Originally, this was going to be a much longer, more technical post, but I’m having too much fun/eating too much in Budapest to think seriously today.
My dad caught the chess bug in 1972 along with the rest of the world, but never quite got the hang of the game himself. This did, however, lead him to teach me chess at the age of 4 from a dog-eared copy of Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess, and I wonder if I’m the strongest player to have this tome as the direct origin story of my skill. It’s not a particularly notable training book — rumor has it Fischer basically phoned it in for cash — but it has a near and dear place in my heart, and when I travel, I usually keep random documents in a hardcover Russian copy I found (because, apparently, a hardcover English one doesn’t exist.)
One thing you learn when you hit your late 20s, which I definitively am in nowadays, is that it’s not exactly cool to say you’re jobless. Sticking it to the man and avoiding big corporate is intoxicating when you’re under 26 (and to people under 26, for that matter), but increasingly my former five paragraph description/rant about interest rates regarding what I “do” doesn’t play as well, and it’s kind of the point where you have to let your past accomplishments go. I find myself in a particularly precarious position because, well, saying that you “trade full time” post-2020 has the same vibe as the people who called themselves a CEO of their own t-shirt company on LinkedIn pre-2020, made worse by the fact that a fair few people think “trading” means crypto. Truly, it’s a no-win situation.
That being said, things have been so pedal-to-the-metal (quite literally, as I bought my first fancy car in January) since the New Year that it’s prevented me from taking a victory lap, even though I am what I drink.
In fact, this restaurant is called “Chess”, 10/10 would recommend
For those who followed along on the various channels I post in (though I know it’s too far to keep up), after I returned to actively trading on August 1st after a couple years off, I didn’t miss on 57 straight stock trades. (The Venderin Oriental challenge ended up turning into a 0DTE options bonanza, which you can peruse here. Fun moments include trying to trade 0DTE TSLA calls while stuck in Bangkok traffic with service going in and out, and other shenanigans.) On top of that, I hit a thousand subscribers (in no small part due to promotion by other writers I enjoy on this platform, whom I’m really overdue to thank formally at this point), “solved” Liquidity Theory, and got pretty much everything about the 2024 election and its ripple effects correct well in advance. Truly, I don’t think I’ll ever have that good of a year ever again — things just happened to align perfectly for me to Notice, and with the current struggle for power and to control the narrative (more to come on this shortly) and how much the algorithm has converged, I truly feel that we’re about to enter the most interesting time to be alive since the Manhattan project.
Whenever my ego gets too far out of whack, I scroll through John von Neumann’s Wikipedia page, a hero of mine. I always wanted to spend my life doing pure math — living in the land of the abstract is too interesting for people like me — but with math, as with most deep theoretical fields and skills (chess, physics, lab science, etc.), if it’s not evidently clear that you’re in the top 100 in the world, the best you can hope for is contributing something meaningful to a small part of what those types are actually working on. That plus the fact that I’m basically dyslexic when it comes to working with equations pushed me off the PhD pathway (which I am thankful for, don’t get me wrong), means that I’ll always be brought down to size when I take a gander at the List of Things Named After John von Neumann. Indeed, when I watched Oppenheimer, my one-line review was that it was tantamount to von Neumann erasure. From ballistics to M.A.D. and everything and anything in between, the dude just got it. The one thing — well, two, I have a better dress sense — I have on von Neumann — well, three, I’m also a better driver — is that he wasn’t any good at chess (and for further reading, you can check out the fantastic biography The Man from the Future). Presumably his brain couldn’t downsize his thinking to two dimensions.
Hungary has a special place in the hearts of anyone who has excelled at math, chess, or classical music, and as someone who achieved quite a lot in all three, Budapest has long been one of my top 5 cities to visit. (Others included are Vienna and, of course, Moscow, both of which I should have checked off by the end of the year.) There’s a certain mental energy derived from walking through perhaps the most beautiful city I’ve seen in my life and presumably plodding along the same pathway that the greats did. Of course, the first thing I did was make a beeline towards von Neumann’s birthplace, which, as it so happens,
is just down the street from the prettiest McDonald’s in the world. Yeah, I’m not giving up that bit just yet.
My current travels were very much spur of the moment — I left to Malta on two day’s notice and probably left a lot of people wondering if I had truly lost my mind this time around — for reasons which will be further elaborated on, but to process why this had to happen, I have to recount a bit of personal history.
