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[Trading Card Games] Keyforge: The grand finals where the players took turns playing solitaire until their opponent resigned out of sheer boredom.
I love Keyforge. I’ve been playing since it first released back in 2018 and still enjoy it immensely to this day. However, the game has, on occasion, been plagued by the odd problem. Though these issues have been mostly cleared up as of today thanks to some rule alterations and errata, during the game’s infancy – when players first got their hands on the game – one particular combo of cards became so incredibly degenerate that something needed to be done. This is the story of how that combo culminated in the most infamous grand finals that the game has ever seen. The State of Play Firstly, I should give some basic information on how the game is played. Keyforge is strictly a 2-player game in which, in order to win, you must forge 3 keys. Each key costs 6 ӕmber (pronounced ‘amber’), which you can gain through certain card bonuses, or by using creatures to perform the ‘reap’ action. If you have enough ӕmber at the start of your turn, you forge a key. There are other intricacies and various aspects of play, but to put it simply: play cards, get ӕmber, forge keys, be the first to forge 3 of them. Got that? Good. The game has seen plenty of extremely powerful combos, including the likes of: - GENKA: Martian Generosity and Key Abduction. Players can draw a large number of cards while also forging keys at a lowered cost. - BRIG: Binate Rupture and Interdimensional Graft. Players can inflate both their own and their opponent’s ӕmber pool then immediately take any remaining ӕmber from their opponent after they forge a key. - Gangernaut: Ganger Chieftain and Drummernaut. Provided the opponent has no creatures on the board, players can use these two creatures to generate a burst of 5 or 6 ӕmber depending on the situation. However, none of these combos quite measure up to the nightmare that was LANS. But before I get to that, you’ll need to know some important aspects of Keyforge. The World’s First Unique Deck Game As opposed to just about every other card game in existence, Keyforge consists of absolutely no deckbuilding whatsoever. Rather than buying booster packs or singles to enhance a deck that you construct, the game is played using complete, pre-constructed decks that cannot be altered or mixed. While some players have experimented with deckbuilding and making cubes, instances such as these only exist as far as casual play with friends. The vast majority of players choose to play the game as intended. Another thing to note is that every single Keyforge deck in the entire world is unique. That is, if you buy a deck, no other deck will ever have the same decklist. Each deck also comes with its own unique artwork on the backs of each card, and each deck has its own unique name printed on both the front and back of each card. (Some famously humorous names include The Boy Who Basically Headbutts Heaven and The Child Who Terribly Fears The Church) Suffice it to say, anyone who tries to mix and match cards from other decks can be found out very quickly, as any deviation from the card’s name, art and decklist (which must be shown to your opponent before each game) are easy indicators. These aspects, from name to decklist to card backs, are all created using an algorithm that picks 3 houses (or factions) and distributes a range of 12 cards to each house, with distribution dependent on card rarity, from common to uncommon to rare and special rare. Keyforge’s model garnered some mixed receptions, with some praising the game for its low barrier of entry and quick casual setup through sealed decks, while others lamented the inability to build decks and likened the game to a lootbox simulator. With the randomized nature of the game, many detractors assumed that the game would devolve into spending obscene amounts of money throwing away decks in search of ‘the one’, while many proponents of the game simply enjoyed the discovery and puzzle-solving aspect of trying to learn each deck, with the ability to find interesting matchups without the need to build decks for specific purposes. The big question was: How could a game of random, decidedly suboptimal decks work at the most competitive level? How could you truly test a player’s skill and knowledge of the game if matchups can never be equal? The answer? Adaptive. A Test of Skill The adaptive format works as follows: The players play two games, the first using their own decks and the second using their opponent’s deck. If the same deck wins twice, players must then commence a bidding on chains. Chains are the game’s handicap system, which can be used to curb decks that have the advantage in a particular matchup. To put it simply, the more chains you have, the fewer cards you are allowed in your hand at any one time. (The standard hand size is 6) From 1-6 chains, you play with 1 fewer card in hand. From 7-12, you play with 2 fewer cards, right up to the 19-24 bracket, where you play with 4 fewer cards. That’s a hand size of only 2 cards! The purpose of bidding on chains is for each player to deduce how much of a handicap they would be willing to take in order to play the stronger deck without putting themselves at a disadvantage. A chain is dropped at the end of each turn, meaning if you start out with 3 chains, after 3 turns you’ll be back up to a normal hand size. Each player takes turns bidding until one decides they aren’t willing to increase the bid, and the game starts with the handicap in place on the 'stronger' deck, while the 'weaker' deck simply plays as normal. Most players consider the adaptive variants to be the truest test of skill at the competitive level. After all, playing an extremely powerful deck holds no advantage over playing an extremely weak deck. Even at the most lopsided of matchups, 24 chains (the maximum) would