A little about me: I got started in the volatility trading business about 13 years ago, initially as the sole junior trader to Robert Kanter. From there, I went on to trade at several proprietary trading firms. After having the best year of my trading career, about six years ago, a few partners and I decided to start our own hedge fund. I like to think I’ve established myself as one of the top volatility traders in my space. Along the way, I’ve been fortunate to receive a few industry awards, recognition, and backings for what I’ve been able to accomplish throughout my career as a trader. My focus on this app is pretty simple: to have interesting discussions with other traders and PMs, help younger traders navigate their own journeys, and share some of the volatility trading philosophies and lessons that have served me well throughout my career.

I’ve seen this quite a bit as well. One of the easiest ways to identify someone who lacks real market experience is to listen to the narratives they construct around the market-making community. It’s a huge red flag whenever someone speaks about market makers as though they’re some divine hand from the sky that sees all, knows all, and controls every movement in the market. More often than not, these narratives serve as convenient scapegoats for price action that someone doesn’t fully understand. And when you actually tap the Street, examine positioning, or dig into the underlying data to validate those claims, they frequently fall apart. The irony is that market makers are often just as constrained by inventory, risk limits, adverse selection, and imperfect information as everyone else. They are not omniscient, nor are they some coordinated entity operating with a singular objective. Ultimately the “market makers are pinning the gamma bro” type of arguments are similar to the statements you hear from a fish blaming the dealer at the casino for “bad luck” on a few hands.

You are starting to see the largest hoarding equity stimulus attempt ever. “Let’s attach the general public to direct exposure to our stock. It naturally creates greater attachment to broad inflows and also incentivizes government intervention and support in the event of a crisis.” I would watch for more companies to begin pursuing similar efforts.

Very often, I’ll speak to allocators who have target return objectives for their investments. I usually express that I’m not a fan of this approach, particularly when it comes to long volatility strategies. Let me explain why. Imagine you have a friend who tells you, “Hey, I’m a good poker player. I’m going to play at this casino tonight, and I’m not leaving until I make $500K.” He starts with a bankroll of $50K. He’s a skilled player, and fortunately, he’s seated at a table with players who are considerably worse than him. Nine hours go by, and he’s now up $450K. However, the table dynamics change. A few players rotate out, and two players he recognizes from other circuits sit down. He knows both are significantly better than him. To me, a good poker player would recognize that the opportunity set has deteriorated. He might play a few more hands with a strict floor in mind, but if that floor is breached, he picks up his chips and calls it a night. Unfortunately, our friend has committed himself to his original rule: He cannot leave until he makes $500K. So he continues playing. Nine hours later, he has lost everything. Now, let’s change the scenario. Instead of two superior players joining the table, imagine two more fish sit down. Our friend plays another hour, makes the additional $50K, reaches his $500K target, and walks away. Unfortunately, those two fish each have an additional $2M bankroll and are willing to keep playing all night. In the first scenario, had he recognized the deterioration in the opportunity set, he could have walked away with $450K instead of nothing. In the second scenario, had he recognized the improvement in the opportunity set, he might have walked away with $2M instead of $500K. So what went wrong in both scenarios? He allowed an arbitrary return target to dictate his decisions rather than the underlying conditions that actually determined his expected profitability. This is the fundamental problem I have with target-based investment frameworks. When you establish external parameters that have no meaningful relationship to the underlying distribution of outcomes, you risk systematically making the wrong decisions. You end up taking too much risk when the opportunity set deteriorates and taking too little when it improves. Now, bring this back to volatility investing. I often speak with allocators who say things like, “We want our hedging program to generate a 40% return if the market declines 20%, and we want to monetize when that happens.” I try my best to explain that the parameters you establish for your hedging program have absolutely no influence on the path the market takes or the opportunity set that develops along the way. A 20% market decline tells you very little, in isolation, about whether the remaining convexity is attractively priced, whether volatility is likely to continue expanding, or whether the positioning dynamics that created the opportunity have been exhausted. This is precisely why so many hedging programs struggle with monetization. They either monetize too early, leaving substantial profits on the table, or monetize too late, allowing significant gains to evaporate. The problem isn’t necessarily the hedge itself. It’s that the decision to monetize is being driven by an arbitrary objective rather than the variables that actually determine the expected value of continuing to hold the position. The objective should never be to maximize returns relative to an arbitrary target. It should be to maximize the value extracted from the opportunity set as it evolves.

This year Ambrus donated $100k to @sonofasaintorg . This is an organization that does real hands on work to provide long-term mentorship and support to boys and young men who are growing up without their fathers, in socioeconomically deprived areas. If you are a trader/ investor looking to pay back your blessings. This is an organization worth looking into.

Opportunity set getting interesting! Have a great weekend everyone 🫡

There’s this persistent narrative in trading that the smartest guys in the room are inevitably the ones who make the most money. You constantly hear things like, “How could you ever compete with a firm like XYZ?” I’ve said this before, but I think that couldn’t be further from the truth. In my experience, a few attributes consistently separate good traders from everyone else: 1) A relentless desire to progress. 2) An exceptional work ethic. 3) Slightly above-average intelligence. 4) Genuine self-awareness and humility. 5) Unwavering discipline. 6) Mental flexibility and the ability to adapt. 7) Natural gravitation to take risk. If you genuinely possess these attributes and dedicate yourself to the craft, it becomes very difficult not to develop into a good trader over time. It’s actually quite rare the giga brain that is strictly exceptional raw intelligence ends up lasting long in this game.

Fingers crossed that we actually get some good trading opportunities into the end of the year. Welcoming stocks moving higher or lower. Three months of nothingness and headfakes in equity land has been a boring torture chamber.

I don’t invest in other hedge funds because all of my investable capital is committed to my own. But if I ever decided to start allocating to other managers, rather than going through a barrage of questions attempting to assess areas where I lack genuine expertise, I would focus on understanding the broad risks and then dial in on two main principles. 1) Does management have meaningful personal capital invested alongside its investors? It’s a relatively straightforward yes-or-no question, but I think the answer reveals quite a bit. You can rationalize all sorts of reasons why management shouldn’t have its own capital at risk, but to me, there is no substitute for genuine alignment of incentives. 2) Is management genuinely obsessed with its craft? I think this is one of the most underappreciated qualities in evaluating any business. And I genuinely believe it’s what gets people from being in the top 10% to top 1%. When someone is genuinely obsessed with what they do, late-night strategy discussions, weekend meetings, and countless hours refining the business stop feeling like obligations. They become problems that people have a burning desire to solve. That obsession drives deeper thinking, better questions, and an unwillingness to settle for satisfactory answers when better ones might exist. Over time, that passion and attention to detail compound. Small improvements accumulate, processes become more robust, and ultimately, that obsession manifests itself in the quality of the product and its results. As humans it’s kinda hard to be bad at something you are obsessed and passionate about especially if your work ethic aligns.

I’ve been preaching this story for a few years now. Notional short Vega in the street remains massive relative to where it has ever been. It doesn’t mean go and naively buy puts because that’s entirely silly. But whenever vol is rising this is something people should be cognizant of, contrary to the one dimensional view of “just short vol on spikes”.

S&P all time highs…… America 🇺🇸 🫡

From a societal perspective, one of the hardest things to explain to a young kid on Fintwit is that some of the biggest red flags for a LARP or grifter are the stereotypical Lamborghini and watch posts. Meanwhile, one of the biggest green flags is the guy casually drinking a 2014 Grand Cru Burgundy with his family on a random Tuesday night while tweeting up a storm complaining that his wife is pissed because the marble slab for his living room centerpiece is three weeks late.