Friends,

For Friday’s family pizza/movie night, we finished watching the 1978 Superman starring Christopher Reeve. It’s one of my favorite movies, so I was nervous it would feel too outdated to the kids, but phew, they approved!

My older kid likes rocks and crystals, so he loved the “programmable” sunstone that acts as a telecom, computer, and data storage in the Fortress of Solitude. My younger kid was pre-inclined to like the movie because he knows his middle name, Kalil, was derived from Superman’s Krypton name, Kal-el, with an Egyptian twist.

My love of the movie is not just nostalgia, but the myth. The struggle Superman lives with. The tension between power and restraint. He is explicitly told by his biological father, Jor-el, not to interfere with the human course of history. When Lois’ car is swallowed by the fissure, Superman, accepting that he cannot revive her, is torn. The wise father’s warning weighs heavily on the man of steel, but is ultimately overwhelmed by Superman’s mortal emotion — the pain and regret of allowing his Earth-native step-father to die of a heart attack within earshot of him on the farm.

Superman’s response is profoundly human. He rationalizes his step-father’s words, “you must be here for a reason”, to mean “I should save Lois”. A goal that’s hard to argue against as bad, yet conveniently flatters Superman’s romantic self-interest.

He’s not a god.

That’s the first moment in the film when he’s wearing the cape that he’s relatable to the rest of us messy creatures. (Clark’s dramatized bumbling makes him cringefully-relatable and Reeve’s portrayal of the awkwardness is, as the kids say, “S-tier”)

There’s more to love in this movie. Namely Gene Hackman’s Lex Luthor. He’s a magnetic mix of wry humor, brazen arrogance, flowery proclamations, and dapper style. From the ornate, booby-trapped Grand Central station lair, complete with an indoor pool, to the most elaborate master-villain plot to…make a killing on real estate.

Wait, what?!

The imbalance is breathtaking.

The feat of imagination required to subdue Superman with kryptonite, hijack 2 warheads, one as a backup plan to distract Superman in New Jersey, and the other to send CA into the Pacific by triggering the mother of earthquakes along the San Andreas Fault…so Luthor’s central valley land purchases would become valuable resorts on the new waterfront “Costa del Lex”. Really. This is the long game.

You have to laugh.

Have you ever seen Lex and Trump in the same room?

(Ok, calm down)

The self-proclaimed “greatest criminal mind of his time”, Lex mobilized earth and sea for something that barely rises above a CA political scandal.

[The plot echoes the early 1900s corruption and land speculation around CA water rights. The “water wars” were also the backdrop for another film I love, this one, 4 years earlier than Superman — Polanski’s Oscar darling, Chinatown, starring Jack Nicholson.]

Really, if Trump did nothing but use the presidency to make his family billions in crypto pumps and bribes, it would be quite Lex. You re-arranged humanity to…make a quick buck??

Ya know what, when I put it that way, it seems British historian Arnold Toynbee was almost right. “History is just one damn [real estate scheme] after another”.

In related news, we were shaken awake last Monday at 3 am by a 4.3 earthquake. The number betrays the experience. It was in Berkeley, less than 15 miles west of us. It was the strongest quake I’ve ever felt, although I’ve only been in CA for 13 years. [I couldn’t feel the large Napa quake from where I lived in SF shortly after moving West.]

The silver lining: doing math at breakfast before school. We talked about the Richter Scale. I explain the difference in relative strength by saying that the number represents the quantity of zeros. So a 7 has 3 more zeros than a 4 (1000x stronger).

🔗Related: What I learned about earthquakes from Nate Silver’s “Signal and the Noise”

Money Angle

This pic is from a tweet saying, “Honestly some of the best life advice I’ve ever heard.”

I’ll stop short of ranking life advice, but this one was timely because it was a not-so-subtle lesson in what I was trying to teach my 4th grader.

Here’s the backstory:

His class has an economy. Fake money you can earn for achieving certain goals. You can use the money to bid on monthly auction items which are provided by the students themselves. Your kid is now looking around the house for stuff they can sell.

You also have to make “rent” on your desk which is a way to force students to participate in the capitalism of the classroom economy. (The idea that a CA public school teacher might not be Marxist must be a narrative violation, but I’m reporting from the field that there’s more to reality than memes.)

So what happened?

Max came home upset and complaining about how the day’s auction went down. One of the kids paid a price far higher than anything has ever traded. (The auction item was a Labubu — I only know what that is because of South Park).

Max says it’s “unfair” because the other student apparently discovered the website that the teacher buys the fake money from and bought a bunch of it himself.

My immediate internal reaction was “great, this is an opportunity to talk about lots of important stuff” but first I had questions.

Did the teacher notice this increase in the money supply?

I got no satisfactory answer from Max on this, casting doubt on his allegation. But if the allegation is imagined, I’m probably raising a supervillain. The irony tracks.

Isn’t a Labubu worth more than the amount of classroom money it garnered at auction once you adjust for the price it costs to buy the classroom money online?

Almost certainly.

Whatever kid sold the Labubu might need an economics lesson. Or they stole a siblings’ toy and arbed the fact that the COGS were $0.

In any case, the inconclusivity of the answers don’t materially affect the conversation I had with my kids.

1) Address Max’s sense of justice

Look, if the kid really bought currency online, it is wrong because it’s not in the spirit of the rules. If the teacher thought fine print was necessary, this would have been covered. We’ve talked about values recently. Disagreements often come from the different weights people assign to certain values. In our household coat of arms honesty, in its many forms, is a chief value. Cheating a game that isn’t about winning but educational is poor form. It’s one thing to find disagreeable edges when that is part of the meta, but this is not the wild.

I don’t judge the alleged perp either because discerning between a clever gotcha and anti-social behavior is so clearly difficult that we can fill a daily Matt Levine column about high-profile examples in finance on a daily basis.

Max, your sense of fairness is well-calibrated. I don’t want to dismiss that.

Yet, you can’t let the injustice paralyze you. Instead, given what we know, how can we turn this situation to our advantage?

2) Diagnose the situation

What do we know if Max’s version is correct?

• The money supply is larger than the teacher intended but the situation was left unaddressed.
• If the money supply keeps growing, especially because of one kid who can easily be traced to as the source, it will break the classroom economy.
• The teacher will need to intervene. Interventions would likely include better tracking of the money supply to get it under the desired control (I’ve spoken to the teacher in the past and know they regretted how loose the money supply was in the first year they did this).

