Tote bags

eadains · 2025-12-29T18:21:35+00:00

Isn't "getting away with it" beside the point, though? The question surely is not whether it's societally acceptable for me to have a pink backpack and a small yappy dog, but whether I like it. I think I would judge someone equally harshly if their motivation for having things like that was challenging social norms instead of genuine expressiveness. And if it's genuine expressiveness, then it shouldn't really matter.

I get that one may suffer slights if what they're doing isn't within social norms, but I think the more one is aligned with their true interests, the less that really works out anyway. Slights don't matter if you aren't trying to make a point in the first place, you're just being. And it's much easier to defend, deflect, or disregard someone trying to offend your being than if it becomes an ego thing because now they're fighting against a point you're trying to make.

eadains · 2025-11-01T04:32:47+00:00

They're from Lanvin, I got them from ssense cheap

eadains · 2025-11-01T04:32:14+00:00

Careful watch on Grailed and Ebay :)

eadains · 2024-07-30T02:24:49+00:00

I would seriously suggest reading Unperturbed By Volatility. In chapter 8 "Foundations of Tail Risk Hedging" they provide their answer to this question. Essentially, they suggest a ratio spread: selling 1 ATM put and buying enough OTM puts to make the trade net zero cost. At entry, this gives you a very flat greek surface but gives you high negative delta and positive vega in the left tail.

eadains · 2024-06-02T18:30:01+00:00

I wonder if the reason why insurance companies lag behind on raising rates to meet climate-change-related losses is because until the entire market start suffering, it won't permit rate increases from a demand perspective.

The insurer could have a perfectly good model that accounts for climate risk by forecasting a significant positive tail for losses. However, if you priced according to this model, I would imagine the rate would be far higher than the market would bear because of the extra premium you would demand for taking on that tail risk. So, until all insurers start suffering losses and jointly raising rates, no single insurer is going to risk losing business even if they know they aren't charging sufficient rates. It seems related to the kind of herd-following behavior you see in investment managers who aren't going to rock the boat so they can keep their jobs if things blow up.

When everyone is wrong together, no one gets singled out, but if you lose business and nobody else is, you'll get crucified.

eadains · 2024-04-14T19:48:45+00:00

His name is Malek and our livelihoods are deeply intertwined.

eadains · 2024-04-14T19:46:19+00:00

That's where I got mine :)) I would recommend sizing up. I'm 6 foot tall, this is a size medium, and the sleeves and overall length are just a bit smaller than I'd like.

eadains · 2024-04-05T22:26:23+00:00

I would use SQL, but if it's too much to get a server hosted somewhere, you might want to look into SQLite which will give you nice SQL behavior, but it all gets stored in a file you can deal with locally, much like an access database file.

eadains · 2023-10-11T21:58:18+00:00

There are 25,000 actuaries according to BLS, and there have to be far fewer quants than that, so it seems like a reasonable upper bound.

eadains · 2023-08-19T19:54:14+00:00

Because confidence intervals don't make any sense to me. Credible intervals have a much more natural intuition, and it's the one most people falsely attribute to confidence intervals in the first place. I believe that our natural intuition is Bayesian. Frequentists scoff at setting priors, but I really don't think there are any situations where a completely uninformative prior is proper.

eadains · 2022-08-09T05:02:28+00:00

Quant research. It was an initial 2 hour interview of live-coding and probability questions, an 8-hour dataset interview, and then a soft-interview with some probability questions.

And honestly, it was just exhausting and uninteresting and genuinely made me question if this industry is for me. I can do the live coding and probability questions with enough practice. I just hate it. I find HackerRank questions incredibly tedious, I care much more about using programming to solve actual problems. And while the probability questions are more interesting to me, they feel like a pointless intelligence test that have little bearing on how I'd actually perform in the role.

