Month

Anecdote: One of the first things I learned as a pit trader in Chicago was that your word is your bond. It was in a time of open outcry, when traders agreed to buy and sell with one another verbally, or sometimes by simply making eye contact across a crowded sea of screaming people, frantic, stressed, speculating. Once such a trade was made, each trader would write it on a card; the commodity traded, the number of co

Hope all goes well… Bitcoin and most big crypto assets jumped Tues and Wed when the S&P 500 was under pressure. And then crypto hardly softened when the Clarity Act stalled, even as equity prices for crypto companies took a beating. Then Trump hit America’s NATO partners with a new 10% tariff on Saturday. And despite being the only market that’s tradeable on the weekend, crypto markets barely budged when you’d ha

Anecdote: Xi considered himself in the mirror and stood there for a long time. It had been a difficult month. The extraction of Maduro was extraordinary. If only he had the audacity and capability to have done something like it himself. But such a successful operation would have been impossible for Xi’s military, which lacked meaningful combat experience and was riddled with incompetence, corruption. He had never bee

Hope all goes well… “The future of the free world, Jake, depends on America being able to assert ourselves and our interests without apology,” said Stephen Miller, White House deputy chief of staff for policy and homeland security advisor, responding to CNN’s Jake Tapper. “We live in a world in which you can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in a world, in the real world,

Hope all goes well… Wishing you and your crew all the very best in 2026, filled with adventure, challenge, change, volatility, introspection too. It’s already off to an explosive start. Back next Sunday with full wknd notes. In the meantime, dusted off an old climbing Anecdote that I reflect on at the dawn of each new year (see below). For Week-in-Review and Weekly & Year-to-Date market data, scroll to the bottom