This quant
who posted this on Twitterhas been putting up a lot more strategy lately. She even posted up results of several backtests in various assets and tickers. I wish I had saved the tweets because I forgot her tweets autodelete every week.

If I remember correctly atleast two were pair trades or timed trades(every 5 days buy or short based on those days direction + or - in ES or Bitcoin). One or two had positive expectancy since 2019 or so which seemed amazing since usually macro changes wipe out edge in those kind of trades. That link is too some concepts on quantitative systems.

from those tweets

"Specifically when I realized the market was hard and you couldn't just buy calls and print free money.
So I started with a group of folks, actually on @unusual_whales discord, randomly studying what I thought would work - using option flow (remember, started from Robinhood short tenor options) to predict directionality of earnings moves. I found a few awesome folks who I sat with, by hand, using ThinkOrSwim's UI, tabulating net deltas from options traded (the origin of NOPE) into a spreadsheet, and trying to figure out if there was any notable pattern between earnings moves and the option flow preceding them.

Also at that point, I started writing weird scrawling threads on Reddit with some ideas about the market, which, some in retrospect were laughably wrong, and some I thought at the time were wrong/simplistic but...I found a small posse of folks and developed the NOPE model around this time, when I noticed some odd trends between net options delta traded and behavior of the SPX. I learned a lot about gamma/vanna positioning, which of course was retail catnip at the time, as we all

Quant is also a very heterogenous term and varies widely by firm and practice.
You can be a quant at an MLP type firm working on a team which essentially is quant-for-hire for different pods (doing analysis as needed).
You can be a quant trader building sketch models

which are then, hopefully, fleshed out by a better quant dev (so you're like 50/50 QR/trading).
You can be a solo quant, building your own systems to prop trade (many of those on Twitter since most of your day is boring).
You can be a quant for a sell-side firm
The best thing is to become an expert in one or a few specific asset classes, because that's how you uncover durable edges.
Macro as discussed on Twitter is mostly prognostication-like gambling. It's unlikely you will find durable edge in volga positioning of SPX.

As I mentioned on a prior thread, alpha generation is Really Hard, and most people gloss over the idea that a well constructed portfolio of orthogonal-ish risk premia will be a much more fruitful use of your time than hunting for the elusive intraday crack junkie alpha.

I think MARA is a squeeze that could go awhile. in 5.50 calls, EVGO long, been in HOOD calls too awhile. Tried CGC calls again, in AMPY puts. If the market keeps creeping higher there should be a lot of oversized potential in squeezes. Just trying to brainstorm the usual high short tickers like BBBY RDFN ect

dangit didn't get enough MARA calls. Already up 70% from 4.40s lol I'm gonna lock in atleast half at open tomorrow. not sure how much gas it could have. If it really is all squeeze it could easily go a couple more bucks I think though. Im mostly just reading the overall market from looking at CAT. It's staying strong atm. CANO is puzzling to me being so low priced. Acquisitions are still going on in the sector and CANO operates doctors offices, pharmacies AND dental offices and is still a penny stock. If they don't have a terrible balance sheet this thing is big-time mispriced. edit: working capital on CANO looks ok atm. only thing is cash is dwindling every quarter significantly. looks like they've done private offerings in the past.

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-rele...301384133.html Not sure how those work or if they are feasible but it seems like it's better than public? They're gonna need a higher share price I would imagine? Bear markets sure are a bich. Good biz likes this gets annihilated.

BBBY up 90% today. Never got in. Been trading Russell and crude e-mini's mostly. Hopefully somebody saw that. Still gonna ride partial positions on all the calls and AMPY puts into CPI with hedges this time undersized. BITO puts and TNA calls. CPI tomorrow morning.

Puru one of the most lazer focused bears may have just capitulated. Right before CPI which the last two CPI days was a major market pivot. The most likely scenario I see is another wide range day where we squeeze up hard in the morning to flush more shorts then reverse down and market goes down awhile. If there is no reversal down the next couple weeks I think October was the low for long while. I'll have a good read after close tomorrow.

I think we stay range bound for a while. Maybe until the next cpi pump. Retrace day today on the news, then we flounder

BBBY beautiful squeeze still going. I got jan 13 $6 calls now and undersized 4.5 puts jan 20. It's gonna be a big move on the short side when it is finally done too. CVNA is another high short interest that is looking squeezy. No significant sympathy from KMX so def just squeeze I think. Got some CONN Jan puts 10 strike.

Germany had good employment numbers the other day. I think people looking for a 2008 style crash are going to be sorely disappointed. Adamant bears are already capitulating. Yeah rangebound is the most logical outcome I think with all the macro conditions. Stock pickers market for a long time.

My friend was bragging about how much money he made shorting bbby and hes been MIA since yesterday so I hope hes all right.

I would hope he used puts. It has liquid options. I saw a good trader on Twitter had a 500% loss shorting BBBY. If a stock has options and I want to short I always go with puts to reduce risk.

