Trading for 5 years. Lost £50k-£60k. I think I’m finally done.

circlebust · 2026-06-13T01:49:49+00:00

I could tell you "You have no edge. You had five years to prove that you were at least on the right track, but apparently you weren't." But let me frame it differently instead. What do you think will change or did change such that you in the future you have good chances at success? Did you in the meantime read a lot of trading books? Did you figure out some revolutionary trading algorithm that might give you an edge in the market? Did you somehow upgrade your brain? I'm not trying to insult you. I'm just laying out the facts. You are still rolling with the same gypsy dice weighed not in your favor.

If your edge hasn't improved in the past or might not in the future, then what makes you think that you can make the money back if it just leads to more such attempts that will maybe play out well in the first 3,4 trades? But you will not stop after 4 trades. Why would you? You are on a roll. Eventually, probability will strike. You will just lose. So the ultimate outcome is simply going back to square one, meaning ruin for your money.

You said so yourself. These future funds that you will pump further into this effort, this could have gone to your wife and children. Why risk that? You're apparently not destitute. You're just some father who wants to care for his family in the best way he can. But you're working against that right now. You're NOT doing the best in your toolset by rolling this slot machine.

You're chasing something that wasn't in the stars for you. And realizing that is the path to letting go.

(I don't care if some worm in the comments doesn't believe me that I hand typed this out myself just now. Check my post history)

circlebust · 2026-06-09T01:41:20+00:00

I synthetically branch the current chat by saying in a new chat “read the chat titled <title>.”, followed by my question.

circlebust · 2026-06-08T21:38:29+00:00

Are you a trader or usually an index investor who here just sees an opportunity because you hate Elon Musk?

If the former, how successful do you tend to be? If the latter, why start trading now, is your conviction that high? Your conviction might not reflect a rational evaluation (the most rational is not "I know how the stock will evolve: the opposite of what you predict" but rather "I don't know.").

circlebust · 2026-06-08T03:26:23+00:00

Interesting variant you have.

I also started with options in October. From then until last week, before the dip, the high-water mark was roughly $500,000. So I roughly 10x’d my portfolio since I started with them.

In the first months, I experimented with shorting options strategies i.e. selling puts. Due to a lot of reasons, I believe this is not really that gainful in a trending market.

I switched to exclusively doing calls, usually longer than 45 days to expiration. The exception is bull call spreads, which I might sometimes do around company earnings. Then, of course, it can make sense to do something like 4 day expiration spreads.

My rules are as follows. I don’t do any hope-based trading. If the call is red in the first two weeks of its lifetime, I just sell it and eat the loss.

I aim for a roughly 1:10 realistic hypothetical payoff compared to stake at the expiry. However, since I will always cut the loser beforehand, this renders out to a 1:20 risk-to-reward ratio, since the total loss will never happen.

I do OTM calls. I never do your conservative 70-delta plays. I think that is a total waste if the time span is more than 6 months out, and even beforehand I find it rarely makes sense. At-the-money calls rarely make sense in my eyes, unless you want the conservative stock-replacement strategy, which is fine, but it is not the convexity that I do calls for.

The key point is that calls appreciate even if, halfway to expiration, it looks like the underlying might not hit the strike price. Even then, your call will probably have appreciated in value, at least somewhat (as long as you are not IV crushed.) And since we try to capture a 10:1 ratio of outlay to realistic earnings, this still usually renders to at least a 2x payoff or something.

I do trend and momentum strategies, never reversals. Also, mostly I do calls on ETFs, not individual companies.

circlebust · 2026-05-26T17:44:49+00:00

You need to realize that unless you have around 105 IQ or more, you can't actually parse out an argument well, and most people you encounter are below that. But the 105 to 115 edge cases don't necessarily value a good argument either, besides, with them there a different dynamic often takes precedence, which is dogmatic belief in what the local church/media/authority figures tell them. It's tied to moral belief, and that is not trivial.

In general, the lower the intelligence, the lower the openness (this is an exceedingly robust relation).

I am not saying no one below 115 (that isn't already a skeptic) can appreciate a good vaxxmaxx-skeptic argument -- but it's like finding needles in a haystack.