shut down a dominant deck’s momentum to an extreme level. Theoretically, you could buy only one deck in your entire life and still win adaptive tournaments, given the fact that Keyforge has no set rotation. Decks are legal forever, and aside from very specific events that require the use of certain sets, there are no restrictions as to which sets can play against which. Surely then, the adaptive tournaments would be the best place to see the most nail-biting and skill intensive matches possible. Nobody could complain about degenerate decks dominating, right? The Most Broken Combo of All Time Enter the LANS combo, consisting of Library Access and Nepenthe Seed. LANS could allow you (with some setup) to draw your entire deck into your hand, play a bunch of cards, then cycle those cards back into your hand, then play more cards, then cycle them back… Let’s break it down. Library Access sees you drawing a card every time you play a card. This on its own is a pretty powerful effect. Keyforge has no mana costs. The only limiting factor is that you can only play or use cards from the active house. In this case, since Library Access is a Logos card, you must only play or use Logos cards that turn. If you keep drawing Logos cards, you can keep playing them, but given that only one third of your deck consists of Logos, you’re bound to hit a wall eventually. Great card, but far from broken. Things get crazy, however, if you pair it with Nepenthe Seed. This is an artifact that allows you to return a card from your discard pile to your hand at any point of any turn you wish. Again, on its own Nepenthe Seed is an excellent card, but not broken. But if you put the two together, first playing Library Access and then using Nepenthe Seed’s ability to return Library Access back to your hand, by playing Library Access again, the effect stacks. Now for every card you play, you draw two cards. And if that already sounds scary enough, it gets worse. Other Logos cards also include: - Wild Wormhole: Gain an ӕmber, then play the top card of your deck. With LANS, this means playing Wild Wormhole, drawing two cards, then playing the top card of your deck and drawing another two cards. - Timetraveller: Gains you an ӕmber on play, and also allows you to draw two cards, meaning with LANS you would draw four cards on play. Each Timetraveller also comes paired with a copy of Help From Future Self, meaning there are multiple ways to get hold of it. - Mother: A creature that increases hand size, giving you greater opportunity to set the combo up. - Library of Babble: An artifact that allows you to draw an additional card. - Phase Shift: The most important piece of the puzzle. Phase Shift allows you to play one non-Logos card. This gives you ample opportunity to use the effects of other houses, and since you’ll likely be drawing up your entire deck, you’ll have all the choices in the world at your disposal. Just as with Library Access, the effect stacks. Using multiple copies of Phase Shift means you can play multiple non-Logos cards that turn. Does that sound bad enough? Sorry, but it gets even worse than that. You see, unlike most other card games, when your deck pile is emptied in Keyforge, you simply reshuffle your discard pile to form your new deck. This means you can cycle back through your deck again. And play Library Access again. Now you’re drawing three cards for each card you play. And on and on it goes. Now, this effect cannot go on indefinitely thanks to the Rule of Six. In simple terms, this means that any card (or card of the same name) cannot be played or used more than 6 times. LANS cannot carry on forever, but it can carry on for a very, very long time. Plus, even if the insanity does come to an end, you’ve now drawn pretty much your entire deck, ready to use it next turn. And while the combo does at least require some setup to ensure you get the most out of it, top players would optimize their play to all but ensure it. I should point out that it was possible to prevent the combo from happening with cards that could either destroy or remove Nepenthe Seed from play. These included Remote Access, Poltergeist, Gorm of Omm, Nexus, Barehanded and Neutron Shark. That said, any deck that didn't have an answer (which was most of them) would be at the full mercy of LANS. And even if you did have an answer in your deck, an unlucky card draw could prevent you from ever using it. Many people outright despised LANS (and to a lesser extent, LART, which swapped Nepenthe Seed for Reverse Time, a card that required more setup for the combo but in turn couldn't be countered). For a game all about interesting and weird matchups with unexpected surprises, the idea of chasing a meta specifically to deal with LANS didn't sit well with many. The insanity of this combo came to a head at Keyforge Vault Tour Illinois in April of 2019. The Worst Grand Finals Ever While you’re more than welcome to watch the entire footage of the grand finals (linked above), here’s some key details with timestamps: Game 1: Game occurs as normal until Library Access is played at 18:25. From here, the player cycles through his entire deck, using all manner of cards and counters to keep track of how many uses each card has seen. From there, all his opponent can really do is watch. He spends his time staring a hole into the table, card effects flying left and right, his stacked army of creatures being decimated, until finally, after eight minutes of inactivity, he concedes the game at 26:25, seeing no other way out of this hell. Game 2: Decks are swapped between players. Game plays normally until 36:17. Library Access is played and the player cycles through his deck, and again, playing cards continuously. After a grueling nineteen minutes of simply watching the madness unfold without being able to take his turn, at 55:15, his opponent concedes. Game 3: Time to bid for chains! Now, you’d think this would be where the LANS deck gets