In other words, money is temporarily oversupplied. It is “cheap”. You get a lot of it per good sold. If the money supply tightens, it becomes more valuable. How do you buy money while it’s cheap?

3) Give the market what it needs — stuff

Sell this kid what they want. Not Labubus, of course, since that would require arbing yourself but maybe 3-D print Labubu accessories. Or find out what else the kid is into. You gotta move fast because the money isn’t likely to stay this cheap.

Later, when taking the older kid to hoops I brought up his brother’s school drama. I set-up the situation and he immediately understood that you wanna just make this kid a customer while the getting’s good.

Being a bit older, I could explain to him that this was “inflation” or too much money chasing too few goods. That in the real-world, this is a signal to be an entrepreneur and create “supply”.

An excessively cheap cost of capital, the flipside of high valuation, also summons scammers and frauds. The market’s lack of fiscal discipline and TINA mentality was bidding for a story in the late 2010s, and there will always be unscrupulous opportunists eager to fill the order.

Some people will become crusaders against injustice. To do it well, you need fortitude and focus. The focus thing is key. Specialization even. A sign of a true crusader is what it costs them. You might disagree with Snowden, but the price was real. Getting rich under the banner of a justice crusade rightly puts the burden of “is this a grift?” on the crusader.

[“Keyboard” crusaders are everywhere. It’s human. They get the “likes” from people who already agree with them for free. For words. But this activity is amplification, not crusading, especially if they are on to the next crusade just as easily. I take it more seriously when the crusader is a specialist and not donning the “constitutional scholar” costume while their legs go numb on the toilet.]

The beauty of capitalism, notwithstanding its distortions and backdoors, is that it allows pro-sum, pro-consumer crusades without the temptation of weaponizing ethics.

We are in a strange place as a society where large swaths of people are sus of any profit while another swath is sus of do-gooding, but it’s because the well of profit and the well of do-gooding have both been poisoned by a minority who blend in.

Acknowledging that neither is ever perfectly pure is an adaptive act to rise above the numbing cynicism.

Even Superman was conflicted.

Money Angle For Masochists

I referenced one of Kevin’s articles about funding trades in Thursday’s letter. I have several of Kevin’s tweets saved. This one is a counterintuitive argument for why the stock’s left tail is probably smaller than you think. In a June 9th tweet, Kevin considers one of ASTS insider sales:

Scott W sold 50k shares today. Here are a few things to keep in mind:

This sale was NOT made under a 10b5-1 automatic trading plan.

Many insiders use 10b5-1 plans that pre-schedule sales based on price targets or preset dates. The benefit is that these plans are adopted well in advance and help shield the insider from allegations of trading on material nonpublic information (MNPI).

Since this was not a 10b5-1 sale, it appears Scott made a discretionary decision to sell, likely recently. He sold about 10% of his holdings, which is a very reasonable action for personal liquidity or diversification.

Importantly, if Scott were aware of materially negative, nonpublic information (e.g. major technical failure, regulatory issue, or business disruption), securities law and internal compliance would typically prevent him from selling. Doing so could expose him to legal risk and internal disciplinary actions.

So while insider sales are typically not a bullish signal, this one significantly reduces the probability of catastrophic near-term news…the idea is the left tail is less likely to occur due to the insider sale, so it makes the left tail worth less.

The thread caught my eye because it’s a neat example of an action that affects your opinion of the tail more than the heart of the distribution. The sale likely has no influence on general bullishness/bearishness but there’s a good chance an insider wouldn’t want to be seen selling shares off-cycle right before some terrible news came out and if they were willing to take that risk in possession of MNPI it doesn’t really make sense to do so with a token amount of shares.

For whatever it’s worth, ASTS is up about 41% since June 9th.

For a frame of reference:

ASTS is about a 100 vol name.

It’s been 76 biz days since June 9th or .30 of a 251-day year.

For a 100 vol name, 1 standard deviation is 100%*√.30 = 54% so the move is well within the range one might expect given its vol.

Stay groovy

☮️

Moontower Weekly Recap

Posts:

• “killing our society”
• the messiness of options in the real world

Friends,

My friend Khe has been working with hedge funds and Wall Street firms to help their teams get more out of LLMs (his weekly letter How To Future-Proof Your Career with AI is consistently practical. On a personal note I feel like Khe’s cadence is about 1-month ahead of my own LLM-discovery arc. I’m just getting started with Claude Code this week).

Khe’s is running an AI Accelerator program in October.

🚀Details and registration

I feel compelled to volunteer that while I will host ads in Moontower this is not an ad. I asked Khe if I could tell my readers about this because I hear the same thing he hears from many people in finance and heck, even in my extended family: ​“Everyone talks about AI, but I still don’t know how to use it effectively in my day-to-day work. I feel like I’m missing out on something that could make me 10x more productive.”

Let’s talk about this a bit broadly.

I don’t consider myself a power user of LLMs compared to say devs or Khe who are building agents over their entire file systems (I’m not there YET, but Emi is giving me a tutorial soon!) but you can probably notice how much use I’m getting out of them in the work I have been sharing here.

I’m not comfortable saying it because it sounds like bragging, but I’ve had more people ask me how I’m able to produce “so much” especially this year and part of it is just the natural leverage embedded in these tools. I’m using them as tutors, research aids, sparring partners, summarizers, and the “connective tissue” of writing ideas not too mention all the vibe-code projects.

A few other examples:

• My 12-year-old and I are collaborating with Claude to prototype a physical game I want to publish.
• This week my 9-year-old is using ChatGPT in a loop to give it pictures that he draws, asks for feedback on how to improve the shading and lighting by words and example and then he goes back and tries to mimic it.
• I have a Claude project where the LLM knows all my guitar gear and I can ask it how I can replicate the sound of particular songs. It provides the signal chain and suggestions for what effects I should get to make my set-up more versatile.
• ChatGPT is helping not just with decorating but home maintenance crap. Well, while it did help me change the cartridge that blends the hot/cold in my sink faucet, it wasn’t until a simple Google search revealed that my problem was that my Delta 20 faucet batteries were dead. New house, new times. I never considered that a faucet takes AA batteries. I figured the LED & touch functions were powered by a plug.

While on the topic of AI, I’ll eagerly admit that it feels like every time I use it I’m training my replacement. I’m also rewarding companies that are so flush with funding that they can brazenly play the “ask for forgiveness, not for permission” game and account for IP lawsuits as COGS.

But I’m what Huxley warned of. The citizen who invites his colonization by embracing the products. I want certain things to exist. These tools lower the cost of making them. I suppose my revealed discount factor to the specter of being replaced is extremely high.

