Why the Edge in RFQs isn't the Pricing w/ TroyCuban | Ep 156

Any model that you're gonna find especially for like saying game parlays isn't I mean I don't even think anyone has one yet. That's like the nuts that like every is an industry standard that everyone could like copy So I mean it's more so just slap a line up there and limit anyone who gets here What's up everybody we got GPS P and Troy C Welcome to the pod Troy Cuban on Twitter and on call she a very successful trading track record so far and Yeah, just thanks for thanks for joining the show these are the episodes that that SP and I love to do where you know It's some talking to somebody who hasn't necessarily been on a time of pods, but is out there crushing it right now Yeah, my pleasure big fan of the show Thank you. Yeah, so full disclosure we had a guess lined up. It wasn't Troy He felt through so Troy is is bringing the record for the shortest amount of time Introduced to to come on actually being on the show. This was a one truly a one day turnaround So Troy is the MVPs for you know all you listeners. You need to think Troy otherwise it would be me and GP doing another You know solo two hours, which I know you know all you love But you know I know the interviews at which you really really want so Troy Troy. Thank you for rescuing us Why don't we start with with where where you got into bedding your first gambling in general Maybe give a little context on like how old you are and when you got started and and just some some broad introduction Yeah, sure. Well, I'm 28 now. I guess first time gambling I mean you guys are gonna love me for this. I'm a child prodigy. I Go to I go to Florida with my family for Christmas and whatnot and they had when I was like 10 They had a greyhound track there. My dad would take me to that once or twice and When I had my Christmas money like in the few days before we would go home You would bet some greyhounds for me and I have my mom my grandma hated that But we'd go and do it anyway and Just yeah, I kind of get some crowd there and Come back smelling like black and mild and That was really like the first time I was bedding and then Then there was maybe when I was 19 I actually got into like options trading I really had no edge there like I was just straight like college kid pointing on Robin Hood And then with my college friends, you know play a little bit of poker do a little bit of sports betting And then just kind of learned try to get a little bit more in the office trading because I was in finance and Got some of those sites that I guess would be similar to what unabated is now, but for often trading and You've had to learn from not winning at that you gain sort of a respect and humility for markets And that you're not going to beat anything with real liquidity that someone's actually competing in you know just reading like some charts or Reading CNBC while you're taking a shit in the morning. So I Kind of Yeah, then I then I got in the sports betting Got much more into the top-down stuff and then I actually started making money and real gambling And it never was anything like big. I probably my best year top-down betting was maybe a little bit over a hundred grand a year But it was just typical like as jam stuff as cream stuff and Just you know turning over fan dual counts for afkings accounts rivers offshore is both bottom you name it So let's go back let's go back to the you know When you had an origin story at like 10 years old that that does sound like fun childhood memories But let's let's go to like when you were you said you were around 19 and you got into options Where I sort of take it you where you were in school or going to school for finance. That's that's what attracted you it seems Like I'm very curious about the sort of like the options ecosystem and some of that like you mentioned unibated for options like You you were you were it's not like a total sort of novice at the beginning like Did you What is that ecosystem like like are there? Like did you did you get to the place where it's just like this is too competitive? I'm gonna go to sports or like how how far along or how serious did you ultimately get with some of those those training sites and what you talked about like in the options world Well, I mean it started just with like you know Running up maybe like 500 bucks and then losing it and then trying again and then you know just digging around for more information That I eventually stumbled that one of those sites and it was cool because like a lot of that options analytic stuff like a wall surface for example You can't really get that unless you have like a Bloomberg terminal and this guy's site. It's it's called predicting alpha. He like had all that stuff on there But even then that was still like a no avail because you know every the whole competition has that kind of stuff So it's like it's it's not like that's gonna get you an edge and just kind of grinding through stuff like that and Thinking like oh now this is gonna be the time I start making money and then like you don't make money You kind of like just through there get a humility for the market and that you really just gotta have if you're gonna be a taker and and have like new Austin formation to try to process it better It's it's not gonna be with like public information, especially in anything that has liquidity So the the unibated like comp was you you could you're still not Winning using that whereas they're unibated you can win because you can bet into Get our draft kings and and whatnot, but like yeah, it wasn't an equivalent I guess I would like equate it more to unibated in that like It was kind of the first thing for the public that you can really get like All those kinds of like options charts and IV rank and all that kind of stuff Like how unibated you can have all the different odds from all the different bookmakers and they have some like You know, what is the point worth tools things like that? Okay, it makes sense. Okay, so like it had like that pricing pricing tools and information Yeah, you know, that was out. Yeah, okay. Okay. That's cool so you're I guess what were you in school for? Finance finance, okay, okay, and then when you graduated you went into a traditional finance role like No, so I graduated during coven and my first job out of school I mean, you just kind of have to take anything so my first job out of school I worked as a fraud analyst at a bank actually did that for like a couple three years got laid off then my next job was Just back office at one of the large agricultural commodity merchants Eventually got laid off from that and During these roles that was just kind of like Slowly top down betting Okay, so you were getting into it. So by the time you got got laid off from the From the agriculture trading firm back office were you like was that when you were like making a hundred K plus Top downing or was that after and that was like full time at that point probably like my last year I was working there that's about what I was making betting Got it. So then at that point you had the choice of like do I go look for another like what we'll call a traditional role or I just made you know hundred K doing this like do I just now do I just spend more time doing this and I think I'll make more if I can put the time in was that kind of the decision you came to Yeah, I mean, I didn't at that time like totally say like fuck this. I'm out of corporate America, but I mean, I was still kind of passively looking for jobs and it's like a recruiter hit me up or whatever I'd answer the phone But yeah, I was focusing most of my effort on just grinding out lines So when you were you get out as you were doing option trading in school you get out of school and and we sort of jumped ahead to like You know out of corporate America doing this full time like how how did you how did that transition from Obstant trading to sports bed and go was that like a very obvious jump to you given you know some of your lessons like you you talked about like Respecting the market and whatnot. I think it's the basis for a lot of the idea of top down trading like was that was an easy jump to you How did you get into sports gambling? I think there's probably also a segment of people who you know The like finances like not gambling and gambling as gambling. So was that an aspect at all or just like walk me through how you got into the sports and started making money there? - Yeah, I mean, I kinda just stumbled upon sports but I just like any other getting college really and then I just immediately right away. I'm like, oh, this is because actually like kind of how often it's up price, it's really just like the same thing. And then you know, made a few punt bets here and there just like anybody when they start you know, betting recreationally. And then I was researching it. I mean, one of the first videos that come across is like Alex Monahan stuff with Oz Jam. And then right there just kinda clicked like, you know, just get an odds screen and run top down. - What would you say to somebody like I think now we're kind of at this point where gambling's like now turning back into finance at least like, you know, pretending to like, what would you say to people who are in the sports betting space? Like what were the similarities? You saw and did you feel like coming from that background gave you some kind of edge and or some kind of different view or edge and top down that someone who just started in sports learning of had? - I mean, the first thing that was just obvious to me and the similarities between options markets and betting markets is that if you just look at like an alternate chain, right? Like all the alternate spreads, that's the same thing. Is like an offense trade. I mean, the minus one 10 spread is gonna be the same thing is like the 50 delta options. And then you know, the 25 delta calls might be like, you know, buying a few points up the chain. Then you know, if you were to do live markets, there would be time decay with that, right? So like if you know, the team didn't score anything or the score was just like flat, you know, the two points out would have to be priced at a higher payout as like that time of the game decays. So there was just like a lot of core layers between and how often's that price with with betting markets? - Yeah, I think like that is how I like that to me is how I think a lot of like options people view it. And did you come in being like, oh, this is where I'm gonna like poke around for edge, like maybe at the time decays wrong. Or yeah, I mean, that's just like, go, sorry, keep going. - Yeah, one of the, one of the first things I tried was the kind of like price in the volatility of a betting market. So like, maybe look at like a baseball game, for example, a game with a total of 12 is gonna be more volatile than a game with a total of six. So that means like the minus one and a half, the minus two and a half, all those have to be priced at like lower payouts if the total's 12 versus if it's six. So I kind of just tried to take her with some models and stuff like that and back tested it and wasn't able to find any edge, but that was like something I kind of dove into. - So what do you think I want to ask? So as friends, you know, friends with some finance people, some are more like mathematical than others, is that like a bent to you? Cause like, I'm hearing like, you know, you were, you were like very into all of this when you were like a relatively young age in college. Like, I think the vast majority of people who are betting on sports and or options are like, have no idea about any of this. Maybe that's wrong, but like that would be my assumption is they're not thinking about like any of this, these actual problems like to, even if like options are hyper competitive and you couldn't generate an edge there, you were at least like trying to get better and whatnot. So do you have like that sort of like mathematical bent was is that like, you know, a strong suit of yours and when we were talking before the show, you mentioned like, I never originated something and I think you put in parentheses like successfully or something. So I do want to hear, it's fun. I wanted to ask you about some like the unsuccessful. It sounds like maybe this is like a version of that, but like I'm just curious like on that background 'cause it strikes me as like not the normal path for the people I know who were in finance. - Yeah, I mean, another thing I tried to do was like a bunch of stuff where like if the more liquid, full-time money line market moves by like this much, what's the relationship with like the first half, the first quarter stuff like that. I tried to like price all that out and just like found nothing in the back testing and I was doing this also before, and like I don't have any like programming background and I was doing this before like clawed and chatted or like really good at, you know, basically just doing anything you wanted to. So I would have to like get these developers on upwork for like $10, $15 from like whatever country. - Good. - Good to go. - It was probably a huge alpha, but they just were like, you know what, I'm gonna take this, it's not worth $15 an hour, I'm actually gonna just bet this. They probably found it. - No, no, I didn't. All I do is have like scrape the odds for me. - Okay. - And how should I say like that? - Like that. - Then looking back at it, I had to scrape it from like odds portal and it was probably like all fucked up. Like there's probably like, it's from the naked eye, birds eye view, like you could probably look at it and be like, yeah, that looks good, but there are probably like enough inconsistency in there that you probably couldn't like trust a back test on any of that anyways. But yeah, those were just kind of some dead end projects that I did. - We all have them. (laughing) - Yeah, so let's, let's, we'll go to like you being full time. I know you had mentioned that, I got into that. But yeah, so maybe like before you were betting, well at your job successfully, it sounds like you're last year, you were making solid money that, you know, at that point from betting. Like was this all just you, your own accounts, like had you run into limits? Like did you, did you have like a, you know, 'cause they're sort of like a first layer understanding of sports betting, I would say, of like, if you watch an Alex money and video, I think most people can broadly understand like how to win some money. - Yeah. - I think the, the like going full time, like you said, and I know you said you were sort of like half in, half out still considering. But like did you, where were you on like the full sort of like knowledge curve when you, you were like, okay, I can do this full time. This is what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna lean into this. - Yeah, so I actually didn't figure out like, spankies very valuable out in information videos until like after it got announced that that we're gonna do like the 90%, you can only write off 90%, which kind of like killed the top down future stuff for me. But I still understand you were gonna get limited, you had to find other accounts. But I never really like had to go past like just a few close friends and some family members and stuff like that. And like my bankroll was just not large enough at the time to where I was like, even betting a big enough pop. I wasn't even like close to like a limit bet on some of the stuff. I got limited really heavily on like all the player props. But I mean on sides and stuff like that, I mean you could still get down like 500,000 bucks, which is like, and well that was enough for my appetite. And they didn't see, especially like on live. And I really got limited down to more to like 400, 500 bucks. So I was still able to like make it these for the amount of money. - Yeah, it does feel, it feels like there was like that sweet spot like live gold rush. Where like books weren't limiting. I feel like, I don't know how it is now. Sports books and live. But it did feel like people were just like making a ton of money live and somehow not getting limited. At least you get a lot more opportunities throughout the game. - Right. I guess it's like harder to tell. Like it's harder to tell if you got real CLV, right? Because like you can make a bet and then something happens. And then you can't compare the two states of like the state where you made the bet and the 10 seconds later. But I guess your P and L after a certain time, like just tells the story. - Right. - Yeah, I'm thinking it's like any, it's like, you know, we'll get to the prediction market stuff. But it's the same thing. I think live benefited a lot from the same idea of like SGPs and what not. Like now if you're taking bets like live during an event on the prediction markets, it's usually either like very good or very bad. - Yeah. - One of the two. Not much in between. And so, you know, I think the same problem is like we talk about some of the challenges with live is, you know, sports books. You know, like we're inventing sports books from first principles here. It's challenging to determine whether or not. - We're helping the sports folks learn how to do their job retroactively. We're finally catching up. No. - What's we gonna say? - But yeah, I was gonna say, it's a good point but I feel that, you know, live in SGPs are the places where you can book something that's really bad or really good. And then like the pregame stuff, it's smaller edges but like your risk of getting totally killed is not that high. Like it can't be that bad. I like that. I didn't thought of that. - So were you doing, it sounds like was it predominantly like when you were doing top down? Like let's walk, let's get into it. to some of the details of that. Like it was primarily live you were doing and were you using software at that time, tools like how were you actually generating or finding the opportunities? - Now I was using a site, I would just buy the full subscription, you're saying called Pick Thoughts and that would just show like whatever, something like an arm to Penny, Chris, bookmaker, or Syracult, whatever. And then you just take it there. - And was it mostly live at that point or was it a good mix? - Yeah, yeah, 'cause you could just get like so much more down throughout the game. There was so many more opportunities and then there was also sometimes good to head your risk because you might get like the other team is now an advantage and then you can bet there and you had your awesome of your volatility. - Well, let's talk about, I mean, I guess let's talk about prediction markets or at least let's start going that way because we have the jump from live at sports books which is pretty good too. If you're being a live taker at prediction markets it can be really, really good. Was that why you started moving that way? Like you just saw, or the 90% tax cap or was it? - Yeah, it was honestly like the tax cap on my start of looking that direction. - And when you first got on the call sheet, you get on there, I think one thing that people, especially people who aren't doing any originating get scared with the exchanges is they're like, oh well, they're efficient. They're like the options market or whatever. Like it's, I can't win there unless I like, you know, have an opinion or I'm like a quant for. But, you know, I think one thing we're trying to do on the podcast is kind of show alternatives to that. So like when you logged in and started looking at call sheet, like what do you go to look at and how did you feel like, oh, there's some edge, there's some edge here. - Well call sheet actually wasn't the first one I looked at at all. I was looking at polymarket international for the longest time. And that was probably like, that's probably like the hardest one to trade on because I don't know, I haven't been there for a while, but at that time there were like no fees. There's no KYC, like total wild west, no nothing. So like you could just get picked off really easily. There are a lot of illiquid markets that you can manipulate. There are a lot of stuff you can do with like people's copy bots. I mean, there are some like mega whales on polymarket that you know, probably just had a ton of crypto body and there was really easy to transfer it over there. You know, anyone in the world can bet on that. There's like no regulation. And there was this guy who would just pound overnight markets. It would move the whole screen. Like he'd get down like $500K to a million on like overnight markets and he had a Twitter task and he was like an India and everything. And I was like looking at him, the trend of like learn how it gets. If he's like sharper, no, 'cause he was on like 150 game win streak. He was just like doing nothing but making millions of dollars. So that was like, shit, do I like tail his guy or do I book this guy? And then it turned out like he was better the book. And there are a lot of people like that. And what you can do. And what you know, what you could do is like how these guys with bet they were obviously like takers, but they would take like four levels into the order book like at horrible prices. So they were just like repeatedly like sweep it like an interval of like five, 10 minutes. So what you could do is like if they made one big bet, you know, just post a market and then hope they hit it again. And then you can get filled on like a spread at like plus one 15 something like that. So in that circumstance, you'd be like, okay, I'm going to post like three levels below a top of a book. And just hoping that guy comes and fills it. And then if it's like, it doesn't happen in like 10, 15 minutes, then then get rid of it. Yeah, I think that's something like, well, it's probably obvious to you that for, you know, people coming this direction from sports betting, it's not as obvious to them that that's actually like optimal there. If you have if you realize like there's this player in the market that does XYZ, like I should not be like in that situation, you wouldn't want to post top of book, but you can post like third level and have no opinion and just like crush. Right. That's like, I was thinking about just fitting up on Twitter and booking it myself, but I wasn't making up to done that. I feel like we've taken a large jump. We went from like, you know, odds jam to to like this, this level of sophistication on on polymarket. Like, was that truly like what you jumped in on? Because I feel like there's a decent amount. Like, were you sort of making right away on polymarket or? Yeah. Because I feel like the more natural. Yeah, but a lot of that stuff can be adverse too because like people will be here to end with those guys. So like what would happen? You would see this like you catch under the trend, people catch under the trend, maybe like a week later. And then you see when this guy like made his first bet, then there'd be like a ton of liquidity coming in for everyone to like make his second bet. And it was about us like if you wanted to, you know, and you could like beard for somebody. Yeah. I'm interested because you said like I wanted to talk about this a little bit more and I'm glad we got into it because you had said when we were talking, you know, pre show, like about polymarket was too adverse and I wanted to hear your perspective on that why that was and some of your experiences. But yeah, I mean, I think like from my perspective, that's one of the clear. It's like a second order effect that I don't think a like an outsider would really understand is that in theory, you know, like making, making everything public basically would make it more transparent. But in practice, I think it just introduces all these weird games and incentives that is like the opposite of that. And so yeah, I'm curious like did you have that you sounds like you had one experience. Like that was a positive one with the, you know, the whale and India or whatever who is just clearing out multiple ticks in the order. But like can you talk about some of your, your experiences like or what drove you off the site that it was like to to adverse? Well, after that, I kind of just tried to get it on a beta API of the web socket and just post markets on there. And I don't know if I had some issues with the feed or whatever if I was not fast enough, but like I was just closing horrible like every time. And I just did not have that experience at all on call sheet. And I think a lot of that has to do with call sheet as the fees. And you know, they got a lot of just soft flow from the Robinhood accounts. And I guess. I don't know what exactly the mechanism was that made it adverse. I probably just had poor code or something like that. But yeah, I just, I did not do well market trying to market make mains on poly market. Are you clotting at this point or, you know, chatter? Yeah, 100%. Okay. Got it. So you're like, okay, I'm going to get unabated API. And then basically like, I actually kind of want to double back to Paulie in a second. But you took the same code with obviously the modifications that you need