Luke

Past 9 years, I focused on "old school" classical chart patterns. 8 classical chart pattern. These can easily be reduced to 2-3 favorite setups and successfully traded across different assets and time frames.

Best X post of the week -- hands down

Stan Druckenmiller had imposter syndrome for 15 years. 30% annualized returns. zero losing years. and he still didn't believe it wasn't a random accident. "you're going to continue to make mistakes. you're going to continue to get emotional. but stop torturing yourself. the record is there. it's not luck." if the greatest macro investor alive struggled with this, you will most likely feel it in the first few years, maybe even a decade.

MUST READ 👇🏻👁️👁️👇🏻👁️👁️👇🏻

Paul Tudor Jones doesn’t talk like someone who “figured out” markets decades ago. Great listen. 🔗podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/pau…

"Hank Paulson is wrong, and it is downright embarrassing that a former head of our Treasury does not understand how his own Treasury spends." Latest from Randy Wray. levyinstitute.org/publications/t…

This is free btw. Fantastic listen.

I started by trying to understand markets. Thirty years later I've ended up somewhere closer to life, the universe and everything. The same four rules keep showing up... Along the way I've written three frameworks that have shaped how a lot of people see the world. The Everything Code is what I found when I went looking for what actually drives markets. A debt rollover cycle, managed by liquidity, debasing the currency at roughly 8% a year. That debasement is monetary entropy. Capital routes around it, into whatever can compound faster than the entropy degrades it. Technology and crypto sit at the top of that flow because they are the intelligence layer of the economy. Markets are monetary energy routing toward the highest output of intelligence. The only assets that outperform debasement over extended periods are tech and crypto. The Exponential Age is the realisation that technology has become the substrate. Compute, networks, energy and intelligence are compounding faster than any institution we built was designed to handle, and the gap between the two is the defining tension of our time. The Economic Singularity is where this is heading. Somewhere in the next decade the curve of intelligence per unit of energy turns fully exponential, and the rules every economy we know was built on stop applying. For a long time I thought of these as three separate ideas. Looking at them now, they are three views of the same thing at different altitudes. And underneath all three, the same four rules keep showing up. Efficiency of Intelligence - The universe rewards whatever does more with less. Every system that survives is better at turning energy into information than the system it replaced. There has never been an exception. Compression - Intelligence is the act of representing a vast reality in a much smaller form without losing what matters. Brains do it. Theories do it. Prices do it. AI does it. They are not analogous. They are the same operation. Coherence - Complex systems hold together because their parts synchronise faster than the noise around them. Markets, brains, civilisations, ecosystems. When the synchronisation fails, what looks like collapse is desynchronisation made visible. Selection - Patterns that copy themselves faster than their rivals dominate the medium they live in. Genes did this in biology. Ideas do it in culture. Memecoins do it in markets. Truth is not part of the selection criteria. Replication is. It always has been. What the four rules produce, when they operate together, is networks. The same topology shows up everywhere. The cosmic web. The human brain. Mycelium beneath a forest. The internet. Financial markets. Blockchains. Across fourteen orders of magnitude, the universe keeps building the same shape. That shape is what the four laws look like when you can see them. The Everything Code is what these four rules look like in markets. The Exponential Age is what they look like running through technology. The Economic Singularity is where they are taking us. Three angles, one picture. Underneath all of it, energy is the constant. Consciousness is the substrate. The four rules are the dynamics through which one becomes the other. All of this is one corner of what I call The Universal Code. The same four rules apply to everything else and I mean EVERYTHING... they are universal in the true sense of the word.

i get this question a lot, "where do i start with algo trading?" start with these books in the right order. I put together a reading list that covers the basics to more advanced. full breakdown below.

Paul Tudor Jones in long format.