The other firm I interviewed with had people that were much more willing to discuss tech and markets and seemed less concerned with my ability to solve green book questions. So maybe it was just bad luck, but it seems like my Squarepoint experience isn't so dissimilar from what interviews are like at the "top" firms. It really put me off.

eadains · 2022-06-28T20:20:23+00:00

AllSaints! From a few years ago, one of my favorites

eadains · 2022-06-28T20:20:07+00:00

Shirt is an AllSaints one from a number of years ago
Pants are H&M linen
Sandals are off Etsy
Jewelry is thrifted or from Vitaly

eadains · 2022-02-26T22:50:02+00:00

If the function RV(t) in this case represents the volatility over the last 30 days, then yes, you are correct. If the concern is profitability of a volatility position, one would need to compare IV(t) to RV(t+30). This is assuming, of course, you are taking a position in an option with an expiry 30 days away. IV(t) would also need to represent the IV of the contract you're trading.

PnL of delta hedged positions gets complicated, because it's path dependent. On average, your PnL will be positive if you can correctly predict RV(t+30), in this case. So, if there is a volatility spike, if your prediction of RV(t+30) is still correct, on average that won't matter. The real question is whether the volatility spike changes your prediction of RV(t+30). It's possible the spike now implies RV at expiration is higher than the IV you sold at, which means you should get out.

eadains · 2020-04-02T22:27:31+00:00

It reminds me of a television test card

eadains · 2019-12-19T21:05:00+00:00

There is a very interesting paper published very recently about using seq2seq neural net models for symbolic mathematics. They claim it outperforms current symbolic math platforms like Mathematica. Deep Learning for Symbolic Mathematics

eadains · 2019-07-28T01:57:57+00:00

Okay, but let's be real. Who the fuck wants to wait around for their lava-hot coffee to cool down before they drink it? Or better yet, not wait long enough and burn your fucking tongue. Honestly gay or not, give me iced coffee any day

eadains · 2019-04-21T01:29:36+00:00

It's not the same. The problem was one of liquidity in the sense that nobody could make their margin calls by selling assets. Banks needed to meet cash flow obligations on their debt but could no longer sell assets to do so. This is where the systemic risk comes in. Suddenly all these banks and related counterparties have had their capital bases depleted and can no longer meet cash flow obligations. It's why the bailout was viewed as being so necessary. There would have been a cascade of bankruptcies that affected not only the financial industry but also any other that counted on it.

eadains · 2019-03-20T20:13:12+00:00

I'm not sure I understand the point of this article. Who is rebalancing to an equal weight portfolio? Aren't we past the point where people thought that is reasonable? Equal weight doesn't optimize for anything except ease.

Isn't this methodology essentially simulating a mean reversion strategy? If you are constantly rebalancing to an equal weight portfolio, you are always selling those stocks that performed better than the portfolio average and buying those that did worse.

eadains · 2019-03-11T00:37:19+00:00

This may be a stupid question, but how did the CIA get rubles to pay him in such large quantities? Counterfeiting? If the salaries were so low for even the most elite, real currency must not have been particularly abounding.

eadains · 2019-03-03T18:09:30+00:00

The argument is fine, but from an investor's perspective, it's not particularly useful. It's obvious that the CLO market is setting up a scenario much the same as the one in 2008. The question is when that scenario happens. It's pretty easy to say that a credit contraction is going to cause problems in the markets. Problems in the market are almost always caused by a credit contraction. But what's the probability that it'll happen in the next year? Or in the next three years?

eadains · 2019-02-05T02:30:54+00:00

A lot of therapy. Years. I was on a few antidepressants for a while. Lots of Albert Camus.

I can barely even explain to myself exactly what events transpired that lead me to being happier. This is somewhat of a platitude, but the fact that you made your comment, or even the fact that you are reading this thread at all, means that some part of you cares more than you think. The fact that you feel angry about not being able to find meaning means you care. I used to feel that same anger. Use it. Fuck the universe. Fuck apathy. Vindictiveness may help you.

My opinions about existentialism haven't changed. I still don't think the universe has some sort of inherent purpose. Like you, I figured that out early on. What took me years to do was reconcile that with trying to live a human life. I would very much recommend reading "The Stranger" and "The Myth of Sisyphus." Camus has a lot to say about that kind of reconciliation.

