iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 2h

The Noble Corporation needs to step up here. The FIFA Peace Prize was apparently not enough.

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Maria Drutska @mariadrutska.bsky.social · 16h

“WE WILL BURN THEIR REFINERIES.”

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

It really needed a longer description of dynamic option hedging as well. That will be a “Part II”, but I decided to make them self-contained articles.

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

500 billion pounds here, 500 billion pounds there, sooner or later you’re talking real money.

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 09/10/2026

Sure. Sell somebody a stock certificate for 1/quintillion of the shares outstanding for $1. I’d go for it if the stock certificate looks good.

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Oh The Urbanity! @ohtheurbanity.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

This is the most suburban Montreal NIMBY thing I've ever heard. Residents of Montreal West want to see a BIXI dock in a park removed for “destroying the oasis of tranquility”. “It would be a shame if a child […] gets injured while chasing a soccer ball into a mangle of metal from the bicycles”

thesuburban.com

MoWest resident calls for removal of BIXI stations in park

Montreal West resident and Concordia University professor Lorne Switzer called on the town to remove a new BIXI bicycle station from Rugby Park, which is located on Radcliffe Avenue just

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lithobolos @lithobolos.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

What kind of intelligence is it?

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Dan Davies @dsquareddigest.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Roses are red Green were her eyes

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lowtax speedrun enjoyer @rickywlmsbong.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

spelling it correctly but pronouncing it like edinburgh

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Daniel Sugarman @danielsugarman.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Well, on the bright side, at least he'll have AI to visit him in the nursing home one day

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McGill PoliSci @mcgillpolisci.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Congratulations to Anne Carson, former John MacNaughton Professor of Classics at McGill, winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize for Literature!

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NY Times Pitchbot @nytpitchbot.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

If Democrats are the party of green vegetables and plant-based protein while Republicans are the party of key and blow, guess who will win in November?

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Goldman buys the “orbital compute” story? Who’s the muppet now?

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

People who think that this won’t go over well are not used to playing eleven-dimensional chess. Threatening your own country with missile strikes is right there on page 17 of “Consolidating Your Dictatorship For Dummies.”

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

With the demise of third spaces, what else can 26-year-olds do besides hack South Korean banks?

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Mark Carney @mark-carney.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Des agriculteurs canadiens qui cultivent l’orge et le houblon aux brasseurs qui les transforment en une délicieuse pinte, bonne Journée de la bière canadienne.

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Jordan aka Jirdan @slclunk.com · 08/10/2026

Finally Treatlerism has its Triumph Of The Will

THE TRUE STORY OF AN AMERICAN DREAMER
HERSHEY

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Brian Finucane @bcfinucane.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Old: Iran pulls an October Surprise on Trump by attacking before the midterms New: Trump pulls an October Surprise on himself by attacking before the midterms www.theatlantic.com/national-sec...

theatlantic.com

Trump Might Order Another Iran Strike Before the Midterms

Pentagon planners are crafting options though no final decision has been made.

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Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

now this is posting

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Bonus points if it was done with a crayon.

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I might do a longer-form version later this week.

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

That was my suspicion, but that was purely based on my instincts as a very ex-electrical engineer.

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Alex @mplsalex.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Petition for Jamelle Bouie to replace all headline writers in the US.

YouTube. Video with title

I cannot emphasize enough that the president has pudding for brains

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Lack of originations eventually helps, but the hedging is taking place on a large debt stock that is much larger than the flow of net originations.

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

There might have been some real doozy monarchs with short reigns, but he’s definitely a top candidate within the republican/democratic forms of government category.

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

You can repurpose data centres, but the chips inside the servers have finite economic lifespans and are a big part of the capital cost right now. And if the data centres are not used for AI, will they be designed well for alternate computing uses (I have no idea)?

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

“The Party of Free Market Economics.”

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Mark Copelovitch @mcopelov.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

No, come on man. Where have you been for the last 40 years?

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The real capital destruction in the 1990s was the telecom buildout — the dot-coms were just zero sum betting wealth transfers. The buildout eventually paid off due to the rise of cell phones (yay), but the problem I see with the AI comparison is that the telecom investment had a longer lifespan.

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

But since dynamic hedging meant that you were trading in a “pro-cyclical” fashion, mortgage hedging meant that USD rates REALLY moved when they broke out. (This is a USD issue since no other market of any size has similar mortgages.) After the GFC, people started moving away from that strategy.

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The modern fixed income market took shape in the early 1990s once there were widespread tools to calculate hedging. And the early 1990s is also when regulators started getting serious about duration matching. So “everyone” who was sophisticated enough had dynamic hedging programmes.

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The process looks like: you make sure you have a fairly neutral net duration position at the end of the day. Unfortunately for hedgers, rates move. If you are short vol, you always have to add positions that lose money if rates revert. (This is why options cost money to buy.)

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

It’s too expensive (b.c. market too shallow to absorb the need) to buy options to cancel out the optionality, so you dynamically hedge the position with linear instruments - bonds, swaps, futures. (The Black-Scholes formula is important because it is derived from this dynamic hedging process.)

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Let’s say you own a lot of mortgages and they are matched against “linear” “liabilities” (linear=no embedded options, “liabilities” in scare quotes because you have a bond benchmark implicit liability, or an actuarial one).

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

American mortgage market mayhem is the result of some (big) players who tightly hedge their mortgage books. (Banks, GSEs, some funds.) There’s been enough mortgage convexity accidents since the 1990s that my understanding is that they have relaxed their strategies.

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

This is a more specific problem than that. Most bond managers have a duration target set by an index, and the index includes mortgages. So they can be neutral on this. People who make asset mix decisions for actuarial liabilities are structurally short duration because there isn’t enough supply.

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

I lived in the UK four four years in the 1990s, and find this hilarious. One interesting part of living in a place and then leaving is that your nostalgia isn’t infected by more recent changes.

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

However, the Russian obsession about “warm water ports” comes to mind.

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Karl Schamotta @karl-schamotta.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

BRB, updating my retirement plan.

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

The only people who should care about 25 bps moves are money market traders. Short-term policy rate movements get too much air time because the rest of fixed income is boring to non-specialists 99% of the time. (The other fixed income topic that normally gets published is “Bond Apocalypse?”)

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Sharon 🪳🌹 @sharonk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

i feel like the vast majority of people in the ROC genuinely do think that separatism was the primary basis for PQ's victory instead of CAQ imploding and PQ promising good government

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Brian Romanchuk @brianromanchuk.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

How USAID kept the McRib out of the paws of American consumers is a story that I would love to hear.

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