Left foot. Right foot. Intelligent sounding quote goes here.
Joined May 2012
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breakeven retweeted
I don't post here as much as I used to, but I want to leave you with this fantastic analogy. This goes for trading or running a business or life in general. In my experience, this is true.
Just watch... #truth
breakeven retweeted
1/ The Binance hack is massive, but the actual market impact could be very different from the headline numbers.
With much of the stolen stablecoins already frozen, the bigger question is which altcoins the hacker can still dump.
I went through the hacker's wallet and compared the holdings against trading volume and market cap. 🧵
breakeven retweeted
Lord, give me coffee to change the things I can, and alcohol to accept those I cannot.
breakeven retweeted
When choosing a new habit many people seem to ask themselves, "What can I do on my best days?"
The trick is to ask, "What can I stick to even on my worst days?"
Start small. Master the art of showing up. Scale up when you have the time, energy, and interest.
breakeven retweeted
Stanley Druckenmiller renders an unfavorable opinion of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's use of buybacks to defend against higher yields in a market that is functioning normally.
"I have spent five decades trading on a simple premise: Markets aggregate information no committee possesses, and prices are how that information reaches decision makers. The long-term Treasury yield is the most important price in the world. It is also the only fiscal disciplinarian the U.S. has left."
"Every basis point of artificial yield suppression is a subsidy to procrastination."
"Return buybacks to their stated purpose: small, scheduled, off-the-run liquidity operations announced at quarterly refundings, never off-cycle responses to yield levels. Term out the debt honestly and pay the price the market sets."
"If the 30-year must trade at 5.5% to clear, that isn’t a crisis. It is an invoice. Then do the only thing that durably lowers long-term yields: address the primary deficit."
wsj.com/opinion/let-the-bond…
breakeven retweeted
The most interesting thing about writing as a human being is that, if you are very lucky, every once in a while you can wander your way so far out on a limb that you actually learn something new yourself from the change in perspective.
breakeven retweeted
This is Les Schwab. One of Charlie Munger's favorite founders. Les's autobiography was one of Charlie Munger's favorite books. If you read Les's book you'd love him too.
A few lines from his autobiography that gives you a sense of the man:
1. I did write this book 100% with my 40 year old typewriter. I didn’t have a ghost writer. I wanted it in my own words.
2. I hope to pass on some of my theories of business to our people. Should we fail to follow these policies toward customers and employees, I would prefer that my name be taken off the business.
3. I encourage you to share profits with your employees. I encourage you in every way possible to “Build People.”
4. If you make people under you successful, what happens to you? Aren’t you also then successful?
5. What nicer thing can you do with your life than to help young people build their lives into successful people? (Read that one again)
6. My school was just a railroad boxcar with a crooked window cut in one side of the boxcar. There were three of us in 8th grade. We all failed.
7. One of my biggest fears was that my father would come to school on Friday drunk. He was found dead in front of a moonshine joint.
8. I was proud; poor, but I had a lot of pride.
9. I was sometimes cocky; but this same cockiness helped me a lot in going through life. (Belief comes before ability)
10. I thought the tire business had a future. I had never fixed a flat tire in my life.
11. It was hard, knuckle busting, dirty work.
12. Never take advantage of a customer, never take advantage of an employee.
13. We share 50% of our profits with all the employees in the store. Each store operates as a separate entity and each store operates as a separate business.
14. It is hard to comprehend today why big companies treat their employees the way they do.
15. Greed destroys.
16. Some people in the office sometimes think they are more important than the stores. The office serves only one purpose, and that is to serve the stores. Some of our office people sometimes wonder about this. But I’ve warned them, don’t bitch to me because that is the way I want it. If you want to go out and start at the bottom changing tires and work into a manager job, then hop right to it. If it weren’t for those men in the stores working their butts off in all kinds of weather, missing meals, God awful hours, etc. you wouldn’t even have a job.
