What's up, outliers? Welcome back to the Outlier podcast. I have Augustine here to tell us how trading is super easy. It's a way to fast, easy riches with minimal effort, stable monthly income, and I'm really excited to learn the secret. So what's up, Gustin? Thanks for having me on. It's great. So being is that I nailed that intro, the funny part is for those that obviously wouldn't know, but when we originally started talking, I had mentioned doing a podcast, and you were like, that sounds kinda interesting, but I'm not sure it would be, like, exactly the right fit because my my primary piece of advice is don't trade. And I actually thought it was funny because even though I do what I do, that's typically my advice. So once we realized that we had that actually drastically in common, I'd love to unpack that because here we are 2 dudes on a podcast talking about trading where the base advice is don't trade. Why do you think people are best off avoiding that? Yeah. Look. I mean, I think a lot of people get into it for, I mean, pretty pretty believable reasons. Like, oh, they think that maybe this is a a way to make money. Maybe it's an easier way to make money than slogging away at some 9 to 5 job. I get to be my own boss. I get to do what I want. I've always had a passion for this, etcetera. So, like, I can get the the idea and the interest. But I think that I I'm a person of analogies, and this is probably the 1st of many that I'm gonna give you over the course of an hour. But I think you really have to understand that that trading in financial markets is like playing in the NBA or playing in the NFL, except that there's no teams. There's no draft. There's no salary. It's just, there you go. Like, there's JJ Watt. Try to get through him. Right? Like, that's it. That's that's the game. Right? And so your prior should be before you even think about it or start that, like, okay. This is not gonna be especially easy, especially because the JJ Watts of the world have resources that you can't even imagine up going up against you. So that's maybe my my headline analogy about it. Elaine, I think it's perfect. Could you double click a little more into the resource section? Because Uh-huh. There's kind of a a couple different ways to go about trading. I'm coming up on 2 decades, And 1 of the things that I've obviously come to appreciate pretty quickly is that you feel like getting where you fit in. You have to figure out, like, where you can play. So can you talk a little bit about the the resourcing side of it? That's actually a huge piece of the equation. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing you're saying, like, you hear it in poker, hopefully, you hear it in poker where if you're if you're at a table with 10 with 9 other players and, and they're the the best players in the world, it kinda doesn't matter how good you are. Like, that's just not a game that you should be playing in. And so, like you said, like, table selection is everything, in in trading, in poker, in life maybe. And and so I wanna say at the outset, like, I can I know that there are profitable retail traders out there? You know, a couple of my friends do this for a living and they're on their own and they don't have any big infrastructure or resources or anything like that. But the reason they can do it is because they know what they're good at and they stick to that. And in particular, it's something that they figured out for themselves that works for them. It's not a system. It's not a it's just they figured out through trial and error, years of of, like, trying to figure it out for themselves. The thing that that kind of pains me when I see it online on Twitter elsewhere is when you see somebody who is interested in this and then they drop some money for a course or something, and that course is is teaching them how to, like, click trade the S and P 500 futures, and somehow they're gonna make money there. Like, you have to understand that the people you're trading against, they're the they're incredibly profitable businesses for a reason. Right? They bring in the smartest people they can to pay them a bunch of money. They have access to computational resources. They have access to prime brokers. They have access to cost basis. They have access to capital. They have all this access that a retail trader can't possibly compete with. The machines that they're they're deploying make decisions on more information than a retail trader can make in under a microsecond. Like, you're just not gonna win in that game. It's not to say there's no games you can't win at, but the set of games you can win at is pretty small. And you spent time at Jane Street. It was, what, like, 6 years. Is that right? Yep. That's right. So what were some of the conversations and problems that you guys are solving there to give people a sense of the other side and Mhmm. What you guys you sneaky little I'm just kidding. What you guys are up to. Yeah. Look. I think, we when we do I used to do a lot of recruiting, and so people would ask us, like, so what is it that you do? And and 1 of the best analogies that that I heard, it wasn't mine, but I'm gonna steal it shamelessly, is it's a it's the baloney sandwich business. Right? Like, if I can buy baloney, bread, and cheese for, like, $3 a sandwich, make the sandwich, and sell that sandwich for $4, that's a business. Right? And that is what ETF market making is. That's what ADR market making is. It's a little bit what options maybe ETF options market making is, etcetera. Right? It's it's understanding mechanical relationships between securities and then providing a service to the world. Market making is definitely providing a service to the world by always being willing to buy and sell. That service has value, has value proportional to how volatile roughly speaking to how volatile the the security is. And so it makes sense that that can be a business. Right? But the thing is there's no real barrier to entry for this business. And so because of that, it's incredibly, incredibly competitive. Like, you have to be very, very sharp, and you have to have extremely low cost and extremely good technology and really sharp people. Now in the game of market making specifically across different asset classes, it's also a completely different game than what a retail trader might be attempting to accomplish. Could you talk a little bit about the goal there versus retail trading? And the reason why I'm asking to explore this point is because a lot of times retail traders say to themselves, oh, I have to emulate the big guys. That's how I'm gonna make money. I gotta, you know, pretend and try to be like them. Right. No. I mean, that's obviously, maybe a fool's game is what I would say. Right? Like, the idea of a market maker is you don't really have an opinion about which way the security will go. You just want to, in principle, collect the spread. Now that sounds really easy the way I said it. Right? Like, oh, just put some bids out here, put some masks out here, see who shows up, blah blah blah. Wonderful. Except the big challenge with in with any kind of liquidity provision is the adverse selection. Right? Like, people are gonna be really, really smart. And if you post a bad market, you're gonna do all the bad trades you want. And if you post a good market, then, like, yeah, you might get, a trade here or there. And so the systematic adverse selection of market making is part of what makes it such a a hard interesting problem. Whereas retail trading, I would imagine, not being a retail trader myself, I'm pretty uninformed, to be honest, is more about, like, can you identify some, some effects, some mispricing, something that that the world doesn't understand as well as you do? And then can you can you put a trade on that expresses that belief in a way that it's, like, cost effective and risk effective enough for it to actually make money for you? There's, a 2 2 stages to the problem. Right? Like, can identify all the inefficiencies you want, but if you can't put the trade on it, like, efficiently, then it doesn't help you very much. The other thing you've talked about before is, especially from, like, a, you know, a self directed lens is is doing less. Why why is that something you harp on? Well, because every time you trade, you're paying somebody money. Right? You're paying the broker money. There's no commission. Like, your counterparty money. I said, but there's no commission. I imagine that that the no commission thing has been touched on in your podcast before. But, yeah, like, you you're obviously always like, every action you