hit with a massive set of chains, stopping it from doing its thing. Right? WRONG. The opposing player chooses not to bid on the LANS deck, allowing the LANS owner to play it with zero chains. Word has it that he still believed his deck had a good chance at outracing his opponent before LANS could be activated, but no such thing happened. At 59:36, Library Access is played. At 1:13:50, the game is over, 3 keys to 0. Community Response As expected, this did not go over well with Keyforge fans. (See YouTube comments) “Stupid combo... much worse than exodia,” writes one commenter. “People bringing LANS decks to tournaments should be ashamed of themselves,” wrote another. “LANS: definition of "not fun tournaments", ladies and gents!” While there were a small minority of players who wished for the game to remain as it was, many saw LANS as a scourge upon the earth and wanted changes to be made. LANS simply wasn't fun for either player when pulled off, but due to its sheer power, LANS decks were highly sought after. The problem was, given the fact Keyforge revolves around opening pre-made decks, individual cards cannot be banned, and the alternative of banning specific decks would set a terrible precedent for the game. Thankfully, a decision was made that satisfied most. On 29th of May 2019 Fantasy Flight Games announced some important errata which included the rule that upon playing Library Access, the card would be purged instead of hitting the discard pile. Much like the term ‘exile’ in Magic: The Gathering, when a card is purged it is removed from play entirely, making it impossible to return to your hand through Nepenthe Seed. Panic over, and people could play the game in peace again. While the card is once again balanced, many still remember the horrors of Library Access in the game’s early days. Being able to draw your entire deck into your hand and continue cycling through? Why, it had to be the most broken card in Keyforge history! Except it wasn’t. Believe it or not, Library Access was generally considered only the second best card in the game at the time. That’s right; another card existed that even Library Access couldn’t stand up to. A card so brutal and terrifying that it utterly dominated the meta. A card that, by itself, with no card required to combo with it, made players shiver and quake with terror. “But how can that be?” you might ask. “After everything I’ve read, the ridiculous combo potential of LANS, how can any card possibly be better than the broken mess that was Library Access!?” Well… as Old Bruno would say, it’s a heckuva deal. Perhaps that’s a story for another time. Please let me know if you enjoyed reading this, as I have a number of Keyforge stories to tell! 😊 EDIT: Wow! I'm shocked my post garnered so much attention! I only found out about this sub a few days ago! Thanks to all of you for reading! Lots of people clamoring for information on the broken card that I teased at the end. I'll definitely have to start work on that one at some point, even if I'm not sure when I'll have the spare time to write it. I have a number of ideas for topics, and with the fifth set due out next month, who knows? Maybe something else will come up that's worth talking about. Like that recently revealed trojan horse artifact... I hope the designers know what they're doing with that one! O_O
$SLV is not going to get squeezed...$SLV is the Trojan Horse for the squeeze THAT'S ALREADY HAPPENING
I have no horse in the GME "fight" right now. I wish you all the best, and it is the biggest trading mistake of my life so far. I was talking about GME with my friends in March 2020, and even did trade some options then for a loss. I must have read DFV at some point, as we were discussing Burry and a "technical short squeeze" happening. But I missed the real boat, so good on DFV and all of the rest of you degenerates. Instead, I focused my market attention during quarantine on precious metals. My opinion is that in the long term (10+ years) they will provide the only real hedge against inflation in the world as every CB on the planet is exploding the supply of fiat to deal with COVID economic disruption. In the short term, I believe that the "powers that be" are engineering the largest short squeeze in the history of markets. We do not have the power to effect whether this happens, it is simply an inevitability. HFs, banks, and other large institutions are going to extract an enormous amount of wealth from the world during this squeeze. This money will be taken from the future pocket of every consumer of industrial goods for the next several decades in the form of inflated prices on everything: batteries, electronics, solar panels, EVs...even jewelry and silverware. We cannot stop them, but I have decided to try to hop on for the ride. The last few months aside, I never saw WSB as a force for societal change, because the people who control the money are always going to win the most in the end. WSB is a place where we can learn the tricks of a market that is structurally rigged against us, and use those tricks to our advantage. To use an analogy that I think we all know: I am not, and will never be, Ender. But I can learn that the Enemy's Gate is Down, and play The Game that way. The tl;dr is this: the market for silver is the most manipulated physical market in the history of the world. $SLV is the vehicle that is currently being used behind the scenes to vaccum up ownership of every available physical bar of silver in major bullion vaults in the world. When it has completed doing that, the "paper" markets that have held down the price of silver for decades will become disconnected from the physical markets. The energy that has been artificially held back for decades by this paper will explode the price of physical silver, and I have no idea how high it will go. $SLV will stand (mostly) alone as the world's exchange traded product for electronic trading of physical silver.
