The trading Dutchman

Tell me you’re not a top quant, without telling me you’re not a top quant…

@FrankVerhees @peterverhaar @drKelderenCo De vraag naar olie neemt alleen maar toe. Piek wordt verwacht rond 2040-2050, en dan nog tientallen jaren afbouwen. De huidige bewezen voorraden zijn daar niet toereikend voor, dus er zal nog heel veel geëxploreerd moeten worden naar nieuwe velden.

@peterverhaar @drKelderenCo Heb eerder het idee dat de laatste 5-10 jaar van Shell, als die al ooit komen, het meest winstgevend zijn want er hoeft niets meer uitgegeven te worden aan zoektocht en installatie voor nieuwe velden.

bij @drKelderenCo zit Rotmans, hij claimt zijn gelijk, maar in 2013 stelde hij dat Shell in 2023 failliet zou zijn door stranded assets, hoezo zijn gelijk Rotmans?

There is a clear Trump Weekend Trade pattern emerging. Friday after the CME close, he will say/tweet/threaten/bomb something, leading to a massive (potential) escalation. Then he watches how things unfold during the weekend, only to TACO Monday morning before the US open if things don’t go his way.

unbelievable that the markets reacted to this again, like he just tried this strategy

Chuck Norris didn’t die, he leveled up! 😇

I would like to report a murder…

Good ol Fartcoin, must have investment for every value portfolio. Right @vdmandele ?

@fintechfrank By that time @HyperliquidX will be regulated and also not be allowed to offer 40x leverage. Yes, I know it’s DEFI, but regulators will not allow a venue where money launderers can freely trade without KYC/AML.

they're not going to enable 40x leverage my brother in christ

@peterverhaar Ik heb twee keer met hem mogen spelen, echt een ongelofelijke ervaring en ook nog eens een aardige vent.

golftweet: in ons hotel zat Lee Westwood ook vast; hij kon met een privevliegtuig naar Hong Kong

It looks like @RoKhanna is no longer a ‘friend of the Pod’… 🤔

Especially the gold backed stablecoins, don’t touch these!

Takeaways from BOCA and Consensus HK. - Focus is really shifting to tokenised assets. All the big banks, tradfi exchanges, custodians, payment providers, and many large assets managers are working on this. - Nobody is talking about BTC anymore, there is no institutional adoption here. Even ETH and SOL are getting very little press. Canton is the in-chain now in the tokenisation community. (No position here) - CSD’s and CCP’s are coming to crypto, and will revolutionise the markets) - Prediction Markets had a strong presence. - CEX people really under-estimate the impact of 10/10, and the damage ADL’s have done. Shockingly clueless actually. - The grifters are also moving to tokenised assets. I saw some projects that are legally not scams, but practically are pretty close and might turn out to be one in the long run. Especially in the gold token space it’s a frenzy of scam tokens targeting dumb retail. Only buy XAUT or PAXG for now guys, don’t touch anything else.

@macrocephalopod Some of his colleagues manipulated the London fix when executing fixing orders. (Banging the close). But completely unrelated to what he’s accused of, “artificially keeping the price of PM’s low by selling paper to protect a massive short position “

@TradingDutchman I mean ... maybe he was manipulating the market ....? JPM settled this lawsuit for $60m without Gottlieb being charged, but not a good look!

Book tip! For those interested in learning how precious metals markets really work. For a long time Bob Gottlieb was the biggest PM trader in the world, and he wrote a book with his life-story and a detailed description of how PM markets work. This book is especially recommended to all you gold/silver bug conspiracy theorists. (Yes, you @wmiddelkoop 😂). Bob was the trader at JPM that you have been accusing of manipulating the market for all these years.

Ok, now imagine all the funds degrossing all their strategies at the same time. That’s 1-2 trillion in positions that need to degross, and all in the same direction. Liquidity disappears and spreads keep getting wider and wider. Margin calls galore, leading to more degrossing. Millenium was rumoured to be down 28% on just the treasury basis in 2020 before the Fed bailed them out. Citadel almost went bankrupt in 2008. LTCM did go down in 1998. Crowding combined with leverage is a death trap. Hormuz closing combined with Fridays numbers was an important, but relatively small event, and they collectively lost their shirt. Think of what a real event would do to their pnl?