do has a cost to it. Right? Even if it even if it is 0 commission. Let's just say it's 0 commission. Right? It has a cost in terms of your attention, in terms of what you're paying attention to in terms of what you have to manage from a risk perspective. So, yeah, like, putting a trade on in the simplest possible way is probably the thing you should do most more often than not. Right? The interesting part about that with respect to trading specifically is this idea of sample size. And Mhmm. If you wanna set something up so that you touch it as little as possible, but you also have to do enough to get a healthy sample size, how would you kind of balance that juxtaposition? Yeah. So I think that's that's where understanding some math comes in, honestly. And I'm not saying it's the only way to do trading. I'm I'm not gonna sit here and say that, but I don't know of a way to do this without understanding a little bit about a little bit about math. I think there's it's pretty clear that if you're doing something where, like, it's a lot of trades every day, then you're gonna get to a high sample size pretty quickly. But probably just by the nature of competitive markets, the edges that you're exploiting are probably pretty small. And so it's gonna take you some amount of time to figure out, like, does this actually make money or not? Or you could go the other direction, right, where you do some infrequent trades, like, once a day or once a week or whatever. Right? You need probably fewer samples if that's a profitable trade for that strategy because, hopefully, the edges on those kinds of trades are much larger. So it all kinda evens out in some sense. Which will raise beautifully into the next general point on that, which is the

Idea of, like, even being able to, like, quantify your edge. Because 1 of the the fun things in retail trading, at least from my own experience, is, like, there's some things I can look at, I can measure, and I can see robustness over duration. And other things, I have no fucking clue why it's working, but I could see it, and it's kinda there. So could you talk about that seemingly thing that's, you know, granted, but it's actually a little more complex? Yeah. So it's funny. I in I talked to a friend of mine, former j 3 friend of mine, earlier today, and I told him I was coming on this podcast. And he said, oh, yeah. Like so he actually he left a a big trading company recently, and he's gonna start out doing stuff like stuff on his own, which is great. I'm sure he's gonna do great. And so he's been trying to understand more about sort of the retail side of things and that sort of thing. And and what he said to me is, I think, pretty interesting. He said, look. I think a lot of these people who who are retail traders have been successful for years and years, I I believe that they are. Like, I don't I I don't doubt that a retail trader can make money. But just the way they talk about their trading, there's probably a bit of what you just said, right, where, like, it's clear they have some edge, but they might not be thinking about it quite the right way or or or maybe as as optimally as they could. I think that gets back to something I think you might have said earlier, which is it's an iterative process. Like, if if you're doing the same thing today that you did last year that you did the day the year before, etcetera, you're probably not gonna do well. It's just it's such an iterative game of just trying to get just that tiny, tiny bit better every single day. There's also this really interesting thing early on where you don't know what you don't know, and then it's difficult to tell if what you're doing is actually value add or if it's path, what are some of the ways that you can think of to explore that to be able to stress test is this path or is this some sort of value add? Right. Yeah. So I think a lot of that has to do with, like, I read a lot when people talk about retail trading about, like, emotional control and staying within and all that stuff. And I would say, yeah. I'm sure that's that's important, but it's not nearly as important as having edge. Like, there's no amount of emotional control that will turn a losing strategy into a profitable strategy. Right? And so I think maybe my best answer that again, talking to to friends who do this is you need to have a small group of people that you can talk to, the where you trust their judgment, they trust your judgment. And I'm not talking about, like, a large I'm not talking about a large Discord group or or anything like that. I'm talking about, like, 3, 4, or 5 people where you're talking most most days, and you're saying, hey. This is a thing I'm seeing. Like, does this sound reasonable to you, etcetera? Getting that feedback from another set of eyes, I think, is probably the thing that accelerates you the most, at least in the at the beginning. Maybe they're they're a little bit further ahead in their journey than you are, and that helps you. And it helps them too. Right? I mean, I'm I'm at this point pretty old, and yet I still get a ton out of talking to more junior people because it forces me to go back and think about fairly basic things from per 1st principles. Like, why is this true? Like, I know I know some fact is true, and they asked me, like, but why? And I have to sit there and think, like, yeah. Why is that? And reconstructing it from 1st principles is immensely valuable to me in addition, hopefully, to the person who's asking the question. Which is also really cool because you touched on that in your book about some of, like, the mentorship and tutelage you had, like, when you 1st entered into the the industry. Could you talk about what some of that was like? Like, what are some of the things that some of your mentors, like, told you, I know a big part you harped on was good decision making, which, I mean, funny enough, kind of applies to everything. So Yeah. Could you talk about that a little bit? Yeah. So, I mean, the the thing I I think trading has historically been taught in a very, we'll say, Socratic way where you're sort of the the person who's kinda senior is asking you questions, and, hopefully, they're good questions in order to make you think and understand things just through your own attempt at at finding the answers. So I think that that definitely works. I think the best firms that I know of have done that and maybe put it on steroids by creating, like, extremely good training programs that kinda take you through the basics in a very structured way that is very useful. It's not a replacement for the other thing, but it's certainly it's an accelerant, I would say. So, yeah, I think a lot of it is just what decisions did you make and why did you make them? And sometimes these decisions are very easy and mechanical, and sometimes they're they're more subtle and, like and they all matter. Right? Could you give an example of something that you would consider a good decision versus a bad decision? Obviously, super vague, so it can be about whatever topic you want. So so here so let let's just say that let's say that you have some strategy that says that that after earnings, stocks do something. Right? Like, momentum is a very common 1. Like, it's been talked about in academic circles forever, so we could probably talk about it. So, like, I think this stock is gonna have some momentum after earnings. And so based on what you understand about the stock and about the price action so far, you might say, okay. Well, I think I think it's probably probably, like, a 50 basis points trade to put to to to sell right now and and buy it back in 2 days or something. Let's just say. Right? Like, I think it makes 50 basis points. And then you say, okay. Well, how big do I wanna make do do this trade? Like, that can be a good trade at $10,000,000 and a horrendous trade at a $100,000,000. So I think a lot of a lot of the problems that that retail traders get on a much smaller scale, a lot of the problems they get into is because they size too big. I think it's the easily, the number 1 mistake that your average retail active trader makes is just sizing way too big. As a percentage of your trading capital or whatever denominator you wanna put on it, I think most retail traders would be utterly shocked at how small the bets are that large companies put on as a fraction of the amount of money they have out there to trade with. Like, for for a really large company, a $100,000,000 bet can literally just be like, I don't know. It's like a percent or whatever. Right? And so what is a percent? That's like a big bet. Right? We'll