LET'S START AT THE BEGINNING: WHY IS SILVER IMPORTANT?
Silver has been used as real currency for thousands of years, and there is an argument to be made for returning to "sound" money through the use of silver and gold. However, that is not the argument that I am making. Silver is a highly industrial metal, and it's usage for industry will only continue to expand as we electrify the future. Silver is important for electrical applications b/c it is the most-conductive / least-resistive metal in the universe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_conductivity#Resistivity_and_conductivity_of_various_materials). It is used heavily in all electronic applications (even more since RoHS has pushed us away from Tin/Lead and towards Tin/Silver solder blends, with silver being added to mitigate the longevity problems of 100% Tin solder growing Tin whiskers and shorting out components). But the largest new demands on silver are going to come from solar panels and EVs. Utility-scale solar is now virtually tied with wind as the cheapest new sources of energy in the world and is only getting cheaper every year. As fossil fuel plants continue to reach the end of their service life, they are going to be replaced with solar and wind technologies. As EVs become more prevalent, their components (ESPECIALLY their batteries) will produce additional demand for Silver. As smart investors are wont to do, this coming demand for industrial silver has been front-run and large quantites of silver have been sucked into investment products so that they can produce financial returns when demand begins to increase. 2020 showed remarkable investor interest in silver, to the tune of an estimated 350Mtoz moving into exchange traded products like $SLV. $SLV alone added ~200Mtoz of silver to it's holdings in 2020. Unfortunately for the market, supply cannot meet demand: Of the 930.9Mtoz estimated for 2020 demand, only 236Mtoz was available for physical investment, because the rest was consumed by industrial uses. This means that $SLV alone absorbed almost the entire world's capacity for silver investment in 2020, and as you'll see soon, this is only accelerating in 2021. Source for demand/supply/investment numbers: https://www.silverinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/SilverInstitute2020InterimPR.pdf
LETS GET PHYSICAL, PHYSICAL
Now it's important to understand that huge amounts of "silver" is traded on "paper" markets, and these markets have historically decided the approximate cost of physical silver in the world, in the form of the "spot price". I'm not going to give anyone a primer on how this works, go read about the London Fix and COMEX paper on your own time. But the important thing to know is that there are a bunch of silver bars in vaults in London and in the U.S., and electronic claims on them are traded on the LBMA and COMEX continuously, without the silver ever leaving the vaults. However, these vaults have concrete numbers of physical bars in them, and trading contracts against them technically means that you can show up at a window somewhere and demand your 5x 1000oz bars that a COMEX warrant entitle you to. This redemption happens all the time, and it can be used to extract physical silver from the unallocated storage at bullion vaults and release it to industrial or consumer bullion uses. However, these bars can also be moved into "registered" or "allocated" accounts without them leaving the overall vault storage. This means that a quantity of individual silver bars that an owner holds title to can be physically moved inside the vault onto a different rack, and the owner has individual serial numbers of bars that they own. These bars can be withdrawn on demand only by their owner and are not available for general redemption of a COMEX warrant. So how many bars are there? Well between LBMA and COMEX, there are 1480.3Mtoz sitting in vaults (sources below when I start doing math). This includes all allocated AND unallocated bars. Now, obviously London and NY are separated by an ocean, but people always like to bring up that bars could be moved b/w London <-> American COMEX vaults. This is an enormous undertaking, but let's make a "spherical chicken in a vaccuum" level assumption and say that LBMA + COMEX vaults are a singular source of inventory for both $SLV and other market participants. If you read the $SLV S-1 (which I did: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1330568/000119312505127244/ds1.htm) you would learn that the custodian of the $SLV trust is required to hold all silver weight (with an exception for 1100toz of unallocated, lol) that is owned by the trust in allocated accounts, where the individual bars are physically segregated inside the vaults, and the serial numbers of the owned bars are explicitly recorded. The idea that there is "no