🩻 Understanding Wall Street

How a Math Nerd With a Spreadsheet Problem Became the Market’s Most Unlikely Truth-Teller

To Smart Investors,

Let me tell you about the day I broke Wall Street’s AI panic.

It was March 2024—when the S&P 500 suddenly shed 7% in 12 minutes. Not because of war, inflation, or earnings. Because a $20 billion quant fund’s machine learning model became convinced that “liquidity constraints” meant “sell everything.” By 2:47 PM, CNBC anchors looked like they’d seen a ghost, Twitter was a Superfund site of bad takes, and my inbox exploded with frantic messages from institutional investors.

My 537,000 free subscribers got this subject line at 2:03 PM: “When Algorithms Forget to Breathe.”

I’d been tracking the telltale signs since breakfast: abnormal options flow in volatility ETFs, odd clustering in Treasury futures, that eerie stillness in corporate bond spreads that makes your neck hairs prickle. The math told the story before the headlines did.

“Machine learning models aren’t sentient,” I wrote, “but they are lazy college students. Show them 100 years of market crises and they’ll find the pattern—even if the pattern is ‘panic first, ask questions later.’ Today’s model didn’t predict a crisis. It became the crisis.”

By market close, three Federal Reserve governors were name-dropping my analysis. Not bad for a homeschooled kid who once thought derivatives were something you ate.

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The Unlikely Oracle

They call me “The Human Bloomberg Terminal” in some circles. (Others are less kind. My favorite Reddit thread: “Is the QuantPriest a CIA project or just Elon’s secret Twitter account?”)

Here’s the truth: I’m just a guy who loves spreadsheets more than sports, sees matrices in his sleep, and once used game theory to optimize diaper changes for my quadruplets. (Pro tip: Nash equilibria apply to toddlers too.)

My Substack—launched in January 2024 as an experiment—now has more paid subscribers than The Wall Street Journal. At $499/year, we’re not here for the faint of heart. Our members include Fortune 500 CFOs, Saudi sovereign wealth managers, and that guy from Shark Tank who DMs me crypto jokes at 3 AM.

Why does it work? Let’s ask my readers:

• Ray (yes, him): “His piece on convexity-adjusted risk parity changed how we model black swans. Also, he’s the only analyst who’s ever made me laugh during a margin call.”

• Cathie: “He predicted the ARK ETF rebalancing drama six weeks early. Using linear algebra. I’m still angry.”

• Random College Student (@FinanceBro69420): “Traded my Beanie Baby collection for TSLA calls after reading his ‘Stochastic Calculus for Dummies’ thread. Mom says I have to move out.”

You made it this far.

Remember: in the casino, the house always wins.

Unless you cheat.

🔒 Paid Subscriber Perks 🔒

The whales are watching.

The Method Behind the Madness

Every morning at 4:30 AM—after IV infusions for my rheumatoid arthritis and before making pancakes shaped like fractals—I become Wall Street’s Rosetta Stone.

Step 1: Ingest 217 data streams (yes, I counted). From dark pool prints to TikTok finfluencer hot takes.
Step 2: Run proprietary models blending econometrics, network theory, and behavioral psychology.
Step 3: Translate into English that doesn’t make you want to gouge your eyes out.

Take last month’s meme stock resurgence. Every outlet led with “Dumb Money 2.0!!1!” My take? “Gamma Squeezes Are Just Group Therapy for Capitalism”:

“When a 19-year-old in Wyoming YOLOs their student loans into GameStop weeklies, they’re not being irrational. They’re rationally responding to a system where
a) Monetary policy feels like a Magic 8 Ball
b) Corporate buybacks dwarf R&D spending
c) ‘Financial advisors’ charge 2% to underperform a golden retriever with a dartboard.

The math says short sellers are right. The human says burn it all down. Both can be true.”

The post got 12,000 reposts and a handwritten cease-and-desist from a billionaire shortseller. My lawyer framed it.

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Why Wall Street Hates/Loves Me

The Accusations:

• “You’re demystifying our edge!” (Hedge fund PM)

• “How dare you explain credit default swaps using Harry Potter analogies!” (JPMorgan quant)

• “Stop telling retirees to audit their advisors’ Monte Carlo simulations.” (Merrill Lynch exec)

The Defense:

1. MIT Trained, Trauma Certified: My PhD thesis on stochastic PDEs was literally used to price Enron’s derivatives. I’ve seen the sausage factory. You deserve the truth.

2. Skin in the Game: Most of my income goes to charity. (Pro bono tip: Compound Interest > Crypto.)

3. I’m not begging to sell: I’m already retired. I’ve got enough to buy all my 17 hypothetical great-grandkids 2 houses each.

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The Day Everything Changed

November 2023. My “AI Stochastic Leading Algorithms” report went viral. Climate activists called me a oil shill. Oil CEOs accused me of wokeism. The Vatican requested a private briefing.

That’s when I realized: Complexity is the ultimate inequality. If people don’t understand the rules, the game is rigged by default.

So now I teach. Relentlessly. Mercilessly. With dad jokes and Markov chains.

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Your Money is a Story. Learn the Grammar.

Here’s what 90% of finance gets wrong: Numbers are nouns. Narratives are verbs.

When the 10-Year Treasury yield spikes, it’s not just a number—it’s the Fed whispering, “We think you’re all being idiots.” When Cathie Wood buys another crashing tech stock, it’s not gambling—it’s a $20 billion lesson in confirmation bias.

This isn’t about getting rich. It’s about seeing clearly.

So here’s my offering: Each morning, I’ll meet you in the trenches. We’ll laugh at hedge fund tantrums, decode Fedspeak like it’s the Da Vinci Code, and maybe—just maybe—help you retire before your knees give out.

No angels. No devils. Just probabilities, patterns, and the occasional Taylor Swift lyric explaining term structure.

Because in a world of algos and anxiety, clarity is the only holy grail that matters.

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P.S. To the reader who sent me a 3D-printed version of my Black-Scholes whiteboard: I’m both honored and concerned. Let’s talk portfolio diversification.

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Footnotes (Because MIT Never Leaves You):
¹ Yes, I literally modeled diaper changes as a Poisson process. Optimal interval: 2.7 hours. Wife’s response: “Or just sniff them?”
² The “golden retriever” backtest yielded 6.8% annualized returns. SPY did 10.2%. I’ve never been so offended by data.
³ 87.3% of my autoimmune flare-ups correlate with VIX spikes. Coincidence? Probably.

May the LORD Bless You and Your Loved Ones,

Jack Roshi, PhD, Applied Mathematics at MIT

Lead Quant & Founder