useless NOISE

This is what ZeroHedge posted after NVDA earnings:

and now NVDA is flat. straddles were pricing in 4.4% move. options worthless, dealers win.

Huh?

Earnings were priced cheap and you think the dealers were… short?

And by what mechanism are they engineering a short pin? Texas hedging their gamma scalps?

The dealers were probably sitting there lamenting how smart the rest of the market to stuff straddles down their throats after the earnings announcement being a nothingburger (at least based on the early reaction).

From a birdie, I pinged who knows a tad about trading — ya know, because they sling thousands of options a day for a living, instead of ragebaiting conspiracy theorists with conspiracies that aren’t even coherent on their face:

Idk- nvda was up four %, then unched, now down 4%. I’d guess you’d be long earnings gun to your head. I doubt dealers were smoking a 4% nvda earnings move. In var space I think that looks rough. What I will say- is given the print- market was long nvda and now just exiting into a good print and excess liquidity if I had to guess.

This brings me to a rant I need to pop off maybe once a year or so before the tank fills up again.

Look, I don’t know shit about most stuff. But watching takes on options from popular channels reminds me that the standards of knowledge one is willing to meet when their game is to have an opinion on everything is embarrassingly low. Which, in turn, discredits that channel on everything. When they are right…it’s accidental.

This is the f’ing definition of NOISE. Pure static. Hanging around, blathering. Like we all know someone like this in person — ugh, enough, aren’t you tired of wasting spectrum yet, jfc.

It reminds me of an old Farnam Street post about Batesian mimicry. Several species of snakes mimic the appearance of the venomous coral snake.

This is a common defense in nature. And a common offense on Twitter/X to gain clout.

The more impressive the “model,” the more effective its mimics can be in convincing people they too are impressive, and in all the same ways. But for every Warren Buffett (just one by our count), there has been many “future” Warren Buffett’s. For every Steve Jobs, there have been many “next” Steve Jobs’.

In fact, sometimes even just appearances can be quite convincing: now-disgraced Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes was very fond of wearing a very Steve Jobsian black turtleneck outfit.

It seems almost a law of nature that success will be copied, sometimes in a very disgraceful way.

And who can best tell the difference between a coral snake and its mimics? The coral snake itself. The Munger quote:

“It’s very hard to tell the difference between a good money manager and someone who just has the pattern down. If you aren’t a good money manager yourself, rather than trying to pick one, you’re probably better off with a low cost index fund. It takes one to know one.”