17. Life is hard for the man who thinks he can take a short cut.
18. You end up being a second father to hundreds of other men and women. Last night I attended a wedding of a young man from our office. This young man told me that two men had influenced his life, his father and me. That’s worth more than money.
19. We are different from most American corporations, as we think the most important people in the company are the people on the firing line; the ones who sell, do the service work and take care of the customer. Most American corporations have the fat salaries for the top people and treat the people at the end of the line as peons. I guess that is why, if you are on the ball, you can beat them on any type of fair competitive basis.
20. Whatever you do, you must do it with gusto, you must do it in volume. It is a case of repeat, repeat, repeat.
21. Let the people at the store level and your manager know you are behind them. They are the ones who make you successful, not the person in a nice office who has nothing to do today but to send out another damn directive. If it doesn't help the store, tear it up and tell the store to tell the office to go to hell.
22. Stay out of a store for 30 days and you've forgotten 50 percent of what you know.
23. I am 68 years old now. And I've run it in overdrive my whole life. I've always wanted to be the best tire dealer, not necessarily the largest tire dealer.
24. Every single one of our more than 250 managers and assistant managers started at the bottom changing tires. They have all earned their management jobs by working up.
25. A company starts, it grows, and as it grows, more and more of the decision making moves to the main office. And this is one hell of a big mistake. The decision making should always be made at the lowest possible level. Give your manager the authority to make his own daily decisions, under certain guidelines of course, but let him run his show.
26. If we rely on last year's results then this company will start down the hill. And once you start down, it is mighty hard to turn around. If we become complacent, brother it's all over with.
The book is hard to find. It's currently for sale on Amazon for $267. But you can learn from Les and his remarkable life and career— right now —by listening to episode 330.
breakeven retweeted
I just got back from an incredible few days at @TheTieIO Out East Summit on the beautiful North Fork of Long Island, which @LMAX was proud to sponsor.
Without exaggeration, it was the best conference I've ever attended.
It wasn't just the quality of the speakers or how flawlessly the event was run. It was the quality of the people in the room. Builders, founders, investors, institutions and infrastructure providers—all deeply knowledgeable, incredibly collaborative, and genuinely focused on solving meaningful problems and pushing this industry forward.
You leave an event like that with something even more valuable than optimism—you leave with conviction.
In many ways, the experience reinforced something I've believed for quite some time.
There has been a growing narrative that the future of digital assets somehow hinges on passage of the CLARITY Act. I think that view has become overstated.
Don't get me wrong—regulatory clarity would be a significant positive. It would remove uncertainty, provide institutions with a clearer framework and almost certainly accelerate the next wave of adoption.
But the long-term trajectory of digital assets does not depend on a single piece of legislation.
This industry has spent more than a decade innovating, building and expanding without comprehensive US regulatory clarity. More importantly, the underlying value proposition has never been stronger.
We're talking about financial infrastructure that is faster, cheaper, more transparent, more liquid, globally accessible and available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
That's why I continue to believe regulatory clarity is a catalyst, not the foundation.
Whether it arrives through the CLARITY Act or another legislative path, the direction of travel appears increasingly clear. Regulation may accelerate adoption, but it is unlikely to determine the destination.
The market has also spent the past year flushing out excess and speculative froth. In my view, that reset has been healthy. Digital assets are increasingly demonstrating that they can stand on their own merits as a differentiated asset class while institutional infrastructure continues to mature.
Perhaps nowhere is that more evident than in the rapid growth of real-world asset tokenization. The migration of traditional financial assets on-chain is happening because the economics simply make sense.
After spending several days surrounded by many of the brightest minds in the industry, I have never been more encouraged about where this space is heading. If anything, the conversations I had only strengthened my long-term conviction that we're still in the early innings of a fundamental transformation in global finance.
A special thank you to @Joshua_Frank_ and the entire The Tie team for putting together such an exceptional event. In my view, they've set the benchmark for what an industry conference can be.