APRN might be the next big squeezer.

Options have time frames and the deltas. Shorts are more pure. I can see a strategy for both

Better to use neither. Shorting individual stocks takes much more skill and luck than being long does. No reason to do something hard when something easier is at available.

Last year being the rare exception, of course.

The markets and niches are too vast to make generalities. I know a couple traders who short primarily Chinese small-cap frauds up over 100% or more with consistent returns. Unless somebody is investing or dollar cost averaging any trading takes unusually "hard" skill long or short.

The guy doing this interview David only shorts and bread and butter is Chinese frauds(there are many on the Nasdaq) he's done something like $500k in returns

https://youtu.be/aKC5grkAuU0
David has a ton of interviews with a lot of verified short sellers on his channel. Def worth a look.

https://youtu.be/aKC5grkAuU0

He has been making 6 figures a year for how many decades?

There was a dude that was blindly shorting vix futures* who made tons of money for quite a few years. His strategy did work for a while, but (assuming he was doing exactly what he said he was doing), he would have lost much more than all of it more than once. He did have his accounts verified, btw. Not after he lost more than his entire winnings, of course.**

*That is a slight exaggeration. He did have an actual strategy that amounted to shorting vix futures on vix spikes and then martingaling if the spike continued. You can easily replicate his strategy if you'd like to make pretty awesome returns most years and completely blowing up your account occasionally.

One generality that always holds true is that YouTube and trading podcasts are filled with people who have strategies that worked last year (and probably do work great once every decade or so) and people who have never heard of the Kelly Criterion.

Interestingly, you could have made 68% annualized for 6 years by simply shorting vix futures when the 30-day weighted vix futures were 5.8% higher than vix. Great strategy that'd have you homeless in year 7.

**Again, assuming that he wasn't lying about what he was doing

So that's the main evidence you're basing shorting is a bad strategy on? One of the VIX shorters? Umm

Kenny Sharkness the top trader at SMB Capital is a short biased trader. He's been doing it years. He doesn't trade a micro niche like VIX though. I don't know if anybody super successful lasts 10+ years. I heard they either retire or give it back and i kinda believe that. Madaz on Twitter might be an example of staying in too long.

No.

Max "Madaz" on Twitter shorts about half the time and like everyday. He is a consistent scalper and posts a screenshot of his P&L everyday. He is consistent but has huge loss days time to time that put him in a seemingly perpetual drawdown now. I don't think he has the best process for finding setups and his biggest recent losses are on shorts usually with a history of halt ups. If he just avoided thin low float shorts especially that recently halted up a lot he would probably be up last year. But I'm not positive most of his losses were shorts but if he improved his stock selection in shorts he would be fine. Madaz has been trading since like 2018 atleast.

Ortex short data 1-15-22. CVNA my top squeeze watch. UPST SI is an inside bar too.

$SI 78%
$CVNA 62%
$GROM 60%
$AYTU 45%
$ATNF 42%
$APRN 40%
$UPST 40%
$BYND 39%
$IGMS 39%
$MARA 39%
$HOTH 38%
$EVGO 38%
$BBBY 38%
$SKYH 38%
$VTNR 38%
$GOSS 37%
$NVAX 35%
$SFT 31%
$NKLA 28%
$WISA 26%
$PXMD 25%
$SDIG 25%
$LUCY 25%
$AMC 22%
$PRTY 22%
$BKKT 18%
$ELYS 15%
$NEGG 12%

I got spammed on Twitter by a BKKT pumper. Never happens to me. Just found out it's a crypto stock. It has a nice inside bar too. If it breaksout should be a good long.

looks like the squeeze is over in bitcoin and mining stocks. I put on a ton of puts yesterday and today. currently ZEUS W PTON MARA BYND UNG COIN BBY all puts with TLT XHB calls all 20th or 27 Jan. Gauging market direction with CAT. It warned yesterday of sell-off today by finishing red. Looks like a good enough bull trap on major indices to call this a short term major top. Yesterday I was inclined to think the market wants to slowly grind higher but looks like they got a good trap in.

Locked in W puts gonna set 50% stops and ride the rest. Shiba coin is green today.

Coinbase COIN hiring Lazard to possibly put the company up for sale with "strategic alternatives" always sounds so desperate when the company or stock is struggling. Stock trades basically flat and down on the day off the news. Feels like one of those desperate moves to save a sinking ship with the timing of this and apparently no shorts covered.

QQQ now poised to test 294 level resistance. After that it's off to the races. It's leading the market higher along with FXI. I think China is contributing to the US run here. I'm long a bunch of calls ADBE FXI XLF IWM weekly. Doing TLT AA puts as a long hedge. After the market reaction to ALLY I'm very tempted for COF calls. I think I'm going to just wait on COF earnings then decide. Already in XLF