say, like, that's a a percent of your of your trading capital or of your available risk capital. That's a big bet. So what is a percent of somebody with a $100,000 account look like? Right? Well, that's 1000 dollars. That's that that's a big bet. Right? I'm not saying that universally true. I'm not saying, like, a 1% is always huge or anything like that. But the times you see people just kinda get in over their heads just because, like, they're sort of destined to go broke because even if their trade did have edge even if their trade did have edge, you're way past, like, some Kelly fraction or something like that. Like, you're just gonna go broke with probability 1. Now as you were talking about that, it made me think of another concept related to what we're talking about before, which is the idea that retail traders are even starting the problem set from talking about, like, controlling their emotions or behaving like a fucking adult. So if you were to think about a trader that has those under control, let's say that they can just behave like a professional. I know. Mhmm. Shocking concept, but maybe they don't apply some sort of unique unicorn to trading, and they just show up and be a professional. Mhmm. And they start trying to figure out these sizing protocols. You mentioned something, you know, fractional, Kelly, which something you and Sinclair talks a lot about, same thing with Andrew Mack, and you spoke with. And it's like a good starting point. What are some of the tools that a place like Jane Street or some of these other firms use to determine their sizing? Right. Yeah. So I think without getting into too much detail about it, I think you'd certainly develop an, an intuition over time about, like, how big certain trades should be in the sense of, like, this is this is a good trade. This is not a good trade. Or this is a very good trade. This is a less good trade. Like, this is roughly the size that we should be be active in. But there's also just absolute limits possibly set by internally, possibly set by your prime broker where it's like, listen. I don't care how good you think this trade is. We're just not gonna allow you to do to put a position on bigger than, I don't know, $5,050,000,000 dollars in some random stock. Right? Some unhedged position in the stock, but we're just not gonna allow it. Right? And I think if you don't have a prime broker, then then you should probably think about what those absolute limits are for you as well. Right? But I think a lot of the the value that having a really good set of people with a lot of experience to to discuss this with, and that's kind of what happens at at these large firms, is that you can sort of collectively arrive at something that seems reasonable. Doesn't mean that everybody's gonna end up agreeing, but probably you're not gonna go completely off the rails given that that's how you make decisions. And 1 of the things that really sticks out to me anytime I speak with anybody from the institutional side is it's very clear that there's a lot of structure. There's a lot of different processes, and there's a lot of checks and balances, which obviously is a is a retail trader, you kinda become, like, all of that wrapped into 1. So if you were to think about, like, the primary processes that a retail trader would need to be able to, like, stand up for themselves to even have a shot at this

Thing. What are some of those processes? I I I actually have started to wonder whether there's any good universal answer to this. Mean, there's some universal answers that we've already covered. Right? Like, there's, you know, don't don't size too big. That's 1 of them. And and just all of the standard sort of behavioral biases that that people might be subject to. Right? Like, your winner short and chasing I don't know. Whatever they are. Right? Like, probably over all that. Right? But I think outside of that, I think part of what I think I've learned is that different people can operate in pretty different kind of decision making modes. Right? Like, I have a a friend who's an extremely he is an extremely quantitative guy, PhD in operations research, I think. And and what he what he does now as a as a solo retail trader is, like, he'll read the news and he'll think about stuff, and he'll sort of say to himself, like, I wonder what the price of this should be if this is true. And then he'll go look it up, and he's like, I don't know. That doesn't look quite right. Okay. I guess that's a trade. I don't think that process would work for me, but it obviously works for him. Right? Because it's kinda compatible with how he sort of approaches the whole thing. So, yeah, I I don't know if there's any kind of universal I'm not aware of any universal thing other than maybe the sizing stuff. Got it. Yeah. And I I think when we talk about this too, you bring in this element of, like, intuition. And intuition is tricky because I mean, I come from a military background, and we always say, like, you know, you you might be 25 years old, but you're in 1000 year old institution. Like, there there's warfare has been around for a long time. You can learn a lot without doing it. But in those kind of institutions that you were in, obviously, there's a ton of just institutional sophistication and knowledge that gets distilled around. Yep. What are the, like, most effective methodologies for that information to be shared? Is it when you both are looking at a screen and just kinda having a casual conversation? Is it through, like, some sort of structured process? Yeah. So I think it I think it varies, but certainly, and I don't think that this is invent it's I know it's not invented at trading companies. In fact, probably the military invented it, which is, like, we'll say, after action reviews or postmortems, whatever you wanna call them. Right? Like, these sorts of ideas of of, like, I did a thing, and then we're gonna sit down, and we're gonna, like, evaluate our decision making process going into it and what happened and what we missed and what we could have known if if and what we couldn't have known. Like, sometimes things just go bad for you. Right? Like, nothing you can do about those. So that's that's definitely pretty powerful. I would even say and and this is coming, I think, more from the rationalist community if I if I am aware of this, is the idea of a premortem. Right? Like, if you're gonna do a big trade or something, it's kind of like, if this goes wrong, how's this gonna go wrong? Right? I'm sure the military does this too. But it's the idea of, like, trying to anticipate what could go wrong, and sometimes you can find a mitigation for it. Sometimes you can't. Obviously, you can't look for monsters under the bedsheets either. So you the premortem can't be an exercise in, like, let's all hold our heads and decide not to do anything. Right? But I think these sorts of processes can, I think, work pretty well maybe if you're pretty self aware on your own, and you have to be kinda disciplined about doing it? Now there's a long standing problem I haven't been able to solve, so I assume you will have the answer. And I I can't wait to have the answer for whatever this is. I am super confident. So in a lot of my conversations, funny, you and I, right before we started, I was talking about a response that I was making to to something on online about a wayward trader, you know, pending blowing up. And I find it to be next to impossible to, like, especially to, again, like, newer traders that they're not, like, too good for a defined small edge. So, like, you were just talking about momentum. Momentum has been around forever. So if you wanted to try to build some sort of trading system, not saying you're gonna necessarily crush it, you could crush it. But Mhmm. At least you're starting starting with something that's a known, well researched, and can give you an idea of what, like, what it could look like. Yet Mhmm. Most of the time, they're more interested in, you know, just jumping into some sort of obscure option structure that they believe provides income or edge. Right. Do you have any tricks in the toolkit for redirecting a wayward trader towards the lights away from the dark? Right. So I think there's a few normal or I'd say, like, fairly standard wayward paths. I think the most common wayward path is paying for something you shouldn't pay for. Some training course, some some like, this is going to teach you the riches. This is a foolproof strategy that will never go wrong for you if you implement it right. Oh, it went wrong for you? Well, you must not have implemented it right. Like, that