Something that might sound a bit weirder, which I’ve admit in a few private convos: I look forward to “replacing myself”. I make the stuff I do because I want it to exist but doesn’t to my satisfaction. If it did, I’d do something else.

I was just talking to a friend who has no background in robotics but is working with an engineering team at the intersection of AI + robotics on the business side. I felt kinda jealous. I probably get that feeling a few times a month. There is so much work that sounds fun that if I weren’t doing the things I prioritize now, it wouldn’t be hard to find something else to do. I wish I could copy myself. If everything on my current strand of thought were created, I could feel liberated to move on to something else. Be a beginner elsewhere.

Like if you’re a radiologist and you saw a path where technology could make radiologists unnecessary, would you root for it or would you protect your job? Of course, the necessity of making a living compels you to protect. I’m not judging that. The priority for anyone is survival. But if you removed the constraint, you’d likely conclude that there are many ways to use your humanity; why be attached to one that overlaps with a machine? The radiologists who “defect” and go train the machines are like the market-makers who tightened the spreads (the game theory bit towards the end of the art of paranoia applies far beyond trading).

Your own value will be maximized where the machine can’t compete yet. Protection is ultimately delaying your own growth unless you plan to have your career outrun adoption. That’s probably fine if you’re 55, but if you’re 40, it’s a tougher question. It’s impossible to hand-wave the constraint of making a living. But here’s food for thought (food that is probably not going to nourish anyone whose already mid-career or older but might timely for college-aged or 20-somethings):

Living below your means, or having cheap tastes (which is easier to do before lifestyle-creep moves in) is a valuable option. And what maximizes the value of an option?

Variance.

Look at the world. The internet is a volatility pump. Connectedness, the reduction of communication/info friction led to acceleration. Having a buffer makes you less fragile. More mobile. Closer to just-in-time adaptability to where opportunity is. Less protectionist. Less defensive. Less calcified.

As we learned from Wednesday’s making the most of your time on earth, everyone has different values. You may not value any of the things I’m referring to above*. Totally fine. One of the things I got from a Straussian reading of the Welch stuff is how so much of our disagreements come from different starting values. Given that the source of values is probably more random than anyone wants to acknowledge (birth lottery and who you happen to hang out with in formative years), we are really left with different guidebooks for everyone. The best I can hope for is my perspectives landed for some of you.

*I didn’t share it in that post but my top 4 values on the values bridge assessment are below. Belovedness is about the primacy of your partner relationship and family-centrism were high — it feels horoscopic, I personally think the exercise of doing the questions is better than the output. The “voice” and “non-sibi” explain the newsletter, I guess.

Money Angle

Speaking of partner, this week was a rare public glimpse of the investment manager my wife works for — Eagle Capital. They are private manager but in 2024 they launched a public version of their portfolio, EAGL. I believe it was the largest ETF conversion to date when it launched. Of course this is where we get most of our beta and it’s the only ticker my kids probably know.

One of the heads of the investment team, Adrian Meli, went on Ted Seides show and I hear it was one of the most listened to episodes despite the vanilla category of “long only” investment manager.

They fly under the radar but I know many on the team. Very clever cats. When you hear Adrian you’ll understand.

🎙️Adrian Meli on Capital Allocators (link)

When Yinh asked me how I thought it sounded, I said “it confirms what I suspected — I wanna work there. Glad you do.”

Gamma: one rung at a time

Last weekend I shared a delta hedging simulation tool where anyone can learn exactly how long gamma mechanically lets you “buy low and sell high” for the cost of theta. I made this video Monday to step through 30 days of simulation to break it down as much as humanly possible.

Money Angle For Masochists

Yet another vibe-code project. This one went viral because…it’s a game!

It’s a replica of the one we trained on an eon ago at SIG. It’s a put-call parity game.

The formula for put/call parity is:

C = (S - K) + P + RC

where:

C = call value

P = put value

S = stock price

K = strike price

RC = cost of carry til expiry (ie “reversal/conversion” value)

In the game you are given the strike price and 3 out of 4 of the remaining variables. Solve for the 4th. The game is timed.

Try it for yourself:

🕹️Put-Call Parity Trading Game

Contextualizing the formula

You don’t want to just raw-dog the formula. You get faster if you can contextualize it because with practice your mind collapses multiple operations into just one or two. You need to try it for ahwile to appreciate what I mean.

But let me give the context.

1. First, note that (S-K) is just “intrinsic value”. If positive, the call is in-the-money, if negative, the put is.
2. The extrinsic portion of the ITM [call/put] is the value of the OTM [put/call]
3. For calls, we add the rev/con (ie cost of carry) for puts we subtract it

Contextualizing the game

The game spread quickly when I shared the link on X. I even had some more recent alum of SIG and one from another MM tell me even in recent years they use a game like this in training.

When I started in 2000, this game was actually in fractions (“steenths”) but decimalization pilots were happening in my clerking months. Even though I started on fractions, I was doing decimals about halfway through assistant year. As clerks we were supposed to play this game when things were slow so you could be fast in mock-trading in class after work so you could actually get selected for the bootcamp (which alone got you a raise) and get on with a trading account.

Speedy mental math was more important back then. Different era obviously, but interesting that they still find use in it. I could speculate as to why but maybe someone reading this will give me the official reason. I would admit that even when I’d get a broker look at an outright option when I was at Parallax I’d automatically do the calc in my head to compare to the same strike option on the chain. Being facile with the calculation was also a requirement on the rare occasion that a broker asked for a synthetic (a topic I discussed in the art of paranoia as well).

It only took about 20 minutes of iteration to make the game with Claude. Which is not much longer than it takes me to play 🙁

I used to get perfect accuracy in the 30-40 second range at my best. My friend Tina was the firm champ at about 18 seconds. Just over 1 second per question.

Being fast was a job requirement, but you knew who the aliens were. It’s often hard to appreciate just how steep the performance curve is at the right tail of any skill in a competitive domain. We tend to get a glimpse of it in sports where everyone knows someone who was extreme (a friend of mine who was top 50 soccer player in US college soccer, another friend whose sister is bottom half of the top 100 tennis players on the women’s tour) but readily concedes there is still a world of difference between them and anyone famous in the field.

The trading floor was a humbling place because it’s very obvious that not all synapses are created equal. The strategic inferences and therefore actions you make with this information is heavily modulated by how much self-awareness you have. Sometimes being overconfident comes from never being exposed to the right-tail (your local big fish in a small pond) but it also comes from not realizing how far apart 2 standard devs is from 3 standard devs is in probability space.

