I run a hedge fund and an ETF. militia.com

Osaka
The Militia Long/Short Equity ETF has launched! The ticker symbol is $ORR and it just began trading. The strategy is similar to my hedge fund, investing in global stocks up to 150% long and 100% short. This strategy will typically have lower correlation and beta to the market than most public investments. This means that during a strong bull run $ORR will have a tough time keeping up. But in a weak market $ORR is expected to outperform. My reasons for launching $ORR rather than growing my hedge fund: Many of the investments in my hedge fund are illiquid and I won’t be able to trade them if my hedge fund grows too big. This is why I’ve been turning away new investors. However, well over half of my bets scale well and $ORR will invest in that portion. The $ORR ETF will have a lower edge due to its larger scale, and thus it has a much lower fee to match. I have a strong opinion that hedge fund fees are incompatible with large AUM generally, not just for my fund. Most people don’t know it but Buffett pointed out that even Berkshire’s track record would have been mediocre with hedge fund type fees. This is by far the biggest reason I want to launch an ETF. I want to do right for the people investing with me, who are trusting me with their money, rather than sell out like most other hedge fund managers do. The $ORR ETF has less risk than my hedge fund because it uses less leverage and isn’t short many microcap stocks, which can have extreme volatility. This is a more appealing product to risk averse investors. The ETF vehicle has many benefits: Simplified, favorable taxes for the ETF holder. Can be owned on margin and in retirement accounts. Daily liquidity. Due diligence on ETFs is simpler than hedge funds, convenient for institutional investors. Compliance isn’t an issue for institutional investors. Allows me to rebalance longs without a tax hit. Both very small and very large investors can join, neither of which could invest in my hedge fund. Expenses stated in the prospectus: The 1.3% management fee is accurate, which is around .65%/year fee per 100% gross leverage managed. The 18.84% gross expense ratio is very misleading. These items cause the stated expenses to be very high but are not real economic costs: 1. When a stock or ETF that I’m short pays a dividend it gets counted as an expense. In reality, whenever dividends are paid the underlying stock or ETF drops by roughly the same amount. Thus, the real economics are neutral. The ETF will be heavily short high dividend investments at the start. 2. When I short a stock or an ETF, I am paying to borrow the shares. On average, my larger scale shorts cost 1%/year to borrow. This is considered an expense. However, when I short sell I am simultaneously borrowing shares from one guy and selling them to someone else. That someone else pays cash for these shares, which the ETF holder earns interest on. Thus, I will be earning a positive carry on that short. But the way the “expense” gets calculated, the interest earned from being short does not offset the cost of borrowing. 3. The margin interest paid for being over 100% gross long. Unlike the first two items, this is a real expense but the expected return of the stocks we own is higher than the interest cost. Frankly, the way the expense ratio gets calculated in the ETF prospectus is nonsensical. Regulators should update this number to better reflect reality. But since they don’t, and since most people do not understand this, ETF managers are reluctant to do anything in their portfolio that causes this official number to go up. Well, I say to hell with that. I’m just going to do whatever I think has the maximum expected value even if this hurts marketing to many potential investors. Points about the $ORR ETF at launch: * Until the ETF reaches ~$50-$150 million AUM, I will not be able to short more than 10 individual stocks or ETFs. This is due to the unusual mechanics of short selling in an ETF vehicle and associated implied cost. Thus, $ORR will be shorting mostly bad ETFs in its early days. This isn’t so bad. There’s a big edge in shorting some of these bad ETFs and I even make these same big bets in my hedge fund. But I want to be transparent: the ETF won’t have its full edge until we hit a bit larger scale. * While the ETF has low AUM you should be careful with trade execution. Do not use market orders. You will get the best fills if you use limit orders and buy between 10 AM and 3:30 PM ET. If you're buying in large size, contact your broker and do a Request for Quote (RFQ) to get best execution. Also, if you want to invest >$10 million and want more liquidity, you can reach out to me and I can help coordinate with a market maker. Regulation on public posts, or why I haven’t posted about the ETF until now: Every post I make about the ETF needs to get approval, including replies to questions in this thread. The turnaround time for approval is 5 days and costs money. Thus, I won’t be able to reply to your questions here. Instead, I will gather a list of questions and write up a FAQ. Oddly, I am allowed to reply to questions on podcasts. If you run a podcast and want to discuss the ETF, I’d like to go on. - Thanks to Sam Lee @svrnco for partnering with me on this. Besides financially backing it, there was an awful lot of overhead work and other hurdles when launching an ETF. He did a great job handling most of that work so that I could focus on investing. For more information about ORR ETF, a prospectus, fees and risks militiaetf.com/
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David Orr retweeted
Fascinating. Chief Economist at Apollo: agents could cause a bank run by sweeping household cash into accounts paying 3-5% instead of the 0.1% national average, causing banks to lose a large share of their cheap deposits.
