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29 Mar, 6 tweets, 1 min read
Random story that came up today while hanging out with in-laws.

One of my HS summers I operated rides at Keansburg Amusement Park in NJ. There was a steel coaster with no loops called the Wildcat.

I used to ride it standing up, leaning forward Titanic style, no safety bar.
The other degens working there and I felt comfortable doing it bc we watched the mechanic grease the track every night by crouching his 300 lb body down on the rear bumper with one hand inches from track and the other hanging on.
Today, I get car sick, hate heights have been in 2 crazy car accidents in my life. One of them should have killed everyone in the car and the other had me see and touch a large portion of my shinbone.

I've had 4 concussions (family claims it was 5).

Today...
I am pretty risk averse. A bit helicoptery, get car sick, fear heights, hypochondriac.

I can't believe I'm the same human. I don't know if its path dependence or age.

I have 2 sons so I will re-live idiocy up close.

Life's f'n weird. Glad to be here.
(ps that summer in Keansburg was bizarro. It's a total degen park. People doing smack in the parking lot, fights constantly. Yet, I remember Whitney and Bobbi coming. And I put maury and connie's kids on a children's ride.

I also have stories that go to the grave w me)
And I just remembered it was the summer I saw Dazed and Confused for the first time. Went over to a "colleagues" house where he had a VHS

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More from @KrisAbdelmessih

Kris Profile picture
29 Mar
Cousins get togethers always come with math puzzles to work on. The last 2 days we used questions from the 2nd Graders Berkeley Math Circle curriculum.

With the ages 4-11 we emphasize kids working independently on the problems at first...
The kids who get the answers first show their work to an adult separately and "present the solution" requiring them to explain themselves well. Once all the kids are done or give up, the "right" kids need to guide the others until they can explain it to an adult themselves.
The puzzles we did this am

1. You have 4 coins but one of them is fake and weighs more or less than the others. You have 2 weighings on a balance scale.

Find the fake.
Read 6 tweets
Kris Profile picture
26 Mar
Anecdote...a friend of mine here in the states (but born in Egypt) went back to Egypt and started a trading shop. He is a good dude and really wanted to teach a group of Egyptians to trade. The "fatalism" work ethic eventually caused him to abandon ship after 2 years.
He described constant no-shows, excuses, and frankly people had a hard time connecting the dots to why making money was worthwhile. No sense of urgency.

Nick's use of "fatalism" captured the essence of what my friend reported to me.

I don't see this quality in Egyptians here
I'm not on top of Egyptian politics and I've only been there once. Arabic was my first language (though i lost it by the time I started school. Can understand household arabic and Spanglish it when I speak) and I was surrounded by Egyptians in Brooklyn and NJ growing up.
Read 11 tweets
Kris Profile picture
17 Mar
5 years ago...

Flew into NYC for a 36 hour trip.

I was hopping around the city meeting with bank deriv sales desks. Routine relationship maintenance.

(late to every meeting since I planned poorly and you can't cross 5th ave during St Patty's parade)

Anyway...
That evening I was at dinner as a client. As I went to the bathroom I checked my phone and my family chat was blowing up.

My sister just had a baby.

I hadn't told my east coast fam I was in NYC bc it was a quick biz trip.
I called my mom in NJ and stunned her with the knowledge that I was an hour away in NYC.

Anyway, I excused myself from dinner, hopped on a bus to my childhood house in Hazlet, borrowed my mom's car and drove down to Jersey Shore Medical Center.

It was close to midnight
Read 5 tweets
Kris Profile picture
8 Mar
We are watching people put a price on their reputations in realtime.

Their bet is they will make so much money they won't need them.
Here's the thing. I've seen this many times. And it will probably work and be fine.

But as I'm struggling to teach my 7 yr old these days, it's what you do when nobody is looking. Fear of repercussions is the lowest bar.
This also implies you should not worry if people get what is coming to them. That can be the thought of someone who abstains bc they fear repercussions themselves.

It will sap your energy to concern yourself. Just protect yourself and others who you can protect.
Read 5 tweets
Kris Profile picture
3 Mar
An example of thinking about wanting to be long options where the stock ain't going.

In my PA I might consider stock replacement. Not ITM calls though. OTM calls.

Why?

The first thing most might think is "steep upside slope"

That's not exactly what I'm thinking.
US large cap is expensive by every measure. Fine. Well Meb Faber said Japan went to 90 p/e. The market could 2 to 3x from here on flat earnings. Falling behind on that would suck. Not acceptable. Wealth effect would mean I could never afford a house in that world.

Still...
That's not really the driver of the trade expression. It's that given the valuation I'm ok missing a 10% rally say but if the market rolls over there's my actual win condition.

Not being overly exposed to the sell-off (I know stonks only go up)
Read 8 tweets
Kris Profile picture
3 Mar
A thread about directional edge vs carry based on a convo I had with a younger trader.

His strategy was to sell options when IV was in the 100th percentile. What are some problems with this?
The most obvious is that 100th percentile depends on your lookback window and the relevance of that window is I don't know, arbitrary. The historical distribution of IV does not need to have any relevance with respect to qualitative information you have today. (Umm, GME).
Here's another issue.

Any day when vol goes up after a 100th percentile IV day is just another 100th percentile IV day.

The next day given, that you just hit 100th percentile yesterday, just doesn't care that yesterday was a "top" compared to the days that preceded it.
Read 16 tweets

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