physical silver" backing the SLV trust and "you could get settled with cash" is ridiculous. iShares publishes a report listing every serial number of every bar that is owned by the trust, along with the total weight contained in the bars. It is 10847 pages long (you can read it here if you have trouble sleeping at night: https://emea-markets.jpmorgan.com/metalicsWebAppJanus/publicUnauthenticated/BONY_SLV.pdf) and is updated frequently. The underlying silver is owned by the trust. It cannot be removed from the trust unless "baskets" of 50000 shares are redeemed by an "Authorized Participant" which is only a few large brokers. It cannot be removed by the bullion vaults and given to other customers because it is physically segregated inside the vaults. People who have recently beaten down the idea of a silver squeeze love to talk about how JP Morgan is the custodian for the SLV trust. And because JPM just paid a $1B fine for historical manipulation of the paper silver market, they aren't going to be honest about this. This is crazy talk. When it comes to the dishonesty of a big bank, there is "fraud" and there is FRAUD. "Fraud" would be them saying "Oh sorry, we didn't realize that a laundromat bringing in $300k/week of dirty dollar bills was out of the ordinary". "Fraud" happens all the time, and the banks get away with it regularly. FRAUD would be them saying "Oh yes, 3rd party customer (iShares) who services dozens of other large banking institutions in the world, here is objective evidence, with serial numbers, that we have these silver bars in the vault" and then just making up the data. It is QANON-level crazy, IMHO, to think that JPM is going to commit FRAUD by publishing a list of serial numbers that is completely fake. I believe the exact opposite: since they have just gotten caught, they are playing it straight this time and have just switched sides in order to go long. On the COMEX alone, JP Morgan Chase is long 193.9Mtoz, or just north of $5B. (COMEX depository data by weight: https://www.cmegroup.com/delivery_reports/Silver_stocks.xls) The problem for the futures and options markets is that their continual trading of paper contracts is chasing a smaller and smaller amount of physical silver that is not owned by $SLV. And the market participants (minus, now, JPM) who have gotten away with naked selling of paper contracts and mostly settling them for cash are going to soon find the underlying vaults empty and no metal to give to warrant holders who come looking for it.
HOW BIG OF A PROBLEM IS $SLV FOR THE NAKED SHORTS IN THE PAPER MARKET? LET'S DO SOME MATH.
$SLV inventory math: $SLV is holding 669,357,789.40 troy ounces in trust, and has 720,500,000 shares outstanding. (If you are curious why $SLV/share trades below the spot price, it's because: 669.4Mtoz / 720.5M shares = .929 toz / share) ($SLV data from here: https://www.ishares.com/us/products/239855/ishares-silver-trust-fund?qt=SLV#/ ) (screenshot from tonight for posterity: https://imgur.com/a/0sqcMFr) Bullion vault inventory math: London (LBMA) silver stocks are 1080.5Mtoz (http://www.lbma.org.uk/london-precious-metals-physical-holdings-statistics) US COMEX silver stocks are 399.8Mtoz (https://www.cmegroup.com/delivery_reports/Silver_stocks.xls) 669.4/(1080.5 + 399.8) = 45.2% of the vaulted silver in the world is already owned by SLV Subtracting what SLV already owns, leaves us with: (1080.5 + 399.8) - 669.4 = 810.9Mtoz (This is completely ignoring the fact that a lot of that remaining silver is owned in registered or allocated accounts by individual owners. E.g. there is 150.2Mtoz in "registered" on the COMEX which means those bars are already specifically deeded to an individual owner. But they could theoretically sell it to SLV so I included it as available.) 810.9Mtoz is the ABSOLUTE THEORETICAL MAXIMUM available in LBMA + COMEX silver that is not already owned by SLV. Now how short are the shorts? Some more math: OI on COMEX futures: https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/metals/precious/silver-futures-and-options.html
in currently open interest that could be demanded for delivery. Just on the COMEX, there could be demand for twice as much silver as there is in the combined LBMA + COMEX vaults that is not explicitly owned by $SLV right now. Caveats:
I have not included any London futures contracts that may have claims on metal here. I am not versed in their contracts at all and don't have a good data source right now. If anyone knows how to calculate the short obligation for London I would be glad to add it.
I have not analyzed any of the strike prices on COMEX options or dates on COMEX futures...some of them could be way out of the money or way in the future. Many silver producers sell futures years in advance to lock in prices, and then deliver the physical to satisfy the contracts.
