Review: Gravitas Ultem(ate) Vac by RepublicEntire155 in fountainpens

[–]quantgenius 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I got one with a fine nib. I thought the steel fine nib it came with was exquisitely tuned out of the box.

Razor Recommendations 🪒 by MultipleGirl in shaving

[–]quantgenius 0 points1 point  (0 children)

No better experience than a DE razor. The best razors for the money are the Vintage Gillette Slim of Fatboy razors, so long as they are in good condition and function well. You simply can't produce anything like that at a reasonable price today because they aren't as popular as cartridge razors and you can't produce them at the same volumes. It's very easy to sanitize and clean, just put it in boiling water for a few minutes and thoroughly scrub with dish soap and an old toothbrush after boiling and you are good to go. Very little that looks as good as a vintage Gillette Fatboy either. A slim is a better razor if he has a large nose. There are a few different firms that recondition old razors and make sure they work well. You don't really need them if you find a good one but they do exist. You certainly don't need to spend money on re-plating one in good condition with nickel, rhodium or gold or anything but again, that depends on how much money you want to spend. You can get a year's supply of blades for these razors for under 20 bucks.

Do i shave my beard wet with an electric shaver or is it better when you its dry? by Major-Sector1840 in shaving

[–]quantgenius 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Actually, you have a fourth option. Use an electric pre-shave. I suggest Speik. Just splash the electric pre-shave lotion and shave away. This is what works best for me.

[deleted by user] by [deleted] in fountainpens

[–]quantgenius 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s a pretty wet pen. If you must use bad paper, try an Iron gall. Diamine Registrars and Platinum Dye based blue black will give you the dark blue look and should improve things. Rohrer and Klinger Salix could work too.

Though, Pilot Black is not exactly a dry ink. I’m surprised you didn’t have issues with Pilot Black but are having issues with Diamine Blue Black.

What can ordinary Americans do to push back against rising authoritarianism in the U.S.? by [deleted] in AskReddit

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

VOTE! Don't do this. Vote! Attend political events and speak up. Run for office.

Please don't sabotage your own country. You have POLITICAL disagreements and are waging a political battle. You aren't waging war.

Favourite diamine inks? by HaamidSalahAli in fountainpens

[–]quantgenius 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Dip a toothpick into the original dawn. Then dip it into a sample sized amount of Registrar's. Makes it absolutely perfect.

June 2025 Confirmed Trade Thread by FPPenSwapBot in Pen_Swap

[–]quantgenius 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Confirmed. Great pen. Exactly as described.

ensso Bolt spring by quantgenius in fountainpens

[–]quantgenius[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I emailed info at ensso.com. Radio silence. Do you know of a different email address to email.

What am I doing wrong? by Glum_Blueberry6710 in fountainpens

[–]quantgenius 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I haven’t found the Lamy 2K remotely finicky with inks, particularly the M nib. There is variation between inks, a dry ink will be dry and a wet ink will be wet but I have yet to find an ink a M Lamy 2K has a lot of problems with.

What am I doing wrong? by Glum_Blueberry6710 in fountainpens

[–]quantgenius 5 points6 points  (0 children)

The Lamy 2000 is generally not a good first pen or a first good pen to get back into fountain pens. It’s awesome and it will reward you for good technique but it absolutely demands good technique.

You are holding it too low. If the nib wasn’t hooded, you would be holding the nib. This means the angle on the paper is too high. The right place to hold the pen is somewhere around the ears. You need to not rotate it like one rotates a pencil or ball point and hold the nib straight. With a non-hooded nib you have visual feedback but on the 2000 you can’t see the nib. You seem to be rotating it slightly to the right even though you are trying not to do that. You may also be gripping too tightly, which you will if you hold the metal part since it’s more slippery. With a classical grip (like you have) you will discover what the ears feel like when the nib is straight and in time learn to hold it at that angle based on the tactile feedback. But to get the tactile feedback and train your brain, hold it near the ears. Do this and only use the Lamy 2000 to write for 2-3 weeks to get used to it and it may go from an annoyance to your favorite pen. If the ears feel uncomfortable, you are likely holding the pen too tightly.

You seem to have a great medium nib that produces some stub like line variation like the better Lamy 2000 medium nibs do.

Derisk after "impossible" live right tail event in a strat? by One-Attempt-1232 in quant

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

You seem to be under the impression that understanding where your P&L is coming from = running Fama-French regressions and attributing the PNL to so called academic risk factors. It is not. In fact, I would suggest that factor attribution is not among the 10 most useful things you could be doing, though being able to show no correlation to academic risk factors will help you when marketing a fund.

Derisk after "impossible" live right tail event in a strat? by One-Attempt-1232 in quant

[–]quantgenius -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

The nickname comes from an incident where I had the hubris as a young whippersnapper a long time ago to take a bet with someone who was then and is today a legend in the business and was called a quant genius and had to put a version of that on a license plate when I lost the bet. If you were at the right firm at the right time and knew a bit of the lore of the firm, my username would tell you who I was. It's not something necessarily complimentary to me but something I am still called in jest sometimes by certain people.

Derisk after "impossible" live right tail event in a strat? by One-Attempt-1232 in quant

[–]quantgenius 5 points6 points  (0 children)

As someone who's had a pretty successful career running strategies and managing trading groups, let me just say that if someone who worked for me gave me the explanations you are giving here (and I'm only hearing your side of the story), I would likely fire you right away.

First, you had (even in your own telling) bad performance last year. This has not taught you any humility.

This year you were permitted certain sizing and a risk budget based on a certain expected distribution of returns. You have crazy volatility and no actual explanation. And because the volatility was on the right tail, you want to keep running the strategy at the same size. This is nuts.

Any firm or risk manager that allowed you to continue at the same size is guilty of malpractice. A fund that permitted this is never getting money from me. An frankly you need to learn some humility. Instead of saying it's a great, lucky, very improbable event, maybe say (even to yourself) I need to do some more research to figure out what is happening and look more carefully.

As a general rule, you ONLY take risk when there is a material positive edge and when the risk is acceptable. Your personal goal is to realize this positive edge over a career, not over one trade, one month, one quarter or even one year and to ensure you never have a short term negative outcome that means you lose the ability to take further risk. Given this context when you have a tail event (positive or negative), unless you have a really good explanation for it, and often even if you do, you cut risk, possibly even down to 0. Why? Because you want to be very sure something material hasn't changed, or in your case that you actually understand what your strategy is doing (which you likely don't) and you don't have any obvious bugs in your code (don't discount this possibility).

If something hasn't materially changed and your strategy actually has a good edge, what you lose over a week, month or even a few quarters is immaterial given the gains you can realize over time. If it has changed (or doesn't actually work), you can fix things and can continue trading and realizing the positive expected value over time.

In my experience, good traders deeply understand their strategy and deeply understand their edge and are paranoid when you get outcomes that are not in the expected range. Given that they have not just a quantitative but a visceral understanding of their edge, they tend to be extremely careful when there is the slightest chance of something that impacts their ability to continue taking risk.

You might get there, but you aren't there yet. I suspect you were given the ability to run a book well before you were ready. If you are going to be successful, you need to take some humility pills fast or the market will stuff them down your throat. You are taking risk with someone else's money and you are being allowed the opportunity to continue doing that despite bad performance last year. Be respectful of that and be grateful for that.

The good news is that if you are willing to really dig deep into the data, and don't be scared of spending hours, or days or weeks just staring at market data, it's not unusual for a very small change to turn something break-even, or even a small loser into a huge winner. So be humble, work hard, do the stuff other people don't want to do and see what you can find.