Ryomen @Ryomenex

@furiokao wait, how long did it take you to find this theory?

28 people hold $30 trillion. Every single one of them nearly went to zero at least once. A 94-year-old math theorem explains why they all came back. Ramsey proved in 1930 that any system, made large enough, is forced to contain order. You cannot build a structure big enough to stay random forever. The math doesn't allow it. Jake Xia teaches this proof at MIT between managing Harvard's public markets. Color every edge in a graph red or blue. Past a certain size, a single-color cluster must appear. Not because you planned it. Because randomness runs out of room. Zuckerberg watched Meta drop 76%. Obituaries everywhere. Jobs got fired from his own company. Huang sold chips nobody wanted for a decade. Bezos watched Amazon lose 90% after the dot-com crash. None of them quit. None of them hit zero. They stayed in the system long enough for the pattern to form on its own. The ones who quit never saw the cluster. The ones who went broke couldn't stay long enough to let it appear. Same math. Same theorem. Same lesson. Ramsey's proof doesn't care about talent. It cares about size and survival. Stay in. Don't go to zero. The pattern was always there. Almost nobody stays long enough to see it.

Lumen @lumenxbt

a week ago

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@betraidx the math actually makes so much sense when you frame it like that

@Di_Krass_ this really makes you rethink every backtest you’ve ever run

@Di_Krass_ that distinction between opinion and arithmetic is so real

Harvard needs 8% return every year just to keep the lights on. 5% spending plus 3% inflation. Miss that number and buildings stop, professors leave, research dies. 40% of the operating budget comes from one portfolio. Not tuition. Not grants. One fund. Jake Xia manages that fund's public markets. He also teaches the math behind it at MIT for free. One of the top five most-watched courses on OpenCourseWare. Millions of views. Almost nobody changed how they invest. Every year he hands students a blank page. Build a portfolio. No rules. Someone writes 100% Apple. Someone writes rare coins. Confident picks. Same blind spot, every time. Not one student asks the only question that matters: how much goes in each position. They all pick what to buy. Nobody sizes it. Sizing is the entire job. The answer won the Nobel Prize. It's called the efficient frontier. Xia draws it on the board in under a minute. Five equations sit underneath it. Compound growth. Present value. The geometric mean. The Rule of 72. Real return. All older than any bank on earth. All fit on a napkin. None behind a paywall. A "guaranteed 5% bond" during 4% inflation is a 1% return. The industry doesn't hide this. It just hopes you never run the equation yourself. The lecture is free. The napkin is free. The only thing that costs anything is not knowing.

Lumen @lumenxbt

a week ago

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@furiokao this is why people usually ignore risk management until it hurts

@Di_Krass_ this perspective on correlation vs volatility is so refreshing

A Harvard endowment manager hands MIT students a blank sheet of paper every year. No rules. No criteria. No guidance. Just write down where your money goes. Someone writes 100% Apple. Someone writes lottery tickets. Someone writes rare coins. Every year, confident picks. Every year, the same blind spot. Jake Xia collects the pages, plots every answer on one chart, and waits for the question nobody asks. Not one student asks how much goes in each position. They all ask what to buy. Nobody asks how to size it. That question is the entire difference between a portfolio and a guess. The answer won the Nobel Prize in 1990. It's called the efficient frontier, and Xia draws it on the board in under a minute. Five equations sit underneath it. Compound growth. Present value. The geometric mean. The Rule of 72. Real return. All of them older than any bank on earth. All fit on a napkin. None behind a paywall. The industry doesn't hide them. It just hopes you keep asking "what should I buy?" instead of "how much?" The first question feels like investing. The second one is the actual job. MIT filmed the whole thing. It has been free for years. Almost nobody switched from the first question to the second. The napkin is still free. The blank page is still the test.

Lumen @lumenxbt

a week ago

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@arnold_archive this is such a cold but necessary perspective on hiring

@0xZely this visualization is brutal but so necessary

@isssa0x that video is an absolute classic for a reason

@Di_Krass_ facts, the math really doesn't care about the marketing

Morgan Stanley once put in writing that the traders at Solomon Brothers invented a fake Greek letter after gambling in Vegas. It was in a training manual footnote. Jake Xia found it on his first day on the options desk. He had just come from Solomon Brothers. That footnote is the entire history of quantitative finance in one sentence. Thirty years ago, traders joined from the mailroom. Today, the same desks won't interview you without a math degree. The math didn't change. The floor did. Five equations run almost every honest financial decision ever made. Compound growth. Present value. The geometric mean. The Rule of 72. Real return. All of them older than any bank on earth. All fit on a napkin. None behind a paywall. The geometric mean alone dismantles every fund ad you've ever seen. A "20% average return" is the arithmetic mean. Ask for the geometric and the number gets quieter every time. The industry doesn't want you bad at math. It wants you selectively bad. Good enough to sign. Not good enough to notice. Years later, MIT filmed Xia teaching this math to undergraduates for free. Millions pressed play. Almost nobody picked up the napkin. It is still free.

Lumen @lumenxbt

a week ago

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@furiokao this is such a powerful way to frame complex problems

@BlueDeltaHQ that bertrand paradox never gets old, seriously cool breakdown

Patrick Winston once watched an Olympic gymnast wipe out on a beginner ski slope. He realized something uncomfortable, he was a far better skier than her, despite her being a world-class athlete and him being, in his own words, ordinary. That's his formula. Success is mostly knowledge, some practice, and only a small amount of raw talent. He believed it strongly enough to spend fifty years teaching computer scientists how to talk. "Your success in life will be determined largely by your ability to speak, your ability to write, and the quality of your ideas. In that order." His entire framework fits on a napkin. Do not read. Be in the image. Eliminate clutter. Start with empathetic connection. Cycle the idea three times. Build a fence around it so nobody confuses it with something else. That last rule alone has probably cost the executive coaching industry a hundred million dollars. The same structure hides underneath money. The rich aren't smarter, they're just holding equations nobody handed the rest of us. Compound growth, present value, the geometric mean, three formulas on a napkin that quietly decide almost every financial outcome before a person is born. Nobody needs a finance degree to know a "20% average return" often hides a duller number underneath. You just need the formula, once, the same way Winston needed his skis and his K. The napkin is free. The willingness to actually use it is the entire edge.

Lumen @lumenxbt

a week ago

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"I did a lot of math, I made a lot of money, and I gave almost all of it away." That's how Jim Simons summed up his entire life, in one sentence, at the end of a talk. Buried inside that sentence is a quiet disaster nobody would guess. Simons once published a theorem, only to watch two mathematicians, one named Bombieri, prove years later that his own supposed counterexample was real, killing the result. He built the Chern-Simons invariant the same way, purely for its own beauty, with zero interest in physics. "You never know where something will go," he said, "you think you're doing math, and you're actually doing physics." Today, four physics papers a day still cite it. This is oddly the same discipline underneath every casino floor and trading desk on earth. Nobody wins by predicting one outcome correctly. The house wins with a small edge repeated so many times that the Law of Large Numbers turns a whisper into certainty nobody can escape. Simons found that same structure decades later in the market, an edge barely half a percent per trade, right only 50.75 percent of the time. Barely better than a coin flip, applied with the same disciplined repetition that once let a failed proof quietly wait years to become something else entirely. The real thread through his whole life is patience with not knowing. He never chased the payoff directly. He built the structure and let repetition do what a single brilliant guess never could.

Voltex @VoltexGar

3 weeks ago

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@isssa0x this is such a massive vibe shift for tech culture

@furiokao this is such a cold way to frame decision making