Married w/ 6 kids. Ex Valuewalk CEO. Currently @HedgeFundAlpha. Claude Code obsessed Luddite, machine learning newbie, MENA & WW2 expert DMs open (no sales)
Passaic Park via Monsey
Joined April 2012
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Some people need to look to sports or actors for heroes, I was lucky that mine practically lived in my house
My first substack ever on my grandfather’s journey from 1939-1946 from the Gulag to the Red Army
jacob Wolinsky retweeted
It’s 9am on a Tuesday, ten weeks after closing on a small pool maintenance and repair company.
You’re standing at the edge of a large commercial customer’s pool looking at green and black algae growing up the walls. The property manager is explaining, for the third time, that the algae was not there when the old owner ran the company.
Your phone rings. It’s Brad, the plumber three units down in your warehouse complex.
“Hey, your garbage just exploded. And there’s a weird smell out here.”
The shop is two minutes away. You tell the property manager you’ll call her back and you’re in the truck before she can answer.
You turn onto the street behind your shop and there’s a haze hanging over the warehouse strip. It’s drifting toward the houses behind it.
At the stop sign you google “can chlorine gas kill you.”
Yes.
You google “how much chlorine gas is fatal.”
You don’t love the answer.
You pull in and stand in the parking lot with your thumb over 911. If you call, they evacuate the neighborhood and your company name is on the 6 o’clock news. If you don’t call and somebody’s grandma ends up on a ventilator, it’s worse.
You call the old owner. Twenty years in the business. He’ll know.
“Huh. I don’t know. You should really get that CPO certification. Good luck.”
Click.
The cloud is starting to thin out. You pull up the security cameras and scroll back to when the guys loaded out. There’s Mitch getting his truck ready for the day, cleaning out his skimmer baskets. He dumps the wet leaves into an empty chlorine bucket, screws the lid on tight, tosses it in the dumpster, and drives off to his first stop.
You fast forward.
The bucket launches out of the dumpster like a mortar round. A cloud rolls up and over the fence.
You watch it three times.
Mitch doesn’t have his CPO either. Neither of you knew that a little leftover chlorine powder, wet leaves, and a tight lid make the thing they banned after World War I.
You think about the SBA loan. Your signature on the personal guarantee. The guy on YouTube who said pool routes are “the most passive business in America.”
You google “liability for chlorine gas release in a residential neighborhood.”
Then “does an LLC protect you from chemical weapons.”
Then you clear your search history.
The property manager texts: “Any update on the algae?”
Mitch texts: “hey boss can I leave early tomorrow”
It’s 9:20. Passive income.
If you work a W2 job and don't have a boring business that pays you $5k-$10k a month on top of your salary...
I got you.
Here are 9 boring businesses for sale today (& where to buy them):
Readers added context they thought people might want to know
The "cash flow" figures are Seller's Discretionary Earnings (SDE) including seller compensation for running the business; these service businesses are not passive side income atop a W2 salary and require active management or added costs that reduce net returns.
bizbuysell.com/learning-cente…
acquidex.com/blog/take-home…
bigideasdb.com/passive-busine…
duedilio.com/absentee-owner…
jacob Wolinsky retweeted
This is what genocide looks like.
A large and devastating urban battle against the people who planned to do this again, unpleasant though it might have been, is not genocide.
The only similarity between Gaza and the Warsaw Ghetto was the Jews being held there against their will.
Remember that when the enemy makes that comparison, they don’t actually think it’s true.
They’re just trying to strip away the moral authority Jews acquired from the Holocaust and mark us for violence.
That’s the only reason they ever use the word Nazi. Nazism as an ideology was primarily distinguished by its obsessive eliminationist intention towards the Jews. Everything they didn’t like was seen as downstream of Jews.
Therefore, whoever is most like the Nazis in any given situation is whoever is most hostile to Jews, regardless of whatever their other beliefs are.
jacob Wolinsky retweeted
Remember that Jim Simons was in his 50s when he started the Medallion Fund.
So if you haven’t “made it” in trading yet, don’t worry.
As long as you’ve made fundamental, groundbreaking contributions to pure math and theoretical physics in your 30s and 40s, there’s still a chance for you!
Soros Fund Management launched when George Soros was 43. Julian Robertson didn’t start Tiger until he was 48. Jim Simons was 50 when he started the Medallion fund. By pretty much any measure, these three belong in the top 5 or 10 best hedge fund managers ever. Things to keep in mind if you haven’t hit your stride by ~30.
This was always fairly obvious; the question is how to make money off of it. I don't know, I just bought the ETF HACK.
But there's a lot of money to be made. The winners here could see Nvidia-type returns and market cap, because every company in the world needs cyber defense.
There is a much larger market than even those who need GPUs. From your local barber shop to Nvidia itself, to governments, to institutions, every single entity with websites or databases, etc., is going to need cyber defense solutions.
jacob Wolinsky retweeted
I have no doubt that cyber security will be a multi trillion dollar industry in the coming years and Ai will be a massive boon to it
jacob Wolinsky retweeted
Remember that time when all of Hezbollah's pagers exploded, so they switched to walkie-talkies instead?
Then the walkie-talkies started exploding too, so Nasrallah resorted to calling an in-person meeting.
Then an airstrike yeeted everyone at the meeting?
That was hilarious.
jacob Wolinsky retweeted
The most powerful man of Syrian descent in the world isn’t Al Sharaa, it’s Eyal Zamir, IDF Chief of Staff.