[I tried to teach my older kid this idea recently in the context of his math MAP score. He is 99.5 percentile for 7th grade fall testing. He has a friend that is 99.8. Sounds similar. But my kid’s score is 5 in 1000 or 1 in 200. His friend is 1 in 500. In the population of Bay Area burbs with a good public school ranking, my kid is more like 1 in 40 and doesn’t make the gifted and talented cut, but those extra .3 percentiles keep you in the 99th percentile of the local pool.

99.8 vs 99.5 is 2.5x more rare. Proportionally, those .3 percentile points are as wide as being in the 50th percentile, or 1 in 2, vs the 80th or 1/5. That range covers 30 percentile points!

The extreme is yet steeper.

99.9 percentile is half as common as the 99.8…almost a similar jump in rarity from my son to his friend for just .1 percentile points.

💡See Tails Explained to see more application to everyday reasoning]

If you do Tina’s morning routine, you’re not gonna be Tina. It’s more obvious when the Tina’s of the world look like Lebron. But don’t be fooled when they don’t. Figure out the games you can win. Playing to your strengths is wisdom but first you must identify them. Self-awareness means stop wishcasting, see reality, and adapt to it.

Stay groovy

☮️

Moontower Weekly Recap

Posts:

• making the most of your time on earth
• the art of paranoia

   

Friends,

A few links before finance stuff today:

📖RTFM

I never heard this acronynm before — “read the f’ing manual”. I came across it in a link embedded in Byrne Hobart letter referencing engineering video game Shenzen I/O.

Wikipedia says:

RTFM is an initialism and internet slang for the expression “read the fucking manual”, typically used to reply to a basic question where the answer is easily found in the documentation, user guide, owner’s manual, man page, online help, internet forum, software documentation or FAQ.

In the not-distant AI-interface-everywhere future, asking anything but really good questions will make you appear lazy.

the control surface and its crinkliness (1 min read)

Dan Davies gives a nice explanation and visual of unpredictable discontinuity in functions that have regions of smoothness:

Whenever I hear someone talking about “tradeoffs” in policy, this is the picture that flashes into my mind – you can see that at every point in this diagram, there are tradeoffs, but that doesn’t mean that every point is easily accessible by changing a parameter and it doesn’t mean that the outcome of nudging the big dial a little is going to be predictable.

Money Angle

Notable short seller Andrew Left’s firm Citron Research gave his “all roads lead to $40” pronouncement on X this week regarding PLTR 2.90%↑ :

Give Palantir the same $100 billion valuation that Databricks just earned. Where does that put the stock? $40. The exact same math we saw when comparing Palantir to OpenAI.

Tyler pinged me before the stock dove on 8/18 before the stock dove:

walk through of put spread LEAP payoffs on PLTR pls

I pulled up moontower.ai to see what odds you can find to bet on $40:

Jan’27

67.5/50 put pays 8-1 if the stock hits 50 or lower ~11% chance of stock dropping 2/3

Tyler’s was drawn to a similar one before asking me:

my gut brought me to 65/55

I looked it up. That one is similar, pays 7.5-1

Put spreads, like any vertical spreads, are straightforward, risk-budgeted, ways to bet on an outcome by a specified expiration. Tyler followed a proper instinct — “Hey someone made a prediction, what odds are being offered by market prices?”

Since stocks obviously only go up in America, those odds don’t sound too exciting for something that is obviously impossible. But putting aside the laws of patriotic stock market anti-gravity, the mathematics of variance drag are the true reason why the odds feel underwhelming — PLTR is a high vol stock so a high likelihood of a negative return is baked into the surface:

In risk-neutral pricing world with RFR of 4% the median one-year outcome for a 50% vol name is RFR minus half the variance.

See Vol drag is misunderstood…until now

You can use my simulator to mess with this idea.

Another application of vertical spread: hedge binaries

Between ERoz and Tyler I feel like I’ve been the options candyman this week. Say my name and I appear. Except you don’t even have to do it 5x.

I gotta change that, I ain’t THAT thirsty.

Money Angle For Masochists

I was asked if I had written anything on the impact of events on skew percentile measures in the Discord. Sharing widely:

I haven’t, but most events are just one-day pricing problems. The effect of skew from 1-day pricing is heavily diluted if you are looking at 1-month skew and beyond. If you are looking at percent skew in like 1 week options, well all kinds of measurement issues anyway:

1. IV on 1-week options alone is a hairy topic since assumptions about how much vol time remains become impactful. Which is why if I’m trading near-dated, I really just think in terms of straddles and the price of vertical spreads. For the latter if a stock is trading 102.50 with 3 days to expiry you simply ballpark that the 100/105 call spread should be about $2.50 which is about the same saying the 105 call and the 105 put are equal (HW: prove this with put-parity). All the weird lognormal Black-Scholes math really melts away in the short term and you are in the realm of common sense handicapper.
2. The vega of options gets small in near-dated options so…maintaining a sense of proportion if important. If the ATM vol is 20% and the skew is 10% (ie 22 vol) vs 15% (23 vol) and the vega is 0.005 you haven’t even changed the value of the vertical spread by a cent even though the skew is 50% larger. I have written about this “sense of proportion” stuff. People get caught up in metrics that when you translate back into price space matter on the order of “it’s like paying an extra commission charge to IB on the trade”. In other words, if the difference changed your decision to trade, then the rest of your infra better be medical grade accuracy bc you’re trading for slivers.

From My Actual Life

Appreciation thread I wrote late Thursday nite when I noticed sub count crossed 20k:

You people are sick. And I appreciate you for it.

Some history on this letter and joining Twitter…

I started lurking on Twitter in mid 2010s bc I was trying to learn about investing. Despite being a trader investing was foreign to me. Frankly I didn’t care about investing or business broadly. Trading was always just some kinda boardgame to me that you could make a living from.

But I had savings and figured I should think about money a bit more so I came to Twitter where there was lots of links to articles and podcasts (consuming everything from @awealthofcs @dollarsanddata @patrick_oshag @ShaneAParrish) learning about Munger or smart beta etc.

Maybe some of that sounds quaint today. It was fresh to me. I was pretty offline, but just knew I didn’t know much. So I came to learn.

I start sharing links with my friends in Whatsapp chats often with own opinion.