kind of thing. I think the best thing that I have for that is what I call the money tree analogy. And so just, like, close your eyes. Imagine that there's a a special plot of land which you don't own. You don't own the land, but you do own a a tree on that land, and that tree gives off pure money. Right? That's its fruit. It's just pure money. Fresh Benjamin's. Right? And so, of course, the tree, like, grows. Right? It sucks a lot of nutrients out from the ground in this special plot of land. It can only grow in this special plot of land. Right? So the question is, if you were the owner of that money tree, right, like, you're the person that owns this tree but not the land on it, would you sell the tree or would you sell its seeds in particular? Because, like, your customers are just going to plant their seeds right next to your tree and suck the nutrients out of the ground too. Right? So, like, the analogy hopefully is is quite clear. If you have a strategy like, there's a gazillion possible strategies out there. If it's a profitable strategy, it's a pretty specific thing that probably works in a pretty specific way. Like, that's the special plot of land, and the strategy is the tree that, like, just gives off money. Like, would you sell that strategy? Like, you just wouldn't. Right? Like, every single person that starts doing it beside you is now taking money away from you. So as a buyer of these sorts of things, you should be extremely suspicious. You should be very suspicious that this thing actually does make money because if it did, nobody would sell it. Right? Like and people can say, like, the sellers can say all that they want. Oh, like, I'm just in it to help the little guy and blah blah blah. It's like, okay. Not gonna say that's not true, but, my prior is in the other direction. And you actually talk a little bit about this, like, general concept to I I've found it interesting in your book about learning more so the process of, like, good decision making and then being able to apply good decision making to different stuff. So it's almost like there's value in starting with just good decision making and then not even necessarily worrying too much about the trading side of it until you feel ready to to make that leap. Could could you ex well, could you talk through that a little bit more? Specifically why in laws of trading, you focus so much on the decision making process versus the the end of the month effect or post earnings announcement drift or, you know, these other very specific things. Yeah. So I I would say the reason that I focus on it is because it's the most general thing that I can think of. Because the momentum effect the momentum effect might come and go. Like, the post earnings announcement drift, it might come and go. You don't know that those are going to keep working if they still do or if they ever did. They probably did. Sure. Right? But the thing that is generalizable, if you're a trader, is the ability to get to make good decisions and the ability to get better because that's what's gonna allow you to find the next thing before it appears in a book, before it appears in an academic paper. All of the best trades are almost by definition things that are not available publicly. Right? Like, that's where the money is. It's in all the weird stuff that you've discovered that nobody else has. And so that's kind of how, at least, I would hope that people can approach the the the business. Right? The business of trading is being a person who is capable of finding new things, of developing them, and of exploiting them, and then when it's not as good anymore, finding the next thing. That's that's the thing that that just generalizes. I think you talked about this in a recent podcast, if I'm not mistaken, but you were talking about the potential impact of technology AI on starting to consume these smaller spaces that used to be bastions for retail traders getting into the super illiquid, dirty, biotech, black tar, heroin trading, but markets are thin, especially on the derivative side, real thin. Mhmm. So sometimes there's something there, but you were talking about what that might look like going into the future. Yeah. So I guess it's a question of cost structure. Right? Like, if you think about an employee at a large, like, profitable trading firm, that employee has to bring in a certain amount of trading revenue in order to be worth employing. Right? Like, that that person let's just say that person median makes, like, 1000000 dollars a year. Right? Like, that's

What they make between salary, bonus, whatever. Right? So that person has to be bringing in more than 1000000 dollars in order to make that that worth it. And so is it worth it for that company to have 1 trader dedicated to looking at some illiquid pink sheet crap that probably makes, like, on a in a good year, a 100 k. Right? Like, no. Right? There's no value to that company. That that like, it's just sort of beneath the the the the cost floor. Right? And so that's an opportunity for a retail person. Right? Now imagine now that the cost to the company of being able to do that, like, the cost per head goes down because this person now has access to better tools, AI, whatever, lets them look at a wider range of things, and they can maybe aggregate 20 of these 100 k little spots, little niches. Okay. Well, now it is worth their time to actually go off and do it. So I think that's kind of the story of quant trading in many ways is figuring out ways to become more efficient and kind of add a multiplier effect to human time so that more and more niches become worth pushing into. So what would you imagine, like, the next decade might look like for the trading space? I so I think a couple of things seem pretty likely. Not necessarily retail trader related directly, but I think there's gonna there is already actually a consolidation in in terms of the the cost of being able to the the technology cost of of doing trading just keeps going up. You see it most easily in options, I think, where used to be, like, you could be a local in Chicago and kind of, you know, eke out a living just trading options back and forth. Now the technology floor is just extremely high. And so a lot of the smaller options trading firms in Chicago are have been put under pressure. They get bought by bigger places. So there's a consolidation in in trading firms, I think, just because the the kind of nonrecurring expense of doing trader trading just keeps going up. Right? So I think that consolidation is probably gonna keep happening. The other big trend, I would say, in the last 5 to 10 years is obviously the rise of just retail traders in general. Like, there's just a lot more retail trading out there that has been incredibly profitable for trading large trading firms. Is that gonna keep happening, or is there going to be kind of a a snapback or or or something where the average person that's doing this realizes, like, no. This is kind of I'm kinda getting taken to the cleaner slowly. And if that happens, then I could definitely see some sort of, like, retrenchment in just the profitability of all these firms for a while. So I don't know. I think that part of it, I think, is yet to be figured out. Yeah. The original explosion in retail trading makes sense. COVID, stimulus, people home. The persistence of it now starts to lead into gamification, accessibility. Yep. Do you like, if you were to make an over underbet, do you think it continues to expand from here, or do you think it starts to wane? Every time I think we're at peak gamblization of society, we manage to go even another step further. Like Oh, yeah. The CME is gonna start listing sports stuff now. Like Hell, yeah. Right? Like, if if if you had told me that the CME was gonna list sports betting even 5 years ago, let alone let alone 10, like, I would have taken any amount of action against that. Right? It's just never ever ever going to happen. No. It actually just got announced. So I think it's a fool's game to say, like, no. This is it. This is this is as big as it's gonna get. But at the same time, I think I do see some sort of like, it's just a vibe maybe that people are starting to realize, like, you know what? This is just kind of insane at this point. Like, if I can actually make money betting on whether dildos gets thrown on WNBA NBA floor, it's like, okay. I think this has gone just a hair too far at this point. That's the bet that interests me. Now we're talking. As as a participant or just as an interested observer? Either or. I mean, I could you could throw them at me. That would be a great