Using the same basic methodology–total shorts divided by shares [toz in this case] outstanding–as is used on a stock to calculate short interest (and gave us the infamous 140% short interest on GME) we get......drumroll please: 1563.9 short / 810.9 physical = 192.9% short interest. OPEN INTEREST ON COMEX SILVER FUTURES AND OPTIONS IS EQUIVALENT TO A 192.9% SHORT INTEREST AGAINST ALL LONDON AND U.S. AVAILABLE INVENTORY. But it gets even worse.
WANNA ADD A GAMMA SQUEEZE??
I pulled the data for all current OI in SLV options. There is a large number (5.7 million) of call contracts open (here are the totals: https://imgur.com/tiqPA34) Using the .929toz/share number, we can calculate that there are up to 527.2Mtoz that would have to be bought during an absolute runaway Gamma Squeeze. Call options on $SLV max out right now at $55, so the spot price would only have to increase by around 122% to reach the point that all of that weight would need to have been purchased. But at some point, it could become self-reinforcing, and the gamma squeeze continues to cause more gamma squeezing. I believe that this almost happened Sunday evening (2021-01-31) as evidenced by the huge premium that $SLV was trading to the futures price for a few minutes when trading opened. (My comparison chart: https://i.imgur.com/UPjL3zm.png) The Silver ETF that trades on Sunday in Tel Aviv (https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/TCHF82:IT) closed up >6% (and was consistenly rising for the entire session) before any american spot markets opened. I believe that hedging algorithms at MM firms that write options saw this spike as a need to buy shares in $SLV to cover their deltas, and so they bought the opening of $SLV like crazy. $SLV opened up 17.6%, while paper only opened up about 6%. Paper market players had to sell 23.8Mtoz of paper in the first minute of trading to keep the price under control. I have never seen an imbalance like this before, and it was covered up quickly (within 2 hours of trading). But to me, it sounds like Vincent's heartbeat monitor in GATTACA when he runs out of fake signal: there was a cover up required to hide this explosion. When the day comes that this cover up is not executed properly, stuff is going to get ugly, b/c $SLV won't just gamma squeeze like a normal stock...
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! A TRADITIONAL GAMMA/SHORT SQUEEZE WILL SEEM LIKE NOTHING IN SILVER
The squeeze in silver will be FAR WORSE than the combination of a gamma and short squeeze in a stock, because shares of stock cannot be removed from the market. Eventually somebody holding $VW or $GME is going to say "sure, I'll sell at $42,000.69 per share" and that share can go back to cover a short. But if instead of doing that, the holder of that share withdrew it from the market by converting it to a physical token b/c they thought that the physical token would be more valuable than the share (the retail premium on physical silver vs. paper silver), the short interest would INCREASE as shares were converted into tokens. And since there are currently more "shares" of silver than there are bars of silver in the vault, the shorts can be caught with a literally illiquid market that has nothing to buy. Zero. Zilch. No silver available. The doomsday scenario (for paper silver holders and writers) is the following combination:
holders of COMEX warrants will see the rising premium of physical bullion to the spot price and decide to redeem their warrants for physical
a rising spot price will Gamma Squeeze the writers of $SLV options into buying more shares in a runaway fashion and the trust will absorb all available vault inventory as it issues new shares
COMEX warrant holders who try to demand metal that doesn't exist will literally break the market. The CBOE will probably step in and decide to force settle the contracts for cash at the last known good price, and COMEX paper warrants will cease trading forever. The physical market price will then be disconnected from the paper market, and $SLV as an exchange traded product will stand (mostly) alone as the new "paper" market for silver.
SO WTF DO I DO? [NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE]
Well I could always buy physical silver, if I can stomach the premium and wait 8 weeks for it to show up. Or, I could just get long on $SLV. Since I believe that $SLV will stand alone after the dust settles as the one true claim on bars in the vaults, I could be long the actual $SLV ticker in several ways:
Buying shares (duh, but it worked for $GME)
Buying long dated calls (Gamma Squeeze go BRRRRR, but who knows when)
My name is Jared A. Brock. Having just turned 35, I sat down to reflect on everything I’ve learned so far and made a list of the things I wish I learned far sooner. None of these are rules or commands for you to follow, just personal reflections from a decade of journaling. I hope they save you a lot of time, energy, and struggle:
1. “Save the best for last” is terrible advice.
