Ethereum Classic is an open, decentralized, and permissionless public blockchain, that aims to fulfill the original promise of Ethereum, as a platform where smart contracts are free from third-party interference. ETC prioritizes trust-minimization, network security, and integrity. All network upgrades are non-contentious with the aim to fix critical issues or to add value with newly proposed features; never to create new tokens, or to bail out flawed smart contracts and their interest groups.
This should be a word of warning, really to everyone to stop sharing so much on social media. But if you're some dumbass IML goon who scams people, I feel justified in shattering your bubble.
Meet C. He rose to a level in IML locally where he was good enough to be used by the company basically as a promotional model.
C moved to Miami to live the 22 year old Forex millionaire lifestyle, or at least play the part on Instagram. Cue the photos of C on the beach, C on a yacht, in a rented AMG, and C in "his" mansion surrounded by his fellow community college meathead comrades who pose for photos of them nodding at their phones like they have any fucking clue how finance works.
Well, I'm like fuck it. I know C makes jack shit based on IML's Income Disclosure Statement. Everything is being paid for by IML to sell an image. But I want confirmation, I'm an asshole and I want him to know that he can be made out for the fraud he is.
So I just pay attention. C posts a photo of him at his mansion's pool, I pay attention. He posts a screenshot of him ordering Uber Eats, I take note of the approximate location of the home. He posts photos of him in his barely furnished room "grinding" so I can tell what is being taken at "home."
I know the difference between what is taken at an AirBnB used to pitch IML and what is their "home" used to sell the idea of him being a well-to-do Forex trader with a Miami mansion.
He reposts a story from his sister gushing over visiting him in his gated community. I take note.
After about a month, I fire up Google Maps. Based on the Uber Eats screenshot, I narrow it down to the only gated community possible. All the homes are waterfront in canals just off the beach. Street view shows the community is gated. Almost every home has a pool, however his is unique because it is covered by a glass panel with several support beams. In the background of the pool photos is clear sky, dense palm trees, a black railing, and a distinctive home across the canal from the pool.
I found a handful of homes with similar covered pools. Only one had dense vegetation in the backyard facing the canal and dock. It's facing east so no skyrises from the beach to the west are in the skyline. The home across the canal roughly matches the 3D view in Google Maps.
So I plug in the address to Google and start looking at Redfin, Zillow, Etc. They have interior photos of the rooms, pool, and common areas of the home. Same exact pool, same exact living rokm where they pose for their "family meetings." Down the the railing on the dock I can see in his daily pool photo, I have it for sure.
The home is off market but the prior listing indicates it has been maintained as a rental. I run the assessor data through the county to find the new owner, lo and behold the buyer is also a real-estate management corp not affiliated to IML. Their website returns to them renting out properties in the area.
So now I have C's fake mansion's address. I want to send stacks and stacks of the Income Disclosure Statement over there just to be petty.
If you pay attention, these people aren't hard to completely dismantle. I did it just to see if I could, I didn't sit on his profile 24/7 obsessing. I just viewed his content in passing and felt like I knew enough about him to sleuth google maps for 20 minutes looking for the home. It was easy. These people live in denial and scam kids looking to get rich quick. It's like a cult and I want to shatter his illusion that he can pretend without anyone being the wiser.
submitted by Hello, dummies
It's your old pal, Fuzzy.
As I'm sure you've all noticed, a lot of the stuff that gets posted here is - to put it delicately - fucking ridiculous. More backwards-ass shit gets posted to
wallstreetbets than you'd see on a Westboro Baptist community message board. I mean, I had a look at the daily thread yesterday and..... yeesh. I know, I know.
We all make like the divine Laura Dern circa 1992 on the daily and stick our hands deep into this steaming heap of shit to find the nuggets of valuable and/or hilarious information within (thanks for reading, BTW). I agree. I love it just the way it is too. That's what makes WSB great.
What I'm getting at is that a lot of the stuff that gets posted here - notwithstanding it being funny or interesting - is just... wrong. Like, fucking your cousin wrong. And to be clear, I mean the fucking your *first* cousin kinda wrong, before my Southerners in the back get all het up (simmer down, Billy Ray - I know Mabel's twice removed on your grand-sister's side). Truly, I try to let it slide.