Wife tells me stop spamming the friend and family chats. She suggests, “Why don’t you ask your friends if they’d want one weekly email with your thoughts and links so they can opt in?” She’s smart, but more so she’s kind & aware. She’ll save you if you’re trapped in a convo at a party. She was saving my friends and family.

So I email 100 people or so and 40 opt in. I’m obviously huge D&C fan and the Moontower is a symbol of togetherness and dorm room kinda convo so I pick that for a title.

I send the email on Sundays.

In hindsight, I realize I was just arbing offline and online. Online people find mental model shit trite and offline people think it’s catnip because it’s interesting if you’re like you’re just living your damn life and not reading your phone all day.

Eventually, I started finding analogies to trading or just explaining things from my own lens. Often quite personally, for better or worse. In any cas,e that’s when it started to grow. Every now and then you get a RT from a big account. I was a reply guy once I was publishing because I was also now tweeting links to the letter into the void. @EconomPic was the first large account to boost me (I remember I was on vacation in Palm Springs when I crossed 100 followers because of him).

And so you get a little boost and some confidence and you keep going.

I met him pretty early, and he told me, “If you can publish 20 weeks in a row you will be 95th percentile.”

That seemed like a super low bar. And tbh it was, other than the time I take off a few weeks in summer and Xmas, I basically never stopped.

I’ve had many convos with people who said they were going to do it and started and got nowhere near 20, so it really is a great mile marker bc if you start out eager it’s really not intimidating, but if you hit it you did achieve a milestone. Just fyi if you wanna write.

It took me about 7-12 hours a week to publish those early letters (takes about 3-8 now). In 2020, I started writing long-form on the blog. The first big one was the “sacrifice to the delta gods” post which took about 40 hours to write over the course of a month. I hit send the day before the market felt its first tremor of 2020 (I can remember the trading environment from that pre-COVID period well. Things felt quite alive on the desk).

After that post I started, I started writing the educational option posts. So many hours over the years on those education posts. No plan. Just writing because I thought “I could explain this my way” and hopefully someone else who needs or wants to know it but is mathematically undereducated could get it with less trouble than it took me.

Anyway, it’s turned into a lot of words on the internet. It’s quite crazy to hear almost every day how those words helped someone get a job or see something in a way they never could before. I hear from pros all the time how they tell their juniors to read MT and that’s always been the most validating feedback.

The writing thing was a happy accident and I really feel like it never would have happened if I didn’t poke around on Twitter and if Yinh didn’t nudge me. The writer/reader relationship is win-win in ways that trading isn’t.

(Trading is a win-win too, but that aspect of it isn’t the primary feeling, whereas in writing that feeling is stronger because it’s personal… it scratches a different itch.)

Thanks for following along. So much more to do.

Stay groovy

☮️

Moontower Weekly Recap

Posts:

• Adam Smith’s Backdoor
• the easiest win in options is for stock traders: how NOT to incinerate money

Friends,

We had company over a few days ago. How’s that for a throwback term to when your cable remote had a wire — “company” as a term for guests. So we’ve got some friends and family hanging out and the topic of jealousy comes up. Not in the adulterous context so much as the general coveting sense of the word.

I don’t talk about envy or jealousy much here.

(I wasn’t much of a Gin Blossoms fan, but I gotta admit this 90s tone is my comfort animal)

Yinh thinks I’m seemingly immune to jealousy. If she had to name one superpower of mine that’s the one. That’s a wild claim but her misperception is understandable. I just don’t get jealous of the things that are commonly referenced as objects of jealousy — wealth, freedom, abs.

I chose my words carefully — “things that are commonly referenced as objects of jealousy” — because the conversation we had with company re-framed my understanding of jealousy. These external objects are not the root of jealousy unless you stopped maturing once you got your driver’s license. I mean as a kid I genuinely thought the world was unfair because f’n George had the GI JOE aircraft carrier.

This simplistic “I am mad because someone has a bigger X” is a fake idea. That’s self-evident. If jealousy were that basic, everyone would be seething all the time. We reserve envy for people we deem to be in the same category as us — similar job, ability, circumstance. If you are jealous of royals you should just go all-in on reincarnation religion and give up orgasms in this life. But for most people whose jealousy stems from even a shred of just-world delusion, there are a couple of ideas worth internalizing.

First is a technique that forms a cornerstone of my own yin-yang sense of reality — every strength is a weakness.

You think too much. You don’t think enough.

You are OCD about to-do lists. You’re a messy professor.

You’re indistractable. You have self-diagnosed ADHD.

In one context, you are a force, in another, your mother thinks you’re inconsiderate.

If every personality trait is some version of the “Wife and My Mother-in-Law” illusion, then you can never get what someone else has without having to make bargains you aren’t aware of. It’s the whole “unless you want to trade your life for someone else’s, don’t bother wishing for à la carte upgrades”.

I don’t know when exactly I internalized this but I’d guess it was ~ 20 years ago. I read Neil Peart’s Ghost Rider, a soul-searching memoir of his 50k+ mile motorcycle ride in the aftermath of losing his wife to illness and teen daughter to a car accident within 9 months. While whatever made him one of the greats had nothing to do with those tragedies, the sheer weight of that book made its mark — I have no idea what others carry.

I don’t know what’s in store for me, but my life, both its interior and exterior, joy and suffering, is all I get. If you can’t find peace with what it finds, what you invite consciously or unconsciously by virtue of living in your body, you can’t even inhabit the only thing you get. If you unify your power with acceptance, there is no oxygen for jealousy to burn. Life is deeply unfair but you are still responsible until you are, once again, dirt.

The second idea, the one surfaced by our conversation, is that jealousy is a gift. Not as fuel, although perhaps that works for some. [Many exceptional achievers claim this but they are also telling on themselves. Not that they care and why should they, who am I to judge? But this type of fuel to be used as anything more than a seasonal nitro boost leads to far more Pyrrhic flameouts than glorious moon landings.]

Jealousy is a shortcut. A forced examination that will save you time in the long run. It will be clear what I mean in a moment, but I didn’t see it this way until that conversation where Yinh recounted her interview with improv comedian Holly Mandel.

The exchange:

Holly Mandel: While I was going through the Groundlings, a couple of people, including one of my at-the-time closest friends and almost constant writing partner. She got on Saturday Night Live, and I remember feeling I knew something was happening the night that SNL was in the audience to see a few people.

It could have been any of us that got called in for an audition, but she was definitely on a short list, I think. I remember feeling her energy that night—she was very focused on something beyond just the show. And I was just interested in the show. I just wanted to have fun on stage, and I remember there being a different energy there. I didn’t have that.