A French monk taught me this one. Every morning, I put on the newest pair of socks in my drawer. Why wear the rattiest pair? When I sit down to eat, I eat the tastiest bits first. Why let them get cold? After every shower, I put on my favorite clean t-shirt. I have a great bottle of 10-year-old Laphroaig scotch in my cupboard, but I probably won’t drink it for months because I received two bottles of reactor-aged Lost Spirits single malt for Christmas. Why? Because life is hard enough and we aren’t promised tomorrow. This doesn’t mean we should throw caution to the wind and “live in the moment” at all times, but it does mean we should try to find the golden middle and glean a little bit of pleasure from every day we’re blessed to live. “Save the best for last” is poverty-mentality thinking. It expects worse in the future. Enjoy the best right now — in your marriage, parenting, work, travel, faith, friendship, contribution. Keep all the chips on the table. Be ready at all times to leave without regret.
2. Tools use us.
A hammer literally cannot hit a nail without using a human. A saw cannot cut through a board without using a human. A phone cannot deliver ads without using a human.
3. Avoid false dichotomies.
When given two great options, choose both. When given two horrible options, choose neither.
4. Failure is overcome by one word.
“Next.”
5. Ambition is ruinous for your happiness.
Most goal-setters (myself included) live much of life in anticipation of tomorrow, and when that day arrives, they’re either disappointed by their failures or underwhelmed by their successes. Instead: trust the process. Whiskey, pasta, bread, beer, and cereal all require just two ingredients — wheat and water — but the outcome is completely different based on the process. Identity precedes action. Determine what you want to be, then find the process that will get you there every single time.
6. Forget what the market wants.
Listen to your gut. Your body knows the difference between good and great. Someone said you should never record a song or code an app or write an article unless it makes you laugh, cry, or orgasm. If an idea doesn’t move you, it won’t move an audience, no matter how “commercial” you think it is.
7. Give yourself a shove.
The best way to eat more candy, drink more vodka, and smoke more cigarettes is to leave them in the middle of the kitchen counter. You get it. Willpower is useless. Instead, line up a series of little nudges to automatically get you through your day. If you want to work out, leave your shorts by the door or your cleats in your fridge. My blue diode glasses rest on top of my laptop so I have to protect my eyes before logging online. I can’t not see my vitamins when I brush my teeth, or chia seeds when I reach for the Brita. There’s a book beside my bed, toilet, desk, and car’s gear shifter. Line up enough nudges and you can shove yourself in the right direction.
8. Grandma didn’t use toilet paper.
She used pages from the Sears catalog. Splinter-free wasn’t available until 1935. The Romans used sponges. The Greeks used clay. Francois Rabelais recommended using “the neck of a goose.” Arabians used their left hand. Never assume our extremely unique cultural moment is “normal.”
9. Ninety-nine isn’t enough.
Water boils at 100 degrees Celcius. The difference between 99 and 100 is the difference between zero and one. Not-boiling, boiling. Corollary: 101 doesn’t make it any more boiling.
10. Old people know better.
Honoring our elders is one of the most underrated practices in our newness-obsessed society. Sure, there are a ton of old crazy far-right conspiracy theorists, but there are also good people who have survived four wars, six recessions, and twelve presidents and are somehow still smiling. Get to know them. Also: meet your old-person self. I try to invent a new word every week — one of them is preflection. To ponder the present through the eyes of your future self. Take an hour in silence to listen to your eighty-year-old self. They might know something you don’t.
11. Fire all your employees.
The employer-employee relationship creates an unhealthy power dynamic between humans that simply didn’t exist when we worked cooperatively to feed our clan or village. I love my work life so much more now that I only work with independent entrepreneurs who are my equals. For me, it’s either a one-man show (my writing business), an equal partnership (my film company), or a co-operative endeavor. Life’s too short to be a boss or be bossed around.
12. Accept that you are a voracious locust of doom.
Nail a roll of paper to the wall and write down everything you consume for a year — food, toilet paper, electricity, car fuel, movies, music, social media content, other people’s time, everything. See what I mean? Saint Augustine said that the human heart can only fully be satisfied by one thing aside from God himself: everything. All the sex, all the money, all the power, all the possessions, all the glory. All of it. Nothing short of everything could ever fully satiate the human heart. We are wired for more. Understanding this truth is the first step toward real contentment.
13. Awkward is awesome.
My best friend says that The Office gave society a beautiful gift: the ability to embrace cringe. When you meet someone new and it’s slightly weird, pretend you’re Michael Scott. Just glory and bask in the discomfort. You can awkward-proof your life by being bold: Ask for discounts. Ask for refunds. Ask for phone numbers. Ask for pay raises. Ask inappropriate questions at inappropriate times. Lather yourself in awkward and pretty soon nothing sticks.
