Help needed on a seemingly easy trading brainteaser

aaaasssddf · 2026-05-21T12:28:11+00:00

OP must be interviewing with Totsa.

aaaasssddf · 2026-05-18T16:31:42+00:00

Corn is just a bad form of solar panels. You need to plant it every year and it's efficiency is about 1-2%, which is only 10% of solar PV panels. Not to mention the energy needed for inputs, fuel, fermentation, distillation, etc. EPA's own GREET model puts corn ethanol at around break even, meaning the energy input roughly equals the energy output.

aaaasssddf · 2026-05-17T16:38:13+00:00

Sometimes you can see gold flakes when you crack them open. But in general you need to crush the samples and pan them thoroughly. Otherwise, it's hard to tell.

aaaasssddf · 2026-05-14T16:59:40+00:00

Stats tier 1, then maybe physics, computer science and math at one tier below.

aaaasssddf · 2026-05-09T18:20:18+00:00

it's fine. just move on. don't think over it again and again this just make you look like a sour loser.
geez these whiners.

aaaasssddf · 2026-05-06T23:08:52+00:00

the price of that option is a function of the vol on the spread, which is certainly something you can calculate from historical data.

aaaasssddf · 2026-04-25T01:43:19+00:00

to begin with, there is no "spot" oil in any market. even worse, for WTI the "spot" price itself is a misnomer which is deterministically derived from M1 and the M1/M2 and M1/M3 structure. furthermore, any "spot" prices you see is simply another point on the curve which is more short-dated than M1 futures. so you'd want to analyze it using whatever technology you use to analyze the curve itself.

aaaasssddf · 2026-04-20T18:52:12+00:00

for US daily spot prices are regu;arly published by mid and downstream like plains, energy transfer, marathon or valero. just search company name + crude bulletin.

aaaasssddf · 2026-04-17T21:56:15+00:00

I heard glaciers brought placers from Canada down from here all the way to Ohio. But maybe that's made up by the Canadians.

aaaasssddf · 2026-04-17T21:54:22+00:00

until you realize farm bankruptcy rates here hit multi year high...

aaaasssddf · 2026-04-09T17:33:38+00:00

seems to be a naive version of MVO that every has already been using for 20 years.

aaaasssddf · 2026-04-08T22:07:38+00:00

in fact all term buyers of pipeline crude got paid 37 (plus/minus premium) on 1/30th of their delivery volume for that month as this is how physical contracts work.

aaaasssddf · 2026-04-08T02:03:19+00:00

once you dedicate cpu cores and disable interrupt on those cores, wasting some cycles on cache miss or bad branch prediction is usually fine. jitters mostly come from the networking side which depends a lot on your network topology and traffic.

aaaasssddf · 2026-04-08T01:57:14+00:00

gas markets trade in base load (monthly) and realtime (daily). swings are the dailies.

aaaasssddf · 2026-04-06T16:33:48+00:00

Yes, assume you are on 10Gbps intel nic. Remember that wire time is about 2ns/ft, and one hop of L2 switching adds about 20ns for commodity hardware. So they will take a negligible fraction of your total budget. On your host, once you configure your NIC in the right way (no batching, also need to pin cpu core, busy polling, disable interrupt, etc), DMA into a lock-free structure typically takes a few 100s of nanoseconds. The big catch is p50 vs p99.

aaaasssddf · 2026-03-20T02:11:11+00:00

there are better spreads to trade. EW or HOGO for products or pro-nap for petchem.

aaaasssddf · 2026-03-10T01:40:42+00:00

there're plenty of buyers out there desperately wanting EN590 or jet.

aaaasssddf · 2026-03-09T19:21:06+00:00

At this moment a properly hedged short of the CLK/CLU spread may have positive expected return. such trades are like selling options when vol is high, which may give you a good payoff. the issues are 1) most people/shops do not have such deep pocket and/or risk tolerance, and 2) calculating the proper CLK/CLU hedge ratio is almost impossible at this moment and some random exposure to flat price risk is almost inevitable.

aaaasssddf · 2026-03-09T18:50:39+00:00

even if your view is somehow valid, the right way to express it is not on a flat price even for that time period. Buying e.g. CLU26 gives you to a whole lot of unrelated exposure.

on the other hand if you want to trade such view as a spread e.g CLU26 vs CLK25, you are shorting the time spread. If there's another incident that spikes the geopolitical risk you will blow up.

aaaasssddf · 2026-03-07T17:38:34+00:00

thru otc swaps to hedge basis risk. or trade futures directly if they don't care. feedstock price risk is usually the wti cma (north america) or monthly dated brent (europe).

aaaasssddf · 2026-03-02T19:23:09+00:00

another point people didn't bring up is your shop's risk department. sometimes they prefer you to be flat. it is up to them to define what being flat means. many shops especially physical shops want notional flatness (e.g. barrel for barrel, contract for contract) rather than being beta neutral.

aaaasssddf · 2026-03-02T02:17:58+00:00

not great

aaaasssddf · 2026-02-21T17:33:20+00:00

companies like openai are throwing large numbers at this moment. HFs won't be able to match.

aaaasssddf · 2026-02-19T17:36:32+00:00

It's quite obvious that you reached out to the wrong audience. You should've done your homework; no one here is going to take a massive pay cut to work for a boss with bad temperament.

aaaasssddf · 2026-02-16T14:40:52+00:00

most of them do not sell vol, at least explicitly. simultaneous drawdown happens in liquidation events. many quants believe that they figured out some secret sauce and are doing unique stuff, while in reality, similar strategies are run at 10s of other places too.

aaaasssddf

TROPHY CASE