A Quick Update — 2

Reclaimed Hops 7

There are a couple major breakpoints in any burgeoning yuppie’s career. The first is deciding what to do with your first real bonus — my advice is always to buy a pair of top-tier dress shoes (Allen Edmonds should be fine, don’t get “big name” designer), some bespoke clothing (though nobody wears suits anymore), and a nice watch that shows you have some taste, but stay in your lane (e.g. no bling.)

(For further self help advice, you can refer to The Ven Commandments.)

The second breakpoint is when you realize that summer is a verb, and it doesn’t apply to you just yet. You hear about the Hamptons, Maine, Montpellier, and Monaco, but you don’t know what the big deal is about them. Instead, you share memes with your friends that totally indicate that you do know what’s up, to the soundtrack of that god awful Guy in Finance Like a G6 remix, as you wait for somebody to take you to “what’s totally the next Zero Bond” so you can post “IYKYK” on your Instagram story.

Next, you’ll eventually learn that the Hamptons suck and that it’s flat-out impossible to get any work done in the summer. It’s slow, markets don’t move, and everyone senior is on vacation, but you’ll be thankful you’re no longer responsible for coordinating intern season. Even in an election year, it’s mostly forced drama driving the news cycles, like when the Jersey Shore producer threw ice at Snooki and made it look like it was an organic fight. You’ll long for the Labor Day weekend where everyone returns to chug Honey Deuces and normal life resumes.

On the topic of elections, as I’m wont to say, I consider them binary options. The delta sensitivity to an event this far out is not meaningful. “Polls predict other polls” is my mantra, and I disregard them up until roughly where theta decay ramps up for an option (~2-3 weeks out.)

I don’t think prediction markets are useful either. In a purely uncertain market, the price of an outcome is simply the equal division of the sample space. Nobody has any true inside information in this situation, and there isn't one D decision maker with significant weight to overrule Biden, so odds will converge to somewhere around 1-(trump odds)/2, accounting for Biden’s incapacitation/death probability.

Once you’ve finally made it, or totally burned out, the break-point is hedging your portfolio to the downside and being gone all summer (as yours truly has been for a while now — take your pick as to which category I fall into), whether it’s weddings (truly the actual pandemic — all my coördinated vacations have just been weddings for the past couple years) or escaping abroad.

(On that note: Japan travel guide will come out soon. For the previous edition, feel free to peruse my Taipei travel post.)

Since I’m coming up on 150 posts and quite a lot of subscribers, I figured I’d write a quick email outlining what I plan on doing in the future with regards to content:

First, I plan to set up a native site. Partly to get around throttling of substack links on Twitter, but there are so many posts and so many nested references in my writing over the years that I want to categorize and anthologize it better so new readers can catch up to speed on the various concepts I’ve developed and highlighted over the years.

Second, I plan to create a couple of sub-sites: I have some burgeoning side interests in the lifestyle space, and spend a fair bit of time curating things. I’d like to keep that separated it out from the “main” heady content, and obviously it would be opt-in. More on this later.

Third, I think there is enough readership such that a Discord/Slack server would be of some interest. I know a lot of my early readers came from talking to me on Discord, but between email, Twitter, and other private channels, the conversation I use to generate ideas seems needlessly dispersed across too many mediums. If this would be of interest to anyone I don’t already talk to, I’d love to hear it — it’s also much easier for me to respond quickly. And frankly, without the constant conversation, I wouldn’t have anything to write about nor would I get any good feedback, so it’s a huge value add for me as well.

Fourth, just for my own records, I’m probably going to edit and anthologize the standalone essays I’ve written and coagulate some of the thematic post series and create a hard copy of a Malt Liquidity anthology. If there’s any interest in this beyond my personal friends, I’d love to send copies your way at-cost of production/shipping. I doubt it’ll be over $15-20, and I promise it’ll include plenty of content.

All this will happen in the next couple months or so, and I will keep writing on here in the meanwhile. I have a couple of essays on the future of open source and prediction markets in the pipeline, so if there’s anything I’d find worthwhile to read that already exists on those topics, please send them to me.

Thanks again for reading! I look forward to finally putting this all together and sharing it.