Hiring at Moontower, STFU, 9:16

Moontower #275

Jun 22, 2025

Friends,

I’m currently en route to Italy and Malta for a few weeks so Moontower will be back in mid-July. It’s a good time to share some updates and business admin stuff. I’ll leave you with some consumables at the end.

Price increase on moontower.substack

I’m raising subscription fees to $240/year (or $22/month without an annual commitment).

The price increase goes into effect on 7/13/2025.

If you are currently a paid sub or sign up before 7/13/2025 you retain your lower rate. This holds for subscribers on both monthly and annual plans.

If you cancel and re-up after 7/13/2025, you’re subject to the prevailing rate.

Moontower.ai subs on the Pro Plan continue to get the substack for free so there’s a built in cross-subsidy there but that’s not the reason for the price increase (actually, I personally lose to it as I have a 100% delta to the substack while I’m a co-founder on software but my interest is for all of it to grow and be awesome for everyone not optimize for the present.).

I’m raising rates to better reflect the time devoted to writing since I added the paywall 18 months ago.

I don’t like self-promoting on the regular so I’ll concentrate some salesmanship right here:

What paid subs say about the substack and what pros say

A sub just emailed me this yesterday:

I’m graduating and interning at an OMM right now and the content you provide about this space is genuinely unreal, unique and absolutely amazing... I appreciate what you’re doing and hope it can serve as a tiny reminder of the positive impact you are bringing to people in my position.

A word on those paid calls I offer

Who calls and why?

Professional traders needing someone to spar on from everything to how to think about trades, business initiatives, and career. Some of these turn into consulting gigs, although I don’t actively seek this as I’d rather build than advise, but sometimes it just makes the most sense.
People that want to discuss life decisions or parenting (someone willing to shell out $500 hour for this is self-selected as highly thoughtful and I have actually learned a lot from this group!)
A tiny percent is retail traders and that’s because they must persist through my deterrence.

I only reserve a few hours a week for calls. In order of preference of things I enjoy doing:

Trading when markets are crazy (rare enough that I got tired of trading as a day job)
Building
Advising

What I’ve discovered from doing these calls

The calls with pro traders seems to be very valuable to the caller but I also expected this. Long ago, I knew some of the best content you could create would be to livestream the discussion on an actual trading desk in production mode or the car pool I used to drive with 3 other Parallax traders where we often recounted the day’s action, how we played it, etc. Of course, this could never be allowed. But these calls are a way to extract tribal knowledge applied to your problem.
The calls that look more like life-coaching I think are even more productive. This is unexpected. First of all, I didn’t expect calls like this to be the majority (~2/3) and I have no f’n training in this coaching. But I find people seem to walk away from this “unlocked”. I’m convinced this has to do less with me, so much sharing your situation with a 3rd party is a good way to find your blind spots quickly. Not to talk myself out of $500 but you can probably get this benefit for less. But some of the unlocks seem profound to the caller so some of what I’m thinking is beta is probably alpha.
Despite offering a money-back guarantee, I’ve only had one person ever take me up on it. It was a retail trader who sought advice after selling options and getting rinsed, getting some straight talk from me on the effort required to even have a chance at success, then proceeding to tell me that other traders they’ve taken advice from who are very successful don’t say I need to do those things. You can see the bizarre loop at work.

🗣️What people say from having calls with me

I’ll add one more thing.

Right now, just via Whatsapp, I’m helping some folks working on an interesting options biz idea. They are not native to the options world but strong on tech and product. And while one part of me wants to yell “gimme the wheel, let me show you how to do this” I’m not looking for that job yet I want to see it done right. In coaching them up, I realize that every non-product problem they are struggling with is something I’ve written in detail about. So I dumped a bunch of stuff on them and in doing so, and I say this as reluctantly as possible (I’m a 90s anti-hustle kid at heart), realize that there is no place on the internet that is actually addressing the questions they have in as practical or approachable way as the millions of words I’ve somehow leaked from my experience in options.

