Skip to content
sqzme

About sqzme

Thoughts from the veranda

Each one of the following themes has lost us money, and they have, thereby, become ingrained in our minds. This is what we trade on, research, and write about.

Intermediation and volatility

  • Volatility is the cost of liquidity. — 2020-04-19
  • "Liquidity uncertainty" is the market's One True Enemy, because it destabilizes volatility itself. — 2021-02-07
  • Ironically, markets don't work properly when people are actually trading with each other. — 2024-09-29
  • Dealer-intermediaries are the only reason markets "work" like we expect them to. Disintermediation is necessarily destabilizing. — 2026-07-12

Risk and fear

  • "Risk" is the underpricing of volatility, not volatility itself. — 2020-04-19
  • But big volatility follow-through only happens when people are ill-positioned to handle the vol. — 2021-05-16
  • But fear also makes prices go up! — 2025-03-23

Signals become abstracted

  • What used to be an everyday edge turned into something we could rely on less frequently. — 2023-06-11
  • The market is an ever-changing river. — 2023-12-17
  • Markets are adaptive. Reflexive. Infuriating. — 2025-11-30
  • Data is not something to get attached to. — 2025-11-30
  • The market is always in an iterative process of pushing edges and risk premia into increasingly abstracted forms. — 2025-12-07

Data, Story, Truth

  • When the data's mushy, your brain gets mushy. — 2020-10-11
  • Because numbers without context are stupid. — 2020-11-01
  • In reality, Truth is the same, in form, as Story. — 2022-05-22
  • Data on its own can't tell you Truth. — 2023-07-02
  • Don't obfuscate your own data! — 2023-12-17
  • Objective truth is always "mediated" by price. — 2026-04-12

The right trade often loses

  • Underrated skill: Knowing when to throw in the towel. — 2020-09-20
  • The only thing worse than losing money is losing money and being wrong at the same time. — 2021-01-24
  • When the pain to the ego is sharper than the pain to the bankroll, you at least know you're sizing your positions properly. — 2021-04-25
  • The "right" trade isn't always the trade that wins. Your job is to take the right trade regardless. — 2022-04-03
  • At these junctures, survival is your priority—everything else is details. — 2022-05-01
  • You have to be willing to be wrong a lot. — 2025-05-18
  • When you don't have any good trade ideas, you're supposed to sit on your hands. — 2026-09-27

Memento mori

  • the market eats hubris and excretes irony. — 2022-05-22
  • Indeed, cynicism is a tool, not a personality. — 2025-04-13
  • The workman does not eat his dinner with a shovel. — 2025-04-13
  • The market is a mystical mirror to your weaknesses. — 2026-03-29