As it happens, he’s also the most powerful man in Syria.
I’ve noticed that out of all the Mizrachim, Syrian Jews have the most complicated and conflicted relationship with their former country.
Moroccan Jews still like Morocco. Iraqi Jews despise Iraq with a passion. Iranian Jews hate the IR but are diehard Iranian nationalists.
With Syrian Jews though it’s more complicated. They were the first Syrians to be persecuted by other Syrians for being the wrong kind of Syrian- but then LOTS of Syrians ended up being persecuted by other Syrians for being the wrong kind of Syrian.
So there’s really no point in being vindictive about it anymore.
On one hand Jews can understand the minority communities who found themselves on the side of the authoritarian state to protect themselves from Sunni religious and political domination.
But on the other hand we can understand the Sunnis perspective of then living under a dictatorship that distrusted them on a sectarian basis.
At some point in our history we have been in both of these situations.
That being said, I don’t know many Syrian Jews who have any interest in going back, even if some of them do still hold an affinity for the place.
2,000 years of Jewish life in Syria has ended, because Syrians wanted it to. One of countless ancient Jewish communities wiped out by their own neighbors over just a few decades.
I know Syrians who do truly wish they still had their Jewish community. They’d really come in handy right now. But that ship really has sailed, and we’d all be better served by moving on.
Germany landed 8 spies by U-boat in 1942. I think it was by the Hamptons in New York, and also in Florida. Those spies were caught almost immediately,.
Also, there were German spies, (a family!) who lived in Hawaii, who helped map out Pearl Harbor for the Japanese.
83 years ago today, German soldiers landed in North America. Almost nobody found out for nearly 40 years.
On October 22, 1943, the U-boat U-537 slipped into a remote bay near the northern tip of Labrador.
Its mission wasn't to fight. It was to steal the weather.
Weather in the North Atlantic moves west to east. Whoever knew what was forming over Canada and Greenland could predict conditions over Europe and the convoy routes days in advance. The Allies had stations all over that region. Germany had almost nothing.
So Siemens built Germany a robot. An automatic weather station that could measure temperature, pressure, wind, and humidity, then radio coded reports back on its own every few hours.
U-537 carried one across the Atlantic, along with a meteorologist named Dr. Kurt Sommermeyer. The crossing was brutal. A storm battered the boat and tore away part of its anti-aircraft armament. But they made it.
A landing party rowed ashore with about ten canisters, each weighing over 200 pounds, and hauled them up the rocky ground while armed lookouts watched the horizon. In about a day, they had the station assembled. A tall antenna mast. Battery canisters. Instruments. They named it "Kurt," after the meteorologist.
Then they disguised it.
They painted the canisters with the words "Canadian Meteor Service." There was no such agency. They were betting that anyone who stumbled across it in that wilderness would assume it belonged to the Canadian government and walk away. They even left empty American cigarette packs lying around.
Then U-537 disappeared back into the Atlantic.
The station only worked for a short time, likely just a couple of weeks, before its transmissions stopped.
U-537 never made it home. A year later, it was sunk with all hands by the American submarine USS Flounder in the Java Sea.
And here's the wild part. Labrador wasn't even part of Canada in 1943. It belonged to Newfoundland, a separate British dominion that didn't join Canada until 1949.
For decades, no one knew Kurt existed.
Then in the late 1970s, a retired Siemens engineer researching Germany's wartime weather stations found records of the mission. He contacted a Canadian military historian. In 1981, they reached the site.
Kurt was still there. Canisters scattered across the rocks. The fake "Canadian Meteor Service" markings still on them.
The only armed German landing in North America during WW2, hidden in plain sight for almost 40 years.
Today you can see it at the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa.
jacob Wolinsky retweeted
jim simons hired a researcher who suspected the fund was a scam. he spent a month secretly checking its prices against the wall street journal.
nick patterson arrived while medallion was enjoying its third straight year of returns above 33%.
the firm said it managed $100 million. its research operation was upstairs in an old house, and the computer model was making money in ways even its creators didn't fully understand.
patterson ended up squeezing a desk into a corner of simons' office.
"Mathematicians can be crooks, too," he said.
so he wrote down the closing prices used for the fund's positions and checked them against the newspaper, line by line.
the numbers checked out. only then did he turn his full attention to the research.
If this is true, the U.S. needs to take it very seriously. We need to prepare for the future, and also be careful we don’t accidentally trigger a war with China.
The TSO, or Technology Support Office, was established in April to 'covertly disrupt and sabotage foreign technology programs considered threats to American military superiority.'
In September the Washington Sun reported that the NSA told lawmakers in classified intelligence briefings that it estimates it has spent billions of dollars 'evaluating and testing' models this year already.
In the draft S-1 leaked by the WSJ yesterday, Anthropic said that one-fifth of its $16.3 billion in revenue in the first half of 2026 came from just two customers.
Motive, means, and opportunity. I think a lot of money is being spent by agencies through Project Glasswing or channels related to it, and they have probably covertly penetrated every nation on earth to look at anything even potentially considered a threat. There is no defense against the current internal version of Mythos unless you have access to it. No foreign intelligence agency on earth has anything even close. It's actions would also almost certainly be undetectable. Assume US agencies know much more about any technological progress in China than they are letting on; given Dario's openly stated position on China, this would almost certainly be done with his approval.
