Lakch

you are your best teacher

[Barchart @Barchart]

BREAKING 🚨: South Korea

1.2 Million Retail Traders received margin calls this week, which is 3.4% of South Korea's entire adult population 🤯👀 Dear God

[Lakch @lakx_]

@Kacper_PK_CH Ahh I see it now. Thanks for the chart

[Lakch @lakx_]

@Kacper_PK_CH Got it. Thanks for the update!

[Kacper Piotr Kaminski @Kacper_PK_CH]

"How much common behavior is there between markets?

Are the patterns of beans similar to the patterns of bonds, or do markets have their own personalities?

I could trade without knowing the name of the market."

Richard Dennis

[Lakch @lakx_]

@Kacper_PK_CH DM'd

[Lakch @lakx_]

@Kacper_PK_CH Yes please. Would love to learn and share what little I have to contribute compared to you :)

[Lakch @lakx_]

@Kacper_PK_CH Yes please. Would love to learn and share what little I have to contribute compared to you :)

[Lakch @lakx_]

@Kacper_PK_CH You thinking downtrend or close above support?

[Kacper Piotr Kaminski @Kacper_PK_CH]

Most people who went to hear Ed Seykota speak that night left disappointed.

They had paid good money expecting to hear the “secrets” of a legendary trader. Instead, Seykota spent the evening turning every question back on the person who asked it.

Someone would ask something like, “How do you know when the trend is moving up?” Seykota would reply, “What is going to tell you the trend is up?”

Another person asked what he thought about gold. He answered, “Are you correctly trading gold?”

He didn’t give them new indicators or magic setups. He held up a mirror.

Later I found out that a large part of the audience felt they had wasted their time and money. They wanted answers. What they got instead was a hard look at the quality of their own questions.

That’s the real lesson.

If you don’t even know the right questions to ask about trading, the answers won’t help you anyway.

[Lakch @lakx_]

@RebellioMarket What book is this?

[Kacper Piotr Kaminski @Kacper_PK_CH]

Industrial Metals

Not everyone trades futures, so I thought I'd list ETCs that exist out there.

WisdomTree Copper → $COPA (LSE)
WisdomTree Aluminium → $ALUM (LSE)
WisdomTree Nickel → $NICK (LSE)
WisdomTree Zinc → $ZINC (LSE)
WisdomTree Tin → $TINM (LSE)
WisdomTree Lead → $LEED (LSE)

Thematic / Energy Transition Metals

WisdomTree Industrial Metals → $AIGI (LSE) (copper, aluminum, nickel, zinc, lead)

WisdomTree Energy Transition Metals → $WENT (LSE) (copper, aluminum, nickel, silver, tin, zinc, lead, platinum, cobalt)

WisdomTree Battery Metals → $WATT (LSE) (copper, aluminum, nickel, zinc, lead, cobalt, lithium)

[Lakch @lakx_]

@Kacper_PK_CH @FirstNameLrekf If possible could you share more information about your system/rules of trading?

[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.

[The Kobeissi Letter @KobeissiLetter]

BREAKING: The Federal Reserve reported an operating loss of -$18.7 billion in 2025, marking its 3rd consecutive annual loss.

This brings the total 3-year loss to -$210.3 billion after the -$77.6 billion recorded in 2024 and -$114.0 billion in 2023.

The losses are primarily driven by the Fed paying out more in interest to banks and money market funds than it earns from its bond and MBS holdings.

Since the losses began in September 2022, the Fed has stopped remitting income to the Treasury Department, ending a streak that totaled +$1.36 trillion since 2008.

However, the Fed cannot become insolvent because it quite literally creates its own money.

Truly incredible.

[Steve Burns @SJosephBurns]

Here is the core principle of profitable trading:

[Peter Girnus 🦅 @gothburz]

I am a Web3 Ambassador at World Liberty Financial.

There are 12 of us on the team page. 4 are named Trump. 3 are named Witkoff. The page calls us "the passionate minds shaping the future of finance."

