A thread on trading reminders for myself:

1/ Get data faster than your competitors, analyze it more thoroughly, and track its performance more rigorously. If you find profitable lagged data (deficit/ electricity), find a way to get it real time. Then defend your moat.

2/ You're playing a zero sum game. Take the gloves off.

Someone steals your strategy, email it to 5 academics.

Tweet it (see above Tweet). Burn the boats.

3/ The guy who wrote Market Wizards wrote 5 more because it didn't teach him to make $ trading.

Stop trading someone else's book in 1987.

4/ Never, ever fully outsource your execution.

If your execution doesn't contain IP you're not trying hard enough.

5/ Find a data vendor you like. Offer them a sizable sum to buy their API query data - broken out by customer. "How many times did Point72 query Zynga's mobile app usage today?"

Or you can take my word for it: the only data with edge is first party data.

6/ Stop doubting directional trading because other people are bad at it.

All the people who are good at market timing have been working in tech since 2011.

7/ Spend 1 hour a day on improving your transaction costs like your heart health depended on it.

To be honest, it probably does.

8/ Don't trade companies where your friends work.

But friends at private companies can give you necessary industry and product color.

9/ Every 8 hour session is a new game.

What is the gap risk?

What is the trend and/or narrative?

What are the key events? Do I have views on them?

10/ If you don't have a view don't have a f*cking exposure.

11/ There's no publicly traded company with a tech multiple that makes its money on proprietary trading. Why? IP. Lack of defensibility given regulation, and resulting valuation.

How to change that is the only interesting question for your career

12/ A quant is just a qualitative trader who can code, use stats, and think well but is using a moving average or his investors to stop himself out.

All quant strategies are synthetic assets. Are you long, short or neutral? Why?

13/ The present environment is a historical moment everyone is desperate to compare to some point in the past.

Do not let history distract from deep and exhaustive study of the present and its specific nuances.

14/ Meticulously track pnl that came from backtested processes and subjective judgment.

PNL by strategy, by day, by alpha origin. Weekly reviews. What worked? What didn't?

15/ Track your allocation decisions between strategy.

You went all in on market making in meme stocks when your big picture macro views made 5x as much. Why'd you make that call, why was it wrong, could you have made a better decision?

16/ Bitcoin at $40k, and Gold near $2k are saying the government is coming for your money.

Domicile and org structure is the ultimate long term transaction cost optimization problem.

What's your plan?

17/ If you haven't read 2 transcripts by 11 AM maybe it's a good day to intermittent fast.

If you get behind don't stay there

18/ The instinct is to have the max on when you're down and to trim when you're up

To truly win you need to do the opposite

Have you architected your process so that it facilitates that, from strategy creation to tracking?

19/ Great traders are more likely to read Gibbons, Durant, Popper and own vintage maps than they are to read trading books

20/ The best way to know you're doing it right is you snap awake 2 minutes before your alarm, chug the coffee and kick into gear. No brakes.

What do you need to do to get there?