bet. I'll zigzag. It well, it's it's also an interesting foray into the the the larger prediction markets where, you know, we now have CEOs during earnings calls that at the end of the earnings call, they're like, oh, yeah. Wait. Before I wrap up, let me rattle off a few words here. Do you think that there's any sort of positive effect from so many things being able to be speculated on? Right. So I think I think in principle, yes. Like, it would be good. Like, 1 of the things that trading teaches you more than anything else and and training at a trading firm will teach you, hopefully, very well is that a bet is a tax on bullshit. Right? Anytime you are forced to put your money where your mouth is, you start to go like, oh, actually, hang on a sec. Me saying words isn't free. Maybe I should actually figure out whether I believe the words I'm saying. Right? This is a wonderful, wonderful fact about bettings betting and about prediction markets, and we should all be very, very glad that the idea of betting as a tax on bullshit being more, well known in the world this is a good thing. This is a very good thing. I think to the extent that the the kinds of things that we're paying attention to embedding on are useful and valuable and important, that's gotta be good. To the extent that they are trivial and distracting distracting from from things things that that are are important, probably not so good. Right? Fair way to look at it. You took a decent bet on yourself to, like, sit down and write a fucking book. That must have been no small task. What led to that? Right? You spent a a little while trading at a firm, and then you said, I would like some pain in my life. Let me Yeah. Let me do this instead, or what will led you there? Some some some pain for no money. Not not just pain. No. So, Eric, just just word to the wise here. Writing a book, not the path to riches for most people. No. I knew that going in. Right? Like, because I knew that I did not want to write a trading book that said, hey. Like, here's a strategy to do x. Right? I wanted to write a trading book that was more about principles and how you might want to think about things that didn't have any ways to obvious ways to make money. And so I knew that the audience for a book like that was small, but I didn't care. A lot of the genesis of the book was training material from when I taught either interns or new hires, etcetera. Kind of came it like, it started off just kind of as a little joke. Like, like, the 1st law that I came up with, this is, like, years ago before I even thought of any book, was the idea that as a trader, you're never happy with the size you did. Right? Because if it was a bad trade, you should have done 0. And if it was a good trade, you should have done it bigger. Right? So no matter what happens, you're going to be unhappy. And I called that, like, the 1st law of trading. Right? And so then I kinda came up with, like, another couple, and then I then I thought, okay. Well, I can actually organize some kind of teaching around these ideas. And so then when I left, I thought, well, I don't know. Like, this seems pretty general. It's not really about trading, and and you see a lot of other things in the world where, like, you you look at it from a trader's lens and it's useful and it's productive to look at it that way. And I thought, okay. Well, let's let's give it a shot. And why why a book versus any other medium? Because I know that there's also like, that's I find for myself, like, in terms of content creation, like, sharing information, I actually prefer video just because you can convey a lot of information very quickly and easily. You can pick up subtle cues. Writing is super challenging because you have to be very, very methodical, not just in what you write, but then how the person's gonna read it, and it's a lot of work. It is. And I think for me, the part of it was that I wanted that challenge. I I wanted to try to see if I could actually write a book. I wanted to see if I there's a joke that everybody has a book in them. And for most people, that book should just stay there. And I wanted to know if if that was the case for me or if if it was okay for it to come out. That's maybe part of it. I also think, there's sort of this romantic notion, if I'm being fully honest with myself. There's this romantic notion about, like, writing a book just like just like it was done centuries ago. Like, could I do that? Right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I feel somewhat more permanent in some sense. It's probably not the, like, dollar or time maximizing thing to do. I'll fully admit that. Yeah. Well and it's funny because I I actually came across the economics of of books from some of the other people on the podcast that have written books. And it is 1 of those things where everybody thinks, like, as soon as you write a book, you are now Scrooge McDuck. You have, you know, a pond of gold coins to go swimming. But you talked about a lot you talked about a lot of different stuff in your book. What do you have any examples of laws that didn't make the book that were things that you're like, this is kinda good, but it just doesn't fit? Yeah. So I think those those

As it didn't make the book either because they were just a little too and not, like, not general enough, ended up as, like, big long tweet threads. Probably the the the tweet thread that that I think people refer to back the most, even though I wrote it, like, I don't know, maybe 4 or 5 years ago now, is this idea that trading is about positioning. Like, you don't get paid for the trades you do. You get paid for the positions you hold. And so the idea of, like, oh, I'm gonna I'm gonna do this trade, and I'm I'm I'm gonna look for an exit, etcetera, etcetera. Like, most of the time, I think that's just the wrong way to think about trading. What you should be thinking about all the time is what is the correct position for me to be holding right now? And then, like, what is the optimal action that I can take given cost, given risk, etcetera, to get me closer to that correct position? And so, yeah, the idea of of trading not really being about the trade, but about the position, I think, is is, like, a really important fundamental concept that I think a lot of people just kinda get wrong. Could you explore that a little bit more? Why do you think they get it wrong? So I think a lot of people talk about, like, oh, here's my here's my entry point and my exit point. And and, like, oh, this is like I should I should put a stop loss here, and I should take profit here. I'm not saying those are, like, obviously wrong and not under all situations, but most of the time, like, when should you exit a position when another 1 is better? Like, that there's no, like, oh, I should exit. Like, 5 minutes later, I should exit, like, when it hits this price. And in particular, what this mindset teaches you is that the world does not care what your entry price was. And so your exit price should like, your exit, you know, decision should not be a function of when you put it on. Right? Like, maybe this trade was was is, like, is profitable, and maybe it's unprofitable. But the point is, like, if the position now is profitable to hold, then you should hold it. And if it's not, then you should get rid of it. And the amount of money you made is completely irrelevant to that decision. It's a 1st order, ignoring cost, ignoring risk, etcetera. Sure. Let's get 1st order stuff right. That opens a a fascinating paradox because then there's the part of it in terms of, like, risk sizing and making sure that you have a position that doesn't end up consuming too much risk like you were talking about before early on the disposition effect letting losers run. So how do you think about balancing those 2? Yeah. Exactly. Right? So, like like I said, this this principle of, like, no. The world doesn't care what what price you entered at. Yes. The world doesn't care, but I'm sure your broker does. Right? And so, like, that definitely matters. Right? And but, again, I think this gets back to bet sizing again because most of the time, like, that should not be much of a in most of the decisions you make, that should not be a factor. Right? Like, oh, shit. I have to get out of this position because it's either too big or or it's consuming too much margin or whatever. Like, if that if you get into that spot fairly often, then you're just trading too big. Like, most of the time, you should just be doing very boring trades that don't, like, enter into, like, in any kind of, like, big risk calculus. It's just, okay. Yeah. I