In a few years, all of it will become part of the LLM substrate, unattributed, and treated as if it were always common knowledge. Part of me has made some peace with that as how could it be any other way. In fact, I want to automate myself as fast as possible and keep moving to the next problem faster than the prior work becomes common knowledge. That’s the promise of working on moontower.ai.

Then again, I don’t know if the future of my broad goal of “helping people make better decisions by breaking down or re-framing complex ideas into useful comparisons” even has space for humans. Maybe this stripmining, grift mentality we see all around us is the rational response to “we don’t know how anyone will make a living in the future so better secure a liferaft”.

In the meantime, I’ve gotten way more than enough confirmation from people who know better, those running large books, hiring talent, vying for jobs, or contemplating big decisions, that this moontower project is a scarce value.

(and can be yours for only $240 per year 🤑)

Moontower Jobs

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Ok thanks for accommodating all that.

Today I’ll point you to a mix of fun and useful.

First the fun…

STFU (2 min read)

Joachim Klement shared an amusing study. Like Joachim, I’ll say nothing, and leave this for you to debate at your next dinner party.

A question I have for the chart I saw in the post:

Money Angle

Non-self weighting strategy

We watched Ocean’s Eleven with my older son Friday night (we’ve recently established a Friday night ritual where we rotate who picks the movie and who picks the pizza. This past Friday we did a double feature — Dodgeball, which the kids loved and O11 once the little guy went to bed).

Clooney gives a tiny speech in response to Pitt’s skepticism about his motive behind the heist.

Rusty: I need the reason. And don't say money. Why do this?

Danny: Why not do it?

[Rusty shakes his head]

Danny: 'Cause yesterday I walked out of the joint after losing four years of my life and you're cold-decking "Teen Beat" cover boys. [pause] 'Cause the house always wins. Play long enough, you never change the stakes, the house takes you. Unless, when that perfect hand comes along, you bet big, then you take the house.

I emphasized that part because it’s a catchy encapsulation of what Mason Malmuth writes in Gambling Theory & Other Topics, a book I read as a trainee. The most important principle in gambling is to employ a non-self-weighting strategy. In other words, vary your bet size with the opportunity.

I don’t want to get too hung up on whether this is the “most important” as Malmuth contends (you can certainly make the case for “having an edge” in the first place), but it might be the most underappreciated with respect to how we port it to real life. Varying your bet size in blackjack is well-understood, but Malmuth argues for more obscure examples like the brevity of the Gettysburg Address, a masterful bet on the right words and quantity of words in which Lincoln varied his rhetoric for maximal payoff.

It’s a provocative reminder to be careful where you enable life-decision autopilot. If you need inspiration to find areas of your life where you can vary your metaphorical bets, paste this whole section into an LLM and prompt it to give examples in your real life.

[There’s probably an interesting essay to be written about the tension between the value of habits vs the punchy payoff of straying from them in deliberate ways.]

Money Angle For Masochists

🔘Interview riddle

You press a button that gives you a randomly uniformly distributed number between $0 and $1

Each time you press, you have two choices:

1. Stop and take this amount of money

2. Try again

You can try 2 times total.

What's the game worth?

Full discussion on Twitter with solutions as well as general solutions to harder versions of the same question.

📱9:16 Aspect Ratio

This week we had a Moontower.ai community zoom. I like that forum because it’s cozy trust tree. I can:

help users get the most out of the app
teach
not censor my opinions on finance and biz topics (if you haven’t been living under a rock you know there has been a major retreat from common spaces into private forums and group chats over the last several years as the algos, social media design, and their incentives have poisoned the commons. There are countless articles and thought pieces around this idea but my favorite comes from Nadia because it surfaced 2 books that look promising.)

While we record the zooms they are only available to the software subs. This one had several teachable moments that I didn’t want to waste so I spent an afternoon using Riverside to edit videos to extract what is broadly shareable.

