How to improve trading strategies from first principles--

Many traders ask the wrong questions. They obsess over technical indicators and parameter optimization while missing the fundamental principles that determine success or failure. A more powerful approach starts with understanding why a strategy works in the first place. Let's use momentum trading as a case study to demonstrate how asking deeper questions leads to better strategy development.

The fight to control AI is a losing battle. What if the most robust solution isn't “containment”, but convergence?

Nature's own playbook shows us that human-AI merger into a new species may just be our destiny.

Here's why 👇 1. The AI alignment debate today revolves around control and containment. We obsess over how to keep AI systems constrained—embedding human values, creating foolproof "off switches", etc.

The implicit assumption is that we must maintain complete control over AI development. Every major AI lab now has an "alignment team." Venture funds pour into startups promising to make AI "safe."

Your investing strategy has a much higher Sortino ratio than Sharpe ratio, e.g. a Sharpe of 2 and a Sortino of 10. It's a common pattern in breakout/momentum strategies. What does it tell you?

Here are 4 key things to know: 1. Your gains are driven by positive skew. That means frequent small losses and fewer but larger wins, as tend to be the case with many momentum and trend following methods.

Web3 needs good regulation to save it from itself.

What good regulation looks like: 1/ I'm passionate about having good regulations in web3. The industry is too important not to.

On a macro level, web3 has potential to help the world solve its income distribution problem exacerbated by AI:

What would it take for crypto to have a new bull market?

The real answer nobody's talking about: 1/ When confronted w/ the "wen bull market" question, the most common answer you hear from crypto investors is "Once Fed starts printing again..."

Give me a freaking break!

How crypto market has changed in 2023-- 5 lessons from recent bull run: 1/ A closer look at the January mini bull run and what you can learn from it as an investor/speculator—

Crypto macro outlook 2023 + 3 investment ideas 👇 1/ In this episode of Tascha Labs podcast I talk about:

1. Macro big picture for this year

2. Crypto market outlook

3. Three investment perspectives

The #1 tokenomic mistake of web3 platforms (w/ 3 hidden costs not obvious on day 1) 1/ B/f we talk abt this mistake many web3 platforms are making, I’m assuming the goal of the platform is to:

1) expedite growth & distribution— to get to critical mass / network effect faster & distribute values to users & contributors

This episode of Tascha Labs podcast covers:

1. A valuation framework to assess blockchain platforms.

2. Impact of token supply on price.

Episode Notes: 1. A valuation framework to assess blockchain platforms

00:57 - What will determine the price of a blockchain native token?

Three main factors:

1. Adoption & usage of the blockchain.

The most overvalued & undervalued blockchain platforms right now: 1/ At any point in time you can think of a blockchain platform’s valuation as determined by 3 things:

1- adoption & usage

2- platform moat

3- crypto mkt condition

Does token supply affect price? If so, by how much?

Here’s result from 1k largest tokens over past 3 yrs.

The data may surprise you 👇 1/ As you may suspect, simple answer to 1st question is yes.

Supply grows—> price drops, other things equal.

Simple answer to 2nd question is: about half of the supply growth rate.

How you develop mkt intuition is just like how you train AI model:

1. Find cases of historical mkt moves (your training data)

2. Define mkt parameters, eg. duration, magnitude, frequency of move (your feature vector)

3. Review cases focusing on your parameters (train model) Review 500 cases like this, you'll have decent market feel.

Review 5k, you'll be semi market psychic.

Review 10k, you'll be pure magic.

Just like training ML models, the more training data you feed your brain, the better your "intuition" gets. And one day it'll seem magical.

Despite bear market, web3 adoption is actually growing.

But growth is not evenly distributed.

A review of adoption status of major blockchains + 3 related investment ideas to help you position for next cycle 👇 1. Total crypto mkt cap is down 70% from a yr ago. Though dramatic, the same mkt ran up over 1000% in 2020-21. Excess opportunism had to go at some point for industry to move forward.

How to survive a dark time

Emergency tactics for those that need it urgently right now: 1. Treat it like a project

Picking yourself up from the floor is a serious endeavor. Treat it like one & commit your best.

Like it or not, FTX was a major innovation infrastructure in web3.

They're a big part of 'financial plumbing system' in crypto economy, channeling 'deposits' into 'investments'.

Alameda/FTX held $5.5 bn in VC investments-- that's 15%+ of total VC funding in blockchain in 2021. They made large investments in web3 ecosystem via their own venture funds & invested in over 40 other funds.

W/ that infrastructure gone-- not to mention contagion to other funds which lost money from FTX fiasco-- financing for new projects will be hurt for a while.

“Don’t time the market” is bad advice from people who didn’t get the memo.

If you understand mkt timing, things like FTX/Binance drama wouldn't stress you even if you aren't an insider.

The unfairly simple, drama-free way to time the crypto market, IQ optional 👇 Below I’ll discuss 3 metrics of crypto mkt timing. All are extremely easy. None require PhD in finance or crystal ball abt Fed’s next move.

They’re based on the concept of ‘market breadth’— possibly most under-rated investing concept on earth.

Sports fan token prices went up 85% in past 3 mos while crypto mkt went down >10%.

Are fan tokens a new ponzi or a new paradigm?

How web 3.0 may disrupt the $500 billion sports industry… or not 👇 How sports industry makes money today

Sports is big biz. NFL (National Football League of the US) alone made $17 billion in 2021.

Crypto is more affected by US monetary policy than even US stocks.

Why & what it means for your portfolio: Estimates show crypto prices have become more sensitive to US monetary contraction than stocks over past cycle, i.e. when Fed tightens it hurts crypto (a lot) more than equities.

Seeing many NFT "membership" use cases that don't make sense.

If you need token to identify a group of users, using NFT is better only if you need to identify users on more than 1 feature dimension. Otherwise using fungible tokens is better.

Example: Say, you want to create a "tiered membership" w/ silver, gold, platinum tiers. That's just 1 feature dimension that can be perfectly represented by a single numerical value. E.g. users who hold < 5 XYZ tokens in their wallet = silver. 5 - 10 tokens = gold. > 10 tokens = platinum

This real-world business is growing 80% a year w/ a most downloaded mobile app & 100 million users.

Their secret? Tokenization.

7 lessons web3 projects can learn from them on how to use tokens to drive growth without being a ponzi: Sweatcoin sweateconomy.com started in 2016 w/ a simple idea of motivating people to exercise by earning tokens from tracked steps. Earned sweatcoins can then be used to spend or get discounts on real-life goods & services.

Today’s problems of web3 are tomorrow’s investment opportunities.

Look for projects that work to solve these 8 big problems of the industry: Adoption of new tech doesn’t progress linearly. It moves in staircases: