Spooky Josh Giersch 🎃
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josh.sg
Spooky Josh Giersch 🎃
@josh.sg
3.5K followers 200 following 29 posts
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. AUD vol on a 40 handle. Crypto basis swaps. BNPL burrito taxis. Cloudwatch bills the size of a phone number. Memories, tears in rain, etc. etc.
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josh.sg
A sign in the style of Zohran Mamdani’s “Zohran for New York City” posters but it says “Wicked for Good”
November 8, 2025 at 11:37 PM
josh.sg
If you’re a cash-plus manager or running a stablecoin reserve, it‘s time to ask your risk team for approval to do equity index options so you can lend to these folks

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
How Affluent Investors Are Using Options Math to Borrow on the Cheap
In late 2021, as the housing market overheated and the Federal Reserve’s benchmark interest rate hovered near zero, Tony Yang found an unconventional way to fund his down payment.
www.bloomberg.com
October 29, 2025 at 4:39 PM
josh.sg
my prediction-markets-themed drag queen alter-ego, Polly Marquette
October 28, 2025 at 8:13 PM
josh.sg
The us-east-1 outage taking out Amazon’s support-case-tracking system is 🧑‍🍳 💋
fintwitter.bsky.social FinTwitter @fintwitter.bsky.social · 23d
AWS SAYS WE HAVE CONFIRMED MULTIPLE AWS SERVICES EXPERIENCED NETWORK CONNECTIVITY ISSUES IN THE US-EAST-1 REGION || WE ARE SEEING EARLY SIGNS OF RECOVERY FOR THE CONNECTIVITY ISSUES AND ARE CONTINUING TO INVESTIGATE THE ROOT CAUSE
October 20, 2025 at 3:42 PM
josh.sg
Selling FX TARFs to corporate or retail clients should be a fireable offense
zachweinersmith.bsky.social Zach Weinersmith @zachweinersmith.bsky.social · 27d
Do you have any extremely niche, but serious, ethical stances?
October 20, 2025 at 2:31 AM
josh.sg
AWS feature request: button in the Lambda layers console that says "click HERE to build and deploy a Lambda layer from {pip_package} for {runtime} on {architecture}" so I don't have to bang my head against the wall building my own docs.aws.amazon.com/lambda/lates...
Working with .zip file archives for Python Lambda functions - AWS Lambda
Learn how to deploy Python Lambda function code using a .zip file deployment package.
docs.aws.amazon.com
October 16, 2025 at 10:53 PM
josh.sg
Bloomberg After Dark
A screenshot from a Bloomberg article. It reads “I’m a little embarrassed by this, but I love Dick’s,” one fellow soccer dad tells me. “When we walk in I say ‘I love Dicks”
October 10, 2025 at 5:06 PM
josh.sg
oh hey I have Sora 2 access
October 5, 2025 at 8:22 PM
josh.sg
It’s October 3rd.
A still from the movie Mean Girls. Cady Heron, played by Lindsay Lohan, is saying “it’s October 3rd”.
October 3, 2025 at 3:31 PM
josh.sg
Went for a wander up the top of Rock Creek Road—the highest paved road in California, and home to some truly exceptional fall colors.

Rock Creek Road peaks at ~10,200 feet, 3,000 feet above the valley floor below, so the aspens up top change color 2–3 weeks before those lower down.
An aspen tree, with a slender white trunk, is fully covered in yellow and orange autumn foliage. It's surrounded by dark-green pine trees, and the scene is reflected in a lake in the foreground. A stand of aspens in the foreground is lit up in red, orange, and yellow autumnal shades. Behind it, a pine forest stretches for miles toward a distant mountain range. Fallen aspen leaves in fall colors - light lemon yellow, rich goldenrod, orange, and peach - are scattered like a Jackson Pollock painting on a black background.
September 29, 2025 at 4:32 PM
josh.sg
Went for a wander up in the White Mountains, to see the bristlecone pines.
A dead bristlecone pine tree, shot from near its base, in dramatic perspective against a partly cloudy sky. The tree is tall and gnarled, and the wood is striated with light-blonde and dark-gray streaks. A dead bristlecone pine tree, shot from a higher elevation, in sharp focus against a sparse, scrubby landscape of mountain grass. The tree's skeleton is gnarled, with blonde and gray stripes through its wood. A wide-angle photo of the Patriarch Tree, the largest bristlecone pine in the world, shot against a brilliantly blue sky. The tree looks like it has five trunks, and is a deep coniferous green; it towers over the moonscape-like scene, with another dead bristlecone in the background; in the foreground, a shaded plaque describing the tree is inset in a block of what looks like marble. A branch of a bristlecone pine tree is in sharp focus against a blurred background of other branches. The branch has a prominent cone pointing from its tip, dark purple in sharp contrast to the green of the pine branch, with crystalline resin forming stalactites from the cone.
September 28, 2025 at 9:49 PM
josh.sg
”Lack of vol is crushing the economics of FX desks” is the same theme we heard in 2010-2018 to justify desks pulling back from market-making. I don’t think it’s wrong right now, but it *is* cyclical, and FX vol will come back.

