Hello again to all of my subs. If your subscription was paid, founding, yearly, comped, or a gift, then you have been comped another month on this substack.
Table of Contents
The Wisdom of Folding Aces
Life is Messy
Writer’s Block is not Real
It’s Not your Fault
Conclusion
1. The Wisdom of Folding Aces
I appreciate you all sticking around. We will get back to the regularly scheduled programming soon, just not today, lol. As some of you are aware, I’ve been dealing with an ongoing civil litigation since January after being the victim of a convoluted game of Simon Says. I’ve written about mindset and emotions here often, despite this substack being primarily about fundamental analysis of currency itself, emotion is still king. Two men can do the exact same thing, one is calm, happy, and juiced on natural serotonin, the other has been a little beaten down, shoulders hunched, uncertain with the weight of countless past errors on his mind. If you had to guess which one would succeed and which would fail, you’d probably guess the first man as the eventual winner, and you’d probably be right 9 times out of 10.
There are certain activities in life that require mindset to complete and others that don’t. Primary to this substack is the concept of trading and investing. This is an obvious activity that is 80% driven by mindset and the last 20% by whether you are actually right or wrong. There are other activities like this as well. I often come across as a “woo woo” spiritual guy due to how much I refer to vibes and whether you are feeling something or not. This is not some mistake or quirk within my personality. This is how the world has worked for me.
For whoever has, to him will be given, and he will be in abundance. And whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken away from him.
When you’re up, you press your advantage and take it for all it’s worth. And the second forces array against you, or the vibes shift, you need to be wise enough to know when it’s time to back off, recharge, or limit your focus to what you can in the given moment.
There’s a great example of this being done to perfection in a poker series called “Loose Cannon,” where an amateur is brought to a table full of pros to play a game against them.
This is just a clip from the full set, but essentially a school teacher came on and absolutely stomped the pro’s and made Phil Helmuth look like a child. But at one point in the game he had what was 3 years salary worth of chips in front of him. At that point, the money had become too real for him to keep playing at a high level. The vibes had changed. At that point, he decided he was going to fold every hand for the next 40 minutes until the time ran out and take the money home to his wife and family. And wouldn’t you know it, not long after he is dealt 2 aces, which is one of the best starting hands you can have in Poker. A test. The vibes had changed. Are you really going to stick to your decision, or won’t you just play one more hand? Despite having one of the best hands in the game, he folded before any more cards were dealt. And as luck would have it, one of the other players at the table got 4 of a kind on the flop. The odds of that happening are 1 out of 4,164. It’s one of the few times you would lose a game if you sat in with pocket aces. And the cards that came out likely would have induced a lot of betting. He could have lost half or more of his winnings if he had played that hand. The vibes had changed.
We all change from being the have’s to being the have nots many times in our lives. Sometimes this can happen in the span of a year, a month, a week, or even a day. Whats important is for us to recognize it for what it is as soon as we can. When you are one of the have’s, put your fucking foot down as deep as you can for as long as you can. That well will keep giving to you so long as you ask. But the moment the vibes shift you need to have the wisdom to know it and back away.
There are people who make trading into their full time jobs, that’s not me, and it never was me. I simply do not get burned any more for the reason stated above. When the going is good, I dig in and trade, and when it’s bad I’m like a deer that’s gotten a whiff of your body wash from 300 yards away and bolted before you even really knew I was there. I can’t tell you why, but I know somethings gone wrong.
I say all of this to give you a better perspective into how I think about certain things. This gets into the next part of what I want to say.
2. Life is Messy
Every now and again you’re going to have a bad year, or a really bad year. My last bad year was 2013, they’re few and far between if you are living life right, but they are still unavoidable. You don’t control other people, their health, nor their decisions. You have about as much control there as you have control over the weather. Sometimes you will have a bad time simply because something bad is happening to people close to you. What are you supposed to do in a situation like that? Many people will pretend that everything is fine.
