The Beginnings of an Idea: XP is Long Volatility

What does this mean?

I bought my first stocks at 7. I saw an episode of Leave it to Beaver where they talked about stocks. I got $50 for Christmas (like $500 today!). I wanted to try it.

My investment thesis was simple—the names of the stocks needed to contain the names of the 50 states. I got as far as Oregon Freeze-Dried Foods & Washington Natural Gas before I ran out of money.

So, yeah, I’ve been investing for a while. Never took it seriously enough to make any money at it, but analogies to trading resonate for me.

My history with trading is why “XP is long volatility” hit me when I heard it yesterday. My history with long-cooking ideas is why I’m excited.

Long-Baked Ideas

My head is a busy place. I have on the order of a hundred ideas kicking around somewhere in here. Daily I’ll pop one out & examine it. Ready yet? Nope. Back it goes.

And then… and then… every once in a while (every few years, probably) one of those ideas is ready.

Features versus futures was one of those. I’d been playing for years (and it feels like play) with a successor to “technical debt”. I wanted a positive, constructive way to talk about software development’s tension between adding features & improving structure, work that became more urgent as I made progress on Tidy First & then with the advent of the genie.

Here are some recent examples:

• 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract

• “Genie” as a metaphor for LLMs

• Thinkies

There’s a whole book to be written about baking ideas, something about distant connections, silence, oblique ideas, & on & on.

Bad Explanation

The only way to learn how to explain something well is to explain it badly over & over.

We’ve stuck a puzzle in the back of our head, let it ferment (cook? ripen?) for years or decades, then finally the lightbulb has gone off. Feels good but this is where the work really starts.

• How far does an analogy stretch?

• Are there related ideas that help?

• How do people understand an idea as connected to their current beliefs & experience?

• How do people misunderstand an idea?

• What exact vocabulary should we use?

• What mental images?

When I had just refined 3X: Explore/Expand/Extract I went on a trip to Africa to teach programming. My friend Nadayar Enegesi watched me explain 3X 20 times in 2 weeks. The explanation was never the same twice—order, vocabulary, examples—all different.

So that’s what’s going to be going on in the paying section of this blog. I’m going to be exploring (ha!) or rather expanding (ha ha!) this idea of long volatility. If you’re interested & not already a paying subscriber, here is a discount link for 30% off your first year. Or you can (very reasonably) wait the year it will take to refine the idea.

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This post is sponsored by kentbeck.com