to make to integrate into call sheet API. And with the same strategy, we're making money on call sheet while you weren't making money on poly international. Yeah. Well, I was going to try to go right from there to the poly mains. And then I actually like heard people talking about the RF cues. And I actually heard Louie on your pod come on and talk about RF cues and kind of just stopped dead in my tracks. And I was like, let's investigate this. And then decided that that was going to be a much better way of doing this. Okay. So you weren't, when you first started on call sheet like you were not, you weren't market making mains. Or you started maybe. And that was sort of like building it out. And then like as I was doing that, that's like when I, I heard the whole thing. All RF cues stuff. And I decided to pivot and look into that. For when you're on poly international, were you, were you building out like a lot of trading strategies that were similar to stuff that you had tried like towards the tail end of options where like, yeah, maybe you weren't winning, but you're clearly like sophisticated enough where, you know, you were, you understood. But enough where maybe, you know, you could have been winning if you were put at like, you know, settle or whatever and like making whatnot. No, I never really tried anything like super quiet like that. I mean, I think I'm like, just as good, like good enough at math to like understand what I want. But in this game, it's like all about really intricate details and I'm not good enough for that. So I didn't want to try going that route. So what you said you were listening to our podcast with Louis, like what in that podcast, like, because you know, every time someone talks about RFQs, at least for me, there's a portion of my brain that's like, wow, I need to drop everything and do this right this second. And then there's a portion of my brain that's like, this is going to cause me to lose everything and I'm going to be homeless if I try and do this. So what, like, what attracted you or brought you to want to try try that after hearing that episode? Yeah, it's just really my bank rule size at the time. I mean, everything on the main market, so it was like a penny wide. So you know, you'd really have to do some volume to make like real P&L and I didn't have enough money at the time to like, do that much volume or like take a bet that large, like that small of the margin. So I thought it made more sense to do something more appropriate for my bank rule, which I thought would be RFQs. You know, you can take smaller bets if you want to as long as you're in front of the market. And they definitely had hired margins. So I just thought that made more sense. And you're like, well, if Louis can do it, you know, I mean, he sounded so sharp in that. But it's very interesting because like I would have thought that there would be some like live taking portion of you. Like I assume that from hearing your background at the first, you know, the first bit of this coming on to call sheet or poly, there'd be some like live taking because you have no delay. And you've been, you know, prior on the sports books doing a lot of live taking into honestly, like what is probably not is probably like a similarly tough environment. I was doing it on call sheet like I can tell you like a live making is super hard. So somebody's making money. It must be the taker. So like why why not do, you know, kind of just continue doing that that taking strategy that you were doing on sports books. Because I think I actually I thought like, you know, if call sheet live has no delay, it's somebody's putting a market up there. That must be like really good. Like the, you know, if someone has the balls to put like 10K out there, like that would know the way. I mean, maybe I'm wrong and maybe that's also like easy pickings. I don't know, but I just kind of assumed like that would, that was good and never try going after it. I guess I had too much respect for that market. Yeah, that's fair enough. Like I was shocked for the first time I saw like a live in play NFL market. How much was up on call sheet? I was like that's in the same like I can't believe that. But I mean, yeah, it's also different like you're the price could be very sharp, but the vulnerability and call sheet is the delay. So the way to win on call sheet is not necessarily like the same way that you'd win live betting on sports books where you're getting like arbes and whatnot. And you identify one book as sharp like the way to win on call sheet is obviously just to court side, which is, which is different. That requires a whole different kind of setup. So that doesn't make sense. Yeah, I mean, I think it's like just a broader point and I'm curious if you've, if you've dabbled in any non sports because we will talk about RFQs in your experiences. They're quite a bit, I imagine, but maybe just like broadly prediction markets and some of the non sports stuff. Like I feel like we're going to look back and be amazed at how tight and how much liquidity was on a lot of these markets. Like because if you go outside as you know sports, like I think I said this before in the podcast, like there is no way like the the the efficient place for you know like a mentioned market to be trading then an EPL side has ever traded. Like there's just no way that should and so I think one of you know the things that that at least for me, I've had to learn, you know, to your point is that like it's like in sports betting a ton of side like historically a ton of size and whatnot has been like a deterrent. I just feel like we're in this like frothy period with these prediction markets. There's this kind of experience where it's not warranted. And I think it's something Henry said at Novig is like it's not one person who's very confident. It's a bunch of people who've put up like small orders and it's just trying to collect some rectal which turns into a very big order, right? So yeah, I was curious on that question. I'm glad John asked that question because I see a lot of people, my understanding what their strategy is like live taking appear to be doing very very well on Calgary still. So yeah, and like I've mentioned many times, I have a collection of data on some live takers I've interacted with and they're quite profitable. Very much. I'm assuming it's a similar question. Or maybe I just suck, but uh, okay, so you so you you zone in it. So you narrowly don't RFQ. So when you're when you hear the Louis episode and you say like, I think this is a good, what's the Louis before Exy or no? I actually don't remember. It was before I think. Okay, so it was Louis. Yeah. Okay, I got it. Um, so what do you do to start diving in? Uh, really just figure out you're going to get your pricing feed. And uh, then the next hardest thing is actually like the hardest thing that I've like had the build is going to sound like really stupid was just making sure the matching is really robust. Like whatever your streaming ads from and what it's called and call sheet, like making sure like that never fucks up because that that's going to like cause so many. I was laughing like at Exy's episode when he said he flipped the spread. It's exactly what happened to me. I was laughing at S.K. What he like had the the Azure Thompson and a men Thompson debacle. Like I literally did that too. And that was in, you know, you hear a lot of other people. I think one guy came on do uh, uh, Chris and Henry's pod and he said something like that as well. It would probably mark it like the slugs are even worse. But uh, yeah, that was like the hardest thing I had the engineer. And uh, I mean, the way I looked at it was, you know, I'm just going to put X amount of money in the account. I'm going to look at it if I lose that as cost of doing business. I'm going to look at it as if the market wants to pick that off. You know, that's my consulting fee. You know, I'd rather let the market find my leaks instead of like hire some dev to try to go through my code. He's probably going to miss stuff anyways. Um, and then just kind of put it up and start blasting and uh, you know, engineer it. So it logs is many things as as you can possibly get like even if you think it's overkill and you're not going to need it. Just like log every single thing that your quota it interacts with. So then, you know, after a month or so when you get a whole bunch of data, you know, you could fine tune everything. Okay. This is is so key. Like we do, we do RFQs too. And like the logging and the post trade and all of that are so important. So I'm glad you brought that up. And like you only, yeah, like I feel like almost all the alphas and like because the the RFQ system is like very black boxy. If you just like hook up to it and run it, like you don't actually, you have to create the stuff that you see and that you log. And then you gotta make like a whole API that would be like enterprise grade that, you know, you could sell for like historical data. That's like the way I will get it. Right. Right. And that's like almost, it almost feels like that's the edge, right? Like because there's so much that can go, you're obviously playing a lot of defense, you know, Qs, right? But, you know, everybody can kind of connect to, you know, whatever pricing feed. Not, you know, not everybody. But, you know, I think a lot of people are using the same pricing or similar pricing. But I think like where and we'll get into this later and there's some good questions on this. But like the game in RFQ does exactly what you said that resonated so much with me. So thank you for bringing that up. Can you can you give, you know, someone like me who's only dabbled in the RFQs and listeners like an idea, I don't want you to share anything, you don't want to share or whatever. But like an idea of some of the things you're tracking or a specific example where in in retrospect, you're glad you you track that or just how it's helped you. Any of those questions are you able to respond to? Yeah, just in general, like, you know, I saw some questions on people now like complaining about like they don't get filled anymore and stuff that were since like two weeks ago when when calls you just like like ramped up how my API I request everyone gets there whatever. I mean, that's like where the logging comes in hand is because like you can analyze like the whole pricing curve and be like, okay, this is where I probably shouldn't even be like dropping my price anymore and I could arguably not even compete here. This is where like I could drop my prices more and I can win some fills. This end of the curve, this is like where my fill percentage versus what I quote is pretty high. Just stuff like that and like, you know, who's a sharp taker, you know, get rid of them. - Yeah, get the fuck out of here. (laughing) - No, we can't, we can't. (laughing) - I like I tried, yeah, I tried. - Just to make GP make sure that's cut and it goes pretty good. - No, so is it, is it, maybe I didn't understand off the bat. So you're logging not only like your trades but you're just broadly logging like all as many like RF Q trades as you can, is that fair? - Yeah, like everything, everything that my quarter interacts with. - Okay, and sort of what I know. - You quoted what other people quoted what was confirmed and trying to, you know, derives value from that sort of exercise. - Yeah, or just really anything at all that my quarter interacts with, even if it's stuff that like it filters out, I want filtered out, I log, I want filtered out, don't even know if I'll need it or whatever, but you know, just anything and everything. - Right, total sense to me because like the order book is like extremely transparent. It might be confusing to people who are not familiar with it but it's very transparent like what's going on. RF Q is like the total opposite. So the need for this to sort of build that transparency makes total sense to me. GDP, did you have something? - Yeah, I was good. Well, I think like, and I want to talk, I want to talk to Troy about the Matt Cowlish, like, ran a little bit, but when it's like, oh, like everybody can see like who you are. It's like, hey, that's only an RF Q's, which is like, you know, kind of how OTC or like anything like over the phone and an RF Q market would work more traditionally. And B, even within that, it's still really fucking hard to like get all that information. So it's not like that's just popping up to anybody that is publicly available, obviously. But one thing I wanted to tack on to that, Troy, and