Steve Ellison 🐍

“Everything happens for a reason” has a tacit addendum of “you’re not privy to all these reasons.” Trading well, in particular, has a way of compounding hubris in your own brain. That because you’re profitable, and that you want it to be a function of being smart, and people want to know what you think about things as a result, that you have some unique read on the chaos machine that other people don’t. And there are ways to ground yourself. The inverse is the way to actually survive over time. You don’t bet on right, you bet on not being wrong. But part of aging — and why I really relate to the “coming of age” aspect in this post — is that there are funny little ways you’re taken down a peg when you think you have it figured out. And OP undersells how brutally Job is told that he has no clue what he’s talking about. That just because you can generate profit out of the machine, it doesn’t mean you actually understand the whole system. It is simply too incomprehensible for us to know, and it will blow up in your face and destroy your mood at one point or another. There’s something kind of whimsical about the algorithm delivering exactly what you need to read at any given time. I’ve been complaining about a lack of reading material, productive conversations, and latent psychosis everywhere around me for months, how reality is just vices and corruption everywhere around me. Much like the algorithm only gives you what you actually want, life will give you exactly what you construct around it as well. I complain about sports gambling, yet I find utility in the system when it comes to making profit. I complain about the financialization of everything, yet my entire life is built around interpreting this system. Part of what you learn through sitting down and reading the book once in a while is that you can’t extrapolate conclusions when there is simply never going to be enough data to ever give you a clear perspective. And that doesn’t mean there’s some magical reset button, or fix everything button, but simply being aware that your moods are not necessarily your fault and belief is the only thing that gets you through anything is a large part of not being consumed by the chaos machine. Nihilism and psychosis go hand in hand — if psychosis is a “break” with reality, then one can only assume that the break is supposed to deliver some form of thinking that pulls one out of the doom spiral. So much of what we see in the world is people confidently proclaiming what is going to happen to the world, and, man, it was a real benefit of the algo to push the book of Job in front of me while trying to make sense out of what is real and what isn’t in this day and age.

Excellent magazine cover indicator. $TLT up 1.75% today. @SteveEllison271 @jimwpaulsen @yardeni

Today is bittersweet. After almost six years, we are winding down OpenBB. I started it over Christmas 2020 with a simple idea: firms and individuals should own the platform where they do research and make decisions. We didn't find PMF to make it a sustainable business. But the vision is inevitable, and what our team built deserves to keep existing. So we're open-sourcing the entire OpenBB product suite under a permissive license. I wrote more about it here: openbb.co/blog/openbb-belong… (the picture was taken the first time I met my parents-in-law, which coincides with when Gamestonk Terminal went first viral and I spent all my time fixing/improving it)

Treasury announces bigger “debt buybacks.” Bitcoin +5%. Gold +3%. US Dollar -1%. Markets understand what this really means: More deficits. More debt. And a desperate attempt at financial repression. Instead of addressing the elephant in the room - higher interest rates driven by relentless spending and surging national debt - Treasury is resorting to financial shenanigans to suppress yields.

mr ellison send daily spec a workout showing that in the 13 weeks since 2008 that the market declinied 5% , it was up the next week in 9 0f them and the average ex[ectatioon was 2.5% with a t 0f 2.3