Malta Liquidity

Money is the anthem of success

Greetings from Malta, a country that quite frankly I forgot existed prior to Monday!

Did I fly across the Atlantic to make this shitty pun?…Possibly, making this the most expensive blog post I’ve ever written.

For someone who has traveled as much as I have, it’s kind of surprising to people when they hear me say that I don’t particularly enjoy it. I very much understand the Kantian rationale of not traveling outside of your hometown, because traveling is mostly about making sustenance entertaining under the guise of understanding and experiencing another culture. For most people, this is a convenient fiction — did you really live in Florence, or did you take watercolor painting credits while “studying” abroad? — while others imagine themselves in sort of a Bourdainian vein when their ability to traverse off the beaten path is severely limited, understandably so given that most of us would rather not traverse around Bahrain without a filming crew.

To the untrained eye, my entire day appears to consist of posting on X, writing blog posts, parsing links, chatting manically (which I allude to quite frequently), not sleeping, and occasionally clicking the red and green buttons. And, in large part, when I’m not socializing, that is pretty much my entire day and night. I can’t exactly describe what trading for a living is in a more formal setting, but having railbirded around enough institutional types, my lifestyle is pretty much their job taken to the extreme conclusion.

It’s important to understand the concept of “the algorithm” that I introduced last post:

There is an algorithm that ebbs and flows around the American workday that controls what everyone who logs on to some form of media or another will see within 4 hours to 6 days. Depending on the form of media, the frequency with which you see things will imply different things about the signal and actionability of what is being pushed. How well you have curated your mediums of choice alters how you take advantage of it — if you understand X very well, you have a head start on doing things, while if you understand how things break containment into regular news, you have a far greater ability to sit on your hands and operate on a “nothing ever happens” wavelength, as so frequently happens. As Deepseek so beautifully put it, the velocity of the flow is dependent on the collective inability of society to stop checking their phones.

This algorithm is not something that’s just coded up — it’s metaphysical, the collective machinations of everyone involved in the post/scroll/share/react timeline. As such, my day consists of processing and synthesizing the algorithm as much as I can while junking the obviously manipulated or useless parts of it, and sharing the funny parts.

Everything can be part of this training data. I listened to a ton of Taylor Swift in 2023 and 2024 because if you understood Swifties, you understood the general ebb and flow of the consumer economy (as most dollars are spent by women, roughly pareto.)

To understand the 2025 market, it’s important to figure out that this meme from 2019 is pretty much a circle at this point rather than a Venn (heh) diagram:

This method of processing markets is a) completely bonkers, which is why I’ve never managed to automate my trading style no matter how extensively I’ve worked with gigaquants b) is extremely mentally taxing. It’s why the most frustrating question I have heard over the years is “what stock do I buy”, because there’s no way to explain the insane general knowledge corpus I have and the “zen” training I’ve had to instill in myself to figure out how to play the market. to the point where I’ve written over 200 blog posts over the past few years such that I can answer with a simple “google Malt Liquidity”. (Indeed, when I made the “google Malta Liquidity” joke regarding this trip, someone actually did and found that there are in fact articles discussing Malta’s liquidity.)

This is how I arrived at the concept of “vacation” while not having taken a paycheck since 2018. It’s not that I look to “unplug” — which I would consider my “retirement”, but more on this shortly — but rather that, as an outward extrovert who literally can’t turn down a single invitation to hang out, I need a break from the real-time process that other people experience so that I can think deeply. Pure, unconstrained thinking time is the most valuable thing in the world to me — I still reminisce about my chess days and the unadulterated, no-stakes flow state of an interesting position in a classical time control, which is perhaps the most addicting drug I’ve ever tried in my life.

Thus, “vacation” is the result of the process that acquired that time to think and the location at which I planned to do it in. Location is critical here — if you are in the same time zone as a majority of your network, frankly, you won’t get much peace unless it’s the middle of the night. Enter the time zone — this clip consistently gets memed, but it is actually how I think. 24 hours is not one day!

Let’s map this out in my current time zone. I usually get up around 5 AM, so by the time I’ve done some morning reading and eaten breakfast, it’s about 9. From here, I can go take in some sun, sit by the water and think, and take a couple hours to walk around by the time markets open at 3:30 PM. Most trading days aren’t that eventful, so I can “work” at my own pace or take a nap during the slower parts of the day. By the time the US markets close, it’s around 10 PM, so if I’m closed out, because it’s Europe and things just operate on a more relaxed pace, I can step out for a nice dinner and a bottle of wine before I sleep. By simply removing the “physical” social reflex, I get about twice as much done in a day as I would stateside.

Of course, you can’t live in a perpetual state of vacation, because otherwise it would just be called retirement, passport-bro’ing, DINKing, take your pick. There needs to be a clear reason why you need this flavour of enabling your thinking, just like there needs to be a reason why you quit your job or drop out of school beyond “Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg” did it. The time acquired has to have some value, because time costs money. This is the quintessential, dynamic trade of life: money buys you time, so you have to make money to afford it. If you never realize that gain, then you buy your kids time. Debt is a mental handcuff for this precise reason: being debt-free is as close to freedom as it gets, as it enables mobility and the ability to spend your liquid currency on what you want to do. It should become clear why usury was forbidden in certain religions: people will do anything to pay off a debt if you dangle the carrot of “freedom” at the end of the zeroed out balance that never comes. It also happens to be the trade I understand intuitively probably better than anyone else, as evidenced by my long-running affair with zero-day options. That’s why I refuse to describe myself as a trader (especially post-2020, where it sounds like you’re a techbro with a Robinhood account) or a writer — what I do is some weird strain of applying the concept of “finance” as I interpret it to everything around me, and if I focus my attention on a particular part of the algorithm at the right time, money appears as a result.

