Deb$tock$❤️

Tough markets develop tough traders. If you’re still here, you’re still in the game. Protect your capital, improve your craft and live to fight another day.

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.

BREAKING: The S&P 500 closes at its highest level on record and officially posts its fastest recovery since 1982. The S&P 500 has now added +$7.3 TRILLION since its low on March 30th.

I hate Daylight Savings Time. Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

@Trader_Dante Put it on a t-shirt 🤲

Reminder: As soon as you leave your desk, whether it’s to take a nap, a shit, or have a haircut, everything you sat there waiting for will take place. Cheers.

Happy Monday! It's been a gap and drift kinda day. Note the "thin" composite 5D profile. That's reason for⚠️ in my book. At the same time, I'm reminded that there is no such thing as overbought or oversold. There is "accepted" and "rejected" prices. So far....auction continues to "accept" higher prices. As long as that continues....any price higher is possible. 😘 Tuesday is more likely to be rotational to build composite acceptance up here nearer 26K. Then, Wednesday we step into FOMC and Big Tech earnings.

This week is going to be action packed: As the government shutdown nears day 30, the Fed will release their interest rate decision on Wednesday. We will then hear from Fed Chair Powell in a highly anticipated statement amid the data blackout. On top of this, Microsoft, Google, Meta, Apple, and Amazon will all be reporting earnings. That's earnings for $15.2 TRILLION in market cap worth of big tech stocks. All while President Trump meets with China's President Xi on Thursday, 48 hours before his 100% tariff is set to go "live." Buckle up for a wild week.

wonder if cooking oil is the next hot commodity like gold and silver

The Q3 earnings season kicks off next week with the banks reporting on Tuesday. The action picks up quick in the following weeks with the week of November 3rd slated to be the busiest. Q3 is often the most volatile period of the year, who do you have your eye on this quarter? Watch for: $MSFT, $TSLA, $AMZN, $TSM, $META, $GOOGL, $MA, $V, $LLY, $JPM, $C, $WFC, $IBM, $KO, $GE, $T, $BLK, $PM, $IBM, $T, $VZ and many more. #investing #stockmarket #investing #trading #stocks #q3 #tariffs #ai #StocksInFocus Note: Any company marked with an * is unconfirmed. Data as of October 9, 2025.

@traderthiz @Perch_Trades I just wanna say it’s rude that I can’t reply to your other posts because I don’t have a laaa de daaa blue checkmark! Thank you for your attention to this matter.

@Perch_Trades Fuck yea Crown Ranal 🔥

@tradewithprof @FuturesTrader71

Really bummed to hear that Robert Redford has passed away. An icon on the screen and one of my favorites.

Happy Monday. TIme to merriam-webster.com/slang/lock-in

Big week ahead with FOMC rate decision and Powell press conference on Wednesday, then Triple Witching on Friday. CME shows 100% chance of a rate cut, with 96.4% odds that it's 25 bps. There are $5 trillion worth of quarterly options expiring on Friday 🤑 #SPY #ES #NQ #QQQ

Key Events This Week: 1. August Retail Sales data - Tuesday 2. Fed Interest Rate Decision - Wednesday 3. FOMC Press Conference - Wednesday 4. Fed Dot-Plot Projections - Wednesday 5. Philadelphia Fed Manufacturing Index - Thursday 6. Initial Jobless Claims data - Thursday The first Fed rate cut of 2025 is coming this week.

Key Events This Week: 1. Zelensky Meets With Trump In US - Monday 2. July Fed Meeting Minutes - Wednesday 3. August S&P Manufacturing PMI data - Thursday 4. August S&P Composite PMI data - Thursday 5. July Existing Home Sales data - Thursday 6. Fed Chair Powell Speaks - Friday Another big week is ahead of us.

#ES_F Daily Plan | August 12 After Friday’s clean value break higher, today’s session saw value remain unchanged, suggesting bullish consolidation—until proven otherwise. However, the afternoon weakness opens the door to a possible “look above and fail” of last week’s inside week. Overall, the market remains in a 6-week balance, with today’s session closing within a notable high-volume area. This suggests the market is coiling for a directional move, with tomorrow’s CPI data release serving as a potential catalyst. Smashlevel: 6396

BREAKING: Putin offers a ceasefire in Ukraine in exchange for eastern territory.

BREAKING: President Trump has fired the IRS Commissioner and US Treasury Secretary Bessent will serve as IRS Commissioner temporarily.

This has been one of the best earnings seasons in years: ~63% of the S&P 500 companies have beat earnings expectations by at least 1 standard deviation, the highest percentage in 4 years. Excluding the post-pandemic recovery, this marks the best quarter in at least 25 years. By comparison, the long-term average has been 48%. At the same time, just 10% of firms have missed estimates by at least 1 standard deviation, the lowest share in a year and below the long-term average of 13%. Earnings momentum is exceptionally strong.

What just happened? Over the last 24 hours, President Trump has: 1. Doubled tariffs on India to 50% 2. Imposed additional 15% tariff on Japan 3. Announced 100% tariff on semiconductors 4. Said pharmaceutical tariffs of 250% coming soon All 4 of these targets have had previous "trade deals" either teased or announced for 4-straight months. Did the trade deals just stall?

@KevRGordon So you’re bullish …

I long for the winter