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Current cashflow, in itself, does not mean much. However, if you are investing in a company because of it's potential even thought it has negative cashflow at the moment, you want the valuation to reflect that you are buying an option as opposed to a guarantee.

The startup world is littered with people that lost their pre-IPO shares when they where fired, got into a scrap with VCs etc. Pre-IPO equity is a very murky market and I, presonally, think that it sucks unless you are a true insider (either a founder/BM or a senior VC). Well, there is a point...

Good stuff, agree with most of the points in this one. There is so much FOMO in the venture space (sadly, you can't short any of these companies until they float an IPO)

You know nothing about the skew of the strategy returns and the magnitude of the losses, so you can't claim that 14 losses in a row is "too many".

Ugh, @Baron, maybe we also need a "dislike" button on this forum? :D

I know what you mean, in general you always want to hear some first-hand experience. It would be interesting to see if anyone here has traded in the 70s, less so the 50s. Exchange fees are similar for all (adjusted for exchange membership in case of futures) while the market data is more...

I try not to make statements about things I know nothing about (except women, of course) :) Well, that's what history books are for, right? We might not have a first hand experience living during the Black Plague, but we know enough to understand that it sucked.

No, I am not that old :) I was mentored by people who have traded in the 70s and had friends have traded even earlier. My close friend died right before the GFC - he started on NYSE (as a runner, he was in his early teens) two weeks before the Black Tuesday. Oh, the stories he'd tell me.

Yup, and if anything, it was worse as they had a lot of structural advantages and there was not technological way to get around them. At least now we have all sorts of stuff to improve execution despite the lack of speed - stuff like Intelligent Cross, dark pools etc. There is nothing...

It did not work fine then either, specialists were there rip you off even worse.

Overall, you might have too many variables to solve for. My suggestion would be to fix one and then use some sort of underlying-specific metric to understand the risk. For example, make them all costless by solving for the ratio at each different strike and then try to understand your max loss...

Nah, it's based on an immutable formula which GS can't really influence (this is a standard CPPI . Of course, you are taking GS credit risk and getting shafted on the actual cost of the structure, but that's a given. Not really. Most structured notes buyers are either retail or family offices...

Just to make it clear, you are trying to find 1xN spreads that you'd like to trade? I am not certain what your evaluation criteria is (you do mention risk reward to delta, but it's unclear what your definition of "risk" is here). Well, think from the first principles. Your trade expresses the...

This has already been answered before (see quote below). The outright trade is indicative of a strong directional conviction. The delta-hedged trade on the other side simply shows that a market maker took the trade down at the implied level that fits his book. It does not even mean that they...

Out of curiosity, have you thought of using one of the discount DMA-ish brokerages like Lime? PS. TBH, if latency matters at all, these days you can find a shared colocated server for a few hundred a month per exchange

To be fair, that's not true. Reg NBBO ensures that they have a clue, of course. But why would you lose a good customer, even if he is (maybe) a manipulator? :D

Something that has a dollar volume in a hundreds of millions is very hard to manipulate unless you are the government. With regards to spoofing, the price movement that it achieves is usually a single tick and it is primarily gaming other algos. The idea is to submit a smaller order on one...

Fiat currency deteriorates by design - the whole idea is that monetary policy is easier to do if you can attenuate both the money supply and the debt markets. Otherwise, we'd still be on the gold standard. Personally, I think "digital assets" have a role in the financial universe but certainly...

Is the idea that you are serving as a quasi-layoff counterparty for their skew risk or is it the opposite, you trade the same direction?

Shall we nominate @Sweet Bobby for the next one?