Just got a tip that Citadel reloaded their shorts before they told Robinhood to stop trading $GME.

If this is true, Ken Griffin and the Robinhood founders should be in jail.

This is class warfare.

@RashidaTlaib @aoc there should be a congressional hearing

More from Justin Kan

With @ycombinator #demoday kicking off, @atrium gathered advice from past YC founders.

.@jaltma from @latticeHQ says “Don’t confuse investor interest with product-market fit. You’re about to be on the receiving end of a lot of hype and FOMO - use it to your advantage by taking the money and then keep your burn and ego low.”

.@typesfast from @flexport says “I like to remind myself that even Bruce Springsteen still gets nervous before his concerts. Remember that, and then try to focus on what investors want: First, not to be bored. Second, to get rich(er).”

.@collinmathilde from @frontapp says “Leverage your data to tell a story about what the business has achieved and where it is going. Metrics are necessary, but they are too often shared without a narrative arc.”

.@drusenko from @weebly says “Make it relevant. Investors can live in their own world, so try to find an angle that they can relate to.”

Justin Kan
@justinkan

1/ Throughout my startup career, I’ve seen many founders have an aversion to sales. This is a mistake that can kill your startup.

2/ Sales is often viewed as either a saving grace or proof that the product isn’t good enough (because it should sell itself). Neither are ever true. Some common mistakes that result in...

3/ Mistake 1: Hire a sales rep before reaching product/market fit to get your initial batch of customers. This is a mistake because founders need to work through their MVP with early adopters to truly understand what it is they’re selling.

4/ Mistake 2: Reach product/market fit, need to scale, and rely entirely on self-serve. For enterprise products that require big commitments and internal shifts, almost no product is self-explanatory enough to sell itself.

5/ Mistake 3: Make a first sales hire who isn’t scrappy enough to help mold the sales process from scratch. Some salespeople are amazing at their jobs, but not cut out to establish the processes that others end up following. This skillset is what @rdedatta calls a “sales ninja”.

Justin Kan
@justinkan

1/ Silicon Valley has changed a lot over the past 13 years since I started my first company (an AJAX calendar called Kiko that was funded in the first batch of YC).

2/ Tech has gone from an industry no one cared about, to every random person I knew in college rushing to be part of it, to the evil industry destroying the fabric of society

3/ Starting a startup is easier than ever. Lots of resources: YC, more financing at the seed stage, much more information online. Starting a company is no longer a risky path.

4/ New businesses in every industry are now being built with methodologies that used to be just for tech startups (fast iteration, access to venture capital). Applies to D2C companies like Allbirds, full stack companies like Atrium, etc.

5/ Personally, I’ve felt recently that the overall risk appetite of the people working in tech has changed. People used to want to join frontier companies building something fun / cool; now everyone seems to be optimizing for salary / career stability.

Justin Kan
@justinkan

I just gave a talk to the W2021 YC batch. It's my favorite startup audience to talk to. Here are some of the highlights:

Finding product market fit is the critical thing to do in a startup.

Everything else: demo day, what investors you get, how much you raise, what press covers you -- it is all window dressing.

Many founders don’t want to talk to their customers because it makes them vulnerable, because it's hard work, because it's scary. Creating a tight feedback loop with customers is the one thing that will help you discover PMF.

If a customer isn't one of your cofounders, try to create a customer panel that allows as tight of a loop as possible. Call them daily. Put them in your Slack.

My Twitch cofounder Emmett Shear has a great analogy on PMF here: it's like rolling a boulder downhill.

1/ What is \u201cproduct/market fit\u201d? I\u2019m not sure I can give you a definition. But maybe I can share what the subjective difference is in how it feels when you have it and when you don\u2019t. Founding a startup is deciding to take on the burden of Sisyphus: pushing a boulder up a hill.
— Emmett Shear (@eshear) July 27, 2019

Justin Kan
@justinkan

10 months ago we shut down Atrium after raising $75m in venture capital. Anyone hearing that knows I made tons of mistakes along the way. Someone asked me today what my biggest lessons learned were. Here they are:

Start with the mission
.

It is very hard to write the mission after the fact. You should start with a clear reason to exist and filter early hires for believers.

Start remote. SFBA is over for startups: the cost of housing and rent gives you much worse operating leverage. Many talented people choose jobs they want to be flexible re: location. Remote is better at this time in the market.

I wrote that before COVID, now it's extra true.

There is no skipping of the R&D phase of a company - if you try to skip this you miss the part where you are forced to develop something differentiated. Very hard to solve this with money.

Don’t build a services company. It’s more work to manage everyone and the reward isn’t there at the end of the day.

More from Trading

Sarang Sood
@SarangSood

@javia_savan You answered it yourself 🙂
Adjustment cost is way too high for bnf. Sometimes bnf does exceed nifty in vol crush, but nifty overall is more consistent.

Hermann Peterscheck
@petershk

For fun I made a Robinhood account. It took me 5 minutes to sign up, get approved and transfer funds for trading...

Here's some details... Read on.

...it took me another 5 minutes to get qualified for options.

If I share a sign up I get "free shares" and I can share as much as I want up to 500$ worth.

The main UI has a prepopulated "list" of stocks/crypto to watch and links to news.

Clicking a stock opens a "trade" button that looks like this.

Notice options is first, buy second.

Options took me to an approval process (which took about a minute) and now away I go trading Baba options.

Buying stock looks like this. It emphasizes fractional shares.

$Shravan Venkataraman \U0001f525\U0001f680\U0001f4b0$

Shravan Venkataraman 🔥...
@theBuoyantMan

Working on some execution optimisation related backtesting. I have so far been executing with market orders only. Going towards higher lot sizes, I'd like to optimise for minimal slippage.

First off, on NSE, if you place a market order, you get filled at the best bid/ask right?

If we want to optimise this, the first non-creative idea one can think of is, slicing the order into different lot sizes, and placing a limit order for each slice at the mid point of current best bid & ask.

But this requires your latency to be the least.

Why would latency affect it?

I looked at tick historical data, and there are more than 18-20 ticks in a second (auction and quote combined).

Even if you keep 10 ticks per second, your best bid/ask can shift from the time you place to the time exchange receives the order.

So, the next best thing that people can do is place tranches of orders every 1s, 3s, 5s, 10s, 15s - in their preferred time range, and get filled at the midpoint or best-bid+1/2/3/4/5 in the depth.

What you need is liquidity.

But if you're trading breakouts, then it's highly likely that your limit orders may not get filled if the action is too fast.

So, a retry mechanism is required in such cases.

If nothing works, you convert your orders to marketable and get filled at worse slippage.

Aditya Todmal
@AdityaTodmal

I spent over 100 hours studying the best patterns in Technical Analysis taught to me by @niki_poojary.

Turns out, patterns trading is simple—if you follow these 8 Patterns:

Let's start: ↓

While studying her Twitter profile and with constant talks with her, I found these to be the most important patterns she focuses on always.

Then I wrote a small summary of what each pattern means.

Also attached are some examples from her tweets.

1/ Cup and handle Pattern

Happens during an uptrend.

The cup portion has a U-shaped appearance.

The bears are getting weaker as they are unable to drive the prices below the last low.

Subhasish Pani uses this a lot in stocks to spot bullish trades.

5: When to play directional:

Whenever the index is moving in a single direction, its important to go with the trend.

A few weeks ago when BNF broke out of the cup and handle pattern, all we had to do was sell PEs.

Pls note: weekly TF chart is attached to just show the C&H BO pic.twitter.com/z0wgUzJW8t
— Nikita Poojary (@niki_poojary) December 18, 2022