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Josh Giersch 🏳️‍🌈 @josh.sg · 3d

oh hey I have Sora 2 access

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Josh Giersch 🏳️‍🌈 @josh.sg · 5d

It’s October 3rd.

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Josh Giersch 🏳️‍🌈 @josh.sg · 9d

Went for a wander up the top of Rock Creek Road—the highest paved road in California, and home to some truly exceptional fall colors.

Rock Creek Road peaks at ~10,200 feet, 3,000 feet above the valley floor below, so the aspens up top change color 2–3 weeks before those lower down.

An aspen tree, with a slender white trunk, is fully covered in yellow and orange autumn foliage. It's surrounded by dark-green pine trees, and the scene is reflected in a lake in the foreground.

A stand of aspens in the foreground is lit up in red, orange, and yellow autumnal shades. Behind it, a pine forest stretches for miles toward a distant mountain range.

Fallen aspen leaves in fall colors - light lemon yellow, rich goldenrod, orange, and peach - are scattered like a Jackson Pollock painting on a black background.

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Josh Giersch 🏳️‍🌈 @josh.sg · 10d

Went for a wander up in the White Mountains, to see the bristlecone pines.

A dead bristlecone pine tree, shot from near its base, in dramatic perspective against a partly cloudy sky. The tree is tall and gnarled, and the wood is striated with light-blonde and dark-gray streaks.

A dead bristlecone pine tree, shot from a higher elevation, in sharp focus against a sparse, scrubby landscape of mountain grass. The tree's skeleton is gnarled, with blonde and gray stripes through its wood.

A wide-angle photo of the Patriarch Tree, the largest bristlecone pine in the world, shot against a brilliantly blue sky. The tree looks like it has five trunks, and is a deep coniferous green; it towers over the moonscape-like scene, with another dead bristlecone in the background; in the foreground, a shaded plaque describing the tree is inset in a block of what looks like marble.

A branch of a bristlecone pine tree is in sharp focus against a blurred background of other branches. The branch has a prominent cone pointing from its tip, dark purple in sharp contrast to the green of the pine branch, with crystalline resin forming stalactites from the cone.

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Josh Giersch 🏳️‍🌈 @josh.sg · 19d

I’m just saying, staffing up an FX desk right now is a long-vega, long-dVega/dVol trade

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Josh Giersch 🏳️‍🌈 @josh.sg · 19d

Also, ”low realized vol is the bots’ fault, therefore sell gamma and wings” misinterprets the outcome: if automated market makers pull back when vol gets elevated (cf CHF ‘15), folks who are short the wings in FX will have a terrible time

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Josh Giersch 🏳️‍🌈 @josh.sg · 19d

”Lack of vol is crushing the economics of FX desks” is the same theme we heard in 2010-2018 to justify desks pulling back from market-making. I don’t think it’s wrong right now, but it *is* cyclical, and FX vol will come back.

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Advancements in electronic trading may be crushing volatility in the currency market, making prolonged wild swings a thing of the past. That’s the view of some of the participants at an annual industry shindig in Barcelona this week, where the impact of growing automation and algorithmic trading were the hot topics. Some warned that the lack of dramatic action creates the risk that market makers may exit as it becomes harder to generate profits.

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Josh Giersch 🏳️‍🌈 @josh.sg · 21d

Went for a wander up Mount Shasta. Quite nice.

A long-exposure picture of star trails circling above the peak of Mount Shasta. Polaris, the center of the circle, is in the top left; down the bottom, the ground is lit in an eerie red, and two trees are silhouetted against the sky, one on each side of the frame.

Mount Shasta towers above the carpark at the Bunny Flat trailhead. There's a forest in the middle-ground, and the bare, treeless peak towers above it.

A Mount Shasta mountainscape, with a treeless range of mountains on the right towering above a sparse scattering of conifers. In the foreground, a path with an "Old Ski Bowl Trail" sign leads off into the distance toward the mountains.

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Josh Giersch 🏳️‍🌈 @josh.sg · 25d

Went for a wander at Pinnacles National Park.