And then she got on SNL, and I remember being so conflicted. It was one of the first times I really dealt with such a deep sense of jealousy. And I’ve since come to understand that jealousy is actually still a gift—it just means somebody has something that tells you you want something of that same caliber. It doesn’t mean you want what they have. But I didn’t know that at the time, so it was just this icky emotion.

It was fascinating to watch her career go, which was fantastic and she was wonderful on the show, and to start to learn that that feeling of failure was really about having to trust that it just wasn’t for me. At the time, I thought it meant I had FOMO, that I wasn’t picked. But later in life, I got to look back and say, Oh, my personality would never have been able to handle it. At the time, I wasn’t built for that. I wasn’t designed for that.

And that energy on stage showed me that she was focused—she wanted to go beyond just the Groundlings. It was a great reminder that you may not see the lesson now, but you can trust you’ll get it at some point. And when I did, it felt really nice.

Yinh: So what did you do with that feeling—with that icky feeling—at the time?

Holly Mandel: Pretending it wasn’t there. And probably acting out of it at times that weren’t lovely. All those messy choices you make. I don’t know how many people listening to the podcast have been around people who get famous really fast. I’m sure there are different versions of that in everybody’s life.

But fame is weird—suddenly the whole world knows the person who used to be your roommate, and they’re living this magical life you were one degree away from. So it’s a growth moment to really learn how to navigate that with grace, and again, have this bigger trust that something else is meant for you. It just hasn’t hit yet.

Maybe this moment is a lesson in: how do you handle being around people who are starting to get their dreams when you haven’t had yours yet? How do you handle that? I think that’s a huge lesson.

Yinh: A lot of my listeners are in asset management, just because that’s the business I’ve been working in. Many are friends and family, but I think there’s a similar dynamic with money instead of fame.

So many people follow the same financial trajectory, and all of a sudden one great mentor, one great job, or one great bonus puts a few extra zeros next to their name. It changes a lot. But for those who don’t get it, you start to question: Am I not good enough? Am I smart enough? What can I do better?

It feels like failure if you don’t get it. But it also lights a fire under you. It motivates you if you do want that, and it helps you question if you really do want it.

Holly Mandel: One hundred percent. And I’ve seen the underbelly of all of that. It isn’t as glamorous as it looks. That’s another growth moment: asking, Is that really the thing you want? Or does it just look good in the magazine?

The mature framing of jealousy is that it’s about you, not them. When it spotlights that you don’t want to do what it takes. You wanna play around but still get the prize? Jealousy reveals the true price of the prize.

The faster you can “muck” your miswants and double-down on your true wants, the faster you can get to burning the inevitable anxieties on the right path rather than wasting your energy on the wrong one. The jealousies you encounter on the right path are distance markers. They allow you to measure your pace vs what is possible which you can then scale for you. They are opportunities to renew your resolve.

It’s the yin-yang thing again. Jealousy is self-sabotage or self-knowledge. Wield it well.

Money Angle

Interactive Brokers launched “interactive finance lessons”. Their modules for option basics are very good.

I also noticed that they would make outstanding learning aids for the options section of the Series 7.

All free.

IBKR Campus

Money Angle For Masochists

In the discord, I was asked a good question that’s lingered for me. I’ll share the fuller response here but first the question:

When you are talking about the ‘mantra’ to reset discipline – “I am buying/selling A for $X because B is $Y bid/offered” – are you thinking in terms of actually putting on both trades or just in pricing terms (that’s expensive and stands in R to this so I am buying this)?

I thought at first that it was the latter you meant but then was thinking that maybe that isn’t actually an expression of the narrow rather than overarching opinion – like I can say I am buying X cheap because Y is expensive to make myself feel good about buying it but it doesn’t really discipline me, whereas the actual long short trade makes me focus on time to expiry, volume, price, trend etc.

Anyway like I say, dumb question but would be very interested to hear the longer form version?

Yea, this is anything but a dumb question. And in case you don’t remember the mantra, it’s what I call a “getting back on track” technique to reset discipline. (thread)

The technique focuses you on relative value. To directly answer the question, I mean that you should stay anchored to the relative lens whether you choose to do both legs or not.

But the unsaid benefit of the mantra is that it recertifies your process. Trading is a business — churning on the basis of discernment that turns over at repeatable time scales.

The loop:

research → opportunity → execution → feedback → adjustment/research 🔁

The loop is wrapped in a risk-management sheath.

In the vol trading context, you are constructing long/short portfolios of options, whether that’s your mandate as a strategy at a fund or a market-maker.

[Some market-makers are more in the category of flipper not warehouser but this business rests on speedy tech more so than discernment of option values].

I would need to fall back on the mantra after getting punished for drawing lines in the sand. Letting my book’s net vega get too long usually because it was so cheap low. Relative value lenses are hard when everything looks cheap or everything looks expensive. Nature of the game. I suspect this is true across many forms of investment not just vol. When discernment of relative value gets hard, we get sloppy. We don’t match the bids we’re getting hit on with enough sells.

This breaks the loop. If you get carried away, we puncture the risk-management sheath as well. Your personality might even change — justifying your position with macro lingo. If you really get desperate, you start blaming the Fed or passive or any other number of things that somehow failed to remind you that nobody owes you the edge you borrowed from the momentary stretch of information and technological track that your career was choo-choo’ing along on.

(Sorry, that got a bit out of hand. I’m sure you’ve never heard anyone sound thaaat entitled, right?)

The mantra stops you from drawing lines in the sand. From turning a relative value game into a…timing game. That’s what an outsize position relative to your business is — a timing bet.

“The cost of wearing this position will be worth it in hindsight because the market will come around to my understanding on a timeline that works for me.”

Timing the general vol level? I’m sorry I haven’t seen this ability consistently from anyone (outside of pockets of legal frontrunning set-ups).

You know what happens when vol gets really low? Trading sucks. And it stays low for so long that you’re happy to dump most of your length by the time it re-traces to your average price. That’s how it goes.

The answer is to take some extra days off when the opportunity cost is low, work on your skunkworks projects, and accept that parsing whether you should sell nominally cheap puts because they “screen high on a percentile skew” basis is an awful way to make a living. If your boss doesn’t understand this, you work for a business manager, not a trader. Masterminding a crap environment is orders of magnitude worse than doing a decent job in a good one.

(Obviously, this comes back to the biggest problem in finance — alignment. The right behavior and the incentives are hard to sync. Not easy to sit on your hands when private school theta is $300 per day per kid.)