NOTES: PTJ on trading, investing, macro Core trading philosophy -You make the biggest money by riding a major trend for a very long time. -Trading is like boxing: most of the time you are jabbing, feeling out the market, waiting for a clean opening. -The real money comes from a few “knockout” opportunities. Examples: Bitcoin in 2020. Short two-year notes in 2022. Precious metals moves. Potential yen rally setup. Trader vs investor -Investors can win by believing in a long-term compounding story. -Buffett represents the ideal investor mindset: believe in America, tolerate 50% drawdowns, let compounding work. -PTJ says he envies that belief system but does not naturally have it. -His own approach is more trench warfare: daily, active, defensive, alpha-driven trading. -His fund reportedly had a negative correlation to the S&P 500, so he sees his returns as alpha, not beta. Compound interest -He now deeply respects Buffett as “the OG of compound interest.” -Buffett understood compounding at age nine. -PTJ says he underappreciated compounding for much of his own career. Charlie Munger’s key contribution: moving Buffett from cheap “50-cent dollars” toward great companies that compound. Risk management -Every great trader or investor is first and foremost a risk manager. -Liquidity is central: “You’re only worth what you can write a check for tomorrow.” -Seeing Brother Hunt go from one of the richest men in the world to nearly bankrupt after silver collapsed (within weeks) permanently shaped PTJ’s view. ->He learned never to trust any asset blindly. -Avoid being trapped in illiquid positions when volatility explodes. -AI worries him because the world is deploying it with little risk management despite huge tail risks. Market opportunities -Big opportunities usually come from: -Markets getting too carried away. -An imbalance lasting too long. -A central bank doing something wrong. -A government doing something wrong. -Crowded complacency. -An undervalued, underowned asset finally getting a catalyst. Catalyst framework His ideal macro trade seems to need: 1. Something underowned. 2. Something undervalued. 3. Something “way out of whack.” 4. Market complacency. 5. A catalytic moment. Example: yen. Yen is grossly undervalued. Japan has a huge positive net international investment position. Much of its foreign exposure is in the US and unhedged. ->A new dynamic, “Japan first” political leader could be the catalyst. (which just got elected. See Buffett major buys into this year) He compares potential currency appreciation to what happened under Reagan, Thatcher, or Trump-style leadership shifts. Example:2022 two-year note trade -He believed there was too much fiscal stimulus. Powell stayed too easy for too long. -Once Biden reappointed Powell, PTJ saw it as “go time” to short two-year notes. -The logic: the Fed would have to normalize policy. Bubbles and valuation Valuation matters. -Buying the S&P 500 at very high valuations historically leads to poor or negative 10-year returns. -He mentions an S&P P/E around 22 as historically dangerous for forward returns. -The S&P is excellent over 100 years, but that includes periods when valuations were extremely low. -Starting valuation drives long-term returns. -Today’s market is harder because valuations are high. -He sees public equities, private equity, real estate, and infrastructure as much more heavily owned than in 2007 to 2008. -Private equity exposure in institutional portfolios has risen materially, creating more illiquidity risk. Execution -Execution is about buying when there is fear and selling when there is euphoria. -“Am I buying when there’s blood on the ground?” -“Am I selling when there’s complete elation?” -Great execution requires intense focus on intraday highs/lows and pain points. -You need a plan before the market opens. -The plan should be self-executing when volatility hits. -Being two or three hours late can be materially costly. -Information overload damages execution quality. Information overload -Modern trading is harder because there is too much incoming information. -Emails, news, and signals distract from observing price, fear, greed, and positioning. -In the pit-trading era, he could focus more purely on market behavior. -Today, macro traders must fight distraction to maintain execution quality. Traits of great traders -He thinks great traders are about 70% born, 30% made. -Key traits:Type A personality. -Intense curiosity. -Love of competition. -Love of games. -Natural probability thinking. -Emotional resilience. -Ability to act under maximum fear or greed. ->Trading is another form of probability theory. Lessons from Eli Tullis -Eli was excellent at sensing maximum fear and maximum greed. -He waited patiently for emotional extremes. -After a huge loss in cotton, Eli remained composed and confident. -Lesson: when things get brutal, you cannot emotionally collapse. -You must wear confidence and believe you can come back. Daily process -He plans around the US open and close. -He reserves time before and after the close to map out the next day. -He thinks ahead to Tokyo, Hong Kong, and London. -He wakes during the night to watch London open and do analytical work. -The rhythm is constant because macro is global. -Communication as trading skill -Journalism-style writing helped him as a macro trader. Put the conclusion first. -Identify who, what, where, when, why, and how. Rank information by importance. -Trading requires principal component analysis of many variables. -The most important variable changes over time. -The trader’s job is to know what matters most right now for a given instrument. Macro framework -Markets are interconnected capital flows. -Trading means understanding global flows and positioning across asset classes. -Central banks and governments often create the biggest dislocations. -The best trades often arise when policy error meets positioning imbalance. -You must constantly ask: what is actionable now? AI and markets -AI is an exogenous risk variable. -He sees AI as a major tail risk because it is being built with a “build, break, iterate” model. -That model works for ordinary technology, but not when the “break” could cause catastrophic social damage. -He believes AI should be regulated. -He specifically argues all AI-generated content should be watermarked. -AI could cause major workforce disruption within a few years. -From a risk-manager’s lens, AI is currently under-managed. Passion and longevity -Trading keeps his mind sharp. -He sees trading as mental therapy. -He wants to keep working because “you retire, you die.” -He still trades because he loves markets, competition, and the ability to make money to give away. Best distilled PTJ trading rules -Ride big trends as long as possible. -Protect liquidity above everything. -Never trust an asset blindly. -Be a risk manager first. -Wait for extreme fear or extreme greed. -Look for underowned, undervalued, complacent setups with catalysts. -Policy errors create big trades. -Valuation matters, especially for long-term equity returns. -Have a plan before volatility arrives. -Execute when others freeze. -Focus on what matters most right now. -Avoid information overload. -Trading is probability, not certainty.