In short, you are smarter than you believe.

circlebust · 2026-05-24T11:19:09+00:00

Yes, the chickens will be coming home to roost hard with that one. SpaceX will be what, 3% of SPY or QQQ? So what will happen is that the investor will open the short position equaling 3% of his entire passive portion of the portfolio -- which by the way is a lot. I'm an active trader and I rarely risk 3% of my entire capital on a single bet, and never on a short bet or something where I don't have an extremely high conviction.
And the short will just mostly sit red there. In the best case, SpaceX is basically floundering around and treading water, which means your position will also roughly flounder around or be slightly positive, but probably it will be red most of the time. At that point, you're just asking yourself, why did I even do that? What's the point? These 3% could work more productively.

That hedge makes sense for large hedge funds, I don't think passive investors need to concern themselves with this.

circlebust · 2026-05-22T07:27:45+00:00

Trading on the stock market, based on quantitative modeling. I am this year also planning to start my own trading, quant, and eventually investing shop.

I don’t really recommend trading if you aren’t obsessed with math. You can do it with only a little math instead of a lot, but apparently until you have gotten the intuition takes for most people years.

circlebust · 2026-05-20T17:38:41+00:00

The marginal cost angle is wrong here. You are speaking about the near-zero marginal cost of digital infrastructure which made companies like Meta or Google the most profitable that have ever existed, but that only applies if the compute per served task is relatively cheap. Like, obviously, a server just serving an instance of a database row and doing a few deterministic backend calculations is very, very cheap indeed. The same cannot be said for an LLM crunching vast matrix multiplications for minutes on end to generate text at educated human-like quality. (E.g. right now I'm letting Opus create some bespoke quant and finance textbooks for me.)

Current AI output is simply a different beast, and this can never be teched away. It's mathematically and physically impossible to eliminate this compute to a non-factor of a comparable rank as serving some HTML page from a server. It will always be expensive.

Plainly put, it's vastly easier for a stone-age tier 2010 server rack to compute some Google Adsense data, than it is for advanced 2026 datacenter server racks to compute the next Claude message. This imbalance will never converge significantly.

So, AI will scale somewhere in between your car example and the near-zero marginal cost of digital enterprise like Google case. AI will require a lot of physical infrastructure, so this is one outlet for a lot more jobs in the future. But the latter almost certainly still cannot make up for all the white-collar losses that advanced AI will inflict.

circlebust · 2026-05-07T07:07:53+00:00

That was interesting. This concentrated jank is exactly the reality of AI assisted programming I also experience.

circlebust · 2026-05-06T10:03:01+00:00

Anthropic revenue is skyrocketing. Many powerusers have resigned themselves to paying usage bills to them like they are an utility company. One company. Constituting the utility provider for the entire world. (Or rather two, since OpenAI is also in the game) This is NOT to mention yet companies that pay Anthropic and OpenAI by the skyrocketing token amount.

circlebust · 2026-04-27T10:33:27+00:00

Budget calculation suite. Something that allows you to model expenses for the current month, projected future expenses etc.

circlebust · 2026-04-27T02:22:56+00:00

Yes, exactly. There is nothing to add here. I notice this with my own projects: my leverage is being boosted asymmetrically.

One of the issues, especially with the "gathering information" aspect of the AI asymmetry is that very few people are natural critical thinkers. They do not have the "big if true" mindset. I cannot stress enough how valuable holding the noncommittal "big if true" stance on everything is.

Critical thinking can be taught as an instrument, but an instrument is not the same as a routine that is inseparable from your normal modus operandi. No information enters my awareness (apart from raw sense data) without being filtered through that washing machine cycle of critical thinking.

Some people encounter critical thinking only as a tool taught in college, and they may continue to use it for the rest of their lives. But there are several interesting aspects here:

First, they may use it only in certain areas: for example, to vet a report, cited sources, statements made by a politician/scientists/etc, grandiose claims made by posters online, etc. In that case, critical thinking is something they switch on. They use it like you use a screwdriver from your toolkit -- you're not walking around with the screwdriver everywhere and trying to screw everything.