🤖 Made with AI
breakeven retweeted
S&P Global is paying attention to DeFi vaults.
Key takeaways from its latest primer:
• Vaults are becoming the on-chain equivalent of managed funds.
• They improve operational efficiency but introduce new risk considerations.
• While crypto-native today, they're poised to become *core infrastructure* for tokenized real-world assets and institutional capital.
breakeven retweeted
Any settlement should require his kids to spend many hours a day doom scrolling and posting his sites/apps
Meta says it's facing $1.4T in penalties in teen mental health case - a sum equal to tech giant's valuation trib.al/ErF1SrX
breakeven retweeted
For nearly 50 years the standard of care for joint sprains has included rest, ice, and ibuprofen not bc rigorous evidence showed that worked, but bc that made intuitive sense and seemed to help. Now there's good evidence those actually impede recovery.
Add it to a long list of medical reversals, whereby a practice that was once widely adopted is later shown to be ineffective or even harmful.
Promising theories, observational evidence, underpowered studies, and early experimentation can generate important hypotheses. But they do not eliminate the need for rigorous randomized trials, regardless of the financial or professional incentives to move faster.
Once ineffective or harmful care becomes embedded in standard practice, it is very difficult to overturn. There is a role for regulatory flexibility and clinical experimentation when patients have unmet medical needs. But neither eliminates the need for rigorous evidence to ensure that the medical system is actually helping patients.
breakeven retweeted
OUSD enters a $311B market where Tether (60%) and USDC (24%) hold ~84% of supply.
The three biggest single-issuer coins (USDT, USDC, PYUSD) stayed out. Nearly everyone else piled in, including Coinbase and BlackRock, USDC's own distributor and reserve manager.
Better tech never dented the Tether-Circle duopoly. Owning the rails might.
Can 140+ giants finally crack it?
breakeven retweeted
Outside of being a participant in this game, I’ve always been a student of it as well.
Growing up in the business, my first mentor was a gentleman who ran a firm that directly competed with the O’Connor guys long before my time. Both firms traded with similar philosophies, but O’Connor went on to become legendary in the derivatives world.
O’Connor became the breeding ground for some of the best volatility traders on the planet. Alumni from the firm eventually spun out and built powerhouse trading shops like Peak6, Wolverine, CTC, and many others. If you came out of O’Connor, there was a reputation attached to your name. You knew how to make money trading volatility.
The firm was built on old school derivatives prop pit culture. Extremely intelligent people, but even grittier competitors. Eddie O’Connor came from a tough background and attacked the pits with aggression, instinct, and an elite understanding of discretionary trading. The guy was savvy and knew how to wear risk. He printed money for years. But the firm evolved into something even more dangerous when he hired, seeded, and partnered with Michael Greenbaum to formally build O’Connor & Associates.
Greenbaum brought a deeply mathematical framework to the business and helped optimize volatility ideas into scalable models. It became the perfect marriage between pit instinct and quantitative rigor. That combination created a machine.
What made the culture special was the philosophy they drilled into traders. A philosophy that every great volatility business eventually arrives at: Make a little money consistently in normal markets by trading flow and pockets of edge, but absolutely blow the lights out whenever volatility goes into chaos.
Every risk taken sat within that framework. Greenbaum believed in “ALWAYS” maintaining long gamma exposure so the firm had the convexity to capitalize on outsized dislocations. That principle became deeply embedded into the DNA of the traders who came out of that ecosystem. It’s why so many alumni carried the same philosophy into the firms they later built themselves.
It’s no surprise O’Connor survived 1987 while many others were wiped out, despite carrying relative value exposure in parts of the book. It’s no surprise those Chicago volatility prop desks crushed environments like 2001, 2008, and 2020. They understood that the real money in this business is made during periods of disorder and panic.