I wanted to hear if you had this experience, but it's like, yeah, you're trying to figure out like, oh, why did I not get filled here? And sometimes you're like, oh, I'm not quoting like this thing because I did this thing wrong. And it's not that I'm like, everything's wrong and I'm not getting filled. It's just one specific issue where if I just fix that, then I'll start actually responding to like, just type of quote or whatever. And that's where it just becomes like, because I think like the big issue is when people start, they're like, oh, I'm not getting, you know, any fill. So I got to make my prices better. But it could be that you have a lot of issues and you're not quoting certain things that are popular legs. - Yeah, and then they'll all drop silently. - Exactly. - You're not logging it and you have like no way of figuring it out. - They have. - I mean, what the race fits was in Colisbury's API docs for the RFTs, you can go up to like, it says you can go up to like four decimal places. But like, if you do all four and that four number, if anything but is zero, it's gonna like finally drop. - Yeah, I didn't learn that, like accident. I learned that by accident, like a month later. And then I was like, wow, now I figure that out. I'm doing like four times as much volume. Like just for that little thing. - Right, like how many times have you been like, like, man, I'm not, yeah, something's, I'm not getting filled. Or like, man, my volume's like kind of low. Or not even that, you're just like, wow, I'm doing a lot of volume. And then you figure something out and you're like, oh shit, like I'm doing so much more volume. But I think that's the thing. It's like people turn the price knob. But you might just be like improving your price so much that you're getting bad fills in the only markets that your quota is quoting. And you're not, you know, and you're basically missing all these other ones. - Yeah, you never quite feel good. (laughs) - No, you don't have like a, there's like a medium amount of like volume that you feel comfortable with and then anything less or anything more, makes you nervous. - Yeah, what are, yeah, yeah, exactly. I mean, when you, when you start building, were you building from a place of like, obviously you're like, hey, I'm gonna try this out. So, you know, we're trying to get better. And that's, that's what, I think that's what S.P. and I always preach on the shows, like kind of. Exactly to your example, it's a good example of this of like plugging in and kind of figuring it out on the way. But are you like, how did you, how did you go through the process of kind of growing? Because obviously you've done pretty well. And I'm sure you've started to loosen up the, the quoting as you've gone on and trying to do a little bit more here or there. Was it like, you're gonna start with certain markets and just add, add markets or start with certain like, per leg risks, you know, like, how did you kind of like, build out, you've responsibly like, build out your RFK, quote, yeah. I mean, my, my like, risk and per leg risk has always kind of more, less been the same in terms of like, relative to my bankroll. But I never like, really trickled in more markets unless, you know, I started doing this in like February, and then, you know, when MLB starts off, then, you know, you move into that market and get that up and running. But no, I kind of just like fired it all right away. Just logged in and saw what happened. I'm over here fishing for like, yeah, like, you know, I really, what, you know, I was really responding. You know, I really followed this process, like, nah, dude, I just fucking fired it in there. Don't be such a. - Yeah, I mean, you just when you start off, you know, I just, you know, like I said earlier, looking at it as a cost of doing business, put in a amount of money in your account, and you're willing to lose quote, like an honest amount. So like, you could get a realistic picture of like what the market actually looks like. And yeah, just go from there, take all the information you can and then improve on it. - When you say quote, honest amount to see the market, do you wanna, I think I know you, I think I know you're getting out, but can you expand on that? - Yeah, well, I mean, if you're offering like 10 grand, the probability of that being adverse is like a lot higher than if you're offering 20 bucks. So you kinda wanna like, simulate, you know, what you're actually gonna be doing in practice, and not like, okay, well, I have, I put like five grand in this account that like do a little trial run or whatever, and I'm just gonna quote people like on the little $5 stuff. Like that might not be good enough to get like an accurate depiction of, you know, what it's gonna look like when you start offering people, a couple grand. - Absolutely, yeah, yeah, for sure. - Has that part been something you've dialed and learned, you know, while working through this is like, optimal sizing and like size constraints, I'm like, what you're willing to offer, depending on the size, I know that was like, you know, maybe we could get into a little bit about K-Lisches, you know, I think he's still going, tweeting through it, but I think that's what set it all off. - I'm an amanded. - My founders of these big companies are built different. - I think it was an RFQ quote, I think. It wasn't clear to me of what was it? - No, it was a golf. - Was it purely golf? - It looked like a combo to me, but I couldn't. - So it was his Brooks Kevco bet. And then, but he was also pissed about like, then he went into the RFQ, basically like, the RFQ system where you can see, use your ideas in the RFQ system. - Okay, there was a lot of tweets, so I couldn't keep up with them all. But my original question was like, you know, he was tweeted about getting a different price depending on size and the slippage you would ever if it wasn't RFQ. Even if it was RFQ, I think it's pretty clear, you know, for a user, if you plug in a parlay for $20, you're going to get a better price than if you plug in a parlay, that same exact parlay for $1,000. So like, have you, is that something you've sort of like worked through and thought through like, different sports, different situations, numbers, numbers of legs, like, et cetera, like the optimal sizing you should be taking. And yeah, I'm eventually, you know, like fine-tune it for that. But like, you know, if you're going to get like, super granular, like, you know, how much lower can I go if I'm going to court a parlay? That's like seven legs versus four legs that has like two player for off, the two legs that are alive versus like, you know, one that's all player for off's pre. Or something like that, you know, to get to that level of granularity, like how precise you're going to be with where you drop your prices. I mean, I'm just collecting more and more data and trying to, you know, eventually get to that level where I can be that granular and really like, stick my head out in front of the market. And stuff where like, I know I can still make money. But yeah, I'm not quite at that point yet. And I'm still kind of just generally throwing like, the same margin on everything. It's cool that it's clear that your process is driven by post-trade data collection. You have this pipeline that is your RFQ process. I think a lot of people are like, "Oh, yeah, I'm just going to quote, "Fandal and then make money." There's this whole other half, which is more than half to it, which involves gathering and analyzing and seeing the market. How that, I think, the data you're collecting, even if you're not using it, that's the hardest thing to do. It's like, "Yeah, I want to make something to collect this thing that might be important or might not, but I want to maybe want to have it because if you don't, it's gone." But now looking back, you're going to have this ability to get a great visual on the entire RFQ market and all of the optimal strut, all of the ways you can optimize, which aren't obvious at first. I mean, I try to make it good enough that I could sell it if I wanted to. There you go. Do you know where to find me? What's the reason for that? Because every code I make, I make to just bare bones work, and I die. It's never going to be able to do it. If I ever, it's not going to be usable like anyone else, it's like, "I have to know each. " What is the purpose? Maybe it's easier than ever to do some of that stuff, just with the AI stuff. What is there reason beyond that? I mean, out of life, I've thought about potential exits in this. If it gets oversaturated, it's like it's just sell the bot. But then if everybody has the bot and if everybody's super, then nobody's super or kind of thing. Or if I want to sell the historical database that I've collected. I mean, mainly it's just for now for my usage, but I've just kept that in mind. If you're going to build something that collects all that, I mean, with a plot, it's not too many more steps to make it in a very organized fashion. And at least what I'm projecting, the baby, be enterprise grade. I don't even know what enterprise grade is supposed to look like, but I think it's good enough to sell. I don't know. No, that makes sense. Yeah, I think it's a really interesting discussion because I think we've even gotten a question or so in the past week on what is the, when everybody has the same odds or everybody's just plugged into the odds feeds, what is the edge? And I think this is the edge of like like G.P. was saying, competing in the right places. Because you could extend this to just talk down and betting in general. It's not like, most people have a general idea of what the fair reasonably is for most games. The people are going to make money are the people who can navigate the order book well and get the action from the people they want well at the right time well. So RFQs are really no different. I think that people think of them as different because the prices are more opaque and you can't just scrape them in as easily. You need like a tool or software or more creative solution. But ultimately like the prices are not the, the secrets, if everybody can get the prices, the prices are not the secret sauce. So I think just with how easy it is to get the prices, that's not going to be the competitive side. I am curious like what you've noticed in the RFQ landscape even since it sounds like you started in February. So for listener that may not seem like a long time. But just for my impression of dabbling over the past couple of months and talking with people and just playing with it, it seems like it's gotten way more competitive. Is that the experience you've gotten? Yeah, I mean, ever since like two weeks ago or whatever, when they gave everybody way more requests per second, it's got a lot more competitive and I've definitely had to drop my curve. When you're, yeah, I do want to expand on the request for second, like why that's made it more difficult for, you know, those of us who are quoting RFQs are made more competitive, I guess. Yeah, I mean, I think the standard was like you can respond to 10 a second and basically there were just people with APIs on there, just like spam probing it. So a lot of people's bots were just responding to a lot of junk. So if you can respond, I mean, I personally think that's a skill issue and you should know how to like filter out the junk and that's like something you're not going to. Also think that Troy. I also think that I'm not going to like say how to do it because there's some like really easy things because think about it for a second on how to filter out like a lot of junk and I think 10 requests a second is just plenty. Like if you know what you're doing. So I think now you're just seeing a lot of people's like poor filtering, like now getting some real bits. You got to. Can I ask a dumb question? Like why, what benefit, like why doesn't Calche just get rid of these people who are spam, spamming the RFQ? Like it seems like those people serve no purpose at all. I know it's a bit periodic or anything. I think they should be completely gone because I hear what you guys are saying. I was like, and you're both probably speaking of your own self interest of like I can filter out the right ones and get. So I hear like objectively it just seems like those people are hurting the experience for everyone because I think in general, if you're thinking of the average customer, you want more competition on the quoting, right? You don't want these finite, like you can only quote 10 or whatever per second and then