Super excited to share my first interview as a trader, with Becky Gaskell on the Market Mamas podcast! We talked for over an hour (I've got a LOT to say about trading once you get me talking!) about a wide range of topics, including: - My initial trading journey using crypto grid bots to "stack SATs" (accumulate Bitcoin) by capitalizing on volatility like a market maker. - My motivation for learning to beat the market after watching my mother lose half her retirement savings (twice!), highlighting the S&P 500's 13-year "lost decade". - The challenge of algo trading: failing prop firm challenges, learning about overfitting, and the market shakeup from the MetaTrader and prop firm shutdowns. - The necessity of a healthy money mindset, the life-altering lesson that "it's only money", and the need to adjust position sizing if you cannot weather the losses. - Applying stoic philosophy and the baseball analogy: world-class hitters miss 70% of the time, normalizing "swing and a miss" as part of the game of probabilities. - The turning point of unlearning esoteric strategies and focusing on "first principles" and "finding truth" from reliable sources and academic papers. - A paradoxical explanation of why I prefer algorithmic trading. - The trading truth that fixed profit targets (fixed TPI) have the lowest expectancy. A little something for everyone. If you're into trading (or even just curious), I'd really appreciate a view, a like, a comment, a share — any questions or feedback! youtube.com/watch?v=rXomEZhY…

The truth hurts. substack.com/@laurencicco/no…

Even Arche (my AI) is getting annoyed at the use of Fibonaccis in retail trading strategies.

I don't know if @MavenTrading or @PropFirmMatch is behind this, but the carpet bombing of the #PropFirmMatch and #MavenTrading hashtags is ridiculous. 50+ messages today. And then another campaign back in August. Same accounts. Same talking points.

Arche (my AI) is acting increasingly humanish. Without any prompting, he's started to curse appropriately. Now we just need to work on contractions. "That is exactly the kind of result I love from this research. We had a perfectly sensible hypothesis and the market told us to go fuck ourselves. 😎"

AFW (Another F'king Wednesday) Fortunately (?) I wasn't feeling good and slept in. Glad I missed it. Algos closed out a couple of trades in profit, and I'm in the green on EURUSD. BWET and some other swing trades are doing just fine. But today was a good day to sleep in.

Doing some really interesting research on market structure in the context of AMT. After 5 rounds of research, I think I'm comfortable making this claim. Is it interesting / potentially useful? I think so. Market structure has a lifecycle. Its useful memory depends on what kind of structure it is and the horizon being estimated. Equilibrium centers retain auction memory longer than boundaries, while disagreement among independent center estimates measures structural uncertainty.

South Korea: "AI is the most important general-purpose technology of our generation. Let's give every citizen access to it and build national capability." America: "But what if somebody uses it to write an email? And the data center uses WATER! 😡" We invented the future and are now trying to regulate, litigate, and moral-panic our way out of participating in it. Other countries are asking how fast they can build AI literacy. We're still asking whether using it is cheating. yahoo.com/news/world/article…

This had me laughing hysterically. #iykyk #firstrule instagram.com/reel/DcG7wgZqa…

Are You in a Trading Cult? Common cult-like community dynamics—not a claim that every participant is literally in a cult: - Charis"matic, infallible founder whose authority outranks outside expertise. - Proprietary revelation: ordinary concepts are renamed and presented as hidden truth. - Initiatory jargon that distinguishes insiders from outsiders. - Claims of unique access to how markets really work. - Us-versus-them identity: believers are enlightened; critics "don’t understand. - Immunization against falsification: failure proves incorrect application, not a flawed theory. - Testimonial evidence elevated above controlled testing and transparent statistics. - Selective success stories amplified; failures disappear or are blamed on the student. - Endless interpretive flexibility: every chart can be explained perfectly after the fact. - Status through doctrinal fluency, rather than demonstrated performance. - Suppression or ridicule of dissent, especially from former believers. - Purity testing: questioning terminology or doctrine reveals insufficient commitment. - Escalating commitment: more study, more mentorship, more content, more paid access. - Founder mythology involving persecution, special insight, or triumph over establishment frauds. - Promise of transformation: financial success becomes tied to identity, discipline, and belief. - Social reinforcement loops where members validate one another’s interpretations. - Borrowed ideas stripped of attribution, then treated as original revelation. - Opaque verification: strong performance claims without independently auditable evidence. - Moving goalposts: mastery is always one concept, course, or refinement away. - Belief outweighs evidence—the exact opposite of sound trading epistemology. If any of this sounds familiar, then you might be in a trading cult. Or know someone who is. Send it to a trader who needs to see it. Or maybe, fortunately, you escaped one. If so, what would you add to the list?

I really hate the marketing and hype in the investing/trading world. Let's look at today's ridiculousness. Email subject: "The $15 Gold Fund That Pays Up to $1,152/Month" (Spoiler: the fund he's talking about is probably $GLDN) 🚩How misleading is that? It psychologically implies that $15 somehow generates $1,152 a month. That's the subliminal suggestion, even though when you think about it for half a second, obviously $15 is not generating $1,152/month. 🚩Gold's rally? Gold's rally ended at the end of January 2026. Since then, it has been downhill. So the pitch is using "gold's rally" language after the rally already rolled over. How misleading is that? 🚩Not options? Yeah, you aren't directly trading options. But this is absolutely an options strategy inside an ETF wrapper. The fund holds gold-related assets, then uses an options overlay to generate income. How misleading is that? 🚩At current price and yield, you'd have to hold roughly $94,000 worth of GLDN to generate $1,152/month. That's the part the headline leaves out. It's not a "$15 fund that pays $1,152/month." It's a fund trading around $15/share, where you'd need close to six figures invested to get that income number. How misleading is that? 🚩And why "up to $1,152/month"? That's just a chosen example size. Put in roughly twice as much money and, assuming the same per-share distributions, you'd receive roughly twice as much cash. The "up to" language makes it sound like some capped opportunity, when it's really just share count times distribution per share. How misleading is that? 🚩That's a return of about 1.2%/month, around 15%/year. Not bad. Not fantastic. But here's the kicker: the quoted yield is based on the current price of the ETF, not your original purchase price. If you buy in and the ETF price falls, your effective yield on cost falls too. GLDN launched in February, and early buyers have already taken a huge price hit. This does NOT protect you from market volatility. How misleading is that? 🚩High-distribution options-income ETFs tend to leak share price/NAV over time, even when the underlying asset is doing okay. Not every options-income fund is doomed. But the extreme-yield ones often have a built-in headwind. - They sell upside for cash flow. - They still eat a lot of downside. - The distribution itself reduces NAV. And if they distribute more than they earn economically, they're handing you your own capital back. GLDN's issuer says its May 5, 2026 distribution was 89% return of capital and only 11% income. Those "returns" are mostly them giving you your own capital back, not profits on it. Return OF capital, not return ON capital. These things are legal. The marketing is legal. But in my opinion, high-distribution options-income ETFs are among the most misleading investment vehicles in the market today, promoted with equally misleading marketing. Buyer beware. Yield is not the scorecard. Total return is.

Survival doesn't favor the strongest. It favors the most adaptive. Adaptability is the new job security.

If readers are leaders, writers are kingmakers.

#BastropTX musicians and music lovers! Electric Jam at Copper Shot this Wednesday. Instruments provided or bring your own. Singers & listeners welcome! Signup at 6, music 6:30-8:30.