If you have had a consistently profitable trading business, you’ll understand this chart.

The blue line is a unitless version of “cheap/expensive”. It’s a sine wave with the occasional rogue amplitude. Your job is to surf it. Notice that your average buys and sells are not the bottoms or tops, but there is a consistent, albeit un-heroic, profit margin.

The opportunist, perhaps a hedge fund that only looks at your market when it’s stretched, might show up when things get extreme and take a stab. They probably won’t pick the top or bottom, and because the market is especially volatile in that period the position will spend a short time in a sharp drawdown. We can assume this is just a sleeve of their total capital that is otherwise well-diversified.

As a market-maker or trader whose primary business is to surf this particular asset class, you don’t want to turn your business into theirs (especially when I’m being charitable and simply blessing this tourist fund with skill). You have a different set of constraints. They need to bet bigger because they get less swings of the bat in a year, but their opportunity set is broader. They carry a big position across a steep (p/l per unit of time) trajectory.

You’re not here for just the peaks and valleys but you need to be “able” when the market is at the peaks and valleys.

Trading is compensation for a service. In other words, a role. Don’t lose sight of the role. The easiest way to remember that is to ask yourself, “If I’m buying X at this price, what is it cheap against?”

(This will work even if you don’t trade cross-sectionally. If you have a forecast, it will focus you on the forecast’s error bars and the cadence of its feedback.))

That’s enough for today.

Stay groovy

☮️

Moontower Weekly Recap

Posts:

• poker without the poker
• Black Scholes Webinar and Slides

We moved into the new house yesterday.

We’ve been buried, just been moving a bit every day for weeks since this house is around the corner from our rental. It’s exciting, the kids are stoked, grandma is over the moon and will be more so when her space is built. But there’s a lot to do (like get the internet working beyond just my office, “sorry honey just a few minutes!”).

I’ll try to be brief.

It’s top of mind, let’s chat real estate.

I mentioned Redfin chief economist, Daryl Fairweather, in Wednesday’s letter in the context of selecting work you want to do. Timely mention because I’m going to show you something cool.

A little background…the Epsilon Theory team (ie Ben Hunt et al) have been building an AI-driven real-time narrative analysis engine called Perscient. It turns data into storyboards or visualizations that spotlight how a narrative is evolving.

In a recent interview with Matt Zeigler, Fairweather reported a number of insights about the housing market. Matt ran them through Perscient and sent me this link:

The Housing Market: Truth in Five Charts (5 min read)

My reply:

dude, i really like this. sending it to my family. The chart is aesthetically pleasing, the content of them is fresh, and they are annotated to reduce cognitive load. Would love to see more of these.

The content upshot: it paints a picture of a housing market perched to roll over.

(Already happening in Austin & Florida according to The New Geography of Housing In America).

Money Angle

That article is tight, but I don’t need its crystal ball. I’ll tell you right now — it’s going down. I just bought a house. Duh.

On a less ego-centric beat, a downturn could have a silver lining.

On the one hand, if houses get more affordable, this will restore balance to the Force. Much of our political upheaval, in my humble opinion, stems from a sense that our future is going to be worse than our past because the American dream is out of reach. The average age people buy their first home is almost 40 (like 10 years later than your grandparents and possibly even parents!). Much of our malaise, according to Nick, is downstream of what’s happened to real estate. He explains in this week’s post:

It’s the housing, stupid (4 min read)

[He also talks about the 3x surge amongst households earning over $1mm/yr choosing to rent. If you’ve done the math, not that this is a pure or even primary math decision, this shouldn’t come as a shock. See The variable that balances the buy/rent equation.]

On the other hand, housing is a big part of the economy directly and indirectly has a wealth effect impact on consumption. It might feel hard to imagine the stock market and employment chugging along happily and decoupling from housing but then again, home prices decoupled to the upside vs income, so maybe it’s a window for normalization.

Anyway, I’m getting out of my realm. On housing stuff, you’re better off listening to Daryl and Logan Mohtashami who live in the data.

Personal observation:

Don’t delude yourself. Many home improvements don’t pay for themselves. The house we bought was meticulously renovated in 2018. The disclosures included receipts. The slab on the island alone cost about 1/2 as much as the kitchen we built from scratch in 2013 in our first suburban house (which had an even bigger island). And this is not even a price from the covid era or aftermath.

I’d estimate the price of this house was in line with its replacement value. In other words, the land was free. We know it starts at $650/ft to build a home here, plus you’ll spend 1.5-2 years renting while the miserable permitting process and construction play out.

This is the bull case on all housing here. Homes trade below replacement costs. The cost to build from scratch is at least $4mm for a 3k sq ft home on a 1/2 acre. And all of these numbers are a fraction of what it costs on the peninsula. (I rarely meet anyone who moves here from somewhere other than the peninsula since Covid. If geoarbitrage is part of the bull case though, that’s a live by the sword, die by the sword case — the replacement cost thing is really the support assuming stable employment.)

The bear case is pure affordability eroding demand — it’s the demand side of this equation that needs to modulate. The supply of existing homes for sale here was higher than I’ve seen for several years, but in CA the supply is constrained not just because of mortgage lock-in, an effect you see nationally, but because of Prop 13. Why re-base your taxes by moving? (The rental we are leaving would probably trade around $2.5-$2.8mm if they ever sold but the property taxes are just under $5k/yr!)

So…back to the home improvements you don’t recoup. I feel like buying this home, I was on the winning end of “home improvements that don’t pay for themselves” because we happen to like the taste of the upgrades. Yinh argues that the reno did pay for itself since they nominally got all their money back. But I do that whole thing where I’m “breaking even on investment you made 7 years ago is a disaster”.

Yinh says, yes but they enjoyed it. It was consumed.

No argument there.

Perfect example of the duality of housing as a consumption good and an investment good. For the 2 major upgrades we are doing, an ADU and solar, I’m fairly confident they pay for themselves and more. But there’s also a list of things that definitely ain’t paying for themselves.

My sorting sickness likes to place these things in their proper container, but I get that many people don’t. Our realtor has been a friend since we moved to the burbs, and she’s always joking with me that my way of seeing the world reminds me of her father and how having done this work for a long time says I assure you most people are nowhere near as cold as Yinh and I are when we look at a house. Part of this is finance brainworms but some of it is a defense mechanism — I like renting, so buying needs to feel really right to cross that rubicon.