the prices are suffer because of it, right? I know selfishly that maybe you know what the quotas want, but feels like those people should just, if it feels like I assume those people are going through the API and just mass requesting, is that what's happening? Yeah, but you can, you can get rid of them. So, is it talk to me a little bit? I know you don't want to get. Calche, if you're, or if you're, you can just not quote them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. But if you're cool, I think like also an SP, to SP's point of like getting rid of them, if you're call sheet, I think they have started to take some steps against those people. It's obviously, I mean, it's not good for the market. Right. I mean, I think nobody's really going to go to bat for the person's right to send in 200,000 RF keys. No, I don't even know who's like the end boss who's making all the money doing this. I look at my block list and it's just like growing and growing and growing and I feel I don't know how these guys get new accounts or whatever all the time. Just the hammer, a few quick bits that are mistakes that just be blocked forever, then you're going to get a new one. I don't know how they keep like, I don't know. Like practice, years of practice in sports. I know it's sustainable, that is the, I feel like it's not what we're doing. I don't know. Yeah, I wanted to ask you maybe a couple of questions on that. You can't share or want to say around this, but like it sounds like that's an active process of years of using the requester IDs and using that to your benefit. Is that that's a combination of it sounds like people who are just spanning the feed, but also people who you just frankly don't want to take bets from. Yeah, but like all of them, I've never had a take or like a volustata collect. I've never had so and then I'm like, oh wow, he's just fundamentally like exploiting that SGP correlation there. Like no, it's always something to do with like like court siding or latency or whatever just spamming it. It's like fixed out like a sore thumb. It's never anything like fundamental that like I could take their bet and then go make money off of it like being a takeer the other way. Like it's always just like some parasitic stuff. Yeah, it's interesting. I mean, I think right now the number of combo like just what's available in the combo product on on cows. She is way more limited than something like on draft kings or something where there's like there's probably far more actual angles you could have like sort of originated angles, but it makes sense that the vast majority are sort of exploits court side, et cetera. Now you're seeing right now. It's fun. I always think like I'm going to be able to figure out this great angle, but sometimes you know, if people like do it smartly and I don't know the sport, I might not actually even know I'm getting, you know, I'm losing like to a fundamental angle, but it's so obvious when somebody's like, of course, you know, and like exactly, you know, there's yeah, and then you could like after you know, you tracked a bet and then you can go see like, you know, from NBA. you could scrape it all and see like the wall clock of like when that play happened and like, oh yeah, that was cool So I did right right right I mean we there's a lot of good RFQ questions, but we have some other we want to talk about kind of like Your future plans, but SP did you have anything more like on the This first block of RFQs like obviously a lot of the questions are about RFQs Yeah, maybe maybe I know we touched on it a little bit, but like you you one of your questions was the chances for our show last week of like managing risk And I think you you mentioned that sort of like the per leg and maybe total exposure like those have remained sort of constant We exchanged in DMs about it too, but like do you have anything to add to that conversation about how you've you've learned to manage risk I mean obviously it's like a very interconnected web when you're doing RFQs and you don't have like a clear View of like this is my individual risk on this bet So so how do you think about that and how have you managed that? Yeah, I mean they ever saw last week. I mean that just gave me confirmation bias that I guess I'm doing like a good enough job And it doesn't need to be overkill But the way I look at it is I say like okay, this is like the max draw down. I'm willing to take it a day I mean for me that's like 25% about quarter-calorie should like get you around there and then I do from that max draw down and just divide it by three and then that's like the the max I'm willing to take for per leg and Then I have I do like one more level of granularity. I do like two lake clusters And I'll just I don't know like mathematically I'll sound it is but I'll take like the same amount on two lake clusters and I've come to thinking that's okay because like I've laid out like I guess some simulations on Like what I would realistically book like if it was all maxed out like that And then just like run a bunch of simulations and see like what your worst case scenario is like how often that happens And as I As I bear it out like I know you can sort of ahead of time sim it and get a sense of like you know Sim each leg if they all go as bad like overweight on these sides is it bad as it as it played out that way? Have you tweaked it at all? Like I'm not gonna would I mean I've never hit my max draw down yet and like the way I sinned it It said that should that should do it like once in every 300 sessions or something like that Okay, I think I've had 300 sessions yet Well, let's hope it stays that way Yeah, I was just curious if you've you've actually like run into it yet and because the reason I ask is In some respect everything you said made sense to me. It's how I think a problem But it's in some sense like academic to be like okay. This is how much I could I could lose and But it's a really like what you said though like I think the the most like soft way I guess of doing it would be like constantly having like a mark the market live sim of it That'd be like the most thorough way I think of like solve again seeing like okay Should I go and like hitch this out or whatever? but I love for what I'm doing. I'm kind of more focused on where I'm gonna play offense better and I think that'd be like a little bit overkill Unless you were gonna be doing something like really large scale and enterprise grade especially if like your sports book You know and you can't just stop quoting something then you might need something like that It makes total sense to me. I I think I said I'll show like I can't imagine that's the highest like Value thing. I think you sort of just need to and that's why I asked like you sort of just need to have that bad day and be like Okay, that was probably too bad of a day I think I made that open I'm not 100% sure but that was a good one Yeah, okay, so you said something there that is interesting and It kind of ties into this like future looking plans, but you said like what I'm now trying to do is play offense a little bit I think we're gonna come to a question later that I may be getting at to the nexus or the Or the reason that you would like to go play some offense, but like so you're right now From our conversation seemingly we've only talked about making but you're Implying that you're either doing or want to be doing some taking oh No, I mean like by offense is like market making Okay, yeah, just writing volume at good old Obviously now I can do like how I can maximize that I think that's It's a better use of time than like you know really trying to get super meticulous with your risk management model And I'm just do something crude. That's probably good enough especially you have the luxury of being able to stop quoting Right Yeah, it's like that that risk model or like the hypothetical one we kind of kicked around would be awesome, but the The It's just so complex like the time to build something that Didn't blow blow up like you know because like with the complexity comes like all these like kind of Unforeseen opportunities to blow your ear holding up I don't just think that you think then do that like doesn't make you ready more money, right? But it's cool kind of indirectly It's a lot of work. It makes you money. It makes you money because it would allow you to bet more right? So like if you were like if you were like in a spot where you were You didn't have your whole band girl on the table and you felt like with your original risk Parameters you were saying like you can't take you can't write anymore here But like with the more thorough view of what your risk actually was you could write more and then you Can also tell you you got to you got to write less. Yeah, but that's not bad The worst result I agree you never want something that tells you to bet less that would be a you know double double negative so I was gonna add I'm glad John took us there because I I was gonna ask it popped in my mind when you said you were collecting all the results like I'm interested personally in like some of the the taking side I think the RFQ is like the most interested. I've been in taking on the exchanges so far just because It goes back to my point of like some of these markets should not be quote like we're gonna look back and they were it's gonna be Ridiculous in hindsight that they recorded this this aggressively. I think so like is that it sounds like the answers know But maybe maybe can you give a little bit of context on maybe why the answer is no unlike taking and maybe it's because you've not seen Like in your data like the clear and obvious things besides Courtsiding and whatnot, but I'm just I just feel like that data would be extremely valuable for identifying potential Vulnerabilities in your competitors who are quoting these things. Yeah, I mean when I was starting this I was really hoping that there were I was expecting that there were gonna be like you know a good amount of IDs that are like fundamental takers And I would like look through everything that bad like oh like look at all these correlations between like these players and those players and try to kind of reverse engineer what they're doing a little bit and especially if like they're confident enough in that to where like they think they can beat the fee I Mean I just have not seen that like I thought I was gonna see a good amount of people like that and I like All the only people that have like made money off of me are like people that are just doing latency type stuff We're like exploiting the In Thompson is the word Thompson the blockals. Hey, that's a valuable information. I learned that I wouldn't have known that there's brothers You know, are you doing this for all sports? I should ask like like basically everything or you you narrowed down to a subset I do Yeah, I just as them now I only have I didn't I didn't get this up and running ahead of the football season I will be doing that obviously as that comes around but I have What NBA college basketball MLB and NHL right now I Was thinking like you know maybe W NBA, but there's no player props today yet, and I don't know how much reactions could it be? I don't know if it's worth spinning that up Could maybe do golf, but you know then you get a hold everything over the weekend, you know, I kind of want fast turnover Yeah, I never got around a during soccer. I don't know how much volume that's raised I mean, maybe that can be another project But there's really like if you look at all the sports and all the different markets within the sports on Call feed there's It's it's really constricted when you look at like what you can actually combo so Have you at any point? Spent a serious amount of time while you're building this RFQ on anything besides RFQ's on call tree or no Well, I want to migrate to profit X 'cause they think they have something on there. But I mean, I don't even know, I don't even know any other exchanges besides those two that allow you to like publicly create that stuff. - Okay, so you're, I guess like my takeaways, you just laser focus RFQs. And that's what you do on call sheet. And like it's better to be good at, I think that, I mean, that's, that's a man after my heart SP, just really grind, focus in, grind it. One thing, don't bother with having fun or trying new things. Which, but no, I mean, I really do think like, there is a big advantage. Who's like the way hearing you talk about RFQs and like having been looking at, they're doing them myself. Like it's so clear to me that