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4/ Hyperscalers have issued nearly $250bn of IG debt so far in 2026, which is more than they issued from 2015 thru 2024 COMBINED. AI-related names are now ~54% of net IG issuance this year, which is why the belly of the Treasury curve is under pressure (i.e., supply)
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ETF Merger/Acquisition Filed Gator Capital Long/Short ETF Ticker: tba Fees: 3.01% Effective date: targeting Dec. 11, 2026 Target: Caldwell & Orkin - Gator Capital Long/Short Fund - $COAGX / $GATRX - fees remain same at 1.00% management fees and 3.01% including interest and dividend expsense. Reorganization of Gator Capital Long/Short Fund into an exchange traded fund structure. ETF prospectus: sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/… Mutual fund prospecutus: sec.gov/ix?doc=/Archives/edg… Filing: sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/… #ETF #ETFmerger @gatorcapital
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For once, Peter Thiel has a big blind spot. Path 4: Fix US healthcare and you mostly balance the US budget.
Peter Thiel says the growing US budget deficit is going to push America to "socialist levels of taxation" or massive cuts to welfare: "You have basically three choices": 1. Massively cut spending 2. Massively hike taxes 3. Keep kicking the can down the road "For close to 20 years, the answer's been #3. "Ever since the 2008 crisis, we've just been borrowing more and more money." "My intuition is we're close to point where that ends, and then you're going to be pushed to a very non-centrist solution of either socialist levels of taxation or some really tough austerity measures." Via Mathias Döpfner
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This should be the top priority of the American capitalist class.
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Point two here is strong. Stop doing this to yourself. You will burn out. This game should be a 40 year marathon.
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If you're struggling with point 2, remember that it's as simple as quitting the positions. You should really prefer cutting risk in a calm or at least not terrible period. If you are cutting risk during a capitulation frequently, you won't make it in this business. And, cruely, if you refuse to cut risk when your volatility picks up too much, you also won't make it in this busienss.
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Overall point: position your portfolio in a way that protects you from the outset.
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I don't know why I didn't put this one on...
$TLT has returned 11% since May 1st and has a whopping 1.9 Sharpe. Has anyone seen an analysis of what happens after past similar periods?
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Why would this be correlated to the Iran war, or is that just a coincidence? I've basically done poorly since this started taking off in March. Since my long book is a strong proxy for this.
THIS THING IS TRADING LIKE ENRON STOCK IN 2001! 30-year TIPS
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It's not really correlated to oil.
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Two things I heard this month: 1. "The institutional allocator I work for will immediately skip any fund who uses Interactive Brokers." and 2. "Market makers consider the trade flow from Interactive Brokers to be toxic, because it has the highest likelihood of being a skilled counterparty."
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Militia's largest limited partner visited our office yesterday. He said it was like all of the staff were good friends, that you'd never know that the majority of the team flew in and normally work apart. His son was with him. He has interned at many investing shops. He said our culture is completely different / seems actually enjoyable. Part of it might be that the average age is ~30, vs 45+ for most firms. It's a bunch of hungry young guys, from unconventional backgrounds, with something to prove. In a genuine way. Other shops say this, but in reality they prioritize ticking all the boxes for institutional allocators. Especially @svrnco's efforts seems to have built a really good company culture, where everyone is really enjoying each other's pressence. Seeing this machine working makes me so damn happy.
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One thing I'm pretty sure that helps with the culture: We don't have any of the cynical shitlords of twitter, it seems.
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David Orr retweeted
$BKNG discourse regarding agents: If the interface to book changes, OTAs lose. Boutique hotels don't need to be tech savvy. They will run some white label SaaS product that interfaces with agents and handles booking. OTAs are bad for society. Huge take rates (20%+) due to rent seeking. No real innovation / value add to society. Disruption here is good. Disruption will be slow because I imagine bkng contracts will stifle adoption and agent usage is still nothing and won't be anything material for at least a decade. If bkng trades at 30 p/e, it would be an easy short. But today's valuation isn't too demanding. But still tempting to short.
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David Orr retweeted
The French have a lot of faults but absolutely getting flooded out in a suit is not one of them
Unironically he looks so cool
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David Orr retweeted
Astra has randomly gained the ability to drive a car, seemingly without specialist training.
Replying to @DrivingBench
Full results on drivingbench.com. Each model gets 3 attempts in the same continuous chat (in-context learning).
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Year-to-date, the GS Most Shorted Basket is up +40% while the GS Long Short Equity Hedge Fund Proxy is down -23%. One of the best investment strategies this year was to buy the market's junkiest stocks while shorting the highest-quality undervalued businesses.
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How often do charts like this end well?
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David Orr retweeted
FUCK. Been a while since I posted something this interesting. Today, QQQ was ▪ Up at least +2.75% ▪ On a day VXN (VIX for QQQ) was up at least +1.00 point And how has QQQ done 2 weeks and 1 month after every similar event in the past? Hahahahahahafuck.
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