I do my bit to try and put you on the right path. Most of the time, I sleep easy no matter how badly I've seen someone explain what a bank liquidity crisis is. But out of all of those tens of thousands of misguided, autistic attempts at understanding the world of high finance, one thing gets so consistently - so *emphatically* - fucked up and misunderstood by you retards that last night I felt obligated at the end of a long work day to pull together this edition of
Finance with Fuzzy just for you. It's so serious I'm not even going to make a
u/pokimane gag. Have you guessed what it is yet? Here's a clue. It's in the title of the post.
That's right, friends. Today in the neighborhood we're going to talk all about
hedging in financial markets - spots, swaps, collars, forwards, CDS, synthetic CDOs, all that fun shit. Don't worry; I'm going to explain what all the scary words mean and how they impact your OTM RH positions along the way.
We're going to break it down like this. (1) "What's a hedge, Fuzzy?" (2) Common Hedging Strategies and (3) All About ISDAs and Credit Default Swaps.
Before we begin. For the nerds and JV traders in the back (and anyone else who needs to hear this up front) - I am simplifying these descriptions for the purposes of this post. I am also obviously not going to try and cover every exotic form of hedge under the sun or give a detailed summation of what caused the financial crisis. If you are interested in something specific ask a question, but don't try and impress me with your Investopedia skills or technical points I didn't cover; I will just be forced to flex my years of IRL experience on you in the comments and you'll look like a big dummy.
TL;DR? Fuck you. There is no TL;DR. You've come this far already. What's a few more paragraphs? Put down the Cheetos and try to concentrate for the next 5-7 minutes. You'll learn something, and I promise I'll be gentle.
Ready? Let's get started.
1. The Tao of Risk: Hedging as a Way of Life The simplest way to characterize what a hedge 'is' is to imagine every action having a binary outcome. One is bad, one is good. Red lines, green lines; uppie, downie. With me so far? Good. A 'hedge' is simply the employment of a strategy to mitigate the effect of your action having the
wrong binary outcome. You wanted X, but you got Z! Frowny face. A hedge strategy introduces a
third outcome. If you hedged against the
possibility of Z happening, then you can wind up with Y instead. Not as good as X, but not as bad as Z. The technical definition I like to give my idiot juniors is as follows:
Utilization of a defensive strategy to mitigate risk, at a fraction of the cost to capital of the risk itself.
Congratulations. You just finished Hedging 101. "But Fuzzy, that's easy! I just sold a naked call against my 95% OTM put! I'm adequately hedged!". Spoiler alert: you're not (although good work on executing a collar, which I describe below). What I'm talking about here is what would be referred to as a 'perfect hedge'; a binary outcome where downside is totally mitigated by a risk management strategy. That's not how it works IRL. Pay attention; this is the tricky part.
You can't take a single position and conclude that you're adequately hedged because risks are fluid, not static. So you need to constantly adjust your position in order to maximize the value of the hedge and insure your position. You also need to consider exposure to more than one category of risk. There are micro (specific exposure) risks, and macro (trend exposure) risks, and both need to factor into the hedge calculus.
That's why, in the real world, the value of hedging depends entirely on the design of the hedging strategy itself. Here, when we say "value" of the hedge, we're not talking about cash money - we're talking about the intrinsic value of the hedge relative to the the risk profile of your underlying exposure. To achieve this, people hedge
dynamically. In
wallstreetbets terms, this means that as the value of your position changes, you need to change your hedges too. The idea is to efficiently and continuously distribute and rebalance risk across different states and periods, taking value from states in which the marginal cost of the hedge is low and putting it back into states where marginal cost of the hedge is high, until the shadow value of your underlying exposure is equalized across your positions. The punchline, I guess, is that one static position is a hedge in the same way that the finger paintings you make for your wife's boyfriend are art - it's technically correct, but you're only playing yourself by believing it.
Anyway. Obviously doing this as a small potatoes trader is hard but it's worth taking into account. Enough basic shit. So how does this work in markets?
2. A Hedging Taxonomy The best place to start here is a practical question. What does a business need to hedge against? Think about the specific risk that an individual business faces. These are legion, so I'm just going to list a few of the key ones that apply to most corporates. (1) You have commodity risk for the shit you buy or the shit you use. (2) You have currency risk for the money you borrow. (3) You have rate risk on the debt you carry. (4) You have offtake risk for the shit you sell. Complicated, right? To help address the many and varied ways that shit can go wrong in a sophisticated market, smart operators like yours truly have devised a whole bundle of different instruments which can help you manage the risk. I might write about some of the more complicated ones in a later post if people are interested (CDO/CLOs, strip/stack hedges and bond swaps with option toggles come to mind) but let's stick to the basics for now.
