The Anchor

Integrity matters the most.

[Anthony Crudele @AnthonyCrudele]

Needs vs wants as a trader.

Many of you started trading chasing wants. More money. More freedom. More of everything.

But the market has a way of humbling that real quick.

Before long you realize you’re not here for the wants. You’re here to service your needs first.

Pay bills. Pay rent. Buy food. Stay in business.

That shift in mindset? It’s actually where real trading begins.

It forces focus. It builds discipline. It creates patience. Not because someone told you to have those things, but because your situation demanded them.

And it shows up in your trading.

I need to protect my capital. I need to cut this loss, the market is telling me to. I need to add to this winner, the market is telling me to. I need to be more aggressive today. I need to be less aggressive today.

Needs keep you honest. Needs keep you sharp. Needs build the foundation.

When needs lead, you do well.

Then the success starts to come and so do the wants.

I want the car. I want the watch. I want the bigger home. I want the vacations.

And just like that, the wants start creeping into your execution. You begin doing things you normally wouldn’t do. Taking trades you shouldn’t take. Pressing when you shouldn’t press.

And now you’re facing what I believe is the harder battle.

You finally have some success. You’re servicing your needs. But now you have to sustain it and grow from one level to the next. What you haven’t realized yet is that part is the tricky part.

It takes you right back to your needs.

What got you here? You did what you needed to do. Now you need to do it at a higher level.

I need to trade bigger because my success has earned that. I need to take more from the market because the market will take more from me when it gets the chance.

To get what you want, you have to go back to what do I need to do to get there.

And that requires an even higher level of focus. An even bigger commitment. Because now you have to sacrifice what you want today to get it later, and that’s not easy when social media is throwing everything you want right in your face every single day.

But I can tell you firsthand, as someone who walked onto a trading floor with every penny he had in his account, the pissant of the S&P pit, when I focused on doing what I needed to do and blocked out everything else, life comes at you fast in the best way.

Keep your head down. Do the right things. Good things will happen.

You will get everything you ever wanted by simply doing what you need to do today.

But that means you need to plan. You need to be smart. And above all, you need to stay in the game.

This is the best job in the world. It will take you places you’ve always dreamed of.

Just don’t be in a rush. Focus on the needs. The wants will come.

Cheers, DELI

[Victoria @VictoriaViorela]

$BTC was supposed to be safe?

[Jordan Roy-Byrne CMT, MFTA ⛏⛏ @TheDailyGold]

@RonStoeferle @IGWTreport @topdowncharts @goldchartbook 4) Family Offices

Another nugget from @IGWTreport:

The JPMorgan 2026 Global Family Office Report covers 333 single family offices from 30 countries with an average net worth of USD $1.6 Billion.

72% surveyed own no Gold

Average allocation of 28% who own Gold = 0.9%

[FoFty @FoFtyTrader]

a new fed chair stepping in soon... so far, we're 12 out of 12 in drawdowns once a new fed chair steps in - will we get the 1 out of 13 anomalous event this time?

[Mark Ungewitter @mark_ungewitter]

Comment: While a single prior case is not a reliable indicator, it’s worth noting that the July 2007 homebuilder breakdown (proxy HGX) preceded the SPX top by about two months. Upshot? Don’t neglect the housing sector given its outsized role in the market economy.

[The Factor Report @PeterLBrandt]

Bull market in U.S. grain prices????
This is composite of Beans, Wheat and Corn
Massive base has been completed

[Tom McClellan @McClellanOsc]

There is another way to make a long term bullish bet on corn prices. Nutrien ($NTR) is a maker of potash fertilizer, and its share price has a very strong correlation to corn futures prices.

[Frank Cappelleri @FrankCappelleri]

Most of the edge is in what you do not trade.

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I have three monitors on my desk. The left one shows the order book. The middle one shows Truth Social. The right one shows the investigation queue.

On April 21st, the left screen moved first.

I am a Senior Surveillance Analyst at a commodities exchange. I have held this position for nineteen years. My job is to monitor trading activity for suspicious patterns and generate compliance reports. I am employee of the quarter. I have a mug.

At 19:54 GMT on April 21st, someone placed 4,260 sell orders on Brent crude futures. They did this during post-settlement. The window after the market closes when daily volume is typically in the dozens. Sometimes single digits. Sometimes I watch the screen and nothing happens for forty minutes and I think about whether my daughter is happy.