like you're, like fully deep in the RFQ game, a game where there's a ton of money, or a ton of recreational money. And where there's not really like, you're not really, you're able to turn your bankroll over also in a way that's like not to adversarial. So I just thought about doing other things. And I'm like, I don't think I'm going to be able to, like it's not going to be the print is good. I just love it. I love it. Yeah, I mean, I think I, I think when we first ink talked about RFQs or early on, one thing that I said is like, I don't think this is the type of thing that you just sort of have to. Like this is not the thing. You just, you can just like dabble in and do very well. I don't think. And so I think it makes total sense that this is like what you're focused on to do it. You know, there's like in any of these competitive, competitive like areas, whatever they are, like you need to be sort of like all in. I think I, you know, the difference is I just are trying to compete at the less competitive areas, right? Where I can't dabble. But yeah, it makes total sense to me. It's also like an enormously growing area of the ecosystem. I know the article was published, which is named Dan something, Dan Bernstein or something. The one with like the takers, Dan Bernstein. He read the article on like how much money people have lost on Galshi RFQs. And I saw like a, I can't remember. I don't know if it was Captain Jagger. So when I was in the flip side. Yeah. I mean, I think it's, it makes total sense to me. I also have heard on inside prediction markets, the Novig show. I think Henry said like he could see more of this stuff, more of the prediction markets in general going this RFQ way, like even like stuff like player props and whatnot, which I mean, I don't really have a strong view of. I'm on the outside, but like it does make some sense to me. If you want to like, because the great thing about RFQs is it allows you to get good prices to people in like a much less adversarial way because it's not out in the open. So like that is, that is the good thing about RFQs. I mean, you lose the transparency. And like the true prediction market evangelist, like cringe probably at the idea of RFQs. But in terms of getting people, you know, their bets, it's actually like a very good way of doing it for everybody. Right? It's like, again, reinventing the sports book from first principles. And like, yeah. And if you tap it any partly, you want on like Colchie. And then you look at like any of the other main rec books, you're pretty much always getting a better price even after the fee. - And sometimes way better. And that's why I'm honestly interested in some of the taking stuff is like, it's, I feel like it is very right now, it's very competitive. And people, like I've dabbled enough to know like, broadly what mistakes would be fairly easy to make. And I feel like anybody who's made for a little bit, probably, 'cause that's a thing with it, right? It only takes one person to make a mistake, right? And it's not like the normal order book where someone makes a mistake, it's gone like immediately. Like on the RFQ, it's not like everybody can just see that it's not like the mistakes on an on screen, right? It's like it's on back end code, right? So it's an interesting world that doubt. - And it's a circle of life. I mean, you gotta, when the making's too competitive, then you gotta start taking and get rid of all those people and then you can make it again. - I've been sent to the sharp takers, you know, I've been on the record talking about it. - Okay, first of all, I'm back on the sharp taker train. A lot of people recognize me as very pro sharp taker. But what you said is, Troy's been my experience, actually with it with golf is like, you need to have the stick too, you know, the carrot and the stick. You're out there, you're making, but when people just get over their skis and start offering, just thinking they can offer whatever price they want, the best way to make a ton of money, market making is to go in there and just like, just rip their face off for a while, taking like to have that ability to keep them in track. So then you go back to making jumping, like just throw out some junk, so then they like undercut you and it's like wave of the market and then just pick them off. - Right, right. And then like to, even like in a, I think that's where, I think that's where having your number, like your own number, if it's good, will end up being very valuable to it. Like I don't really think like having your own number from a traditional, like if you were in a not super competitive market, it doesn't really matter. You're trying to, I guess at the end of the day, you're just trying to get in front of Rex, not deal with sharps, right? But to now deal with the other makers, I think, well, like you said, it's like a circle of life. Like there will be a rise of the hashtag sharptakers. Like you'll have to be a sharptaker too, along with a maker, I think, and the long run. - Yeah. - And we'll know who's side there on GP. We'll know who side the sharptakers are on. Let's talk a little bit about future and then we'll do the listener questions. Like, do you, is this what you see yourself leaning into the next one to two years, all in RFQs? Like do you have any thoughts or opinions on like the current state of the legality of prediction markets, any of that? Like, or are you just head down working on this? I'll figure out the next thing if I'm forced to figure out the next thing. - Yeah, I mean, I'm already kind of like pivoting on another project that I want to be doing. I mean, it's what Campford Jack says. I mean, every market maker wants an exchange and every exchange wants to be a market maker. So I kind of want to open some kind of exchange. I mean, it's really ambitious, probably not going to work, but you know, that's, you know, I got some money and I could sit on it for a little bit and see if it's plausible or not. I mean, whatever it's EV, the ticket shot at it. - Well, that's cool. - That's, that's big. That's cool. That you want to like any, for people out there who might be interested in working with you or whatever, like any more deeds on that. - Yeah, I mean, kind of keep dead of myself for now. - That's good. - I think you're gonna work. - It's not what I want for there. - Okay, yeah, I didn't know. I wanted to give you the opportunity to, you know, because I know we do pay you a lot to come on the podcast, but sometimes that's not enough. (laughing) - Sometimes get some economic benefit out of it. - Well, that's cool. - Okay, let's go to the listener questioners, questions, the first from Cut and Paste. Do you do much live-quoting trading? How do you deal with court-siding for CalShi where the delay is zero seconds? Now, I did, I want to ask you about this. Obviously, like there's proprietary stuff that like just like you said, and alluded to dealing with, you know, certain spammers, like we can't give away everything, 'cause the RFQ stuff is competitive. But are you doing a lot of the RFQ stuff live, and do you have anything you could share related to this? - Yeah, I mean, live is most of my volume, and I think that's specifically cause it's least competitive, 'cause it's difficult for people to deal with the court-siding. I can't really obviously give 100% on how I handle that, but one thing I will say is if you can filter out a lot of the people that spam the API, you're gonna get a lot less of that. So that's one way you can handle that without me disclosing everything. - That's pretty solid, that's pretty generous. So well, I've gotten this from like a few people in gambling, like I don't know if you guys are big Harry Potter fans, but there's my cat, Hi Luna. Hi. But okay, anyway, in Harry Potter and the fourth book of Harry Potter, said, like Harry like solves something for said, then said, "Drick, like in return gives him the egg." And as I said, like think think it over in a bath or whatever. And then like it turns out you just have to go underwater and you can hear the egg. I think that's the that's the gambling advice I'm going for. It's like, look, this is kind of it, but you got to go figure out the rest of it. And I think that that's that's what you did there. It's you know, so everybody can mold that over in a bath with an egg. Anyway, this was the question I think that this is a question I was alluding to from Mani. He says, for our fk's, it seems like pricing is extremely competitive. I often find myself dropping prices lower than I want to win flow. How do you handle this? And I think there was another important post to this. I think it was plus E.V. Analytics who wrote about I didn't even remember what like the when it was called. There's basically just like a winner's winters tax or whatever. Like you get to a point where people are quoting unprofitable levels. And then like you have to sit out as somebody who's only going to be quoting profitable stuff. Like how do you deal with what Mani is asking? How you deal with like that phenomenon when like you want to be in there. You feel like you're not making any money if you're not in there. But at the same time, you're like, I can't really offer that price to win. Yeah, I mean, that comes down to like what I was saying earlier about like storing as much data as possible. And then you can analyze spots where you can be more aggressive and spots where you could charge more et cetera. And also there's, I've never really met anyone who's talked about this side of things. But I'm sure like there's some really big entities in this that like have some kind of deal with call fee or like they can quote a fair and then they get like a rebate of some kind. And I don't know if they do that. I'm RFQ's. But like I would think that I'm going to speculate and think that there's definitely some of that going on some kind of predatory pricing. Yeah, I think either that or like if you have equity, right? Like let's say you're call she trading like you'd be incentivized to quote RFQ's a fair right? If you were to quote yeah or you could be like Amazon and even quoted that I think a loss. Yeah, yeah, so then everybody gives gives up and then yeah, I was going to say you're actually incentivized to quote a loss. I guess a good point. Like that would be active. You could put your call fee and quote a like 1% loss but then you're taking in like 5% or whatever however it works on the curve of like fees. Then you probably can't afford to do that for sure. Please don't do that. Yeah, I mean that's the interest of the interesting part of the like the long term internal trading arm of any of these companies. I know they're lose your makers. Yeah, it balance that. Yeah, I think it's it's tough because like I you can clearly make arguments for why you need internal trading. I think especially like if you're smaller and my head is always internal trading gets the market like off the ground and then you want to get out of the way to make it like a normal ecosystem where you're not like playing games into. So yeah, I mean I think those would be some of the downsides if you if you have you know situations like like that. Let's go to next one from John Rappaport. What's your mental model for deriving and pricing correlation top down? So I know you would mention like using the unabated feed in the past which you know obviously you're getting some some correlations there. Is that primarily what you're relying on? If you're doing mostly live I'm curious if that that holds or or there's other considerations where you've had to work through. I mean without saying too much like I don't make any of the models of my own. I mean there's there's a lot of ways you could figure out how to get odds. So I don't want to I want to speak too much in the specifics of that but you dig around you could definitely figure it out. Yeah it's so like I think to your earlier point of like you didn't find anybody taking who like had a winning opinion on correlation. Right so it's like as like making in a lot of at least what we're doing it's like not our own correlation price. I think you know you could I do think that it'll evolve that way like you know having your own sim that correctly prices correlation but you know I think. A thousand percent yeah. But for you know for us like that's totally different. Like that's a completely different process like it's just not in day to compare to you know because you're basically you know you're you're top downing you know you're not top downing you're when you're top downing like you can't