This is just a urban legend built around a typical long vol strategy on index futures. There's nothing really uncommon about that, except the press it had on HN.
I know a bunch of guys in various market making shops that did that trade at the time.
That's what I thought too. Though guys from Volatility Views podcast rarely have an episode without mentioning '50 cent trader' always assuming that it's one trader behind and arguing his/her strategies,..
I'm a bit lost in all the hype vocabulary that emerged in the non-conventional/non-quant spheres.
I guess what you call "volpocalypse" refers to the massive deleveraging of late 2018.
I also don't know about XIV specifically. Most institutional players would not go through an ETF to short VIX, this seems more like a small shop/individual way.
Only thing I know is that being long volatility is a somewhat well know strategy, with multiple big players at it, mainly in the market making industry, since the totally skewed returns distribution of returns is not particularly attractive to a lot of people.
For the culture, you can see a lot of short vol (the inverse of what we're talking about) strategies being crushed right now. Diversified Long/short hedge funds were particularly in demand of it since some time and it got really crushed with the current massive deveraging, which is mostly why you see below market returns for a lot of funds at the moment, thus causing them to deleverage more, thus feeding the cycle.
I remember coming to the bay area and it wasn't long before someone that felt they had a cultural affinity with me invited me to a GroupMe group. Man that was years ago. Surprised to see people still use GroupMe, still seems to be for cliques exclusively.
GroupMe is still extensively used at universities. I only know a few undergrads who prefer to use it, but most seem to use it as a compromise. I personally hate its UI.
the medium term plan is more capacity and equipment at hospitals
the short term plan alone will flatten the curve too much, if successful, and we simply dont have confirmations about whether we build immunity or the virus dies out, so without those features the short term plan being the long term plan or a recurring plan (even if we build immunity but we flattened too much, then clusters reemerge). But in conjunction with the medium term plan and most people not being reinfected its the best solution
long term plan either way is a vaccine, effective treatment
edit: can you engineers please tell me and the world what some of you disagree with about this information? this isn't the place to write a dissertation on every edge case necessary to explain whats going on, and the lack of that dissertation doesn't undermine the point or utility of what is written
> Consequently, prices sometimes can be manipulated by the very well connected, who would be consistently selling and reselling the same works at increasing prices
Go ask your local fine art gallery about the prices, try to do literally any price discovery and get the avant-garde run-around and count the minutes until it gets defensive
"ah you know I'm just in finance and most of the markets I work with have other mechanisms for price discovery so I was just curious about how it works here, for this artist"
well you know you need to buy something you really appreciate for yourself and want to keep for decades and you need all that time for the price to appreciate
generic stuff, but none of this answers what the market depth is now and how is standing market depth determined and what were the prior prices, or why that piece over there keeps increasing in price by 15% but is still in your gallery - is this consignment from someone you just sold it to? how come they weren't influenced by the same thing you just told me
Anyway, you can't ask it exactly like this in a casual conversation because thats just asking for defensiveness, but don't expect a transparent market. you can try asking about the art world in any cordial way you can think of and get stonewalled. You know the answers deep down.
so of all those minorities you see pulled over on the curb, 90% of them were just being arbitrarily frisked and had nothing on them and were not arrested, but you wouldn't know the difference, some of the other 10% had drugs planted on them, and many of those weren't their first random stop
the other validation of all those arrests and prison population records, many of them simply took the plea deal or violated parole where anything from any minor infraction to exercising a freedom you already have such as staying out after a certain hour imprisons them for the original length of the sentence
the other validation is all the violent crime stats, which comes from communities demanding certain areas are policed, based on the images of 90% non-arrests already burned into their mind
all while all the minorities have been trying to say this is exactly what has been happening while the majority power remains in actual and intentional denial, now relying solely on an unquantifiable comfort that this is statistically rare, because it has to be, .... right?
>This is an issue with that particular website's implementation, not something inherent to the browser or the API.
When that statement applies to 90% of pages out there, that argument gets more stale than cracker left out for the better part of a year.
That staleness, in fact, is why no one is encouraged to run blind unauthenticated proxies on the Internet anymore. Completely valid technology. Very problematic use case.
> This is an issue with that particular website's implementation
because the product manager thought my user session was engaging with the site for 2 seconds longer so it must be good.
I never said it was the browser or the API just acknowledging that it is a predictable gripe and not a feature, and yes enabled by the browser and APIs
Love the Vix products