Sidebar: Luck is by far and away the bigger factor here, without question. If you make income from capital revenue or entrepreneurship (investing, startup) then your revenue is a function of your investment decision and your luck.

If you work for a wage, then you won't have much income variance, and you can expect to make anywhere between half and ~3.5x the US median income (~55k/household). How much income does one make in his own lifetime? That depends really on what you do to earn wealth. Of course, social rank doesn't just depend on wealth (there are other measures of influence) but wealth is a decent proxy to start. We can simplify this and say that social mobility depends on one's 'rank' in an ordered list of all individuals in a given society. If you want to be spared 700 pages of pain, here is a toy model to explain it: If you want an actual non-prax answer, Picketty's C21 is where to go. I was planning on finishing this book before deciding if I wanted to read any of his other works. It's interesting, but I can't say I'm the biggest fan of his writing style. I just don't know who.Īnd I'm in the middle of reading Fooled by Randomness. So I know someone else has put this together before. Or maybe a 38 delta short and a 1 delta long spread (to try and capture the lower volume of intermediate days, but higher volume of large days, that the leptokurtosis is showing).

Like maybe it's indicating a more profitable strategy is a 38 delta strategy, or a 25 delta. But other than seeing that both appear to be pointing in the same direction, I feel too dumb to know what else I'm supposed to do, like holding two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle but not knowing what picture I'm putting together. I've also been seeing a number of backtests (namely by u/spintwig), showing that selling 30 delta options appears to be profitable overall, which would line up with the leptokurtosis and skew I'm seeing. Clearly I'm supposed to do something with this, but bashing it against a rock doesn't appear to be doing anything. Helpful and interesting, but I'm still left wondering what I'm supposed to do with the information, you know? I mean, yes, I'm consistently seeing evidence of leptokurtosis (now that I'm looking) as well as skew (which was less surprising to me), but I feel like a monkey that just got its hands on a wrench.

Incerto fooled by randomness