Something I’ve noticed over the years. The longer someone has actually been around markets, whether traders, fund managers, pre-Dodd prop guys and brokers, and especially old floor guys, the less seriously they tend to take themselves. They bust balls. They can take a joke. Disagreement isn’t some deeply personal event. I think a lot of it comes from the environment they came up in. Old brokerage and trading floors, and pits especially from what I gather, selected for a very specific personality. Loud, competitive, physical, status-driven, and relentlessly insulting. You got a nickname whether you wanted one or not, probably not a flattering one. Someone could be screaming in your face and then having a drink with you after the close. There wasn’t much room for being precious. Markets themselves reinforce the same thing. Spend enough years being wrong, losing money, getting humbled, and watching incredibly smart people be completely full of shit, and eventually you stop treating every opinion like an extension of your identity. Obviously there are exceptions, and I’m sure the old floors produced plenty of thin-skinned assholes too. There’s some survivorship bias in who is still around. But I still notice the difference. Some of the funniest and easiest people to talk markets with are guys who have been doing this for 20-30 years. Short, sarcastic, allergic to pretension, and usually more interested in who has size and what price is doing than dressing everything up in theory. Then you get on modern Fintwit and disagreement can somehow turn into a moral event. The new generation can talk but that is about it. There is a smell of weakness still. Idk, maybe that has less to do with trading than I think, though. Maybe markets are just a small sample of what happened to society in general. We communicate more than ever, mostly from behind screens, while somehow becoming worse at handling the friction that comes with actually communicating with other people. Either way, I think being able to laugh at yourself, take some shit, give some back, disagree with someone and still like them is a pretty healthy trait. In markets and everywhere else. Anyway, happy Saturday, hope it’s a good one.

ETH’s breakout today is the perfect example of one to have less confidence in. I ended up shorting it but then closing before picking up my daughter from her first day back at school. A few things: BTC isn’t breaking out with it, and there was no real compression into the highs. No multiday drift higher on tightening ranges. Price had been moving away from resistance, then ripped straight through it in one candle. How price gets to the level matters. If it’s already made a big move just to get there, you’re buying the breakout after a lot of the move has already happened, which sets up an easy place to get trapped chasing. In this case, with a good amount of positioning up through the level, and stretched 230% beyond the average daily range. I’d much rather see price tighten up under the highs and gradually press into them, or get a failed move lower first that traps shorts and helps fuel the move back up. You often see a combination of tightening intraday ranges and RV if we drift into the level. Typically unless there’s a catalyst driving it, jumping from deeper in the range straight through resistance is usually a move that isn't one to chase.

Core CPI came in hot. Fed hike odds are up (85% priced in by now). Curve flattening: long bonds liking the upcoming hike. Warsh will hike next week. He will deliver what the market expects, and build up reputational cache.

As I do every year on this day, I make myself re-read this and sit with it for as long as I can. And remember. One of the greatest pieces of writing, on any subject, ever. The Falling Man by Tom Junod

Upcoming workshop live stream. @TheFlowHorse is going live to walk the room through how he screens for what's in play. Macro to micro. You'll leave knowing how to narrow a whole market down to the handful of things actually worth your attention today. Come join us. Link below.

So Jacob Coxon, who dramatically resigned from Anthropic yesterday, worked there for a grand total of six weeks. He started with them in July. All of his socials appeared yest. It has all the signs of a highly coordinated op through doomer mega donors and the corporate media.

Guys who actually made the book in index options, commodities, and single names telling you GEX levels are 99% non-actionable and only look clean in hindsight. Retail price-action traders who change systems 14 times in 2 years and selling you an indicator: "So much edge!"

My oldest and I are cruising along through all the classics, which is creating peak nostalgia and an awesome part of having little ones. Jurassic Park was on repeat, and I was like “hmm, can I buy a velociraptor skull?”

The social trading meta around FOMO and PUMP right now is really interesting. A lot of these accounts are basically playing a weird version of the prisoner’s dilemma. They’re up enormous amounts of UPNL, while their main doxxed wallets are completely transparent for everyone to watch. There will absolutely be winners here that eventually get listed on venues with much deeper liquidity. But at current liquidity, a lot of these positions simply cannot be exited anywhere near the price they’re marked at. Some of the PNL you’re seeing could realistically be 3–4x what could actually be realized if someone tried to get out. And once everyone knows that, the game becomes pretty interesting. Also, shout out to @theunipcs. True talent at this game. Midas touch at this point.