These are the 4 videos.

🔍 Moontower Volatility Visualizer Tool Walkthrough (YouTube)

Key Features Covered: Click-to-Visualize Workflow. Quickly jump from the Vol Scanner or Tickers page into a detailed vol view by clicking on any IV cell (e.g., Tesla 60-day maturity).

🧠 Moontower Hedge Analysis Tool Explained (YouTube)

Why This Tool Exists: Born from a live trade idea during a market dislocation. When SPY sold off, the 2-month VIX futures looked too cheap. The trade: Long SPY + Long VIX futures — expecting both to rise.

⚠️ Using Moontower to see the geopolitical unease in the market (YouTube)

Geopolitical Risk, Oil Volatility, and the Market’s Risk Premium — we analyze the elevated risk premiums embedded in the options market, from geopolitical stress to oil price shocks.

🧾 Decoding the Moontower Attribution Visualizer (YouTube)

Explore the powerful Attribution Visualizer — a new tool that breaks down daily P&L attribution for delta-hedged options trades using Vega, Gamma, Theta, and unexplained P&L.

Riverside uses AI to create “Magic Clips” — TikTok and YouTube Short-friendly clips. They are ~1 min long and use the 9:16 aspect ratio (ie 16:9 flipped vertically for phones).

I watched a bunch of the Magic Clips and some were a good start but ultimately decided to create a few shorts of my own as an experiment.

(Btw, YouTube treats videos under 3 minutes as shorts).

These are the 3 shorts I published:

On hedge ratios:

This was ambitious…can I break down option p/l attribution arithmetic in a YouTube short? You tell me if you can follow it.

I didn’t expect any of my videos to get any views organically from the YT algo. The 2 above just got a handful each.

The next one got 700 within minutes of me posting which tells you everything about the f’n algos.

Look at the title I gave it:

From My Actual Life

I’m off to Naples right now. We are staying in Sorrento and exploring Amalfi for most of the week before we head to Sicily.

My cousin Gabriella is getting married in Taormina. This is a huge family trip and we are touring as a big group with several people having gotten a head start a week ago.

My cousin is half-Egyptian and half-Sicilian which averages out to this is going to be the best Big Fat Greek Wedding event since her parents got married back in 1986 (a wedding I remember because I was 8-years-old and begged to have spiked hair for it. My memory is weird — I’m 90% sure my aunt’s wedding song was Suddenly by Billy Ocean).

Gabriella is also my goddaughter. Why?

Fun family story actually.

I got my NJ driver’s license on July 12th, 1995. My 17th birthday. I only had a driver’s permit for a couple of weeks before I got my license (for reasons I can’t remember, but I just know I had very little driving experience by the time I got my license.)

On July 20th, 8 days later, my aunt frantically calls me in the middle of the day because I was the only driver in the family who happened to be home on this summer afternoon. Her water broke.

I needed to pick her up from Aberdeen (I was in Hazlet) and get her to her OB at the Jersey Shore Medical Center.

Driving experience be damned, I’m doing 95 down the Parkway as my aunt in the passenger seat is yelling that the baby’s coming. I’m screaming “not on the seat” even though I was in a crappy Dodge Lancer that only by providence was even hitting 95.

[The women on my mother’s side of the family all had their babies quickly after going into labor. My sister was born in a doctor’s office, not a hospital, as they couldn’t get there in time. The first car she was ever in was a police car, my mom likes to joke.]

We get to the hospital and Gaby is born 10 minutes later. Cousin Kris gets the godfather title.

And now we go celebrate that little girl getting married in the land of the real godfathers.

The White Lotus Nails How We Struggle To Reassess Classic Cinema

(Random world collision: Gaby’s groom was the one who informed her that I was a popular fintwitter. Turns out he works in finance. Congrats Mike, see you soon!)

I’ll be back in mid-July.

Stay Groovy

☮️

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