On April 21st, someone placed $430 million in directional bets in 120 seconds during that window. One hundred and twenty seconds. I timed it on my watch because the system clock rounds to the nearest minute and I have found, in nineteen years, that precision matters to no one but me.

At 20:10 GMT, the President posted on Truth Social that he was extending the Iran ceasefire.

Brent dropped from $100.91 to $96.83.

I flagged the trade. I flag a lot of trades. I want to tell you what happens to my flags.

My flags go into a system called TRACE. Trade Review and Compliance Evaluation. I did not name it. The system generates a report. The report goes to a committee. The committee has a name I am not allowed to share but I can tell you it meets quarterly and the conference room has a credenza with bottled water that is sparkling because someone once put still water in the room and a managing director sent an email about it that was longer than most of my surveillance reports.

The committee reviews my flags. The committee has reviewed all of my flags. Here is the complete record of actions taken on my flags in 2026:

Reviewed.

That's it. "Reviewed" is a status. In compliance, a status is the absence of an action that has been given a name so it looks like one.

Let me show you my flags.

March 9th. Someone bet millions on oil falling at 18:29 GMT. Forty-seven minutes later, a CBS reporter posted that the President said the Iran war was "very complete, pretty much." Oil dropped 25%. Forty-seven minutes. I flagged it.

March 23rd. Someone sold 5,100 lots of Brent and WTI crude futures between 10:49 and 10:50 GMT. Fourteen minutes later, the President posted on Truth Social about a "COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION" to hostilities. Oil dropped 11%. Over 13,000 contracts traded in sixty seconds after the post. Fourteen minutes. I flagged it.

April 7th. Someone established a $950 million short position in oil futures at 19:45 GMT. Three hours later, the President declared a two-week ceasefire. Nine hundred and fifty million dollars. I flagged it.

April 17th. Someone placed $760 million in bearish bets twenty minutes before Iran's foreign minister confirmed the Strait of Hormuz would reopen. Seven hundred and sixty million. I flagged it.

April 21st. The $430 million. Fifteen minutes. I flagged it.

That is $2.1 billion in directional oil bets in April alone. Every one of them landed on the correct side of a presidential announcement. Every one of them was placed in a window so narrow you could measure it in bathroom breaks. I flagged every single one.

The CFTC chair told a Congressional committee that his organization has "zero tolerance" for fraud and insider trading. I wrote that quote on a Post-it note and stuck it to my right monitor. The one that shows the investigation queue. The investigation queue has not moved since March.

Zero tolerance. Zero staff. Zero budget. Zero prosecutions under the STOCK Act since it was signed in 2012.

Fourteen years. The law has existed for fourteen years and has been enforced zero times. In compliance, we call that a compliance rate of one hundred percent. No cases filed means no cases lost. You cannot fail an audit you never conduct. We call that excellence.

Last month the White House sent an internal email to staff. I was not on the distribution list but I have read reporting on it and I need you to sit with what I am about to say. The email instructed White House staff not to use insider information to place bets on prediction markets.

The White House had to send a memo telling its own employees not to insider-trade.

I want you to read that sentence again. Not because the instruction was unclear. Because the instruction was necessary. Because someone in the building looked at the same pattern I have been flagging for months on my three monitors and decided the appropriate response was an email.

The President's son sits on the advisory board of Kalshi. He is an investor in Polymarket. Both are prediction markets. Both saw accounts created days before U.S. military action.

One account. I cannot stop thinking about this account. It was called "Burdensome-Mix." It was created in December. On January 2nd, it placed $32,500 on Venezuela's president being removed from power. On January 3rd, Maduro was seized by U.S. special forces. Burdensome-Mix collected $436,000. Then it changed its username. Then it disappeared.

One account is a coincidence. But there were six.

Six accounts were created on Polymarket in February. All bet on U.S. strikes on Iran by the 28th. When the President confirmed the strikes, the six accounts collected $1.2 million between them. Five of the six never placed another bet. The sixth went on to correctly predict the ceasefire date and made another $163,000.

My surveillance system logged all of this. My system logs everything. My system does not have opinions and neither do I. I generate reports. The reports go to committees. The committees meet quarterly. Between meetings, the windows get shorter and the bets get larger.