In no small part, my abilities elevated significantly as the internet defined more and more of the algorithm. There is a specific strain of neurodivergence that has been enabled to thrive specifically due to the internet — think Gwern, Asmongold, xQc — which I’d describe as some blend of ADHD and autism. It’s not chance that the people who become big on the internet do so — this same variant of generalist thinking and pattern recognition allows them to “hack” the algorithm over and over again so their work persists. They can’t do anything else — even when the attention paid to them dissipates, they will still probably do the same writing/streaming/gaming thing because what else can you do?

I find myself in the same boat. I don’t think I would have been able to function in the pre-internet world — the oddity containment zone of academia doesn’t work for generalists like me, as it’s oriented towards hyperspecialists. (Infamous in Ven-lore is my dad telling me on my 14th birthday to not do a Ph.D, as I wouldn’t be capable of finishing it. One of the best bits of advice I’ve ever gotten, even though most people are horrified when they hear that bit, and shockingly prescient, as I dropped out of grad school.) As it so happens, this strain of consistently seeking for new mental stimulation becomes more and more powerful as normal people’s attention spans near their theoretical minima. While I (logically) worry about how this will warp society, it’s also kind of exhilarating to see my “work” become more and more prescient and relevant (and profitable!).

Post-2020, I have found myself seeking “vacation” more and more, because I am so locked in to this algorithm and it only keeps reinforcing, and I reached a point where I borderline couldn’t function in a normal capacity. My runtime was too high, and I couldn’t stop and smell the roses at all (or unpack my various suitcases, which have sat in my closet for months at this point.)

If you’ve read my intermittent ramblings on psychiatry, it’s very clear that I have an anti-medication, theory-of-mind approach to dealing with (non-traumatic) mental issues. In particular, I am a heavy proponent of the theory that antidepressants and ADHD medication are heavily overprescribed, as someone who wasn’t allowed to be medicated for ADHD as a kid and thus had to reorient my entire mannerism of working to account for that (more to come on this later.) So it’s quite surprising that, recently, I decided to take ADHD medication for the first time in my life. When society is collectively reaching the point where only a select few people can keep up with the torrid downpour of information stimulation, I truly needed some time to gather the complex jumble of thoughts and ask WWJ(ohn von Neumann)D?

To my surprise (I obviously don’t need stimulants), I found that medicating myself in this manner didn’t dampen my thoughts, but in fact elevated my thinking to such a high level of clarity that I spooked myself when I focused on what came across my desktop. As such, for the sake of the yet-unscared hoes around me, I figured that a last minute flight to buy some time was the best use of my resources instead of p(doom)ing all over the place. And, two days in, I feel like I’ve gotten good use of this time already.

Earlier, I mentioned the concept of “retirement”, which I largely don’t believe exists as it’s sold. This entire blog is a never ending rant against passive investing, and I generally consider “set and forget”, “target date funds”, and the literal gating of 401ks to be part of an elaborate scheme to make sure people do not panic sell their stocks all at once and consume more liquidity than exists. Retirement, as a result, is simply a state of mind where you are not prioritizing forward earnings — however and whenever you reach this point is up to you. The people who bought the conventional definition and “retired early” — hanging out at a country club golfing 5 days a week after cashing out of their company, for example, which is a surprisingly frequent stereotype I’ve encountered — are generally some of the most dissatisfied people I’ve talked to, like an athlete who was forced to hang it up early. The “hook” that you won’t have enough money to live on is so powerful that it turns most people into the type of video game player who saves the best resources for the bosses then never uses them, when the price of contentment hasn’t really changed. I don’t fear lose money trading because I can always go work odd jobs by a beach, shack up with some friends, smoke some pot, and surf, as the happiest people I’ve seen in California do year-round. The price of ambition and status, of course, has exponentiated — just take a gander at how much a year at Rice costs nowadays.

It’s interesting to find myself at a point where the “tourist tax” doesn’t matter to me. I like sitting in the nice hotel, being upsold, paying above-median price for the convenience of being able to walk to the restaurant and get a table with a view. I truly never thought I’d reach that point, being such an obsessive about not getting the worse end of a transaction (though I’d never barter, I have my attorney do that for me.) Concurrently, the manic urge to converse and explore has mostly dissipated by now. There’s only so many “meaningful conversations” you can have with strangers, and I’ve had my allotment of broken-English, google-translate oriented transactions. I truly enjoy vacationing alone nowadays, left alone with my thoughts — at this point, I think retirement is being content with not utilizing my time and enjoying the scenes. The ideal life might just be sitting in the Barcelona sunshine with a bottle of orange, some boquerones, and some bread, which I have done, but not enjoyed yet. At some point, I’d like to get there.

The subheading, of course, is from National Anthem by Lana del Rey, whom the internet right has an interesting relationship with.

In it, there’s a lyric:

Money is the reason we exist
Everybody knows it, it's a fact (kiss, kiss)

I’m more certain than ever that this probably won’t be true in the fiat sense on a faster timeline than I thought, but

Money is the reason we exist
So put on mascara and your party dress

maybe I’ll make it back to Barcelona before then.

Alright, it’s once again time for breakfast.