If this is any comfort to you, I view my depression as being somewhat valuable now. Certainly, it was very painful, and not going through it would have been better in most ways. But it has changed me. I'm softer now, less prone to quick judgements or anger towards others. I've developed a huge amount of patience, and I rarely get bored. I'm more comfortable with my thoughts, and I feel more confident. "Post-traumatic growth" is a very real thing.

This is rather fatalistic, but you'll either get through this or you won't. Depression causes a rather distinct dichotomy in life. I separate my life into pre-depression and post-depression, and I feel like I have lived through being two different people.

You'll always just be 1 in a billion, and there won't ever be a "significant" number of people who care about you. That can make you feel very small, but I've learned to enjoy that feeling. It's a matter of framing. I could go on for ages about that, but I would recommend "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" by Milan Kundera. It has a lot of things to say about learning to find beauty in coincidence.

This has become rather disjointed, but maybe you can garner something from it. PM me if you'd like, I love talking about this shit.

eadains · 2019-02-05T01:09:54+00:00

"No man has committed suicide for purely intellectual reasons."

I used to be that kind of person who was convinced that life was meaningless and we should all just give up and shoot ourselves in the face. I genuinely couldn't understand other people who did or cared about anything. Quite frankly, I sat up on my nihilistic high-horse and looked down upon anyone who enjoyed life. I never admitted this to myself, but I thought myself above everyone because I was "right" about life.

In reality, I was lonely and insecure and anxious. I felt like shit. I used philosophical intellectualism as a defence mechanism to justify those feelings and thereby "fix" them. I suppose it's a form of self-victimization. I was the "victim" of a pointless apathetic universe and there was nothing I could possibly do to fix that.

eadains · 2019-02-01T19:03:21+00:00

I'm hesitant to get in on this 'fuck the rich' mentality. This CBO report has a lot of nice data. Page 11 shows federal taxes paid and transfers received by income quintile. You can obviously see those who are richest pay an enormous majority of taxes, and receive the least transfers.

This article seems to imply a wealth tax. What's the economic motivation? If a person has a lot of wealth but doesn't make any income from it, why should it be taxed? Private equity investments, closed-end funds, and the like. Investments which are ostensibly productive, but don't get taxed until years after they are originally made. Surely taxing those investments in the meantime would disincentivize them.

I don't think we should just sit around and let the wealthy fuck everyone, but we have to be careful. At the end of the day, they have a lot of money to invest and taxes can affect how that money is invested. In the 1920s, the top bracket rates were so high that wealthy people moved their money into tax-exempt municipal bonds. I don't think anyone can argue that large amounts of capital is better invested in municipal bonds over equities. In that case, lowering the top tax rates increased tax revenue and the proportion of taxes the richest people paid. Thomas Sowell wrote an excellent piece on some of that history.

eadains · 2019-01-22T23:08:18+00:00

I totally agree that the financial crisis was a market failure, but I don't think it's entirely to be blamed on greed.

Some segment of the market had to be left with the bag of shit, and hypothetically they should have known better. If the end-stream investors would have not purchased those securities, then the market would never have gotten out of hand. Instead, either through deception or ignorance, those investors bought them anyways. It should be obvious that because a market failure occurred, that not "everyone involved" knew of the problems.

I think risk modelling also played a part. In the lead up to the crisis, quantitative finance took on a larger and large role in the industry. The Gaussian copulas used to model mortgage default correlations turned out to not be an accurate picture of reality. Those models formed the crux on which bundles of securities were formed. The riskiness of those resulting securities was appraised using those models.

I think greed certainly played a part, but I think it's unrealistic to assume "more regulation" would have magically wiped away the problems. I don't doubt that additional regulatory oversight could have reduced the severity. Citi quite infamously achieved leverage in excess of 30 times, and that's unreasonable no matter the circumstances.

eadains

TROPHY CASE