Steve Longo (me)
Equity Derivatives trader for 15 years.
I market make volatility on Indices, like the S&P 500, and on ETFs for large institutions. Underlyings can range technology (QQQ) to Emerging Markets (EEM), to rates (TLT) which gives me an excuse to scroll Twitter hours on end dive into almost any topic and its affects on the market.
The main thing to know about derivatives is that they allow non recourse leverage, which means asymmetrical payoffs, on whatever the derivative is in reference to. You aren't just betting whether something is going higher or lower, but the timing and magnitude as well.
Now, if you get enough people agreeing on a bunch of prices (probabilities) of value in all sorts of different futures states of the world, you might start to think that those probabilities contained more information than the single price of whatever is being referenced.
Not only that, but this newly "uncovered" information is now taken into account by market participants, which affects their buy and sell decisions, which will have a direct affect on the future distribution.
To generalize: The more information we have or create about a particular system, we are able to make more and better predictions, but these predictions themselves will have an effect on behavior and thus the outcome it was trying to predict in the first place.
I think this is a good framework for a world with, to a first approximation, almost limitless resources for good ideas, especially as more of that world takes place in the leverage of the digital world.
I want to connect with people who share my optimism and perspective and are interested in systems that leverage the awesome power of ever increasing digital information and interconnectivity.
On the personal side, after spending my younger years playing football and rugby I now devote my fitness time to running and rowing, body-weight lifting and yoga. I live in the Northeast, with my wife and our three year old daughter.