think this position is I think the stock is now at its fair value. There's no edge to holding it. It's just risk with no edge. I should probably try to work out of it. That's it. Like, that's what should that's what most of your, like, trading decision should look like or the or the opposite. Right? Like, oh, I think the stock is undervalued. I should buy some. Throughout a lot of the conversation, and I I find this a lot when I think about trading is, like, it it really is about this balance between kind of, like, these competing forces. It it seems like a continual balancing act. It is. What are some of the tools that you learned either, you know, in your institutional career or just throughout your life in general that help you to create that balance? Because it really requires the ability to, like, switch quickly between different perspectives and then, you know, find a center point. You talked a little bit about sorry. You were just saying Go Go ahead. Yeah. Before you talked a little bit about using other people, right, to help with that decision making process, but let's forego that point. Let's pretend that you're alone on an island, I guess Mhmm. With Internet and a computer. What thanks, Elon, Starlink, whatever. Yeah. But Yeah. So for me, this is where the fact that I am not a discretionary trader and never have been is probably where I start to become a not very useful resource to answer this question. Because my answer is always going to be, like, you did all the work before. Right? Like, you define the strategy. You defined everything upfront. Like, this is what I think the strategy should do. This is what I think its sizing function should be like. This is what I think its risk limits should be like. Like, that's it. Like, now I'm I'm done. Like, it's running. Right? It's doing whatever it is it does. And periodically, depending on the strategy, maybe, I don't know, once a week, once a month, once every 6 months, I should, like, run this analysis again, like, maybe build a new model or or analyze my trading and make sure that, like, the thing that happened is the thing that the model kind of said should have happened. Like, is it was this an outlier performance 1 way or another? Like, that sort of meta level stuff. Yeah. You should be doing some of that. But sort of day to day, a huge advantage with a systematic approach, which is all the trading that I've ever done, is that you don't really get into this like, oh, like, what decision should I make now? Like, what what should I do? It's just like, I don't know. I already defined it all. It's just it's running. And and that's hard in the sense that you have to have a lot of confidence in the work you did upfront, but it's easy because data and yeah. It's easier day to day because then you don't have to exhaust yourself with actually making decisions, but then it's hard again because if it's having if it's having a bad day, you just have to let that ride, like, for the most part. It's funny because at start of that, you said, you know, it's not necessarily the most useful answer, but the funny thing is is that's actually incredibly useful. Because if you think about the the path, especially retail, most of doing that, right, which is Mhmm. Confounding to say, but most of them aren't even thinking about kind of devising the system before they do it. They're just kinda like, oh, I learned iron condors. Let me go we go sell some of those and make a bunch of money. So here so here's the thing. Just because just because this is a a a a hobby horse of mine, and I'm just gonna jump on it. The idea of options strategies as, like, as they're sold to the public is, like, batshit crazy. And I'll tell you why. K? Like, the whole thing about options and option strategies is that this is a linear operation. Right? So, like, you cannot take 2 losing trades and sum them and turn it into a winning trade. Right? So, like, if whatever complex strategy you've come up with is a profitable trade, then at least 1 of those legs has to be profitable. Okay? Maybe all 4, 5, or 8 of the legs that you're engaging in are profitable legs of the option strategy, but I bet you they're not. I bet you like, if it's profitable at all, I bet you 1 of them is profitable, and I bet you 3 of them are losing you money. And so maybe you should think about doing the profitable thing and not do the things that don't lose you money and manage risk a little bit better, and you'll probably come out better in the end. I think we gotta clip that part specifically because I spent a lot of time talking about structure strategy and the multileg omni dragon that people build. So I I'm really glad you mentioned that. Now talk to me a little bit about the broad process to creating a strategy. And I know there's a lot that goes into that. But if you were to think of, like, the major muscle movements and Yeah. How you go about that, what what does that look like at least at the institutional side of stuff? Yeah. So I think it depends a little bit on on what you're good at. And I think this gets back to the 1st thing that we talked about, which is, like, really being self aware about what is the differential edge that you have in the market or that you might have in the market. And so years ago, the way I tried to think about and come up with strategies was something that I actually enjoyed doing a lot of, which is just staring at ticks. Like, I would literally just stare at the book like this. Like, I would stare at it, and I would see, like, oh, like, that dude, like, penied that other dude, and then this other guy came down a little bit. And then, these are pretty illiquid stocks. We're not talking ES or NQ. We're talking stuff where you can actually see it in real time. And then, like, oh 0, like, 5 lot guy. He's back. Right? Like, oh, where is he in the book? Oh, he's up there. Oh, he's kinda ticking up. Right? And and so this would sort of give you ideas about about, like, just things you might want to to try. And so then and so then it's like to the Batmobile. Right? Like, in where the Batmobile is this, like, massive trove of data that you have collected for the last 10 years and all of the tooling that lets you, like, just really, really quickly study an idea and do it properly and not fool yourself and not have look ahead bias and all this stuff. And 98% of the time, you would do this and you'd be like, oh, yeah. Okay. That doesn't make any money. Right? Like, it it's it's it's better than just incinerating money by randomly flipping a coin, but that's not, like, that's not helping anyone. Right? Every once in a while, you'll come up come with something where it's like, oh, actually, I think there's, like I think there's something here, but I think it's a little piece of a larger pattern. And it's like, then you so I used to do that a lot. Right? Like, I used to really stare at ticks a lot, and and I got a lot of ideas, only a tiny fraction of which were good out of doing that. I think now, with the company I'm at now, that is very much not the approach. The approach is very much a all in bet on machine learning where there's

No, like, humans staring at ticks. It's it's much more meta level, like, can we construct the machine that figures it out on its own? And so I certainly had to adapt kinda how I think about things a little bit in this sort of new world, but it's it's just as fun. Yeah. Talk to me a little bit about the the new project. I know that you can't go super far into detail, but No. That is a completely different way of thinking. So Yeah. How have you melded with that so far? Yeah. So so the company, it's a small trading startup here in Prague, which is where I live now. And it was founded by a bunch of ex deep mind scientists. Like, they were they were the ones who built the 1st poker agents that could beat humans, And then they unified it with the deep mind agents that were world like, were the best at chess. And, like, they sort of had this sort of game playing reinforcement learning background, and then they thought, okay. Well, let's try trading. Now there's, like, a long history of academics and other people saying, oh, I'll just apply my cool technique to trading, and that often doesn't go well. But I think these guys, or at least I thought, obviously, that that these guys really had something. And the reason I say that is because I would say in traditional quant, we'll say machine learning style, quant trading, you have this idea of a big huge system that produces a fair value. Like, what is the thing that I think that I'm trading worth? Right? And then you have another