@TradingDutchman they wont collapse that way. risk is too tight, down x%, they cut risk in half. Degross and now every 10% moves doesnt hit them as hard as before. You need them to get high, every pod is choked up and then a week like last to hit them real hard for anything systematic to happen.

As I said before, all these multi-strats are doing the same strategies, and they will all start unwinding around the same time, essentially exacerbating their own losses. Imagine what would happen if there was a real crisis, like a US-China conflict. LTCM was only around $10bln, and that crashed the market 30%. Multi-strats are 100’s of billions. Next GFC waiting to happen, all we need is a trigger and these funds will come tumbling down.

There are several initiatives on the way for crypto CSD’s that would allow direct tokenisation of equities (and everything else). No more SPV’a needed from then on. Cleartoken in the UK for instance aims to go live with this in a few months. NYSE is working on it, DTCC with Kanton (ADR’s though), and possibly a few more like Euroclear. Leaves the weekend clunkiness, which will solve itself as volumes grow, and tradfi markets going 24x7 (still far out)

“I’m relatively bearish on the current state of spot equity markets on-chain… it’s some sort of SPV… and during off periods you can’t necessarily redeem. There are dislocations… it’s very clunky and it’s really hard to scale.” x.com/i/broadcasts/1…

@izakaminska Thanks for having me in your spaces. If you want to do another ETF Q&A session either in a space or one-on-one, let me know

Great. Come and reeducate me in my spaces session today. The prevailing retort I’ve been given is “because arbitrage”. But it’s simply not just arbitrage. There are obvious patterns and insane amounts of value being skimmed from a system that allows some players more freedoms than others.

For years, while at the FT, I was obsessed with the murky behind the scenes trading practices that powered ETF arbitrage mostly at the expense of retail investors. Despite having a warm and fuzzy public retail facade, my work on ETFs soon revealed there was a dark side to the industry. It was entirely connected to the role authorised participants and market makers played in supporting liquidity for these products. The more I wrote about it, especially about practices like “create to lend” (I was the first journalist to publicise this), collateral asset sweating, serial settlement fails in the industry, and how inflows and outflows usually move opposite to price performance, the more aggressive and hostile the ETF industry got with me. They really didn’t like it when I highlighted that almost every famous modern rogue trading incident from Jerome Kerviel to Kweku Adoboli and even the flash crash oriented around ETFs, and the settlement factors that allow for funding related shenanigans and delayed recognition of losses. They were particular sensitive too about the academic studies I platformed which highlighted that ETFs were habitually oversold and that many more phantom shares existed in the underlying (in terms of perceived ownership) than were officially issued. Or any discussion about permanent settlement fails in products like the retail etf XRT (which includes GameStop). At the heart of all this was the new vogue for Delta One trading. The context here is that after internal hedge funds were banned in banks under the Volcker rule this was the one area that they could still run risky prop trading-style positions through their market making ops. They became some of the most profitable bank divisions. But their strategies also were emulated by private prop houses like Jane Street and Virtu, all of whom were super secretive and for a long time didn’t talk to the press. Writing about this for years I was either harassed, shouted at or summoned frequently for reeducation. Told all my hunches about how things really worked were wrong. If anyone would be interested in doing a Spaces session about this today, let me know. Would happily compare notes and explain what I have discovered over the years. But also check out my historic work on the topic, both in the FT and the Blind Spot. There is no greater market blind spot!

A new peak stupid. Before we had idiots claiming ‘JPM is selling paper gold & silver to depress the price for the gold cabal’ Now we have ‘Jane street is daily selling BTC in the most stupidest and transparent way to depress the BTC price’ What is this obsession of people to see fake conspiracies when their favourite asset experiences down ticks? Why would people lose all credibility by posting this stuff? So they can make money of gullible retail apes?