Gareth Parri

[Modernism in Metroland @mod_in_metro]

Wembley Stadium
1923
Maxwell Ayrton and Owen Williams

The twin towers of Wembley Stadium, originally designed by Maxwell Ayrton and Owen Williams
as part of the 1924 British Empire Exhibition, and later turned into the national football stadium until its demolition in 2002 🥅

[Modernism in Metroland @mod_in_metro]

Grandstand, Summers Lane, Finchley
1930
Percival T. Harrison with Owen Williams

Double faced grandstand, built to overlook two pitches. The structure was designed by Finchley Borough engineer P.T. Harrison, with assistance from Owen Williams ⚽️
https://t.co/vKAhYJ8rR1

[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.

[Team Visma | Lease a Bike @vismaleaseabike]

🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 "I speak fluent Welsh and I'm very proud of my Welsh heritage. The first thing I asked of the team was to get a Welsh flag on my helmet."

Get to know Owain Doull a bit better via the article below.

https://t.co/zFoW7tgSFm

[Les Amis de Paris-Roubaix @A_ParisRoubaix]

Carrefour de l’arbre. 🌳⭐️

[Henry Winter @henrywinter]

Kiernan Dewsbury-Hall is not a dirty player. He’s played 5,219 Premier League minutes and gets a booking every 401 minutes. One booking every seven hours (roughly) hardly constitutes a one-man footballing crime-wave. Yet, this season, the midfielder is the first Premier League player to accumulate five bookings and so has to serve a suspension for Everton’s difficult home game against Crystal Palace on Sunday. He’s playing well, Everton will miss him and it’s a patent injustice.

Dewsbury-Hall’s first three bookings of the season were for fouls against Brighton, Wolves and Villa. His next two were, frankly, a joke: dissent for taking a quick free-kick against Liverpool (when the advantage should be for the team fouled against) and, last night, for a fair tackle on West Ham’s Kyle Walker-Peters in the 90th minute. Dewsbury-Hall’s offence was listed as a foul.

His reaction, and that of Jack Grealish closeby, spoke of experienced professionals who knew it was a ridiculous decision to punish a fair challenge with a free-kick and booking and who instantly expressed their frustration.

Dewsbury-Hall then went full Basil Fawlty, beating the ground. His frustration was understandable: he was trying to launch an attack, trying to win the game, and instead found the referee awarding the opposition a free-kick in a dangerous position for a fair challenge – it’s still a contact game - and also found himself banned for an important match. If the booking had been for dissent there could have been some logic but it was listed as for the foul.

The ref may have been swayed by Walker-Peters' reaction to the challenge. There was contact but no foul. Dewsbury-Hall was going for the ball and won it fairly. Dewsbury-Hall is, of course, culpable for the first three bookings that led to his forthcoming ban. They were fouls. He has to analyse clips of those and work how to avoid bookings in the future. But there is widespread sympathy for him over bookings 4 and 5.

Yellow cards can’t be rescinded but, at the very least, Dewsbury-Hall is owed an explanation from PGMO for the type of decision he described as “mind-boggling". Respect for officials would actually be enhanced by some acknowledgement of their mistakes. A phone-call from refs' chief Howard Webb to Dewsbury-Hall or his manager, David Moyes, would be diplomatic. #EFC

[Team Visma | Lease a Bike @vismaleaseabike]

🤝🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 𝘊𝘳𝘰𝘦𝘴𝘰 Owain Doull. The 2016 Olympic team pursuit gold medal winner has signed a two year contract with our team.

[Brighton & Hove Albion @OfficialBHAFC]

We're proud to be supporting the #TogetherAgainstSuicide initiative alongside @Samaritans and the @PremierLeague. 💙🤍

Find safe spaces, trained listeners and vital support at @The_AmexStadium. 🫂

[Everton @Everton]

Remembering Gary Speed on what would have been his 56th birthday.

Always in our thoughts, Speedo. 💙

[danmeis @Meisarch]

2/2
…have to find a next project to design, but I can honestly say there will never be another one like this. You have touched my heart and soul…thank you for trusting me with your new home…💙💙💙

[danmeis @Meisarch]

1of2:
To all Evertonians:
I can’t thank you enough for the incredible outpouring of love and appreciation I felt from you all yesterday. I feel so lucky to have been involved in this journey, and to have been become “part of the family”. As an architect I will of course…

[Tour de France™ @LeTour]

💛 RT & follow for the chance to win a 🇸🇮@TamauPogi signed Yellow Jersey with @SANTINI_SMS

💛 RT & follow pour tenter de gagner un Maillot Jaune dédicacé par 🇸🇮@TamauPogi avec @SANTINI_SMS

#TDF2025 | @MaillotjauneLCL

[Tour de France™ @LeTour]

💛 RT & follow for the chance to win a 🇸🇮@TamauPogi signed Yellow Jersey with @SANTINI_SMS

💛 RT & follow pour tenter de gagner un Maillot Jaune dédicacé par 🇸🇮@TamauPogi avec @SANTINI_SMS

#TDF2025 | @MaillotjauneLCL

[Tour de France™ @LeTour]

💛 RT & follow for the chance to win a 🇸🇮@TamauPogi signed Yellow Jersey with @SANTINI_SMS

💛 RT & follow pour tenter de gagner un Maillot Jaune dédicacé par 🇸🇮@TamauPogi avec @SANTINI_SMS

#TDF2025 | @MaillotjauneLCL

[Tour de France™ @LeTour]

💛 RT & follow for the chance to win a 🇳🇱 @mathieuvdpoel signed Yellow Jersey with @SANTINI_SMS

💛 RT & follow pour tenter de gagner un Maillot Jaune dédicacé par 🇳🇱 @mathieuvdpoel avec @SANTINI_SMS

#TDF2025 | @MaillotjauneLCL

[Maillot à Pois E.Leclerc @maillotapois]

⚪️🔴 RT & follow pour tenter de gagner un maillot à pois dédicacé par Tadej Pogacar avec @SANTINI_SMS

⚪️🔴 RT & follow for the chance to win a @TamauPogi signed polka dot jersey with @SANTINI_SMS

#TDF2025

[M I N T @mintisculture]

1966 EVERTON pocket square from Blacklers department store, bought for the FA Cup Final

“I bought one for myself and one for my brother.” - Stan Parry

Goodison Rd
18 May 2025

[Athletic Club @Athletic_en]

💙 As @Everton's men's team get set to play their final match at Goodison Park, we remember one of our enduring links to the Liverpool-based side.

Before our @EuropaLeague semi-final tie agaisnt Man Utd, we spoke to @paulmcparlan about Howard Kendall's legacy in Bilbao and Merseyside.

🤝 Best of luck today, Toffees!

#ACMuseoa #UniqueInTheWorld 🦁

[Everton @Everton]

Goodison Park forever. 💙

#EndOfAnEra