system that's like a bunch of human heuristics that say, like, how do I turn that fair value into a set of trades that I should do in order to exploit that knowledge? Right? I guess the idea of the company is using reinforcement learning. We can just learn all of that end to end. So, like, data comes in, decision making agent comes out, and it's it's up to us to sort of figure out the algorithms that make the training algorithms that make that make money and not lose money. The fascinating part of that is it almost reminds me of spoofing, actually, where there's probably a lot of other people doing this. And the information 1st questions I asked. I asked these guys. It's like, how do you know that this agent that you're training isn't gonna do some illegal shit? Yeah. There we go. Right? Absolutely. This like, you hit the nail on the head. Right? When you part of the reason a huge part of the reason that that quant trading has been divided into this, like, figure out a fair value and then have a bunch of heuristics to turn it into trades is that humans can look at these heuristics and say, like, that thing is doing something it shouldn't. Right? When you sort of hand it over to the machine and the machine maybe discovers, like, oh, wait a 2nd. Like, if I put a huge bid here and a tiny off you know, like, you could totally figure that out. Right? It probably would. And so part of the challenge for us is making sure that the machine absolutely does not do that. And we have some approaches to that to sort of cracking that. Mhmm. But, yeah, like, that is an absolutely a huge concern with systems like this. And how do you think about the concern? Maybe your guys' machine and model is doing what it's supposed to, but what about everybody else that might be doing this and whether or not they play by the same rule? Yeah. So I guess I'm not super concerned about what other people are doing if our agent makes money. Like, if our agents making money and we know that we're not doing anything in even remotely close to illegal in doing so, then then all all is good. And and believe me, like, regulators and brokers, etcetera, all have an incredibly large interest in making sure that you're not doing anything stupid. And if you're in this game for the long haul, you have a very big interest in not doing anything stupid. So I'm actually not super concerned about that. I think the interesting question and there's been there have been cases in the past where a very, very sensible strategy from your like, human rules, I'm saying. A very sensible strategy from your bot or your machine interacts in a weird way with a very sensible strategy from another guy's machine and the sort of the emergent behavior in most of them looks really, really bad. So, like, let me give you a classic example if you have time because I think it's Yeah. Yeah. Please. Instructive. So let's say that your your your machine is a market maker in a very illiquid, very wide stock. Right? And so if it's very liquid and very wide, like, probably you wanna be, like, the best bid. Right? Let's just say. Like, you want like, this is the good side. The bid side is the good side. Right? So, like, whoever's got a bid out there, you just penny them. Right? But the thing is, like, your your opponent, the other market maker, has the same strategy. And so then, like, he pennies you, and then you penny them, and then he pennies you. And so you do this, like we just call it the penny war. We, like, where they just kinda, like you see it in the market data, like, do do do do do do. And then 1 of them say says, oh, wait a 2nd. This is way too much. I'm canceling. And then the other guy sees, oh, there's nobody behind me. I can go back down to here. And so you see this, like, sawtooth of pennying in these illiquid stocks. Regulators hate seeing that. It looks horrible. It just looks like manipulation. It looks like every bad thing you could imagine even though both agents are doing very, very sensible things. And so you obviously have to, like, write in some logic to detect, like, whether your machine is in a penny war so that it, like, learns not to get into a penny war. That's just part of the game. And I have to imagine, like, those kinds of problems just cascade into like, that's a simple example. Right? And so it's just gotta become this massively huge problem set to deal with. So when you're approaching problems there, do you find that it's kind of like you're working on a specific piece with the broader context in mind? Like, how do you even start that process? Yeah. I mean, I think it, you sort of go up and down the abstractions pretty frequently. Right? Like, sometimes you're you're really, really in the weeds. Like like, what's our latency to this? Like, what how can we make this, like, you know, microsecond faster or whatever? Like, it's a tiny, tiny problem you're super focused on. And then sometimes you zoom all the way out to, like, well, what should we be trading in 6 months or or or 12 months or or 18 months? Like, where you know, what's the next thing to attack? Like and and just everything up and down the scale. I think the way we approach it is in a very collaborative way. Like, we we definitely think of ourselves as trying to construct a shared mental model of what we're doing and what's important and what and, like, what's going on so that people can sort of self organize and kind of divide the work naturally that way instead of instead of having a bunch of managers and stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Obviously, you feel like you guys have to have some sort of competitive advantage against all of the other firms that you're talking about. But, like, obviously, can't go super far into detail, but what's the essence of that? Yeah. Yeah. So I I would say, to to be clear, we have a lot of disadvantages. Being a small company, like, we're definitely less, you know, well funded than than the big boys. But I think 1 of our advantages is that we can move very, very quickly. Like, we we're very small. And if we can keep velocity high, then we can adapt, not necessarily to market conditions or anything like that, but we can sort of adapt what we're doing hopefully quicker than others. I think that's maybe 1 thing. And the other thing is we believe that this idea of of, like, end to end training of an agent is is the way of the future. But the problem is it's what I call the Kodak problem for a lot of existing very profitable companies where, like, you can't really kill the golden goose on your way to trying to do this new thing. And so we're organized from day 1 to do it this way. Right? If that bet is correct, then we should be able to move faster than others and get there before others. If that bet is wrong, then, like, we go out of business and we lose everything. So it's like, it's fine. Right? That that's that's a start up. Right. Right. No. And and it makes a ton of sense because it's like a more sophisticated, higher capitalized version of a retail trader, but not quite the same size as institutions because that's 1 of the benefits of the very few that retail traders have is you could be completely long and then immediately flip completely short in just a couple seconds with consulting nobody. So there is a little bit of advantage to speed there. So it makes complete sense that you guys are looking to exploit that funny enough. That's generally the Marine Corps philosophy is speed. So Yeah. I I think that that resonates really well. I had just a couple more questions for you. The 1st 1 specifically is when you think about the book that you wrote I've never written a book. So I've never had the experience, but I'm guessing you it might be an experience where you look back at it, and there's something in there you're like, I fucking nailed that. And then there's something that you're probably like, I wish I did that slightly different. Yep. Is that true? And if so, could you share what those are? Yeah. So I would say I think the chapter on edge, I I think I really like. I think it holds up. I think the yeah. So it's interesting. Like, when you're at a when you're at an institution, like, you drink the Kool Aid, and I'm not saying that's a bad thing. Right? But you just sort of have a way of looking at the world. And ever since I wrote the book, I've met so many people, and I've sort of expanded my notion of what the landscape of profitable trading can look like. Mhmm. And so especially when I talk about, like, in the last chapter, like, and when I talk in the 1st chapter actually about why are you even doing this? Why are you even trading? I think there's stuff there that I would I would probably say I I am too