(i) Swaps
A swap is one of the most common forms of hedge instrument, and they're used by pretty much everyone that can afford them. The language is complicated but the concept isn't, so pay attention and you'll be fine. This is the most important part of this section so it'll be the longest one.
Swaps are derivative contracts with two counterparties (before you ask, you can't trade 'em on an exchange - they're OTC instruments only). They're used to exchange one cash flow for another cash flow of equal expected value; doing this allows you to take speculative positions on certain financial prices or to alter the cash flows of existing assets or liabilities within a business. "Wait, Fuzz; slow down! What do you mean sets of cash flows?". Fear not, little autist. Ol' Fuzz has you covered.
The cash flows I'm talking about are referred to in swap-land as 'legs'. One leg is fixed - a set payment that's the same every time it gets paid - and the other is variable - it fluctuates (typically indexed off the price of the underlying risk that you are speculating on / protecting against). You set it up at the start so that they're notionally equal and the two legs net off; so at open, the swap is a zero NPV instrument. Here's where the fun starts. If the price that you based the variable leg of the swap on changes, the value of the swap will shift; the party on the wrong side of the move ponies up via the variable payment. It's a zero sum game.
I'll give you an example using the most vanilla swap around; an interest rate trade. Here's how it works. You borrow money from a bank, and they charge you a rate of interest. You lock the rate up front, because you're smart like that. But then -
quelle surprise! - the rate gets
better after you borrow. Now you're bagholding to the tune of, I don't know, 5 bps. Doesn't sound like much but on a billion dollar loan that's a lot of money (a classic example of the kind of 'small, deep hole' that's terrible for profits). Now, if you had a swap contract on the rate before you entered the trade, you're set; if the rate goes down, you get a payment under the swap. If it goes up, whatever payment you're making to the bank is netted off by the fact that you're borrowing at a sub-market rate. Win-win! Or, at least, Lose Less / Lose Less. That's the name of the game in hedging.
There are
many different kinds of swaps, some of which are pretty exotic; but they're all different variations on the same theme. If your business has exposure to something which fluctuates in price, you trade swaps to hedge against the fluctuation. The valuation of swaps is also super interesting but I guarantee you that 99% of you won't understand it so I'm not going to try and explain it here although I encourage you to google it if you're interested.
Because they're OTC, none of them are filed publicly. Someeeeeetimes you see an ISDA (dsicussed below) but the confirms themselves (the individual swaps) are not filed. You can usually read about the hedging strategy in a 10-K, though. For what it's worth, most modern credit agreements ban speculative hedging. Top tip: This is occasionally something worth checking in credit agreements when you invest in businesses that are debt issuers - being able to do this increases the risk profile significantly and is particularly important in times of economic volatility (ctrl+f "non-speculative" in the credit agreement to be sure).
(ii) Forwards
A forward is a contract made today for the future delivery of an asset at a pre-agreed price. That's it. "But Fuzzy! That sounds just like a futures contract!". I know. Confusing, right? Just like a futures trade, forwards are generally used in commodity or forex land to protect against price fluctuations. The differences between forwards and futures are small but significant. I'm not going to go into
super boring detail because I don't think many of you are commodities traders but it is still an important thing to understand even if you're just an RH jockey, so stick with me.
Just like swaps, forwards are OTC contracts - they're not publicly traded. This is distinct from futures, which are traded on exchanges (see
The Ballad Of Big Dick Vick for some more color on this). In a forward, no money changes hands until the maturity date of the contract when delivery and receipt are carried out; price and quantity are locked in from day 1. As you now know having read about BDV, futures are marked to market daily, and normally people close them out with synthetic settlement using an inverse position. They're also liquid, and that makes them easier to unwind or close out in case shit goes sideways.
People use forwards when they absolutely have to get rid of the thing they made (or take delivery of the thing they need). If you're a miner, or a farmer, you use this shit to make sure that at the end of the production cycle, you can get rid of the shit you made (and you won't get fucked by someone taking cash settlement over delivery). If you're a buyer, you use them to guarantee that you'll get whatever the shit is that you'll need at a price agreed in advance. Because they're OTC, you can also exactly tailor them to the requirements of your particular circumstances.