break out the correlation I think like in any way that would be meaningful to your pricing like it wouldn't help right like to try to figure out like oh what is MGM think the correlation is here like to try and to ride that and I don't know I don't think that that would really do much and it would be like this massive problem but let's go to next one then from Chris flow I'd love to learn about his setup does he schedule certain things what tools or resources does he use with technology someone get a glimpse something to get a glimpse of his overall process would be sick so maybe you know the important question I can talk about that yeah then you got to start with the most important part is is whether we are on you know team team codex or the quad what are what are we running right now I'm doing I mean I'm just doing the $200 month quad yeah best fall know it pretty much everything I don't know I mean I'm not I hear all kinds of engineers like poking holes in it and whatever but I don't know it just sounds like hope to be like it'll eventually just get there and it'll know every little engineering trick possible it'll it'll all come down to creativity at the end of the day I did it like codex is like getting better that that is what they're saying I think it's quite good I don't even use like I don't even use like the quad code terminal thing or like that that's good I literally just do it like in like how it would be like on your phone I literally just do everything like that quad code terminal I would say this is really helpful but yeah anyway that they answered the question I mean the what I do I actually have everything all on a server on a vps so I have like my quota on there and then that quota takes a matching file so it matches like what everything's called in the feed that I'm getting the the odds from and then what everything's called in call fee so like it knows how to match that up then I send it to that I'm a server via telegram and then I also have like all my knobs and stuff on telegram so I can change like what margin I want to quote at what my risk parameters are and then I have like another dashboard that shows like all my positions my risk management I can like freeze and unfreeze positions I can sort like I can sort them a bunch of different ways so that's kind of like what I do for everything at first I like we're just ran it on a laptop but then I was gonna like be traveling and stuff and I don't want to just like have it on the laptop and then leave the house or whatever so I want to be able to just have it on a phone or have it on a server that's always going to be reliable and I can control it all from a phone yeah I'd second if you can like migrating stuff to servers they're very like helpful any you know a little bit better latency if you go to wherever like close to what calls these is right right another good point actually this was a question that I just want to add on to here but another good thing about having on a server is if you work with multiple people we had a outweigh we had a question in the outline for the future like are you are you alone wolf and if so like are you planning on potentially bringing in other people oh I'm already resent by myself yeah and we're getting a lot of like really profitable lone wolf you know in here the lone wolf movement's day right now you know what are they called the garage band market maker garage band that was a good term that was one of the first like good terms that come out of the early production market days do you have any interest in working with others or do you feel like you're like like you'd be hard to have another person realize the value needed uh I mean it would have to if I did it would have to be like so on and it can complement me in spots where like I weak like someone is really good at doing mains but doesn't know how to do RFQ so there would have to be like you know a trade equilibrium with that um and then obviously you know you could always use more money the scales big as possible you could always use some political poll if you can be one of those people that gets the code at fair and get a rebate you can count like uh rum shoulders with the call fee people did I don't know that would be at the top of my head some some good partners Well, this is a good spot to try and find some. We had, it was there anything, like I was trying to, okay, so we have the cloud, we have the cloud code X. We got to, we got to hear about your server. Are you, for your dashboard, are you using like, stream lit or like, what are you building your dashboard in? - I mean, I'm like such a novice coder man that like, I don't even know what it's called, but it's just a, it's just the button that's like on, on Safari that I, like a web extension almost that I click it and. - Oh, okay. - It's got everything. Looks just looking app. - Okay. - Cool. Oh, it looks like an app, so it doesn't run on. Oh, it's, no, I could, I could run it like on like, - Wherever you want. - Just like, if I want. - Yeah, it's just, yeah. - Yeah, I think that's, that's, that's a, that's a thing like with, with anything, where like, there's not a lot of like good, UI for like RF cues or, you know, other things. - Not a call for UI sucks. Like you'd be, like if you're doing, you know, bowsons of best of day, like, you have no idea where you're at if you're just looking at a call sheet. - Right, and that, that's like the whole thing. It's like this whole visualization. I think that's like, under talked about is, yeah, post-rate or just like, like visual, like where am I at right now? - Like, it's not necessarily simple. Like, what positions do I have right now? Like, I don't know. - Yeah, I was quoting some, some RF cues as we can and it just came through with individual athletes' names and like, yes. And I'm like, I don't know. - Yes for what? Like what did I just, like, I'm not really here. And you, you can't even see it. You know, like, if you click on that, what does it do? - You click on it, you don't even see what it's for. So, yeah. - Yeah, the first thing I, I was building this weekend was, what is it, yes for? What did we actually just quote? - What was that? (laughing) - It's got, yeah. - Let's get back to one from here. - Yeah, Richard. What types of markets sports do you, sports categories? Do the PMs lead in in terms of price line moves versus the books, sharper books? Have you seen a change in the last couple of months? So obviously, we've talked like your primarily focused in the RFQ space. I don't know, like, to what extent, maybe the way we could reframe this question is like, to what extent have you done work to sort of like evaluate? What, what to use as the source of truth? Has that been somewhere you've used a lot of time and effort into or, you know, there's a million projects that probably could go on with RFQs and like where you wanna spend your effort is the source of truth and like refining that. And Eric, you've spent a lot of time on? - No, not really in RFQs. I mean, like any model that you're gonna find, especially for like, same game parlias, isn't, I mean, I don't even think anyone has one yet. That's like the nuts that like, is the industry standard that everyone could like copy. So, I mean, it's more so just slap a line up there and limit anyone who gets here. That's almost certainly gonna be the intro to this. There's a lot of good lines from it, but that one's a content. I think, so Daniel's question was about, you know, how long have you been doing this in competition change? So we answered that one. Earlier Judge Judy's question, I think this is an interesting question. So he has, how worried are you that in a few months the books will start skewing their quotes. So I think to, - It's a great question. - Assume, yeah, exactly. To just to clarify what I'm pretty sure is being asked here is like a lot of us, you know, like scumbag market makers are using some pricing that already exists on other sports books and these sports books know this and they're also getting into the trading, space themselves, has been announced. Yes, exactly. Like what are you worried that they'll start spoofing like on their book and doing something on P.M.s? - Yeah, that's a really interesting question. And there's like a lot of parts that go into it. Something that really surprised me was that Fandals gonna be like on these external third party prediction markets implying like call sheet, which I actually saw a video of yours like a couple of years ago and you were talking about like why Fandals isn't like the sharpest it can be. You're like just anecdotally using them as an example and it's because it's way more profitable for them that just get a bunch of people into their book or idiots that it is, you know, maybe spend a lot of money and get like the sharpest lines so they can hold like half a percent more or whatever. It's just not worth their time. So I'm surprised they're even like doing this in the prediction markets and yeah, does it make sense for them to spoof markets? I mean, well, one if you're gonna do it on call sheet, it's literally gonna, it's literally illegal and they wanna have, they wanna have prediction markets themselves. So if they wanna be allowed to do that, you know, I don't know if that's the best idea, but I mean, it could also be good to just get everybody out of there. He's copying them and then they have free rein on posting their own prices. So that'll be interesting to see, but I mean, my gut just tells me it's not really worth them doing and it's literally illegal. So whether they can get around, get in call for that on some technicality, I don't know, but I mean, they're just like such a massive business that getting involved on trading and call sheet just seems like small potatoes and a lot of risk to do something like that. - I agree with that, 100%. I mean, I think we talked a little bit about it last show. I feel like the reason they're doing it is to, at the end of the day, like, fandals success in prediction markets is not gonna be because they made a bunch of money trading on cow cheese prediction market. It's gonna be because they are the prediction market. And so I feel like they're just trying to learn and get their traders up to speed to like actually trade on their prediction market or whatever when they roll it out in the fall or whatever. - Yeah. - Yeah. - You know, huge corporations generally are not in the business of, you know, you can give me some good counter examples. Generally, they're not in the business of committing crimes. So, I think to follow up on Troy's, like, because there was this whole conversation on this where it's like, is this insider trading? But it's like, you're not even asking the right questions, not insider trading, but it is illegal. Like, it's extremely illegal. - Yeah, exactly. So like, there was that whole conversation on Twitter, which was the stupidest conversation ever. But like, yeah, it's not insider trading. - It's not clear, I mean, you know, not a lawyer. It's not clear to me, because like clearly, doing something to the order book, whatever. Like, my understanding is that is illegal. Like, doing something on sports betting with the guys that people are gonna copy you and go to it. Like, that is not clear to me, whether that's actually illegal or not. - Yeah, but are they gonna fuck around with that? - Are they gonna take? - I don't think they're gonna, I think, yeah, no, I think they're just not gonna do it, just 'cause it's not worth their time or money or effort when they're this big. - Yeah, I think they could do it just to fuck with people. I don't think that would be illegal. Like, as long as they're not in there like, taking, I think if they're in there taking, like, it becomes a very difficult, if they're taking on the market that they have, like, just have like, move this now. - If you see us wrong though, like, what, right, there's someone, like, they go, you're right, it's spoofing is like, - That's so lame. - Like, imagine being that lame, like, you copy Fandall and then you're like, Fandall, then you file a lawsuit 'cause Fandall, - No, it's lame. - That is, like, I don't, I don't mean, can't comment on the legality. Like, that would be the lamest thing I've ever heard in my life, like. - So, I think spoofing is a stupid, stupidly illegal. - Troy, this is my, like, one of my, I'm not saying that I would ever do it because, like, sp said, like, it's just crime doesn't pay. But, I do think like, there's annoying situations where you're the originator and you want to spoof and, like, fuck over somebody who's just stealing your information and, like, you can't do it. And that's across, that's across asset classes, like, not just with the products from markets. - Yeah, but then, if you're not getting filled, you just leave and then it kills the market. So, I mean, you gotta, this, yeah, there's gotta be, like, some of that allowed, I guess, to, like, keep people honest. 