Working under Rob, this same philosophy was hammered into my head from an early stage. That old school framework of volatility trading never left me, and it became foundational to the way I built my own firm. It is a principle I will never move away from.
Some of our investors and close trading relationships today are former O’Connor guys. There’s a natural synergy there because we think about volatility, convexity, and risk in very similar ways. In exchange for making them money, I get the privilege of listening to old war stories from eras of trading I wasn’t even alive to experience lol.
With all due respect, once UBS acquired the firm, it simply was not the same culture anymore. And in this business, culture matters. The edge is never just the model. It’s the mindset, the philosophy, the risk framework, and the people carrying it out.
I genuinely hope that in some small way, Ambrus can continue carrying a piece of that old lineage forward. The style, the culture, the obsession with convexity, and the mentality that defined those legendary volatility shops.
When people talk about the great firms in derivatives history, O’Connor often gets skipped over. Slowly it’s becoming a forgotten firm. But make no mistake, those were the guys who printed money for decades and ultimately sparked the creation of many of the volatility trading firms the street idolizes today. 🫡
breakeven retweeted
"China. Russia. India. If they align, the next global boom may not belong to the US."
Louis Vinent-Gave @gave_vincent (Co founder and CEO, @Gavekal) on the macro shift he believes markets are ignoring:
"If you live in the Western world today… AI is the macro trend that you hear about all day, every day."
"But there’s other potential macro trends out there."
"China and India seem to be committed to repairing their relationship."
"Russia produces the world’s cheapest commodities. China produces the cheapest capital goods. India has the world’s cheapest labor."
"You match cheap capital, cheap commodities, cheap labor — you have the making for a potential explosive boom."
"Today you buy the world MSCI, you’re essentially buying 70% United States."
"It’s not priced anywhere."
The question: If the next economic explosion is Eurasian, not American, who is actually positioned for it?
breakeven retweeted
Something caught my eye in the latest 13F filings.
The biggest new entrant into IBIT, from a brand new entity, is something called Laurore Ltd. No website. No press. No footprint. The only public information is that the filer's name is Zhang Hui and it's HK based.
Let's double click on that for a second.
Zhang Hui is the Chinese equivalent of John Smith. It's what I like to call it a "non-anonymous anonymous" name, something hiding in plain sight buried under the statistical weight of millions to make it untraceable. The "Ltd" suffix suggests a Cayman or BVI structure, the classic offshore wrapper for accessing US markets. And the portfolio? A single holding. Nothing but IBIT. This isn't a diversified fund. It's a $436 million Bitcoin access vehicle dressed in institutional clothing.
Why would you do this?
Because Chinese investors can't hold Bitcoin.
If this is what it looks like, it might be an early sign of institutional Chinese capital moving into Bitcoin, not through crypto exchanges or gray market channels, but through a BlackRock ETF, filed with the SEC in a regulated jurisdiction hiding in the most "transparent non-transparent" place imaginable.
Funny that the name Laurore likely derives from the French l'aurore: the dawn.
Smells like capital flight to me.
breakeven retweeted
A 20-year marathon for Chinese exports to the US, back to the starting line overnight.
Goldman Sachs warned last year that China’s share of U.S. imports could fall to 7.5% by 2025.
Now it’s 2026—and reality has confirmed it.
7.5% is where China was in 2001, the year it joined the WTO.
That means two decades of export dominance in the biggest and most profitable consumer market in the world—built factory by factory, port by port—have effectively been erased.
At the peak in 2017, China supplied over 21% of U.S. imports.
“Made in China” was everywhere: Walmart, Target, Amazon.
Then the world changed.
The U.S. pushed reshoring and friend-shoring.
Orders moved to Mexico, Vietnam, India.
Mexico is now America’s #1 import source for the first time in 100 years.
China's exports to the U.S. fell 17% in 2025.
Factories are idle. Jobs are disappearing.
Trust—the real currency of trade—is eroding.
De-China-ization is no longer a theory.
It’s happening.