You’re not quite yourself, but you’re pretending to be yourself. This is what comes naturally to us, but just like how natural human behavior is almost always the wrong thing to do when it comes to markets, it’s also the wrong thing to do in most social situations in life. When you’re not yourself, don’t pretend to be yourself. This doesn’t mean that you should be mean to random people when you feel angry, but it does mean to be transparent. Most people wear smiles like masks. Don’t do that, be as much yourself as you can be in any given situation. If you’re down, be down. If you’re up, be up. If you’re sideways, well I guess you can be that too. I won’t get into too many details about my personal life in the moment, but the civil litigation is going basically as adversarially against me as it possibly can. The court is not and never will be your friend. They postponed my court date to the last possible day. This will be the first time I am allowed to present any evidence before the court… in October 2023, for grievances against me in January 2022, this is despite appearing in court this summer after my initial date was delayed by several months. There is of course no telling how much longer after October it will take for my money to be returned to me, if at all. The company that perpetuated the theft could go out of business between then and now, all of this can easily amount to me never seeing the money stolen from me again. That is just how life goes sometimes. Not to mention other issues threatening my family, our family LLC, and property owned on behalf of my grandmother and other things within my family. I don’t wish to get into details, but when it rains, it pours, and then it rains some more.
This isn’t a space for me to vent to you. You are after all, paying customers who are here with an expectation of services rendered. But I simply cannot write about anything else, until I have written about what you are reading right now.
3. Writers Block is not Real
Writing is an activity very similar to trading. You can write all of the 1+1=2 stuff in the world without needing to tap into any divine inspiration whatsoever. Over the past 2 months I have written quite a bit of the dry content of xyz happened this week. That part of what I write on here is easy. The harder part is tying it in to concepts that are easily understood, making inferences that reveal the deeper nature of the world around us, and drawing connections into what this means for the future. To do that, I have to basically sit here and think in an uninterrupted manner. Over the past two months, I have failed to do the above in time on a weekly basis.
There is no such thing as writers block. It’s not real. People who tell you they have writers block are admitting a few things to you, either there are too many other problems in their life for them to focus long enough on what they are supposed to be writing. Or they are ashamed by the quality of what they have written and simply refuse to accept the things their brain is giving them.
The key to getting around writers block is either to fix the problems in your life, or to simply accept the crap that is coming out of you. Your brain wants to write something else other than what you intend to be writing. You simply have to exercise those demons and write the wrong thing for long enough until its out. Writing is a muscle, it takes practice in much the same way as any high level athlete has to practice to refine their motion and actions to a higher level than the average person could achieve on even their best day. This means if you’re new to it you are going to have to squeak out a lot of horrible reps before you ever get to a point where you start to impress yourself. I’m not speaking about me, I impress myself literally all the time. I have been writing in long form on the internet basically non-stop since ~2009, and on financial matters since ~2015. With not an ounce of hubris I can say that bad content is simply not my problem anymore, and it hasn’t been for a long time.
My problem has been that everytime I have sat down to write, I have essentially side-tracked and written about writing. I can’t write about anything else until I write about this.
Writing, is more than anything else an act of self-revelation. You’re a fat woman, staring into a mirror and loudly describing every imperfection you see. The louder you are and the more detail you cover, the better it gets. And as soon as you blink and look away from your own reflection or try to change the subject, you lose. There is no mental state required for good writing other than what is essentially the 5th step of Alcoholics Anonymous. It is a deep and personal confession of everything that is wrong with you. Wrong with us. Wrong with me. Every criticism I have ever laid at the feet of central planners, Government actors, rogue traders, smart contract exploiters, and even Janet Yellen; all apply to some form of my own personality. There is no escaping my own personal responsibility for the wrongs with the world. You might read that sentence and instinctively think “Nonsense, you have nothing to do with that.” That’s a mistake for you to think that, but you’re forgiven for being authentically human in your initial reactions.
4. It’s Not your Fault
The problems of economies, governments, and currencies may not be our fault, but they are our responsibility to fix as best we can. It is on us to find some small piece of the giant football field national anthem flag that we can be responsible for holding up.
