The academic teaching that increasing risk increases return is false; the opposite is true—the more risk you take, the lower your expected return in investing, which means the entire backbone of academic investment theory is wrong.

David shorted Nvidia in 2023 going into May, initially thinking he was shorting a crypto miner, but was blindsided by their earnings result showing the massive opportunity in AI. After understanding the technology and their competitive position, he realized Nvidia could become the most valuable company in the world, a call that came true.

David tells his PMs that he doesn't want to pay for plain beta (1.0 beta to the general market), but he's willing to let them run concentrated factor bets (e.g., 6x beta to AI factor) as long as it's not excessive; the pod shop extreme of zero factor exposure is equally wrong as the other extreme of pure market beta.

David's vertically integrated broker dealer and operations vision requires finding support people passionate about optimizing finance operations (understanding 50+ brokers, structuring trades, managing financing relationships), which is a much larger job scope than typical hedge fund back-office roles.

Even though ETF-wrapped hedge funds are a new product category, David is being patient with the launch timeline because he wants to ensure they work mechanically before scaling them, rather than rushing to capitalize on first-mover advantage.

Japanese corporate governance is improving due to government intervention forcing small companies to treat shareholders better, and this pattern is already clearly working with companies reacting in real time, not theoretically, making it a valid theme for multi-year or decade-long holdings.

Support roles in hedge funds (operations, compliance, CFO work like optimizing broker relationships or structuring trades) are severely underrated and offer good career prospects; there's low competition for these roles (2 applications vs. 200 for analyst roles) and if you add value (saving millions in costs or taxes), you can earn $200-400k+ per year without the chaos of managing money.

Large hedge funds like Citadel charge what they call a performance fee but it functions essentially as a second management fee, with total annual compensation (management + performance fee) reaching several billion dollars per fund annually, which is profitable for the fund operators but ethically problematic.

A sell-side research analyst's boss tells them what conclusion to reach and they have to come up with a report to justify that conclusion in order to sell the stock, making sell-side research inherently compromised regardless of the analyst's intelligence or integrity.

Poker bots and algorithmic solvers had nearly perfected poker by 2015-2016, making the game no longer profitable for even top human players, which is what prompted David to transition from professional poker to investing.

David's hedge fund currently has 1,200 positions across all portfolio managers combined, with his own partition holding about 350 positions.

Airports are a simple business with a long-term thesis: they benefit proportionally from increased travel, have no real competition (typically one per city, sometimes two), and new airports only get built when demand has proven the investment worthwhile, making them suitable for multi-year or even decades-long holds.

Natural gas pipelines in America have two new tailwinds: increased export to Europe and supply to AI data centers, plus they yield 7-8% dividend with robust, well-covered earnings, making them likely to return 12%+ annually with these new tailwinds even if baseline returns were only adequate.

Cable TV and linear television are so obviously screwed as businesses that it's almost weird the stocks are still trading, and companies like Charter are in big trouble, making them suitable candidates for short positions based on structural industry decline.

Pod shop hedge funds' strategy of ultra-tight stop-losses and near-zero factor exposure was originally smart for smaller scale operations, but now that these firms are massive, the short-term focus mathematically cannot work at their current scale, making their entire model untenable.

Pod shops' neurotic approach to factor exposure and tight stop-losses stems from having too many PMs and worrying about them gaming the system (riding trendy beta factors or taking oversized risks), forcing them to use rigid rule-based constraints because they don't understand what their individual PMs actually do.

David doesn't copy other investors' theses from Twitter or follow sellside research because you can't generate edge that way; instead, he originates his own ideas by thinking independently and blocking out the noise of naysayers and sell-side cheerleaders.

If you're not willing to spend 15 hours a day researching investments during the early phase of learning investing, you should quit because investing is too competitive and you won't succeed unless you have that level of initial drive and commitment.

If you have genuine edge and write about it (in fund letters or public posts), people will find you and fund you, even if commenters on the internet say it's impossible; David proved this by writing Militia fund letters starting Q1 2019 and raising capital without a traditional pedigree.

In prediction markets, David found a coin-flip bet on the 2024 US election (Kamala Harris vs Donald Trump) shortly before election day when Harris hadn't even been the candidate for long and had only a couple months to prepare, which he viewed as properly priced at even odds despite surface-level political momentum.