These contracts are incredibly byzantine (and there are even crazier synthetic forwards you can see in money markets for the true degenerate fund managers). In my experience, only Texan oilfield magnates, commodities traders, and the weirdo forex crowd fuck with them. I (i) do not own a 10 gallon hat or a novelty size belt buckle (ii) do not wake up in the middle of the night freaking out about the price of pork fat and (iii) love greenbacks too much to care about other countries' monopoly money, so I don't fuck with them.
(iii) Collars
No, not the kind your wife is encouraging you to wear try out to 'spice things up' in the bedroom during quarantine. Collars are actually the hedging strategy
most applicable to WSB. Collars deal with options! Hooray!
To execute a basic collar (also called a wrapper by tea-drinking Brits and people from the Antipodes), you buy an out of the money put while simultaneously writing a covered call on the same equity. The put protects your position against price drops and writing the call produces income that offsets the put premium. Doing this limits your tendies (you can only profit up to the strike price of the call) but also writes down your risk. If you screen large volume trades with a VOL/OI of more than 3 or 4x (and they're not bullshit biotech stocks), you can sometimes see these being constructed in real time as hedge funds protect themselves on their shorts.
(3) All About ISDAs, CDS and Synthetic CDOs You may have heard about the mythical
ISDA. Much like an indenture (discussed in my post on $F), it's a magic legal machine that lets you build swaps via trade confirms with a willing counterparty. They are
very complicated legal documents and you need to be a true expert to fuck with them. Fortunately, I am, so I do. They're made of two parts; a Master (which is a form agreement that's always the same) and a Schedule (which amends the Master to include your specific terms). They are also the engine behind just about every major credit crunch of the last 10+ years.
First - a brief explainer. An ISDA is a not in and of itself a hedge - it's an umbrella contract that governs the terms of your swaps, which you use to construct your hedge position. You can trade commodities, forex, rates, whatever, all under the same ISDA.
Let me explain. Remember when we talked about swaps? Right. So. You can trade swaps on just about anything. In the late 90s and early 2000s, people had the smart idea of using other people's debt and or credit ratings as the variable leg of swap documentation. These are called
credit default swaps. I was actually starting out at a bank during this time and, I gotta tell you, the only thing I can compare people's enthusiasm for this shit to was that moment in your early teens when you discover jerking off. Except, unlike your bathroom bound shame sessions to Mom's Sears catalogue, every single person you know felt that way too; and they're all doing it at once. It was a fiscal circlejerk of epic proportions, and the financial crisis was the inevitable bukkake finish. WSB autism is absolutely no comparison for the enthusiasm people had during this time for lighting each other's money on fire.
Here's how it works. You pick a company. Any company. Maybe even your own! And then you write a swap. In the swap, you define "Credit Event" with respect to that company's debt as the variable leg . And you write in... whatever you want. A ratings downgrade, default under the docs, failure to meet a leverage ratio or FCCR for a certain testing period... whatever. Now, this started out as a hedge position, just like we discussed above. The purest of intentions, of course. But then people realized - if bad shit happens,
you make money. And banks... don't like calling in loans or forcing bankruptcies. Can you smell what the moral hazard is cooking?
Enter synthetic CDOs. CDOs are basically pools of asset backed securities that invest in debt (loans or bonds). They've been around for a minute but they got famous in the 2000s because a shitload of them containing subprime mortgage debt went belly up in 2008. This got a lot of publicity because a lot of sad looking rednecks got foreclosed on and were interviewed on CNBC. "OH!", the people cried. "Look at those big bad bankers buying up subprime loans! They caused this!". Wrong answer, America. The debt wasn't the problem. What a lot of people don't realize is that the real meat of the problem was not in regular way CDOs investing in bundles of shit mortgage debts in
synthetic CDOs investing in CDS predicated on that debt. They're
synthetic because they don't have a stake in the actual underlying debt; just the instruments riding on the coattails. The reason these are so popular (and remain so) is that smart structured attorneys and bankers like your faithful correspondent realized that an even
more profitable and efficient way of building high yield products with limited downside was investing in instruments that profit from failure of debt
and in instruments that rely on that debt and then hedging
that exposure with other CDS instruments in paired trades, and on and on up the chain. The problem with doing this was that everyone wound up exposed to everybody else's books as a result, and when one went tits up, everybody did. Hence, recession, Basel III, etc. Thanks, Obama.
