All of Isma's Comments + Replies

Don't talk about how other solutions might also be good, and of you're asked about them point out they ways they're not as good.

 

Hmm, dictation typos

2jefftk
Fixed! While I still use dictation a lot that was a traditional typo.

How come this article didn't appear on jefftk.com

?

3jefftk
It does: https://www.jefftk.com/p/playground-game-monster

"Will XX re-open their borders for inbound flights in December?"

This question resolves positive if at least five international (5) flights land into territorial XX between December 20 and December 25.

  1. Quick Resolution. Make these markets resolve by mid-December. e.g. Morocco has closed borders until Dec 13. Will they re-open after that? If so, is the re-opening in both directions or just for inbound flights? 
  2. Probable Resolution. OK
  3. Limited Hidden Information. This is the one I'm most uncertain about. For some countries, it's unclear who exactly mak
... (read more)

just jotting this down for now. can elaborate on the five bullet points later this weekend.

1Isma
"Will XX re-open their borders for inbound flights in December?" This question resolves positive if at least five international (5) flights land into territorial XX between December 20 and December 25. 1. Quick Resolution. Make these markets resolve by mid-December. e.g. Morocco has closed borders until Dec 13. Will they re-open after that? If so, is the re-opening in both directions or just for inbound flights?  2. Probable Resolution. OK 3. Limited Hidden Information. This is the one I'm most uncertain about. For some countries, it's unclear who exactly makes these decisions and how much hidden information there might be. 4. Sources of Disagreement and Interest. (1) Do repatriation flights count as re-opening? (2) Some countries (like Japan, Israel) only allow their own citizens back in, not international travellers. Others (like Morocco) don't even let their citizens back.

Would love to see markets on when certain countries, like Morocco, Israel and Japan, will re-open their borders.

Essentially, the only reason they have ever closed borders is due to COVID. So the resolution would be straightforward. 

These kind of markets would have high social value, e.g. travelers to those countries hedging.

1Isma
just jotting this down for now. can elaborate on the five bullet points later this weekend.

It would be great if Lesswrong had a feature "Remind me of this article in 3 years" so we can check these investment suggestions through the test of time.

Twitter has bots that do this.

3[comment deleted]
Solana is no longer a truly amazing investment but it's still worth buying/holding

There doesn't seem to be much evidence backing this claim. And the recent trajectory of Solana all but backs this.

2sapphire
I have suffered the severe consequences of selling a chunk of my Solana around 40. 

Re BTC-PERP, looks like the funding has flipped negative for the last 24 hours or so: https://ftx.com/trade/BTC-PERP.  There are plenty of altcoins with positive funding though, e.g. FTT

2sapphire
Crypto is not doing the hottest. But another part of the story is BTC is losing dominance. Though who knows what is about to happen.

And over 30% annually on FTX.com (or FTX.US for US residents) currently.

https://ftx.com/spot-margin/lending

"After that, Polymarket stopped making new CO2 markets."

If the hourly information is public, it seems to me that this user did nothing wrong.  After all, the market was inefficient. They got it closer to the real market price.

After hanging out in the Polymarket zone for a while, it became clear to me that there are at least two pretty distinct groups of people -- the +EV veterans who have fun trying to beat the market and make money, and the gamblers who like to play the game of betting on their opinions and seeing who makes bank. The latter group doesn't really like it when the +EV people find a "clever" edge like this because it makes the game less fun and fair-seeming.

There exists no third group that really wants an accurate up-to-date prediction of the CO2 level printed on the website as of the next day.

Really good points, with which I agree.

Coincidentally, Arthur Hayes just wrote about this: https://cryptohayes.medium.com/all-aboard-4d50435190d6

I think by far the easiest way to trade the US election (for non US persons) was on FTX www.ftx.com

For reference, this is Vitalik's blog post about the US election prediction markets (which of course favors Ethereum-based platforms!) https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/02/18/election.html. It looks horribly complicated. Maybe Vitalik himself didn't know about FTX?

Side note: for US persons,  www.ftx.us is available (but more restrictive).

