Every day, I come to this place and see numerous posts about "alpha" and "edge," which are always extremely discretionary heuristics illustrated with handpicked examples. What is actually the edge? -Risk premium: risk above the risk-free rate, mainly basically buying stuff that can go technically to zero, but historically it doesn't and goes up (indices, stonks, bitcoin seems a pretty good candidate in the last decade, and so on.) -Variance risk premium: volatility in a lot of markets is often overpriced because people are retarded gamblers. You will see this often in SPX due to the way options are priced, or in single stocks around earnings. So you can sell options/volatility products to profit from that. Basically, the edge in markets is just being able to provide liquidity at places where a lot of people don't want to. Your risk is often big tail events, and you profit from "nothing ever happens" meme scenarios. There is obviously a lot of other stuff you can do, especially in crypto (getting early into high negative funding short squeezes, different misspricings, fading end of short squeezes etc.), but it is very rare to just find edge in charts drawing lines, especially in most of these coins I see on timeline which have like .9 correlation with BTC.

btw @therobotjames has great substack articles about some of this stuff. @SinclairEuan wrote bunch of great books about the volatility trading if you are into trying to learn bunch of math and than questioning your existence wondering why you are retarded