Haha. But 80% never gets sent to Ukraine in the first place - most of it goes to enrich the long time Gov / military executives running ITA components. The 20% or less that goes to Ukraine is mostly a bribe.  *FWIW - we look down our noses at bribes in America but it's basically a mandatory part of doing business around the world (I will not provide personal examples on a public website....but I guess just trust me). 

Here's the bulk of the Ukraine funding: 

It's all in GLD, SLV, FCX, URA, BTC, ETH and SOL....I'm good!  Thanks. 

Meaningless, in fact. Look at Japan - they just announced they've been in recession for 3 quarters, and Germany, and the list goes on. All of the above are either making or have made recent market highs. It's all about currency debasement - almost 100%. Once that variable in plugged in, it all starts to make logical financial sense.  I know my analysis became orders of magnitude less complicated once I figure it out this seemingly obvious but not so obvious fact (the gaslighting is heavy when it comes to getting people to look in other directions for explanations - you get hammered as biased if you say currency dilution is causing market rallies). I was honestly a bit frustrated until it really clicked....and I mean it had to REALLY click...then I was fine. Game on - I just had to understand the game because my stupid personality demands it for some reason. Life would be easier if I just blindly followed trends but that's not me. 

The FED has all but gotten on the table and screamed "stop wasting your money on protection - we are the damn put! Let tax payers pay for it in the next bailout."  A high VIX in this environment would be weird. Even if things were terrible (arguable depending on the economists you listen to),  the Fed has made their support very clear. 

GME and Scottie having a rough day...

Go ahead, dilute me. Make my day! 

DBC not long on the systems yet, but I took a long last time it stopped out when it recovered back above the next day. I imagine it's close to going long again, officially?

Ahhh, makes sense. I hope it's something like "Siri - help us make money" ....but not Siri.  Siri is going in down in history as the worst AI humans ever created    It's so bad that they didn't even try to improve it and just did a deal with Google instead to cover that area for them. 

RDDT up 13%.  I love the smell of a squeeze in the morning. They only lost 605M on revenue of 883M....after being in business for over 20 years. What's not to love??

Are there any hard asset / currency dilution names that aren't up today?  (sounds funny to call BTC a hard asset, but it's definitely a currency dilution play).

Oil doesn't belong in the group. I think real estate also has to be excepted because the same people causing this panic into hards already broke that asset (again) trying to inflate it for political purposes...but even XLRE is getting interesting lately. 

Currency dilution basket is crushing it today. On fire. People are panicking into hard assets around the world in an attempt to escapate the money printers...2024 style. 

You would think there are a lot of instances since October 27th when the RSI 14 has been at this level...I know I did. Turns out, not so much. Rare readings after what was essentially a V bottom.  

I want to create an indicator that automatically overlays QRA announcement dates. Pretty wild what they have done over the last year and it's likely to remain the all important secret sauce for future currency dilution rallies.  

They really should rename QRA to something more honest. I mean, why not just call it what it is - the Quarterly Dilution Announcement (QDA)? They literally tell the market exactly how much they plan to dilute and the market reprices accordingly. 

Apparently I was moving a little too fast yesterday - I wanted to sell some calls against WMT position to partially cover my position (the calls would be just slightly in the money after today's move, so it would have been a decent move) BUT, I sold puts instead of selling calls! Sheesh. Well, it wouldn't have been a disaster if it went against me, but not great even though it resulted in a windfall today.  I was 150% long instead of 50% hedged.  (would be nice to have an AI looking over my shoulder and be like: really? You want to sells puts that far ABOVE the current price going into earnings?)

Last though on this and then back to trading (I'm well over 100 trades already today....needed a break): It's all fun and games having an easily manipulated market via an explosion of derivatives products until you get a country that decides it's time to teach the smug Americans a lesson, even if it costs them also, and uses this relatively simple gamma squeeze trick but in the opposite direction.  We know that most major countries have infrastructure hacks in their modern bag of weapons / tricks. This will just be one possible weapon in that genre that countries have over us that we don't so much have over them. 

Epic buying opportunity by 2024 standards   

We're likely going to end up with more guardrails on the derivatives market eventually because what we've ended up with is not a healthy market for people that aren't day traders. You get crushed for using reasonable fundamentals to short, the market goes up because of derivatives manipulation instead of fundamentals, people are purposely creating low floats to give themselves the possibility of getting squeezed, etc, etc..  But we won't get the guardrails as long as we keep crashing higher (it's bad politics and the CBOE's of the world are crushing it). They will slap them on if we ever crash lower. It's difficult to crash lower now that the market mechanics weakness / flaw / trick has been exposed to the world, but flash crashes on the downside are still quite likely.

I mean, it seems pretty reasonable that you shouldn't be able to buy 5,500 calls on SPX 5475 calls expiring this coming Monday and force the dealer to buy a crap ton of the underlying to hedge the tail.  That buyer is clearly attempting to manipulate the market. 

Yep. The game has been defined and why wouldn't you do this? The out of the money call buyers are NOT expecting those prices in most cases, but they're attempting to goose the market makers to buy the underlying to hedge their exposure when they sell them those strikes...and it works.  The Apes taught the street the trick with the 1st meme craze. Now we have big money players doing it at the index level.

Crypto going crazy. I'm getting crazy FOMO calls from people that normally don't have a strong opinion.  

Just now: 25% allocation to IBIT. No stop. Market order. NOW.

Ok...your call   

Probably close to a near term top, but we'll see. 

Up $2 bucks or so since this post.  But it's a 38 dollar stock so I'm not letting go for anything less than +20. Lol. 

I'm not a breakout trader (the odds typically favor the fade). I don't like the R structure most of the time....although it definitely works for some people. Also, I dabble around the edges, but medium term moves in the large indexes is my primary game. To each his own. My style is a little problematic in this environment...it will change eventually (I think?). For example, after a trigger in the daily STS systems my trading plan is to look for an entry on the 1hr time frame (especially if it's a breakout trade...I don't like playing those and would rather enter on first pullback). That's all good unless there's not an objective pullback on the 1 hour times frame. Historically, I should just be patient and not change a strategy that is proven over time, but it does "feel different" sometimes and leads to self doubt. Part of the game.

In this currency dilution environment, I think I definitely need to accept that sideways in time might be the new pullback. The're just too much capital chasing too few assets and people are panicking in at any sign of weakness.