Seeing lots of explainers about the reddit/hedge fund drama right now, and as someone who worked as a quant for a big fund for 7 years, figured I'd chime in. This whole situation is pretty much why I quit. Big thread.

First, what's happening? At the simplest level, hedge funds "short" stocks. That is, they borrow stock, sell it, and have to buy it again later to return it to the borrower. If the price falls during that time, they make a profit.

It's an effective way to make money from falling prices. But it also has enormous risk. Normally, if you put $100 in a stock, all you can lose is that $100. But if you short a stock and it goes to the moon, your losses are unlimited.

Consider $GME, Gamestop. Let's say a fund shorted it when it was $40. When the price spiked to $470 today, they'd be facing a LOSS of $430 on that $40 investment. If they shorted it for, say, $10M, they'd be facing a loss of >$100M.

But it gets worse. Let's say an institution BORROWED money and then used that loan to short the stock. That's called leverage. Before the GFC, banks were running at ~33x leverage ratios. For every $1 they owned, they'd invested $33.

1/ Today is Winter Solstice. We
WAKE UP to the DARKEST DAY of the Year.

2/ but hey, it’s 2020! So?

3/ this year, for the first time in 800 years, we have the same SKY EVENT that WISE men traversed and followed in ~4 BCE.

The CHRISTMAS STAR illuminating our way....

4/ ... seeking, with COURAGE, to find WISDOM.

5/ Many of us have been AWAKE for several years, AWAITING the BIRTH of a NEW NATION...

an END to the Corruption, and a Govt once again By the People, For the People, Of the People.

HOW LONG do we WAIT for a BIRTH?

Ob/gyn's inform us it's
9 mo.
280 days.
hmmmm⤵️

Pep’s approach on Saturday bored a global audience to tears. Let’s look at:
Why he did it?
Why it worked?
And why we might have to get used to it?
A thread 1/

Pep sent Fernandinho and Rodri out in a double pivot. Since defeat at Spurs, when City set up in the traditional 4-3-3, Pep has deployed a double pivot for the last 6 matches. It stops the dm being isolated and subsequently the centre backs being exposed 2/

Pep set up like this in order to keep control. In the Spurs defeat and the derby defeats last season City lost control when the opposition countered. It was impossible to track runners on quick breaks with 1 dm and City were often all at sea 3/

With the addition of an extra dm, and consequently a more defensive approach, City were able to cope with United’s counters.
United didn’t create any big chances and only looked dangerous from set pieces 4/

City created 3 big chances, all of which were spurned. That was Pep’s plan in a nutshell, completely nullify United’s main threat and rely on City’s front 4 to create big chances. From that perspective it worked. Pep’s post match comments told the story 5/

1/ Mitch McConnell wants to let corporations kill you without consequence. (THREAD)

2/ Probably the most under-reported story of the year has been how Mitch McConnell is holding Americans hostage in exchange for letting big corporations kill Americans without any consequence.

3/ Mitch took you and me hostage back in May, when the House of Representatives passed the HEROES act that would have funded state and local governments and provided unemployed workers with an ongoing weekly payment.

4/ Mitch refused to even allow the Senate to discuss the HEROES Act until or unless the legislation also legalized corporations killing their workers and customers. To this day, he refuses to let it even be discussed in the Senate.

5/ We’ve seen companies fire people for refusing to take their lives in their hands, executives organize betting pools on which employees are going to die first, and companies lying openly to their workers and customers about the dangers of COVID-19.

A brief update to the focal S:N501 builds to start your Friday off right! This one includes data from 7 Jan 21.

We have about 20 new sequences each in 501Y.V1 (B.1.1.7 #b117) & 501Y.V2.

Let's take a look at the new sequences, starting with 501Y.V1

1/14

https://t.co/kT1gFsSZn0

There are 22 new non-UK sequences in 501Y.V1, including for the first time from Luxembourg (3), & additional seqs from Singapore (1), Australia (4), France (12), & Switzerland (2).

2/14

First, Luxembourg has 3 sequences in 501Y.V1 for the first time. Each represents a separate introduction.

3/14

France has 12 new sequences (orange). Many of these represent independent introductions.