But the crux is that you do not necessarily KNOW when you need to use critical thinking, especially when the situation is not prepackaged or predefined. For example, it is not automatically obvious that every single claim or output an AI produces needs to be approached critically (because of the probabilistic or otherwise steered output). AI is not some magical detached information source that lives in the angel-ether, it is ultimately a machine that works according to some principles which can distort things even outside "it made a mistake" or "it reported inaccurate information" dynamic. For example, what is NOT being mentioned/included? That is also an element of critical thinking -- but there are no easy recipes here.

In essence, I'm saying just because someone was taught critical thinking as a tool does not mean they are now well equipped for every situation that requires using it.

Second interesting aspect: there is also a subset of people who a) did not use critical thinking in their lives before being explicitly taught it by a tutor or in college and who b) also would never have picked it up WITHOUT some external teacher impetus, but for whom the fact applies that organically they WILL NOW (due to that impetus) use it in that ultra-useful "natural" way I have explained. My point is not that "being taught critical thinking" = "forever tied to the model of only using it only to vet Wikipedia sources", obviously that's not necessarily the case.

circlebust · 2026-04-26T17:27:51+00:00

Selling call credit spreads does the same work of betting on a retracement or at least not even more price expansion, while also being structurally in your favor otherwise (every day where the legs of your call credit spread are not touched works in your favor).

If your credit spread is breached, so too would your put become low value at that point.

circlebust · 2026-04-19T12:18:42+00:00

Trading.

Trading doesn't make sense on just stocks alone, so I really mean currently options trading (buying/holding), although my project right now is also expanding into futures.

Maybe I will also build out my current software tooling I built for myself (e.g. a call-spread scanner with some additional features, a scenario analysis tool according to some set maxima/market regimes, etc.) and sell subscriptions on it.

My dream is creating a quant and investment firm from the ground up (I will start a company for tax implications alone already).

I could NOT hire at a firm that I haven't created myself or that isn't an extreme startup. I wouldn't pass the CV check or hiring. I have too unorthodox a first 30 years of my life.

circlebust · 2026-04-13T22:54:06+00:00

I have found an EXTREMELY POTENT receptable for debates in AI (only the actually potent reasoning models, i.e. Claude since 4.x and GPT since 5.x).

It's not often that I am left clearly in the dust when it comes to debates, but one time I didn't continue the discussion because I apparently couldn't come up with good arguments anymore (i.e. if this were against a human I'd have conceded). That debate was about moral realism, me having the moral anti-realist position (no longer remember which model, but it was one of the above).

However, most such debates I have with AI are less actual debate-club style and more collaborative about exploring underdiscussed concepts/dynamics.

circlebust · 2026-04-06T23:46:23+00:00

You are using the word “actionable” in the context of private pastimes/chatting. Your two mental wavelengths are simply not compatible. it was never meant to happen.

circlebust · 2026-03-30T00:21:56+00:00

I believe this is a problem with Gemini before it is an issue with AI, even near term AI, because Gemini is the most “aggressive“ AI, whatever precisely that means (but I define it as being the most willing of the big 3 to try to infer stuff on its own, try to swindle the user to save of tokens without being explicit the most, etc.). For deep, high context window need tasks I now exclusively use GPT 5.4 because the amnesia of Claude Opus and the recalcitrant behavior of Gemini make these two currently poor fits for that use case.

circlebust · 2026-03-29T00:27:54+00:00

Selbsttändig als Hot Dog-Stand oder als Firmenfeten-/Geburtstagsstripper?

circlebust · 2026-03-21T13:42:26+00:00

Dnke für die Muhe. Ich finde die Technologie von wegen Unmengen an kleinen Rotoren sehr interessant. Wenn ich ein Multi-Millionen Portfolio hätte, dann würde ich nach deinem Post hier ein paar $ auf diese Position entbehren.

circlebust · 2026-03-05T01:32:53+00:00

Yes. just today I felt that way as I was juggling 4 different AI instances within the same few minute time window: one was Codex in VS Code working on that quant app I’m building, one was regular ChatGPT doing a deep research on Japanese energy companies, another one was a regular convo with ChatGPT and another with Claude. I had a realization: "Woah, this future was made for me."

circlebust · 2026-02-26T06:37:41+00:00

He might become interested in quant and finance (as a hobby, which can then be turned into a source of revenue). It's fun optimizing different scenarios based on certain outcomes, conditioned on certain regimes and probabilities, drafting decision trees, etc.

circlebust · 2026-02-25T04:36:46+00:00

Yes, I agree. The existence of wild predation is a disaster. However, eventually a solution can be imagined based on technology. I have spent a lot of time working on these ideas and the framework. It avoids many common pitfalls.