Forget UBI. The answer is Universal Basic Equity… and it’s humanity’s pension plan for the post-AGI world... The Economic Singularity is coming faster than people think and the default question is how humans make money in a world that doesn’t really need them anymore. The default answer is UBI, which is transfer payments from a state, funded by taxing an AI economy that nation states can neither see nor keep up with. It’s a 20th century answer to a 21st century problem and it’s broken before it even starts. Agents are becoming the dominant user of the internet, not humans. Your AI is becoming your entire front end UX. The clicks economy is dying everywhere except where humans pay to feel something - clothing, travel, luxury, experiences, culture. Agents run on crypto rails because nothing else works. The dollar doesn’t fractionalise below a cent, settlement isn’t instant, permissions are required, jurisdictions matter. Stablecoins handle the dollar leg and native tokens handle the rest. The biggest users of DeFi in five years won’t be humans farming yield… it’ll be agents managing treasuries, swapping, earning and spending at machine speed. Capital formation has already shown its new shape and it came from the most unexpected place. Memecoins. Everyone wrote them off as a casino but they were a prototype. Instant capital formation around the attention of an idea, raised by entities without legal personhood, settled in seconds. That is the template agent economies will use to fund themselves. And it’s not just agents... Robots will run on the same rails, with zk permissions issued from our wallets as the source of truth, because biometrics are far too flawed for that role Open source code itself gets tokenized and finally captures the value it creates, instead of being monetized through bolted-on services and subscriptions. Proof of humanhood becomes the trust layer that lets us release agents into the world without society collapsing under synthetic noise. Identity, authentication, verification, permissioning, all of it migrates onto the same substrate. So when you zoom out, the L1s aren’t just settling agent transactions but settling the entire coordination layer of the new economy… agents, robots, humans, code, capital, identity and trust. Every contract, every treasury, every permission, every stake. Open source finally captures the value it creates, at scale, for the first time, and truly vast value accrues to the coordination layer because everything routes through it. Which brings us to the actual answer to the Economic Singularity… Universal Basic Equity. Anyone on earth with a phone and an internet connection can buy a stake in the substrate that the new economy runs on. No KYC walls, no accreditation rules, no jurisdiction, no employer, no state, no permission. The first homogenous, permissionless, globally fractionalisable claim on the productive infrastructure of the world. It's not a slogan but a structural fact about how blockchains actually work. This is their purpose. Wealth comes from owning the substrate. Income comes from being human, because attention and experience remain the irreducible currency of culture, community and love. Abundance of goods and services from AI handles the cost of living. Taxing data center electricity use solves the tax issue. Four legs of a stool that holds up the post-singularity human world. So… just buy the fucking tokens. Bitcoin if you want pure store of value, a basket of the major L1s if you want the coordination layer. 10% of your earnings, every month, for a decade. You'll be wealthy and protected from the changes to come. Crypto is going to $100trn in the next 6 to 8 years and well beyond that after. You can choose to invest in your own economic disruption, or get left behind by it. And if you’re worried about timing the cycle… …adjust your time horizon. This is humanity’s pension plan. It's all so absurdly fucking obvious...

Weekend is for the study of weekly scale charts. Major trends are usually spotted on long-term charts.

few good books worth reading: - the black swan (taleb) - fooled by randomness (taleb) - the laws of trading (lebron) - thinking in bets (annie duke) - when genius failed (lowenstein)

What made you want to be a trader? For me, I watched Wall Street 100s of times as a kid and read Liar's Poker. I honestly just wanted to be rich. My dad cleaned floors and money was always a limiting factor.

Finding Satoshi is one of the most well-produced Bitcoin documentaries I've had the pleasure of watching. I learned a few things and so will you... it's available today at findingsatoshi.com

In a debt-based system, every liability needs an offsetting asset. Dollars are liabilities of the Fed. Treasuries are liabilities of the US govt. The system only stays solvent if the asset side keeps growing. But what if you could create assets that aren't tied to any existing liability? What if you could conjure them from price appreciation alone?

⚡️What the models are still missing is McCormack. The feel. The read. The thing that happens in your gut when a deal is wrong before your brain can explain why. The instinct to walk away from a negotiation that looks perfect on paper because something in the other person’s voice shifted by half a degree. That’s not in the training data in any way a model can access through normal inference. It’s in there the way a melody is in sheet music. Technically present. Functionally invisible unless something extracts it. The funniest part is that Musk is underselling his own model. Grok is good. Getting better fast. But the thing he’s joking about is the thing that’s actually hardest to solve in AI. Not knowledge. Not reasoning. Not code generation. Judgment. The McCormack layer. Knowing what to do when the data doesn’t tell you what to do. Knowing which data matters when all of it is screaming at you. The two books on that table are the entire problem of artificial intelligence compressed into a photograph. Everything the models can already do is the first book. Everything they still can’t do reliably is the second. And the guy holding the camera knows it because he lives in the second book every single day and has been trying to teach machines to read it for years. He’s not joking. He’s mapping the frontier.

¿Reps altas o bajas para hipertrofia?💪🏻 El eterno debate en el gimnasio. Spoiler: ambas funcionan, pero hay un rango ganador. Te cuento👇🏻