600,000 wallets bought our memecoin. They lost $3.87 billion. The family collected $350 million in trading fees. It launched 3 days before the inauguration. 80% of the supply went to CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC. I did not choose the names. I designed the allocation, the vesting, the timing, and the distance between the product and the President.

The distance is my best work.

I am the reason these events are unrelated.

World Liberty Financial sends 75 cents of every dollar to DT Marks DEFI LLC. That is the family entity. Zero capital contributed. Zero liability assumed. I wrote this into the Gold Paper. Page 14. The lawyers bound it in white leather. The binding cost more than the due diligence.

Justin Sun invested $75 million. He was facing SEC fraud charges. The SEC dropped the case. He is now our advisor. These events are unrelated.

Changpeng Zhao pleaded guilty to federal money laundering violations. He received a presidential pardon. The SEC dropped its lawsuit against his exchange the same week we listed our stablecoin. Then the exchange settled a $2 billion deal entirely in that stablecoin. These events are unrelated.

Arthur Hayes, Benjamin Delo, and Samuel Reed of BitMEX pleaded guilty to Bank Secrecy Act violations. All 3 received presidential pardons. Then the company itself was pardoned. $100 million in fines. Gone. An American first. These events are unrelated.

Sheikh Tahnoun of Abu Dhabi paid $500 million for a 49% stake that was never publicly disclosed. Then the administration approved semiconductor exports to his companies over national security objections. These events are unrelated.

Everything is unrelated. I track the unrelatedness on a dashboard I built. The dashboard has 7 columns now. I am proud of the dashboard.

On May 22nd, 220 people paid a combined $148 million to eat dinner with the America First president. Over half were foreign nationals. Justin Sun paid $18.5 million for the first seat. He visited the Executive Office Building the day before. I designed the seating chart. I put it on the Investor Confidence page. That page is doing well.

The team page lists 3 Witkoffs. All 3 are Co-Founders.

Steven Witkoff is the President's Middle East envoy. He testified as a character witness at the President's fraud trial.

His son Zach runs the crypto operation. His son Alex is also a Co-Founder. I have not been told what Alex co-founded.

The father runs the diplomacy. The sons run the platform. The family runs both. That is organizational efficiency.

Barron is 19. His title is Web3 Ambassador. The same as mine. Donald Jr. called the conflicts of interest "complete nonsense." Eric launched a Bitcoin mining company called American Bitcoin. America First. The mining partner is Hut 8. Hut 8 was founded in Canada. America First means the name.

On March 6th, the President signed Executive Order 14233 creating a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. The order directs the government to hold Bitcoin. The President's family holds billions in Bitcoin. The executive order appreciates the President's assets by presidential decree. I did not write the executive order. I made sure it looked unrelated to the portfolio.

Trump Media put $2 billion of Bitcoin on its balance sheet. The ticker symbol is DJT. His initials. The press secretary said it is absurd to insinuate the President profits off the presidency. Forbes calculated his crypto holdings exceed the combined value of Mar-a-Lago and Trump Tower. I would call that absurd too. That is my job.

600,000 wallets bought in. 1 of them asked why she could not withdraw her funds. I told her the protocol was experiencing dynamic market conditions. She asked what that meant. I sent her the Gold Paper. She said she had read the Gold Paper. I muted her channel. Dynamic means the conditions change. The condition that changed was her access.

A congressman called us the world's most corrupt crypto startup operation. We put it on a coffee mug. Ironic merchandise. $45. The revenue split on the mug is also 75/25.

My own tokens vest on a different schedule. I wrote that schedule. That is not in the Gold Paper.

The memecoin funds the family. The family funds the platform. The platform funds the stablecoin. The stablecoin funds the deals. The deals require the pardons. The pardons free the partners. The partners fund the platform. The President signs the executive orders. The executive orders inflate the assets. The assets fund the family.

I am the reason these events are unrelated.

[Adam Kobeissi @TKL_Adam]

This chart says it all:

US tech valuations have compressed from 40x to 20x Forward P/E in weeks.

Tech valuations are now LOWER than they were when ChatGPT was announced.

As the Iran War drives markets lower, AI is only getting bigger.

Record highs are on the horizon.