Two Acorn Woodpeckers - black birds with white undersides and prominent red heads - are sitting on a branch. In the background, the trunk of the tree they're sitting on is pockmarked with holes drilled by other woodpeckers.

A buck deer with four-point antlers is sitting in a field of dry grass, looking directly at the camera. His mouth is slightly lopsided, because he's in the middle of chewing a mouthful of food.

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Josh Giersch 🏳️‍🌈 @josh.sg · Sep 3

Went for a wander on a gray morning out at Half Moon Bay

A half-sunken ship, weathered by time and salt spray, sits listing in the calm water of a harbor.

An excited dog is caught mid-leap, splashing into the ocean.

A common-or-garden sparrow, caught in shallow depth-of-field, sits on a branch.

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Josh Giersch 🏳️‍🌈 @josh.sg · Sep 3

Also here is @matt-levine.bsky.social in 2014, digging through the smoldering wreckage of MdP’s derivatives book and finding some truly amazing artifacts www.bloomberg.com/view/article...

Portuguese Railroad Company Was Really Into Snowballs

If you show an affinity for crazy derivatives trades, you will get shown a lot of crazy derivatives trades. You may be tempted to interpret this as a sign of your savvy. Don't.

www.bloomberg.com

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Josh Giersch 🏳️‍🌈 @josh.sg · Sep 3

The risk dot net coverage from the time pulled absolutely no punches: www.risk.net/risk-managem...

"Worst trade of all time" pits Santander against Portuguese client - Risk.net

Interest rate swap with €79 million notional is nearly half a billion euros underwater

www.risk.net

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Josh Giersch 🏳️‍🌈 @josh.sg · Sep 3

The last time snowballs became a thing, it ended with a Portuguese train operator dropping a yard and a half on a €90m swap notional. Can’t wait to see how it ends up this time

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

China’s Rich Return to Risky ‘Snowball’ Derivatives for Yields

China’s wealthy are once again pouring money into “snowball” derivatives for juicier returns, a year after the regulator curbed the product that was blamed for exacerbating a stock rout.

www.bloomberg.com

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Josh Giersch 🏳️‍🌈 @josh.sg · Aug 29

Went for a walk in the Hayward Shoreline marshes this morning and met the locals.

A squirrel pokes his head up from behind some dry grass, looking intently at the viewer, his ears perked as though he's suspicious of something.

A brilliant-white Great Heron in flight, seen from below, its wings fully spread with some light diffusing through the wing feathers.

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Josh Giersch 🏳️‍🌈 @josh.sg · Aug 14

New blog post: TARFs have been blowing up customers (and banks' exotics desks!) since at least 2007, so why are FX derivatives sales desks still printing them? And why are corporates still doing them? (Bonus: blind item!) josh.sg/2025/08/elev...

Eleven Years Later, Highly-Leveraged Short Vol Trades Still Going Horrifically Wrong For Everyone Involved

Back in 2014, clients and banks in Hong Kong got carried out backward when a sharp move in USDCNH blew up clients who’d unwisely bought Target Redemption Forwards (henceforth TARFs). I wrote about it ...

josh.sg

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Josh Giersch 🏳️‍🌈 @josh.sg · Aug 10

Fixed the link: josh.sg/2025/08/back...

Back To The Well On Ripple's Valuation

TL;DR SEC v Ripple has come to an end, with Ripple agreeing to pay a $125mio fine; XRP is officially not a security, and Ripple is not barred from selling XRP except through certain channels; Re-runn...

josh.sg

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Josh Giersch 🏳️‍🌈 @josh.sg · Aug 8

Now that SEC v Ripple is in the rear-view, I’ve updated my 2022 article where I tried to value Ripple’s equity: josh.sg/2025/07/back...

Back To The Well On Ripple's Valuation

TL;DR SEC v Ripple has come to an end, with Ripple agreeing to pay a $125mio fine; XRP is officially not a security, and Ripple is not barred from selling XRP except through certain channels; Re-runn...

josh.sg

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