Zooming in (divergence view), we can see 2 new sequences are identical (possible local transmission), & 2 differ by 2 mutations (1 each).

4/14

Australia has 4 new sequences (red and orange) which are spread across the tree, representing separate additional introductions.

5/14

Hearing coming up at the top of the hour on the USPS lawsuits over possible delayed delivery of mail-in ballots.

Yesterday, Judge Sullivan indicated Postmaster DeJoy was not "off the hook" for failing to follow an Election Day order to sweep facilities for misplaced ballots.

Note that court staff have set up two more public lines after hundreds of people dialed in yesterday:

We also got a dump of data from USPS in the last hour or so on:

Extra and late trips
On-time delivery percentages
Number of inbound/outbound ballots processed

(all stats the agency has been sharing/updating daily over the last week)

DOJ has brought with today several USPS processing facility managers, per Sullivan's request yesterday, including from Philly, Central Penn, Greensboro and the Mid Carolinas.

Vote Forward attorney says the data USPS filed this morning suggests that 150K ballots were delivered yesterday, including 604 ballots in Atlanta and 7K in Pennsylvania.

It appears that 1inch's governance token is right on the horizon.

1inch is the leading Ethereum-based decentralized exchange aggregator. Since its launch, it has done $7.6 billion in volume.

Here's a thread on what we know so far. 👇

First off, some context:

1inch is a decentralized exchange aggregator that routes liquidity through a number of exchanges to find the optimal prices.

This is often useful for larger traders, who may need to spread their buys or sells across exchanges to minimize slippage.

e.g. Here is Three Arrows swapping 4,000,000 USDT for 4,001,307 TUSD via 1inch v2 around four weeks ago.

1inch does have quite a bit of traction, even though you may not hear about it sometimes.

Stats:

- $7.6b in total volume
- $272m in seven-day volume
- $36.5m in seven-day volume

h/t @DuneAnalytics for the stats

Yesterday, some sleuths spotted a contract on Ethereum pertaining to a "1inch" token.

The contract address: 0x111111111117dc0aa78b770fa6a738034120c302

Contained in the contract is this bit of ASCII art.

Only Few Can Answer the 3 Questions

1 Why is Gold a Precious Metal ?
2 Why Planets Spin and Never Stop?
3 Is so called Space-Time Fabric Real?

Answer to Question 1

WHY IS GOLD SO PRECIOUS.?
Some have answered partially right

Will Try to Explain Both MODERN and ANCIENT Reasons.
Please READ Slowly ( #Thread )

MODERN REASON👇🏻

ANCIENT REASONS

Gold VALUABLE in Sanatan Dharma.

MOBILE PHONES have 0.034gms of Gold used as connectors in circuits as it is the highest Conducting Material of electromagnentic waves &Cosmic Energies.

1. HINDU IDOLS and CHILDREN

2. WOMEN and AYURVEDA

3. TRADE & ART

A few paradoxes or philosophical ironies I have observed on this Bird Street:
1. Idiots have devised effective strategy to get under the skin of intelligent people:
E.g: Class A says he will unseat Tinubu in Lagos for N100m. Class B, gets riled up. Ought we not to just waka pass?

2. Second irony:
The illogical person makes illogic sound logical and incredibly many people retweet and like the illogic. The logical minded is now thrown into arguing that a clear illogic is illogic. Ought the logical minded person not to simply waka pass?

3. The third irony:
Tinubu owns Lagos. 2 businesses were burnt down (Nation and TVC). Those 2 media houses have not in the past 3-5 years done anything to support Tinubu's party, the APC-they have been largely opposition media. Who did the arsonists punish? Tinubu or Insurance?/

4. Tinubu and the ABC and the money laundering allegation: If people were rational, they would have done this:
1. Scrutinised the MEMART of the ABC company registered with CAC? Is Tinubu's name featured there?
2. Is the LASG operating an opaque contract with ABC company? /

5. The rationale mind would find that there just may be a substantive contract between the LASG & the said company. There may well be a LAW of the LASG supporting the ABC's operations in Lagos. So accusing Tinubu may not go anywhere in the face of the Law. Nut changes can happen?

