Week 6 Session: Loss report crit

The session where you defend one number in your log out loud, two weeks before the loss report is due.

29 March 2027

Bring the log. Not a summary of the log, not slides about the log — the rows, with the prices you actually transacted at.

Before the session#

Pick your mode. Assignment 1 accepts one of three: cost drag, concentration, or return chasing. Have the arithmetic with you, and have it as arithmetic — an opening position, what happened, a closing position, and the subtraction that connects them.

If your chosen mode is return chasing, you need the counterfactual entry you filed on the day. If you did not file one, pick a different mode; a reconstruction written this week is not admissible and pretending otherwise wastes the crit.

In the session#

Four-minute reports, in pairs, then questions from the room rather than from the tutor. Each report answers three things and nothing else: what you did, what it cost, and which named mode accounts for the gap.

Then everyone gets the same question, because this morning’s lecture handed it over: what would it have cost you to actually get out? Your log prices assume an instant complete fill at the quote. Say by how much you think that flatters your number, and say that you cannot know.

Afterwards#

You have two weeks and a mid-semester break before the report is due. What usually changes after this session is not the arithmetic but the choice of mode — about a third of the room discovers that the loss they planned to write about is not the one their log can actually evidence.

That discovery is the point of holding the crit before the deadline rather than after it.