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
Advancements in electronic trading may be crushing volatility in the currency market, making prolonged wild swings a thing of the past. That’s the view of some of the participants at an annual industry shindig in Barcelona this week, where the impact of growing automation and algorithmic trading were the hot topics. Some warned that the lack of dramatic action creates the risk that market makers may exit as it becomes harder to generate profits.
September 19, 2025 at 2:36 PM
josh.sg
Went for a wander up Mount Shasta. Quite nice.
A long-exposure picture of star trails circling above the peak of Mount Shasta. Polaris, the center of the circle, is in the top left; down the bottom, the ground is lit in an eerie red, and two trees are silhouetted against the sky, one on each side of the frame. Mount Shasta towers above the carpark at the Bunny Flat trailhead. There's a forest in the middle-ground, and the bare, treeless peak towers above it. A Mount Shasta mountainscape, with a treeless range of mountains on the right towering above a sparse scattering of conifers. In the foreground, a path with an "Old Ski Bowl Trail" sign leads off into the distance toward the mountains.
September 17, 2025 at 11:32 PM
josh.sg
Went for a wander at Pinnacles National Park.
Two Acorn Woodpeckers - black birds with white undersides and prominent red heads - are sitting on a branch. In the background, the trunk of the tree they're sitting on is pockmarked with holes drilled by other woodpeckers. A buck deer with four-point antlers is sitting in a field of dry grass, looking directly at the camera. His mouth is slightly lopsided, because he's in the middle of chewing a mouthful of food.
September 13, 2025 at 10:07 PM
josh.sg
Went for a wander on a gray morning out at Half Moon Bay
A half-sunken ship, weathered by time and salt spray, sits listing in the calm water of a harbor. An excited dog is caught mid-leap, splashing into the ocean. A common-or-garden sparrow, caught in shallow depth-of-field, sits on a branch.
September 3, 2025 at 6:44 PM
josh.sg
The last time snowballs became a thing, it ended with a Portuguese train operator dropping a yard and a half on a €90m swap notional. Can’t wait to see how it ends up this time

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...
China’s Rich Return to Risky ‘Snowball’ Derivatives for Yields
China’s wealthy are once again pouring money into “snowball” derivatives for juicier returns, a year after the regulator curbed the product that was blamed for exacerbating a stock rout.
www.bloomberg.com
September 3, 2025 at 1:09 AM
josh.sg
Went for a walk in the Hayward Shoreline marshes this morning and met the locals.
A squirrel pokes his head up from behind some dry grass, looking intently at the viewer, his ears perked as though he's suspicious of something. A brilliant-white Great Heron in flight, seen from below, its wings fully spread with some light diffusing through the wing feathers.
August 29, 2025 at 9:13 PM
josh.sg
New blog post: TARFs have been blowing up customers (and banks' exotics desks!) since at least 2007, so why are FX derivatives sales desks still printing them? And why are corporates still doing them? (Bonus: blind item!) josh.sg/2025/08/elev...
Eleven Years Later, Highly-Leveraged Short Vol Trades Still Going Horrifically Wrong For Everyone Involved
Back in 2014, clients and banks in Hong Kong got carried out backward when a sharp move in USDCNH blew up clients who’d unwisely bought Target Redemption Forwards (henceforth TARFs). I wrote about it ...
josh.sg
August 14, 2025 at 5:12 PM
josh.sg
Now that SEC v Ripple is in the rear-view, I’ve updated my 2022 article where I tried to value Ripple’s equity: josh.sg/2025/07/back...
Back To The Well On Ripple's Valuation
TL;DR SEC v Ripple has come to an end, with Ripple agreeing to pay a $125mio fine; XRP is officially not a security, and Ripple is not barred from selling XRP except through certain channels; Re-runn...
josh.sg
August 8, 2025 at 5:32 PM