It’s very easy to observe problems from the sideline. It’s very easy not to take risks, to simply live within the lines of the life you are given. Even easier so if the life you’ve been given is a good one. History will happen just fine without us, if we allow it to. There is no compelling reason for you to step into the fight if you don’t wish to do so. But, a long time ago, I saw a dead homeless man on the sidewalk while I was walking home from work. I wrote about it that night, but I don’t think people really understood what I meant when I wrote that section.
There is a concept that many people laughed about in 2018. Essentially, the more attractive and physically fit you are, the more likely you are to be conservative or libertarian. This relationship is causal, but not in the direction people think it is. At the time, most conservatives were crowing about how conservative beliefs led to better and healthier life choices. This was the wrong interpretation of the data. The truth was that those who are more able and more capable are less likely to see a need for government intervention and assistance. If you happen to be attractive or in shape, that will alter your view of both the people around you, and the world around you. I did it, so why can’t they? This question hides a far more disturbing truth about life. Some people are simply better than others. Better off. Better Adjusted. You can call it privilege if you prefer. Many people might not like how bluntly I’ve stated this disturbing truth. We all only get one life after all, how could it be, that some people’s only shot at life is a shitty one? It goes against basically everything we’ve ever been taught or would want to teach our children about the world, but it is a fundamental truth. Some people start out with 2 aces in their hand, and some people start out with deuce eight unsuited. Maybe you are advantaged in IQ, height, cellular recovery rate, your parents connections, the country you were born in, or any other thing. Maybe you didn’t get any of the obvious advantages but you got some less obvious ones like being born in the second half of the year and being older than all of your peers in school due to cutoff dates for enrollment. Being born in September is a gigantic advantage over being born in July, simply because you will always have a few months of development over most of your peers for the first 18 years of your life when it matters the most.
When I was 29, I walked by a lifeless corpse who was also probably around the same age as me at the time. I was walking home from a 6 figure job. I had maybe a few thousand dollars of random credit card debt, I was in shape, attractive, and essentially most things in my life had worked out in my favor. I am a man who made many errors and mis-steps yet had come out on top, partially from being born to a family that was well-off. I could afford to make mistakes that others could not, and I’ve made a lot of mistakes on my way here. When I saw that man dead in the street, I was most struck by this thought; “Had I been born in his life, and he mine, would he be walking by my corpse right now? Could I rise above the station of my birth if in his shoes? Had he grew up where I grew up, might he have risen even higher than I have?”
There, but for the grace of God go I.
I’ve been given a good life. It would be very easy for me to sit pat where I was. To fold my pocket aces and every hand after that to take my $150k home to my wife. And when prosperous weapons are arrayed against you, that is absolutely the right call to make. But in life, if you are winning, it would be an affront to your creator to stop trying for more than you already have. If you are favored by the world yet refuse to roll the dice you are letting everyone else down. You owe it to everyone around you, to hold a corner of that flag up, if you’ve been chosen to be one of the few to stand on the field.
I’ve said it many times this year on this substack, but my goal has always been to find my way into the crypto economy and to be paid in crypto for real work. It’s one thing to get random one off consultation work here or there, or to get a role as a community advisor with a DeFi project in exchange for tokens. It’s another to have a job in the space.
I will hold off on the news for now until it’s confirmed. But I have a corner of my pinky on the flag. I am responsible for the state of the world in all of my actions. It may be exhausting to think this, but if you buy a phone made by political prisoners in a slave camp before their organs are harvested, you are directly supporting the continuation of such. Similarly, if I live and work for dollars, I am a part of the continuation of everything I think is wrong with currency and the financial system world wide. This is not a call to action for you to drunkenly burn a $5 bill in the fire pit at your new years eve party to strike back at the system (but by all means, go ahead). But it is a call for us to thoughtfully consider how we can disengage in a manner that preserves our lives as they exist. Maybe today isn’t your day to disengage, or now isn’t your time. Maybe your opportunity will come in 2025 or 2028 or 2030 as crypto adoption continues to move into the real world. I am simply calling you to keep your eyes open for opportunities to make the world into a better place as you see fit. You are born into privilege in some form or another. The better you are as a person, and the more fit you are for survival, the more you owe it to everyone else to be a light for them to see.