Dogmatic about that like, I have a perspective that is probably a little bit too narrow relative to what I think is reasonable now. Fair enough. And as expected from any high performance person I've ever met, I do it does not miss me that you spent way more time on the negative thing than the positive thing. The positive thing was like a sentence. So I wanna point that out to other people because that's a really common trait that I find with people. Like, we do that in the military and, obviously, people that are trying to do well. Right? You'd spend a little more time there, which is funny. The other thing I wanted to just probe you on slightly is if you were to speculate on what the world of institutional trading will look like over the next 5, 10 years, how's that landscape going to change? Do you see consolidation? Do you see more spreading out from would say, yeah, a consolidation. Okay. Consolidation. I think the investment banks will continue to get disintermediated. Like, a lot of stuff that that used to go through investment banks doesn't go through investment banks. Like, trading companies are are now, like, making VC investments. That was, like, unheard of 10 years ago. Right? But now they do it all the time. Right? They used to go through some investment bank and some vehicle or something to you know, if they even did it at all or maybe it was the the owners of the company that did it outside of that vehicle. Now they do it too. So I think, like, risk capital should probably always, for the most part, live with the people taking the risk. And I think that's just going to continue to be the case. And I think as these companies become more successful and larger, they're just gonna sort of keep eating away at more of what this, like these, like, investment banks that are now public companies. Like, that's not the right structure for this kind of risk taking. Like, public companies are should not be in the business of of doing that sort of stuff. And, yeah, like and banks have become these incredibly boring, incredibly regulated institutions that where nothing happens. It's probably actually good for the world. So that's definitely a trend that'll probably continue. I think, obviously, there's still room to run-in terms of middle income countries getting richer and getting more, kind of yeah. Like, moving up the scale, and there being people there like a like a really a growing middle class that then obviously is thinking about their future and investments there. So I think the developing world still has a lot of growth left in it, like a lot. So I think that's that's gonna be great for the world. I love that. And 2 last ones. 2nd to last, what's like a really good piece of advice that you've gotten literally from anywhere that has helped you in the different pursuits that you had? And it's it's broad, but you do have a really interesting background. Right? You've bounced between, like, really different things, some same, but some different. So, yeah, talk to me about that. Yeah. So I think a thing that I feel like I've learned is and I think I maybe I've said it before on other podcasts, but I still definitely believe it is, life is long. Like, life life isn't short. Life is long. Like, you have time to to dive into something and get really, really, really into it and hopefully get really good at it and get become an expert at it. And then you can go do something else and get really good at that thing too. And it's not and the thing I hope that I've discovered is that the thing you were doing 12 years ago somehow informs the thing you're doing now. Like, it might seem like it's a completely different thing, but it all sort of combines. It all helps. And so this idea, Chris Abdel Nessie, who's who's a friend of mine, he said he he sort of he put the finger on it. He said, oh, yeah. You're just doing serial PhD after serial PhD. It's just you're not doing it in university. I think that's actually fairly accurate. Like, my my number appears to be roughly 6 years. Like, I seem to do like, I seem to make a big change every 6 years or so. So I don't know. That seems like a pretty good way to go. I think it's huge, and I actually resonate with that quite heavily from, like, bouncing between things, looking for new experiences. So what do you think is next? Obviously, you're in your current thing, and, you know, that'll sustain for however long, but what else interests you? Yeah. Look. I mean, if this if this goes well, I'll definitely be here for for a few years because I think there's just a lot of this could be a really big company. This could be really something interesting. But after that, I don't know. I think I I I dream of figuring out a way to to help young people start their own companies. And and I and what I mean by that isn't like, oh, just, like, write a bunch of angel checks or something like that. But I think 1 of the things that I'm reasonably good at is is, like, talent identification and that sort of thing. I would like to figure out how to, like, put together little groups of, like, 3 or 4, like, young, super smart, knowledgeable people and just kind of, like, kinda give them a kick in the direction and maybe some money. It's like, okay. Now, like, go. Like, this is your thing. And, like, find the next group of 3 or 4 people that, like, would work together well as a team, and then, like, they go off and do their thing. I think that might be, like, a good, semi retirement thing to to do for a while. What a cool project too because you'd learn a lot about a ton of different stuff, which is absolutely awesome. Exactly. Yeah. So we covered actually quite a lot. And 1st, I I generally wanna thank you because you're also in a completely different time zone. So I I I know that the timing is a a little tricky, but 1st, thank you so much for coming to hang out. I I do have on my notes that we kinda missed the fast, easy money part. Maybe we circle back to that. We we get to that in the few we just forgot about it, obviously, because it's there, but we just just wasn't here. Yeah. I think on on that subject, think, you know, 1 of the 1 1 of the most important things for me, you know, my sometimes I come off as, like, irascible and and, like, ill tempered on Twitter. It's not really my intent. It's just that it really, really, like, deeply, deeply offends me when I see, like, people getting scammed Yep. By and, like and trading is 1 of those places where it happens a lot. Like, people just get scammed because they don't like, you can't get scammed, like, from a from a language teacher. Like, I'm learning Czech right now. I'm trying to. I'm failing at it, but I'm trying to. Like, if my language teacher is, like, bad or isn't doesn't know the language, I will find out this the 2nd I go to the store and I try to say something. Like, I'll be able to tell. Right? Mhmm. Whereas, like, the person you're buying some trading instruction from, like, you're probably just not gonna be able to tell if it's scam or not until much later and many, many dollars later. And that's part of why these scams just kinda keep propping up come again and again and again. So It's it's actually funny. I I mentioned it earlier that I didn't really get into YouTube to, like, do this stuff, but it ended up kinda becoming a thing. Funny enough, it's it's actually for that exact reason because I grew up relatively poor. And the thing that gets me the most is that the people that are getting scammed are the ones that don't have the money. It gets scammed. So you're literate they're literally plant preying on people's, like, literal dreams and taking their fucking money, which drives me crazy. So I actually love the personality. Fuck those guys. So I I say the more you could do it, keep up the fight. For folks that wanna get ahold of you, you're on x, so I can obviously throw the link to your profile in the notes. Is there anywhere else that you wanna direct people to? Your book? I'll throw a link to that. Yeah. Laws of trading, I think. Yeah. I mean, my DMs are open, at least I think they are. So, you know, happy to if people wanna ask questions or wanna talk or whatever, I'm usually pretty accessible. And for what you asked for, but okay. You heard it here 1st. You could show up to his house and talk trading. So on that and I'm just kidding. Absolutely awesome hanging out, man. Definitely look forward to catching up. I hope you enjoy the rest of your weekend, and thanks for sharing some of your knowledge and time. Alright. Thanks, Eric. Really enjoyed it. See you, guys.