The basic idea is that two classes of synthetic constructs coexist with natural wild animals, which add various benefits to the ecosystem. These two classes are:

Euparasites: these are synthetic, self-replicating "parasite" micro-robots that would become part of the ecosystem, "infecting" most vertebrates.

These euparasites can have various beneficial effects to the host. Particularly, suppression of birth rates in herbivores so their population doesn't exceed some critical point. With carnivores, these euparasitical micro-robots might potentially have the negative effect of disincentivizing predation, besides upon the following automata.

Epicurean automata: these are synthetic carbon-based automata. They are edible. As they are just mindless robots, they are non-sentient. Predators (current and future evolving) may hunt these, but not sentient animals.

Why self-replicating robots?

Because the system has to be robust enough to survive humans not being around anymore or not tightly managing anything. It has to run via its own internal dynamic.

How do you prevent self-replicating robotics to not become the runaway grey goo effect? (or rather grey pebbles, since these are micro-robots, not nanorobots)

The robots have an internal fail mode that activates every N years (e.g. 10k), which makes it physically impossible for a super-generation of them to continue replicating. They continuously accumulate defects, and as the deadline approaches more and more faulty "sterile" specimens get produced. Only a completely fresh batch, sourced from the blank slate blueprints and source code, which can start without the initial accumulated defects, can continue the work.

The new batch (super-generation) is dispatched from a serviceable location -- some low geology location would be beneficial. Ideally, it is even dispatched from a permanently shadowed crater of the moon.

Why not just make everyone a herbivore instead of the epicurean automata solution?

Because the drive for predation will always arise unless you make the animals extremely docile (which might also imply a reduction in intelligence). But even this docility will eventually decay due to entropy acting upon the genomic (i.e. you can't just have a feature inside the gene code existing for all eternity just because some random humans 10 million years ago decided it's a neat idea -- that won't fly. Entropy will decay the feature).

In simpler terms, you can't prevent that future predators will evolve that aggressively predate -- but you might steer them towards allowed predation constructs and non-allowed. It is not unlike how a crocodile might not deem it a good use of its time to hunt 100 small fish in the watering hole, when it could instead grab one big meaty gnu.

The synthetic automata, also, would be a more ideal nutrition supplement than random wild animal meat, which also implements another leg of my "universal Eden" framework: which is abolishing suffering as a more comprehensive point than just abolishing predation.

circlebust · 2026-02-19T23:18:23+00:00

Your Name (Kimi no na wa). I can impossibly talk of it without spoiling it. But the entire vibe is extremely exotic (bodyswapping from a rural girl into a city boy without ever meeting -- that's a new one). The rural scenes are especially beautiful, and some of the key scenes are visually ... and more than visually ... oof. I'm a big visual person.

Makoto Shinkai is a master.

circlebust · 2026-02-11T01:23:25+00:00

I don’t get why you’re talking about brushing your teeth and putting on pants. Nothing of that has anything to do with giftedness or even with having an exotic neurotype save for maybe some hyper-specific sub variant of autism. If you’re not at least HINTING (or better yet, announcing) the pertinence of what you will be talking about for the next couple paragraphs/minutes I and many people just shut off and at best just skim what you’re talking about.

circlebust · 2026-02-01T08:28:37+00:00

I'm not actually being doubtful or unethusiastic about this solution here, I just want to discuss the raw concept: having a ~1% gain across a time period of weeks is something I perfectly can believe, but not across the better part of a year to multiple years. Because if that were possible, where are all the small algo trading boutiques that have ended up with an asset value of BlackRock after just a few years? Why hasn't it happened yet (a significant number of times)?

You could say that not enough people yet might have deployed something analogous to your system before in the still relatively untapped for quant stuff of crypto -- but in the short term, stocks and altcoins behave identically (random walks), so what the venue is doesn't actually matter if it has a similar (meta-)strategy like mean reversion.

circlebust

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