The first 16 years of my life up until I went to college could aptly be described as having built a resumé rather than a life. The time required to build the skills above (and more, I was pretty good at League of Legends back in the day, though I suck at FPS) and still remain active meant that, up through high school, Valentine’s Day was mostly spent playing chess tournaments, practicing basketball, or grinding League of Legends at home. This immediately flipped when I moved to New York at 17, where the next decade was spent having a life rather than building a resumé. To this day, I think the most recent line item on my resume is “Malt Liquidity” — that’s been the case for the past two years, well before the viability of this network actually became something, if that doesn’t make it clear how little in the way of “formal” work experience I can point to.
Von Neumann’s biggest fear in his shortened life (having died at 53 years old on February 8th, 1957, just a few days prior to when I’m writing this) was that his legacy would be too hard to comprehend or largely forgotten. And, to some degree, that is what happened — the baseline intellect required to understand the magnitude of his intellect is far beyond what can be conveyed by Christopher Nolan, and nothing he worked on is particularly marketable in the same way Einstein’s achievements are. The Thinking Man’s Genius is definitely an admirable title, but it’s kind of like being called a writer’s writer or a comedian’s comedian — at some point, you just want the full-scale recognition, you know?
I find myself at a particularly unique crossroads as a result. On one hand, the “hardest road” of avoiding credentials and resumé line items I deliberately chose — my life would have been much easier if I had just fucked off and gone the big tech product manager route like most of my peers did and kept my thoughts to myself — has become exponentially more valuable in the current meta as the credibility of institutions has finally collapsed. I have been waiting for this for over a decade, for any semblance of mainstream thought to acknowledge how goddamn stupid everything has gotten.
I often talk about that DFW quote on irony, but certain conversations have made me reconsider. Every part of the algorithm is too stupid to process irony at this point — instead, we get this cynical and toxic sincerity where idiots judge you based on whether you said the right thing over actually getting anything done lest you appear rough around the edges. Thus, we ended up with 10 years of honest, working people who just want to mind their own business being scolded by the likes of Greta Thunberg while I kick rocks and trade stocks and write blog posts because I refused to write a diversity statement just to get a pay check.
Is it any surprise that society polarized to “burn it down” or “spineless screeching”?
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 diagram:
My version of “worrying about legacy on my deathbed” is the fact that trading well doesn’t feel like an accomplishment at all — in fact, I largely feel that what I do shouldn’t really exist. It's existentially jarring that money just sort of appears around you if you happen to focus your attention the right way — it's an accidental circumstance of the world we currently live in. It’s flâneurism on steroids.
Up until 2022, I didn’t really own “stuff”. You don’t want to own much in New York anyway, it makes moving easier, I had (and still have to some extent) a mental block with regards to furnishing things (cue “guy apartment” memes), and other than a couple watches, I largely lived out of two suitcases for the better part of a decade.
That kind of changed in the past couple years, when I finally burnt out and stayed in the same place for more than six months. Along with having a few more watches and the aforementioned car, I have a bunch of fancy cookware (that I don’t use anywhere near enough) and a wardrobe that would make a Hollywood stylist drool. Out of sheer boredom, and as a way to quantify what exactly was happening as my attention converted to profit, I have accumulated a lot of things. This life is good, but unfulfilling — what is the point of making it out of the mental gulag if you’re not going to do something once you’re freed from it? And so I had to fly to Budapest to figure this all out.
Certain events and projects I’ve been tinkering with have convinced me that it’s only apt to accelerate further. As a result, I’ve finally been able to outline what I do for work: I am almost certain that, by the time I’m 40, the way we perceive “retirement”, “career”, “credentialism”, and even the dollar, simply won’t exist as the algorithm understands it now. So, I spend all my time thinking about this problem. I expect to see some sort of warp in the next three years, which I’m still in the process of outlining. But for the time being, all I’ve concluded is that I have to keep moving. Preferably within driving distance, I really do enjoy having a car with more than 300 horsepower for the first time in my life.
Anyway, more dispatches from Budapest to come — thanks for reading, and hopefully the prix fixe menus y’all have reserved aren’t too much of a rip off. (Pro tip — skip the wine pairing, just order whatever Barolo they have on the menu.)