When people call you privileged, the most cucked response you can provide is “No, I’m not.” Slave mentality is for slaves. Yes, I am privileged. I am very privileged. I will do my best to represent my privilege. There is no Olympics for the unremarkable. You’re either chosen to represent your country, or you are not. To even get on the plane and go to Paris in 2024, you must first accept your gifts.
5. Conclusion
I’ve been going through some things all year. But as always, I keep winning. If you are a paid subscriber, you’ve been comped another month. If you wish to unsubscribe, I don’t hold that against you at all. As much as I have problems with the dollar, I have an infinite amount of respect for the time that goes into earning each one of them. They may be being irresponsibly inflated away with each spending omnibus passed by congress and the senate with bipartisan support, but the time you put into them still matters very much to me.
I intend to get back to regular content soon, however we’ll have to do some catching up. As I stated in my first post ever on here back in November of 2021;
At some date in the future. This substack will end, this will not exist forever. The value of this substack is in the present moment, just like all other facets of life. You were either there when it happened, or just a bystander viewing events through the curved lens of history. You may decide to sit on the sideline and not participate in the present moment. And thats okay, but understand that there is a certain magic and energy that cannot be recreated if you were not there yourself. Do you remember TV before netflix. The debates you had with other people about what you thought was happening on Lost every week between episodes? The conversations about the next season of Breaking Bad or who the mom was in HIMYM? That only happened in real time. If you weren’t up to date and participating, those conversations dried up. That doesn’t happen today as time and entertainment have become disjointed. The capacity to binge on past output as compared to participate in present creation stifles all conversations about TV. You have to be quiet for fear of spoiling it, unless you both have seen the entire thing, at which point no creative conversations exist, except between seasons, and those are lackluster at best.
This will be a real time experience with the markets themselves.
One day the substack will end, but that is not this day. This is a real time experience, meaning that each post exists within a meta-context of the week within which it is posted. You can’t understand what’s happening in Season 5 of the Japanese Yen, if you missed Season 4. Which means that we can’t exactly have real time posts next month unless I create a catch up post about each region first so you understand what you’ve missed. I’ll be splitting them up into regions based on what underlies each currrency. This is a concept that is lost on most people, but if you recall from September we discussed the concept of fx invoicing dominance and how 84% of all commerce was invoiced in either Dollars or Euro’s despite only ~42% involving Europe or the US as an import/export party. This creates extra demand for the Euro and Dollar. But the company receiving the Euro and dollar for their exports still convert a portion of their profits into their home currency, so countries whose exports are widely dominated by only one or two specific markets will still see demand for their own currencies fluctuating at rates that correlate with that market.
An example is Iron/Coal for Australia. This is a major export for them, and despite a good portion of these exports being invoiced in Euro’s or Dollars, the companies still convert their profits back into the local currency which means the Australian dollar’s movements can be correlated to the price of Iron and Coal. Every currency has it’s export tie in, or market tie in, and it’s easiest to group currencies like this within the current macro.
Can you guess what the major export is for the US Dollar, British Pound, and the Euro? It’s a bit of a trick question, but there is a real answer here. The worlds appetite for this asset directly impacts the price of crypto and other assets as well. If you’ve read all of the content on here the answer should come to you even if you feel uncertain about the answer yourself.
Also, if you’ve read all of this content, pat yourself on the back. Over the past year I’ve averaged around 3,200 words per post, with 118 posts (119 including this one), that’s 380,800 words.
You’re a fucking animal for reading all of this. Especially considering how dense this content can get. Pat yourself on the back. I’m serious. Do it now, God’s watching, he’ll know if you didn’t do it. Thomas Sowell’s “Basic Economics” is 634 pages, and many people never crack it open because of how intimidatingly large it is.
For now, have a happy new years, and remember to accept your privilege. You’ve been blessed in many ways.
Great to see your name in my inbox again. I was certainly worried, as I hadn’t seen you super active on Insta either. But good to have you back.
760 single spaced pages.... never would have guessed as your writing is so engrossing. Appreciate your way of thinking and how you get my mind going in directions it never would have