Heavy investment in CDS can also have a warping effect on the price of debt (something else that happened during the pre-financial crisis years and is starting to happen again now). This happens in three different ways. (1) Investors who previously were long on the debt hedge their position by
selling CDS protection on the underlying, putting downward pressure on the debt price. (2) Investors who previously shorted the debt switch to
buying CDS protection because the relatively illiquid debt (partic. when its a bond) trades at a discount below par compared to the CDS. The resulting reduction in short selling puts upward pressure on the bond price. (3) The delta in price and actual value of the debt tempts some investors to become NBTs (neg basis traders) who long the debt and purchase CDS protection. If traders can't take leverage, nothing happens to the price of the debt. If basis traders
can take leverage (which is nearly always the case because they're holding a hedged position), they can push up or depress the debt price, goosing swap premiums etc. Anyway. Enough technical details.
I could keep going. This is a fascinating topic that is very poorly understood and explained, mainly because the people that caused it all still work on the street and use the same tactics today (it's also
terribly taught at business schools because none of the teachers were actually around to see how this played out live). But it relates to the topic of today's lesson, so I thought I'd include it here.
Work depending, I'll be back next week with a covenant breakdown. Most upvoted ticker gets the post.
*
EDIT 1\* In a total blowout, $PLAY won. So it's D&B time next week. Post will drop Monday at market open.
i know there are hedge funds out there but i don't believe day trading is what they do. wondering if there are any professional forex/stock day trading firms out there? kinda like how a hedge fund works create a pool from clients investment day trade then distribute the gains. i would think there has to be something like this out there but never heard of anybody doing it.
submitted by As the title says, I used to only trade on FOREX. I have since diversified into cryptocurrency because FOREX was so stressful for me and I needed to have something that was a bit less news-job-report intensive to level it all out. You can't get away from charts and candles in crypto, but I feel like there are more long-term hold opportunities in the crypto space and I feel like longer-term investments are less stressful for me. I know this isn't 100% FOREX related, but since I do trade on FOREX, I feel like it has relevance in terms of the ways the spaces are similar.
First, the reasons I diversified. The main one that frustrates me is I feel like the cards are stacked against me in ways I have no control over. Exchanges can sell information about customer buy and sell points to bigger fish than me. The whales have way more information about what the public is doing than I do. Next, trading firms have access to news much faster than me. They can process announcements in microseconds. And lastly, countries do crazy things with their currencies and I just wasn't great at interpreting all the signs. I don't like my fortunes being tied to job reports and the decisions of a treasury secretary that doesn't take any input from me.
The above reasons pushed me to start trading longer term in FOREX. That's fine, there are plenty of long-term strategies that work. Most people will tell you that longer-term is safer, and so the shift didn't bug me that much. But over time, I felt like there were more currencies I was missing out on, so I started adding cryptocurrency into my portfolio.
For those of you that don't know much about cryptocurrency, it's basically a currency that is not controlled by any one person or government (or shouldn't be). It's money free from political corruption, free from bailouts, and free from big banks. It is also highly more volatile than FOREX. Gains and losses are measured in the 10% or 20% range per day. There's actually lots of money to be made day trading it, just like FOREX. But I chose to take a longer term approach for my peace of mind.
One of the things that I looked for when trading FOREX was to trade pairs where I could earn interest while holding it. Then when the pair appreciated, I could sell it for a gain plus the interest. Win win.
Right now, I feel like I found that in ADA (Cardano) crypto. ADA just opened staking (mining) capability last week, meaning that just by holding it you can earn 4.5%-5.5% on your coins (paid in coins, not in dollars). It's the most undervalued crypto in the market (in my opinion), and the fundamentals on it look really strong. It is doing everything I was hoping a FOREX pair would do and I think it's the best crypto investment right now, so I'm just filing it away as a 5-year investment. It's now 50% of my "overall" currency investments, including FOREX.
Anyway, that's my story. I wanted to share it in case anyone here was curious about Cardano in particular, and how it related to fiat currencies. I was super intimidated about crypto at first, but I am also a software developer with a lot of experience, and so I was able to make the transition quite well. I even started my own mining pool to earn more.
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