"Take advantage of volatility. Don't get taken advantage of by it. The last thing you want is to be the guy stopped out at the low." Joe Walsh is the Founding Partner of hedge fund Code Partners. Personal track record: 60% annualized with a Sortino over 2. "The expected value of buying a stock at 100 on a certain day and 100 on a different day, they're not the same." We cover: - Pods run equity books at up to 8x GMV, credit at 10–15x, vol-targeting with centralized stops. "Volatility targeting is not profit maximizing," and their forced selling is his entry - Why he runs no portfolio leverage in normal times and preserves the balance sheet for when vol erupts, then puts 20–25% of the book in a truly exceptional situation - The right side of the V: buying at 100 on the way down and at 100 after the bottom are not the same trade, because only one has a defined stop - Liberation Day: financial conditions worse than the 2011 Eurozone crisis, PM sentiment worse than 2008, and why that read as a bottom - Poker and trading are both games of missing information, and the winning players who never make it have the wins but not the bankroll management - Game selection: you have to increase your edge faster than the market becomes efficient, which means running away from competition - Time horizon is game selection: don't price a stock on 3–6 months against a PM with better corporate access. His edge is 12+ months in sectors where the pods got shut down - Passive is a price-indiscriminate buyer, and market-cap weighting makes it a momentum trade: from 6% of flows to over half - Why two investors who both made 100% on the same stock took wildly different risk. The early alpha is the best alpha (bought Palantir at a $20B EV, sold too early) - The AI trade: 40% of S&P earnings, data-center landlords at teens yield-on-cost trading at single-digit cap rates, and gigawatt delivery missing by 25% as the risk to consensus - Industry structure as the biggest edge: power-shell players at $1M/MW that went to $7–8M, and the offshore-wind value chain where one installation-vessel company became the monopolist of the profit pool Highlights: 00:00 Intro 01:10 What poker teaches you about trading: missing information and bankroll management 06:04 Game selection: avoiding passive flows and the pods 13:34 De-grossing events: SVB, the yen carry blowout, Liberation Day 21:01 Dry powder: how much to deploy when volatility erupts 27:32 Reflexivity: why a windfall tax belongs in your bull case 35:08 Underwrite the downside first, then size the upside 41:53 The right side of the V: why 100 is not always 100 48:39 When to put 25% of the book in one name 51:18 Why shorts get hard limits and far smaller sizing 56:24 New sectors nobody knows how to value: space and SpaceX 01:01:42 Tesla, Palantir, and why early alpha is the best alpha 01:11:24 The AI trade: hyperscaler CapEx, power constraints, where the asymmetry is 01:21:40 Industry structure: mapping profit pools in offshore wind and AI power shells