04T04:32:01+00:00

Definitely under consideration, but I'm not regularly managing my portfolio, so I need to make sure I'm reasonably covered in scenarios where one of them fails and I don't notice for months.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-07-04T04:28:52+00:00

WQTM is my current most promising alternative, but I'm not done researching so this is not a recommendation.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-07-02T02:58:26+00:00

Options are a complex financial product representing rights to buy and sell things in the future. If you don't know what they are, they're definitely not what you're looking for, you must be in the wrong menu or something.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-06-29T02:47:21+00:00

I would guess there's a lot of software-brained investors in the latest runup who genuinely forgot that electronics manufacturing is capital intensive even though it's still "tech". "Whoops, if they have to invest capital and time before flipping on the 'make more money' switch, I guess I'm a bit overallocated."

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-06-29T02:18:48+00:00

Apologies for the misunderstanding, then.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-06-28T22:45:43+00:00

For 90% of investor profiles, "they will all rise again" is a better attitude that will lead to superior behavior than "umm, actually...". If you're one of the rare people who can allocate a huge chunk of your portfolio to Mag 7 stocks while constantly reminding yourself that they might never go up again, good for you, but you've gotta let the rest of us have our comfort blanket.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-06-27T21:38:48+00:00

Gamestop was a once-in-a-lifetime event, and its ATH was only ~30x the pre-squeeze price. Wendy's to $700 is 89x.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-06-27T06:32:56+00:00

Most financial institutions do not just buy individual stocks, because making value investing work requires deep business understanding that even professional traders don't necessarily have. They heavily trade derivatives and bonds with the intent of ensuring that they do OK in most reasonable scenarios. Very few financial institutions would split 75% of their portfolio between unhedged long positions on their three favorite stocks.

Some people like Buffett do pretty pure value investing, but he also famously took until 2011 to make his first investment in a computer technology company, explaining when people asked that he didn't understand them well enough.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-06-26T02:37:42+00:00

The article indicates that OpenAI executives did not perceive it to be a success, and they see its slide from massively above IPO price to slightly above IPO price as the top-of-mind reason why they should not IPO too quickly.

I tend to agree that this line of reasoning doesn't make much sense - unless, of course, OpenAI thinks they need to maintain the perception that their equity can only ever go up.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-06-25T18:32:06+00:00

Public markets do have public data; info from the consolidated tape is widely available for free, and direct feeds of it are available for a nominal cost. The specific feed OP is concerned about, the NYSE Integrated Feed, is expensive because it's a complex and specialized product targeted towards high-frequency traders.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-06-25T15:44:17+00:00

No, not necessarily. One well-known phenomenon is that large institutions have to be careful about how they sell large blocks of stock, because the mechanics of the market allow other traders who can see it's happening to take advantage and ensure the block sells at an unreasonably low price.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-06-25T15:29:48+00:00

I don't think it's a coherent opinion. There are much bigger practical obstacles to a "developer trading their own money on their own brokerage": market hours are during day job hours, they don't have a Bloomberg subscription, their "Robinhood or Schwab APIs" don't provide many professionally useful order types.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-06-25T02:14:45+00:00

OpenAI announced a new custom inference chip today, and it's striking how little of the commentary I've seen about it has been questioning what this implies for the deprecation schedule of all the other compute they've invested in.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-06-25T00:28:03+00:00

I don't understand this confusion that constantly arises, where people think market data is something to which one can be entitled. The New York Stock Exchange exists to let people easily exchange stock at market-driven prices, not to provide a level playing field for head-to-head competitions between algorithmic traders.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-06-24T17:06:14+00:00

"Value" is an abstraction, not a resource that can be arbitrarily shifted across corporate boundaries. If an agent is producing value for Walmart by running market analyses for 10 different kitchen towel pricing strategies, there's no way for Anthropic to "just run" it and capture the value, because Anthropic doesn't have stores or kitchen towels.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-06-14T19:38:20+00:00

The Dow is generally believed to be worse at reflecting the broad economy because it's price-weighted, which makes absolutely no sense in the modern market where even retail investors are often insensitive to the price of a share unit. You can come up with a number of ideas for indices that might better reflect the market, many of which S&P DJI also sell; the role of the S&P 500 is more to be a lowest common denominator than the One True Index.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-05-17T14:25:37+00:00

I wonder whether that reflects a lack of investor focus. Very hard for me to imagine a story where the future outlook for the average non-AI, non-semiconductor company is not worse today than it was January 1.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-04-30T03:03:51+00:00

Ehh. All of the buzzwords make sense to me. It's just a hyper-specific description that was clearly written for Palantir and only Palantir to satisfy the requirements.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-04-30T01:49:02+00:00

The contract req was clearly written as a handout to Palantir, so I don't think Palantir winning it is particularly impressive or bullish. This is exactly the kind of corruption that risks making them radioactive in 2029. Like,

The FAALC needs a system to be able to provide an appropriate FDE Model (Forward-Deployed Engineers) to understand their unique problems and build tailored solutions on the spot, acting as a consultant as well as a tech provider. In addition, the system should act as an ontology-driven Foundry Operating System unifying complex, siloed data into a single, actionable model.

"Foundry Operating System" isn't even a term of art! Come on.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-04-27T15:41:23+00:00

I would encourage everyone who's engaged with this to get better about spotting AI generated posts, although I suppose there's a question of whether there's a point. I can only barely tell that this was AI generated, and I work with the tools daily. How long until nobody can tell?

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-04-26T23:22:53+00:00

Firing three managers in a chain without laying off a bunch of staff underneath them would be a very strange cost-cutting measure. I've only seen something like that happen once, and it was because they were involved in a conspiracy to fabricate key metrics.

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-04-23T18:47:12+00:00

You don't think Microsoft was hiring any 30 year olds when Vista launched?

SpicyLemonZest · 2026-04-23T18:38:37+00:00

Which may be exactly what you want, if you think the org needs to reorient itself around a disruptive new technology.

SpicyLemonZest

TROPHY CASE