@robert_spalding The CCP factions are real. I spent 10+ years living their. The mess we unleashed on the world is of the West’s own making. We did not spend the time to understand the Chinese people, their culture or their government. Most still do not, bother. But now they are transformed.
1/

In 2019, @propublica and @postandcourier ran blockbuster investigations into SC's magistrate judges: inexperienced political appointees with no training who held South Carolinians' lives in their hands - and who use the bench to extract bribes, deal in overt racism and worse.

1/

The first revealed that SC's magistrates got less training than its barbers, and their appointments, though subject to reapproval, were practically speaking lifelong and irrevocable, regardless of misconduct, bumbling, or actual criminal

The qualifications process is bizarre. SC magistrates need to pass a one-hour exam, but they can (and do) re-take it many times without penalty. That test includes questions like "Which of the following numbers is larger?" And magistrates fail that test. Repeatedly.

3/

Magistrates are so ill-qualified that the rare, decent appointee can end up repeatedly breaking the law without knowing it, as construction worker (and local GOP chairman) Arthur Bryngelson did, leading to him resigning in horror and reporting himself for breaches.

4/

Not all of the unqualified magistrates have Bryngelson's moral fiber: BBQ chef/magistrate Clemon Stocker got his relative Willie Earl Reese released on bail after he pistol-whipped a man. Reese murdered his wife five days later.

5/

@freedom9230 By flushing out the same inflammation that leads to depletion of the tryptophan pathway (which adjacently leads to depletion of serotonin) by all tryptophan depleting down to NAD+ in response to inflammation, niacin will quickly restore serotonin by restoring tryptophan.

It’s not really “excess” serotonin produced but rather, previously depleting/deficient serotonin becoming rapidly restored once the inflammation that was depleting it is flushed out by niacin.

Once inflammation is for the most part flushed out and thermodynamic energy transfer / metabolism / all auxiliary biochemistry are restored to more homeostatic states, supplemented niacin won’t affect tryptophan down to NAD+ or tryptophan to serotonin pathways.

Instead, with continued dosing, sufficiently supplied niacin will then work as continued pump-action against any downstream inflammation / free radical electrons that manifest thereafter by turning into NAADP if needed... and any free intracellular niacin will be urinated out

Does that make sense? Lol

Well. #Bridgerton has already started off on the wrong foot with the underpinnings.

@DonaldWelsh16 Oh hello.

I knew Dr Rorabeck. He was a wonderful guy. @SchulichMedDent does have much to be proud of. Like any institution, it has its warts.

@SchulichMedDent But to respond to your comment: I think you’re referencing the concept of balanced pathogenicity, which probably will will, over the longer term, favour less virulent strains.

@SchulichMedDent The difficulty we have with VOC is that they appear to bind better to ace2 (as a vascular biologist I bet you’ve heard of that!) and that may underlie their increased infectivity and increased

@SchulichMedDent propensity to cause outbreaks among kids, which has caused the UK to do a u-turn on schools.

You seem to fancy yourself a bit of a quant (math! So great!) so you can probably figure out what happens if you get an increase in R resulting in increased attack rates, while virulence

@SchulichMedDent Remains constant. Yes! You get more people dying that way!

You got it! Gold star ⭐️!

And we have no evidence of diminished virulence for VOC as yet. What we do have is evidence for increased virulence.

Staying well out of this beef, but I've spent the last 48 hours in hysterics since I learned that an influencer has been getting fans to give her money by calling it "individual reparations."

That's the joke line I use when I want one of my white mates to get a round in!

I get how this dynamic emerges. Social media blurs the distinction between influencer and activist. Individuals are seen as totemic of a wider political struggle, so you want to see them succeed. And of course, supporting people's work is meaningful.

But it's not reparations.

Reparations isn't an individual white person giving money to an individual black or brown person (apart from when I'm broke and want a cocktail, in which case it's very much that).

It's about recognising that

a) colonialism and slavery have had a lasting economic impact

b) this impact is not just a legacy, or a long tail.

It has been reinforced by the underdevelopment and debt servitude of the Global South, and the exploitation of labour and resources from the Global South.

And unless you're a billionaire or a central bank, it's unlikely that your PayPal activity is going to make much of an impact on the root causes behind the Global Movement for Reparations..