March 9th: 47 minutes. March 23rd: 14 minutes. April 17th: 20 minutes. April 21st: 15 minutes.

The window is compressing. In March, you had time to make coffee between the trade and the announcement. By April, you had time to send a text. By summer, at this rate, the trade and the announcement will be the same event.

The spokesman said any implication that administration officials are engaged in insider trading is "baseless and irresponsible reporting."

Then the White House sent the email again.

I have been in compliance for nineteen years. I have seen insider trading run out of strip mall offices by men who could not spell "derivative." I have seen pump-and-dump schemes coordinated over WhatsApp by people who used their real names. I have seen a man try to manipulate soybean futures from a Panera Bread.

I have never seen $2.1 billion in perfectly timed trades across five presidential announcements in a single month go uninvestigated.

But I have also never seen a compliance system work this beautifully. Every trade flagged. Every report filed. Every committee briefed. Every quarterly meeting attended. Bottled water: sparkling. Minutes: distributed.

Zero prosecutions.

As long as the flags go up and the cases don't, my performance review says I am meeting expectations.

I am meeting expectations. The system is meeting expectations. The $2.1 billion is meeting expectations. The fourteen-year-old law with zero prosecutions is meeting expectations.

The left screen moves. The middle screen moves. The right screen stays perfectly, immaculately still.

In my field, we call this price discovery.

[Michael Burry Stock Tracker ♟ @burrytracker]

And it begins

Sullivan & Cromwell just admitted to a federal judge its court filings contained AI hallucinations

The firm apologized to the federal judge as they had to submit multiple corrections focused around:

• Fictitious Case Names: The filing included names of legal cases that do not exist

• Fabricated Quotes: The document contained direct quotes that were never actually spoken or written

• Non-existent Statutes: The AI incorrectly analyzed or entirely invented provisions within the U.S. Bankruptcy Code

The primary team and secondary review all failed to catch these errors, meanwhile the firm's partners bill $2,000+ per hour

[The Anchor @DiverAbyss]

$Gold chart shows possibility of $3750/oz. Still wouldn’t be bearish at that level.

[Northstar @NorthstarCharts]

Congratulations - You're living through the 4th signal in 100 years. DON'T MESS IT UP BY LISTENING TO FAIRYTALE NARRATIVES.

[Jordan Roy-Byrne CMT, MFTA ⛏⛏ @TheDailyGold]

I refined my Gold analog chart to improve the target.

Gold’s only three major breakouts: 1972, 2005, and 2024.

The 2024 breakout most closely mirrors 1972, not 2005 (which broke a long base but not to new all-time highs).

Performance is slightly weaker than 1972 and ~6–7 months behind.

I’ve shifted my model weight from 50/50 (’72/’05) to 75/25, reflecting stronger similarity to 1972.

The 75/25 analog peak in 1973 (Point B) aligns with Gold’s recent top before this correction. Gold corrected 29% then and corrected 27% in past few months.

The analog projects an $8,000 target in Q4 2027. 📈

[Reversal Levels | LunaticTrader @lunatictrader1]

The decadal pattern, McWhirter's nodal cycle, and Benner's cycle, all point to 2026 as a year to "sell high" and to be followed by two years of trouble (or more).
And the sunspot cycle already peaked out last year. $SPX

For the fans of lunar cycle work, here is my new blog post about it: https://t.co/th02d9bw4G

[Aksel Kibar, CMT @TechCharts]

#GOLD/#SPY

[Jan Nieuwenhuijs @JanGold_]

In the late 1960s France was just right in timing their massive gold repatriation operations before the gold price skyrocketed.

Could their recent repatriation of the last few bars be a buy signal?

https://t.co/ic4UGCRIiU

[Kevin Gordon @KevRGordon]

Worst week for gold since March 1983

[The Anchor @DiverAbyss]

Amen

[Charlie Bilello @charliebilello]

There's going to be a lot of people complaining this week when the Fed doesn't cut rates. Let them. It's the right decision. In fact, interest rates should be much higher than where they are today. The free market should be determining rates - not the President or the Fed. Price controls don’t work - whether it’s rent, oil, or interest rates.

[Aksel Kibar, CMT @TechCharts]

#GOLD this is still part of that consolidation after the sharp rally in late 2025.

[Aksel Kibar, CMT @TechCharts]

Volatility continues to drop. No sign of chart pattern development at this stage. #GOLD