2ChristianKl
https://ftx.com/markets/prediction has little markets and doesn't look to me like it has markets that easily allow you to make tens of thousands of dollars with nearly no risk. 

The counter-party risk (either from hacks or scams) of FTX seems extremely low right now. The team behind FTX/Alameda has built flawless reputation in the crypto industry over the past few years, and is considered among the strongest technically. They basically went from non-existent to top ~3 of crypto exchanges worldwide in volumes in a matter of ~1 year. The recent growth in the FTT coin reflects this.

I think FTX will continue to grow in the next 6 months, as (1) crypto grows as a whole; and (2) FTX innovates and grows more than the competition.

For US residents,  www.ftx.us is available (but more restricted).

"Every hour, each perpetual contract has a funding payment where longs pay shorts if perpetual is trading at a premium to index, and shorts pay longs if trading at a discount. This funding payment is equal to TWAP ((Future - Index ) / Index) / 24. "

Source: https://help.ftx.com/hc/en-us/articles/360024780791-What-Are-Futures-

Regarding the claim that PERP contracts systematically trade above the spot, I'd say that in the past few months it's been true for maybe 60% of the time? It really depends on the coin and the market sentiment. So the funding rate ... (read more)

1sharpobject
This seems silly. Perpetual futures generally trade at a much higher annualized premium to the underlying than quarterly futures. Also, quarterly futures regularly experience significant changes in the amount of contango, so it is possible to lose money if you are forced to exit early. Also, even if the amount of contango remains unchanged, if you are long the spot and short the quarterly, and the underlying goes up, you will have a negative USD balance that will either result in liquidation or paying spot borrow rates on USD. So the quarterly version of the trade is a lot riskier and pays a lot less. Thanks.

Side note: the counterparty risk (either from hacks or scams) of the FTX exchange seems extremely low right now. The team behind FTX/Alameda has built flawless reputation in the crypto industry over the past few years, and is considered among the strongest technically. They basically went from non-existent to top ~3 of crypto exchanges worldwide in volumes in a matter of ~1 year. I think FTX will continue to grow, as (1) crypto grows as a whole; and (2) FTX innovates and grows more than the competition.

For US residents, www.ftx.us is available (but more restricted).

Side note: the counterparty risk (either from hacks or scams) of FTX seems extremely low right now. The team behind FTX/Alameda has built flawless reputation in the crypto industry over the past few years, and is considered among the strongest technically. They basically went from non-existent to top ~3 of crypto exchanges worldwide in volumes in a matter of ~1 year. I think FTX will continue to grow, as (1) crypto grows as a whole; and (2) FTX innovates and grows more than the competition.

For US residents, www.ftx.us is available (but more restricted).

The short answer is yes: you could bet in BTC because FTX pools collateral across all positions: https://help.ftx.com/hc/en-us/articles/360027946371-Margin-Collateral

Just curious, what maintenance margin do IBKR/Ameritrade require for this box spread? 

I suppose they might depend on the nature of the collateral, so let's assume my collateral is 100% SPX.

i.e. if I were to max out the box spread loan amount, what's the maximum percentage that my collateral could drop before IBKR issues the margin call?

1Thomas Kwa
Depends whether you're holding it as SPY/VOO or as a mutual fund (assuming you don't mean SPX futures, and SPX itself isn't tradeable). IBKR has somewhat higher margin requirements than the minimums set by the OCC; I think they require 25% maintenance margin for mutual funds and 10-15% for broad-based stock indices.

This trick gives an interesting way to borrow money for cheap, and I could imagine other uses for it than CD deposits.

The article gives the impression that the only use one can make of the box spread trick is to invest the proceeds in a CD. But one could as well invest them in crypto or to fix their house, etc. Now regardless of the use the borrower chooses, it's their responsibility to make sure they can still repay it soon in case of margin call. I can think of at least 3 ways other than CDs that accomplish this.

What is it that guarantees that whoever borrows the stock does so in order to short it? Couldn't they just be borrowing it to go further long?