'Cause we lose the originator and everyone's, there's a copy of the originator. I mean, then, and you lose the whole market. - Right, right, exactly. So, you know, I do think, like, spoofing rules, like, in general, like, that sub, that subset of, like, this is illegal, is, or really, penal to originator. I mean, you could even do it, like, - I mean, I think you guys were talking about this with XG, and I think Chris and Henry were talking about this, like, now, the whole, how the whole, like, college, basketball market, and March Manas, who was, like, all propped up on pinnacles, like, $5,000 limits or whatever. And then you see a lead date, you see a lead date liquidity top of the book for, like, $20 million. And it's like, you know, you could just, like, bump pinnacles line with, like, a few good limit bets. I'm just getting like a really good prize for millions of people. millions of dollars, you know, if everyone's just copying pinnacle. That's what I'm like to be. I'm confident. These just participating for long enough like this happens in spots. Oh, sure. You know, so like, well, that was a great tweet by then you can get rid of everyone who's doing that. And then you become the maker circle of life. Right. But that's why, unfortunately, these, this is exactly why I do think like the spoofing rules in general are overly penal because you should be able to do that. I think. Yeah. But, you know, free market. But these are the rules. But that was a good tweet by I think, it's like a good account on Twitter who's just kind of in the replies a lot. I think it's prediction watch who is like, ask the questions like, what percent of people right now are committing crimes on call sheet don't realize? I mean, there's honestly one of the first I like learned of, you know, that those, I still am not an expert in all these laws or whatever. But like, it's just very clear. Like, there are games being played on like overnight stuff and I'm ready. Like, so to me, you put up like not legal advice, not financial advice, not tax advice, not like, you put up an order on the market. Like, you are accepting that it could be taken. That's legal. That's fair game. For whatever reason you do that, you do that. Right. Like that, that should be the rule in my opinion. I agree with that. I agree with you. Free market. Yeah, I agree. I think, yeah, I think I like it. I'm like, love to hear. It's not like you're protected. Like, if you said, actually, it was a joke order. Like, no, you had every, you know, that could have been taken. So, right, right. I agree with that. Like, I'm used to say that you, who's to say that you didn't mean to fill that at that second, but like, you know, but anyway, I would love to hear everybody's opinions on spoofing rules. Maybe this new CFTC will create no spoofing allowed in prediction. It's probably at the top of the list. It could be. It could be. Should we get our closing? Yeah. All right. Closing questions. First, do you have a hot take that sharp gambling Twitter? You obviously been, you know, part of gambling Twitter. Now you're part of a prediction market Twitter. I don't know if you want to, you know, if you want to have a hot options, you know, take, I would accept that as well. But a hot take that the people of sharp Twitter or your peers would disagree with. Hmm. I think a lot of people like to say they're, they're handicappers and they try to like beat these really liquid markets and they just run that. They don't have any information that is like nuanced or anything creative that like you couldn't get anywhere. And I'm sure those people that do it, I'm probably going to be wrong, but I just think that's like, I think that's like not a very efficient endeavor. All right. I've made full out a good point on this. He's like cool. Like the best NFL originator in the world on sides made two units. Like I was just like spamming SGPs. You know, it's like so true. Right. I mean, obviously like when we had that discussion, like the units are different. Sure. Sure. But, you know, so like the size is different. But yeah, I mean, I, it's a conversation we've had a couple of times with different guests who do different things. I think, you know, different, different people have different skill sets and whatnot. But if you're just trying to make like the most money, I would say for the vast majority of people, that is not a good use of your time. So, and you should do, you know, you should be in markets that are appropriate to your bankroll. You know, you're about 1% of your bankroll and you get 100 grand. You know, you should only be participating in markets that are like a thousand bucks. You know, you shouldn't why I try to beat something that's taken like a hundred grand, trying to beat something that's taken a thousand. Well, SPS is optimal market sizing. I forget what it was, but it was like half the max better, something you said. Yeah, you're starting it to be like 50 to 60. So that you, you can, you have some room to grow, but it absolutely shouldn't be to your point. Like you can bet $5,000 and you only want to bet $100 today. Right. Yeah. That is not a good fit for you. So it's right. You know, I think you want to leave some room to grow, but because you don't want to just immediately get good at the market and then be maxed out. But you know, yeah, that's a good point. Yeah, and as a piece of that, I was like, oh, shit. That's all definitely right. Because I was like, I was a max better. You know, like if you're not, if you're not officially betting like 100% max, like what are you doing? But like go down in the market, basically, like go down the stakes or whatever, because it's, but I don't think about these second order effects of learning and building. Okay. Well, it sounds like maybe that was a Bayesian update for you a while back. Last section was a Bayesian update. I can give mine quick. I really didn't, I didn't have one. I was trying to take a one right here before mine. I guess this is a true change your mind. Real time and we can talk about it more, more next week. But like, you know, Kaelish's first tweet. I was like out on it. I'm like, okay, it's just like clearly like does he actually not like, like what is going on with this tweet? Like let's all dunk on him. The fact that he's like, he's like in the replies and he's gone on for like four days now. Like a new level of respect. It's impressive. Like he wasn't one tweetin out. Like I'm enjoying what's going on over there. So I hope he has a stamina to keep it out. But that was like truly something I changed my mind on. That he's just like full rage bait. At this point, it's like, it's great. You know, great to see him mixing it up with everyone. He's had some good burns, too. Like it's good. Like he, he's, he's had, like if you read through, you know, this threat, like he makes a lot of pretty good. Like the guy, obviously, like, he's not stupid. He's he's worked at a big two. He's taken draft things from like very small company, doing enormously big company and obviously other people involved. But like, he understands the market. I think he's he's towing the line of like rage, bait, serious, back and forth. Like he's got it down. Like I, it's actually a shame that he was locked up and not able to tweet seriously for so long. Like, yeah, I know. It's like we've missed out on his prime years of tweeting. Like he could have been. He's still he's still can't be bank. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He's got it down. So that's my update. His, uh, you're right. Like he has this really interesting mix of like in the thing was like I came, I came in and like kind of agree with him. And then he like, he didn't like come at me. But he like, he has this weird thing of like retweeting and then responding and then retweeting the responses. And then like when he's, when he's like, so you don't even know like you lose his threat. So like, there's no way that you can stay in a platform. It's art that I've not seen on Twitter. Like he's got his own signature. It's really an interesting thing. You can't follow him around in an argument. And then he has people like chasing him. And that just looks stupid. If you like come into his like new reply to the retweet or whatever, like it's it's really top tier, it's top tier stuff. That's what I'm saying. I'm disappointed. Like we could have had a decade of this if he if he had stepped down earlier. So yeah. That's my update. My, uh, yeah, I had a couple, I had a couple of ones. But when I was thinking of for a while was like, I realized that like my attention span has been lowered in other areas than just like social media and stuff. Like I was literally on the plane like listening to music. And I was like listening to a couple of songs that they're good, they're good rap songs. Like yonkers by Tyler the creator is a good example of this. But it's like the look how smart I am rap song. Well, like everything's like really clever and like a good rhyme. But they're, but they're these like three to four second snippets. And the song means nothing. And there's no there's no like it. But it's just like one after another. It's like these little dopamine hits. And I just like, I'm like, I love this. And then when anything like from like J Cole comes on where it's like a longer more like connected thought out song, I'm like snooze like pass. And now I'm like, I need to kind of, I don't know. I just want to like kind of nurture that desire to have like a little more umph to stuff I'm engaging with. And like I feel like it was only something that presented itself like in social media and like short form video. But I do find myself now in like other entertainment forms like kind of falling. Not that like I think yonkers is a great song. I think that's a great song or whatever. But like, but like I need to make sure that I get my brain back on track to be able to like stay and enjoy like longer more thought out things because those are those are also quite good. How's the meditation going for you? I'm doing it. Uh, it's that's the only thing that helps. I do it. I was worried when you described this. I'm worried you fell off the boat on the meditation. I did. I did. But I'm I'm back on the last week, which was when I was having this basically like, okay, moment of like, why do I only like these songs that have like four second bits to them? I'm like, oh, because like my brain's fucked because I'm on Twitter and I don't do any meditation anymore. So anyway, that's a good one. All right. Do you have one for us, Troy? Um, I mean, just in general, I used to think like you had to be, like do anything like this. You had to be such a good, like engineer or computer guy. And, um, I don't know. Now just with how I read how good everything's gotten with like, with AI, I mean, it's shifted back to where you can just be so on your creative again and has an idea. And it's, it's just never been easier to execute something than it is today. Yeah. I mean, when you were, when you were describing like your dashboard and, uh, and you were like, I don't even know what it's in. I was in the back of my head. I'm like, what a time to be alive, you know, that, you know, like you, you didn't even know what it's built in, but you, you described it extremely complicated like dashboard. So I, uh, I second that. I think, you know, that's a good takeaway from this episode. I third it. Um, I think that's a good wrap up. Do you, uh, any, and well, thanks for coming on. This is where we're like, if people want to reach out to you, a good place to find you is, should we say Twitter? Yeah, just Twitter is good. Okay. That's at Troy a cube in. I'll put your, your link in the, uh, description. But, yeah, thanks, thanks for coming on. That was really good. I think, yeah, my pleasure. One of the most like focused RFQ pods I've heard, you know, I'm here. A lot of you. You know, you, you, you, you, you, you felt like you had nothing new to add. And I think you added a lot. Yeah. People love the, uh, the RFQ discussion. So we appreciate you coming on. Absolutely. And thanks for everyone for listening and, and questions. And, uh, we will see you on the next episode.