Recent moontower posts about housing

• Why home prices could fall with mortgage rates

Money Angle For Masochists

The idea that your primary residence can be seen as an investment has poisoned the country multiple times in the past 20 years, from the GFC to the restrictive zoning laws that have pulled the ladder up.

I have previously shared a dive on Georgism which in principle I agree with. If you want to follow the implementation experiments around the US you can check out Lars Doucet’s substack. Its title is a hat-tip to Henry George’s influential treatise.

One of the interesting things about Georgism is how it had fans from across the political spectrum as it had elements that sound socialistic and elements that are aggressively capitalistic.

Rory Sutherland hits the high points in this 10-minute vid:

He makes a point I’ve made in the past — Texas, despite being conservative, has tax policy that is quite Georgist — it taxes land heavily and leaves income alone. CA, meanwhile, is landlord heaven.

(Landlords love to bitch about the insane tenant rights here, and they’re not wrong when you see some of these crazy squatter cases, but on the whole, you could have no tenants and did better on an after-tax basis just land banking. I hate having distortions making up for prior distortions but these tenant cases are hard to sympathize with in the abstract given how insane CA has benefited landowners. Fiscal karma. Still I’ve also heard some awful personal stories regarding tenants that would compel you to subscribe to zerohedge premium.

A few trash tenants give tenants a bad name and a few rotten landlords give landlords a bad name but it’s important to put the emotions down for a second and trace this all back to poor policy broadly.)

I appreciated that Rory pointed to the error in economic theory from which Georgism sprouted:

Adam Smith thought there were three sources of wealth creation: land, capital, and labor. But future generations of economists thought it was too complicated to have three — it made the math difficult. So they pretended capital and land were the same thing. They’re not. Capital is potentially limitless — you can create more of it. Land is effectively a bottleneck. An artificial bottleneck.

He also reminds us that Monopoly was literally a game designed to point out the flaw in treating land as capital! It was designed by a Georgist as a cautionary tale and became the most popular boardgame in America non-ironically. Amazing work all around really.

Anyway, Rory touches on all this but if you find it as fascinating as I do feel free to continue with:

• Moontower On Georgism

From My Actual Life

A note I wrote yesterday…

Moving day.

We moved into our rental in Nov 2020 after selling our house during COVID thinking we would leave CA.

The next few years had interesting twists…

I was at Parallax doing the WFH thing. My team moved to CO. We all sold our houses at the same time and even used my same realtor friend. In the meantime, we needed a place to stay. The realtor called her childhood friend who she knew had this house vacant.

They agreed to rent it to us. An old groovy Boogie Nights house. It needs (A LOT of) TLC but I describe it as a rich person’s house from 1969. Anyway, we figure it’s temporary. So as things start opening up we visit Denver/Boulder on a majestic weather weekend. Looks great.

We get back home and Denver weather made national news. It was 80 and sunny and they had a snowstorm the next day. I text @Elfonzerelli:

“bruh, the weather?”

Apparently that can happen.

Egyptian blood gets cold feet. I’m out on CO. I myself am a snowflake. I don’t need them in September.

Summer 2021, we travel for about 7 weeks in the US, including a month in TX visiting friends. We spend 4th of July in Austin and on the way back to our friend’s house in DFW area we swing by an open house. We called the realtor on the way to make sure she’ll be there. She warns us there’s 3 offers on the place already. No problem. We are looky loos and it’s next to our friend’s house so we still wanna look.

We step inside, love it immediately and the price seemed cheap (adjusting for coming from CA and TX property tax even).

I ask my friend who knows the market what’s the worst he thinks we could rent it out for. Satisfied we lift the house paying 12% thru ask. As we celebrate that week we tell our friends we will rent it out …but move there in a year!

We return to CA.

So it’s now spring of 2022.

We have the move to TX as this unspoken deadline in the back of our minds. Yinh and I are driving up to Napa. A telekinesis moment as we were driving thru the beautiful valley…I don’t remember who spoke first, the words could have been either of us:

“we can’t go to Texas”

Immediate agreement.

We do love it here. Our family is here. I left work a few months earlier, still not much of a plan, and while TX would have been way better financially, everywhere has warts…dealing with the high cost was the thing we’d rather bear.

We commit to CA then. No more wandering eyes. We sold the house in TX.

[Almost top ticked it but our first buyer backed out the week the market first dropped in 2022. We ended up eventually selling for about a 25% profit and that luck parlayed into more bc we jammed the proceeds into XHB in what turned out to be the low — long-time readers remember this as I wrote about in real time. It was a weird trade bc I got the inkling that year that I wanted to short builders, bc after talking to our TX tenants and their experience with buying a house from a builder I understood how the builders seemed squeezed on both demand bc affordability and supply cost inflation. They were like a broken crack spread. So I wanted to buy puts. But when I looked at the performance of REITs and other RE plays they were all flattish while the builders were crushed. Figuring they were now hated and be it that we were now “short a house” I held my nose and bought them! Anyway, dumb luck. Sold ’em after the 1 year mark from the basis.]

Anyway life again.

In late ’22, we are having “Sunday coffee with neighbors in the shared driveway” and learn that the tenants whose backyard is adjacent to us are moving out. We don’t know them, but our neighbor tells us. We walk to the house, introduce ourselves and discover the house isn’t listed yet. We call Yinh’s sister in SF.

“You have to move here”

This was out of left field.

We badger her and her husband all evening.

They agreed to come see it that week. By Friday they sign the lease. The 4 adults, 4 kids and grandma sharing 2 adjacent homes.

We remove part of the fence. Compound.

When my kids moved into our rental they were in COVID homeschool pods. Pre-K and 2nd grade. Tuesday, they go into 4th and 7th. These were big years. They will always remember the years “when they lived with their cousins.”

I’ve probably lived the best 2.5 years of my life. I’m sad to leave this house. The memories spanned important years (not to mention my own leaving work transition).

But today…the fence is mended.

We sleep in the new house tonight. It’s just around the corner, 3 min by bike, 8 walking. Kid goes to the same bus stop.

But this house and compound arrangement needed a tribute.

We hear our new neighbors are empty nesters. Our backyards are adjacent. We own the new place and would happily max lever to make the compound happen again but this time… permanently.

Moontower Weekly Recap

Posts:

• an impolite answer to “how do you get people to do good work”

  [this friggin post — I wrote it off the cuff and it ended up doing numbers. It’s probably the most read post of mine in the past year. I’ll take it, but not without some internal grumbling about the trash correlation of effort to reception]

• shadow theta