14. Happiness isn’t the purpose of life.
Hitler really was following his bliss by offing millions of Jews. I’m sure Jeffrey Dahmer genuinely enjoyed the taste of human flesh. Bernie Madoff seemed content to bilk charities for decades. Happiness isn’t the purpose of life. It’s not even in the top ten. Happiness is a seasonal fruit, not a foundational root. Find firm and fertile ground.
15. There is no ugly.
My grandpa re-proposed to my grandma on their fiftieth wedding anniversary and called her the most beautiful woman he’s ever known. Old wrinkly grandma? Yes. Because we choose our definition of beauty through our thoughts, disciplines, habits, and patterns, be they conscious or otherwise.
16. We are what we consume.
The statistical average American is a walking bodybag of sugar, alcohol, caffeine, porn, pills, and digital stimulus. Imagine how different life would be if our only inputs were nature, sleep, sunlight, organic food, and embodied human interaction? Guard your inputs carefully.
17. We’re going to die quite soon.
Make sure you live first. Practicing memento mori will help.
18. Fame is poison.
One in four Gen Zers thinks they’ll be famous by age 25. One in 3.9999999 Gen Zers are going to have a miserably disappointing life. Why do people desire the attention of strangers? Because we all need to love and be loved, to know and be known, but are too afraid to risk personal heartbreak to seek it out. Attention is not affection. Influence is not intimacy.
19. Boomers are to blame for half our troubles.
The Me Generation took a free ride at the planet’s expense and are hellbent on taking the rest of it with them. They’re statistically low on empathy — blame the lead, asbestos, and hairspray if you must — but at least acknowledge the reality that life is hard for everyone, and no one has it easier.
20. Children are dope.
Kids are the blood transfusion in our sick system. We need to stop manipulating, brainwashing, colonizing, and propagandizing them, and learn from them instead.
21. It doesn’t have to hurt.
Joy is a choice.
22. Watch comedy before calls and meetings.
Five minutes of gut-busting laughter will prime you for even the most tedious conference call. Your co-workers and customers all have tough lives like everybody else, so brighten their day by pre-brightening your own.
23. No ragrets.
Tattoo it on your neck. Most people play it far too safe. Instead: optimize your life for the least number of regrets and the most amount of selfless contribution.
24. There are better ways to vote.
I’ve manned several local voting stations, and I’ve also hob-nobbed with politicians in Canada, America, and the UK. The reality is that they don’t work for us. They work for their corporate sponsors and private interests. Democracy isn’t dead. It just hasn’t happened yet, with all attempts to date being stillborn or aborted. Democracy = one voice one vote. Athens wasn’t a democracy — women, slaves, and tenants had zero say. America isn’t a democracy either — no representative system is, because it’s far too easy for private interests to buy politicians. The charade of voting is illusory. All elections are sham elections. So what to do? Vote with your money and time and attention. One sham vote every four years versus tens of thousands of dollar-votes each year? It’s a no-brainer. My wife and I haven’t stepped foot in a Walmart in more than a decade because thousands of its suppliers are based in China, the billionaire heirs are anti-democratic tax-avoiders, and they treat their employees like indentured servants. Vote for pro-democracy third-party candidates if you must — just understand the game, and vote in the ways that actually matter.
25. Everything easy has already been done.
So run a little further. And if it hasn’t been done, it won’t be as easy as it appears. The question to ask is: what’s been standing in the way this whole time? Achievement is all about knocking down obstacles. Just make sure what’s on the other side is rightly worth the effort.
26. Broccoli still tastes terrible.
But you’re not a child anymore. Adults do hard things.
Discipline is great, but it’s also subject to the law of diminishing returns. Life is just too dynamic to schedule with military precision. Free yourself from the tyranny of “only people who wake up at 5 AM are successful.” All hours are not created equal. It depends on your sleep drive and chronotype. Know yourself. Unapologetically get more sleep, then do your best work at your best time in your best state.
28. “Freedom” isn’t freedom.
America wasn’t founded on freedom. America was founded on violent autonomy. The ancient Greeks had an entirely different definition of freedom: it was the ability to choose the right regardless of circumstance.
“We talk about freedom all the time, but we’ve stopped talking about freedom a long time ago. Now we’re talking about autonomy. Freedom is different than autonomy. Freedom has boundaries. Truth is one of those boundaries. And morality is one of those boundaries. Autonomy is the ability to do whatever you want whenever you want in whatever way you want. The problem is this: If I’m autonomous and another person is autonomous, and I have preferences and those matter more than the truth, and that person has preferences and their preferences matter more than the truth, when two autonomous preference-seeking beings come together and their preferences don’t match, who is going to win? If truth is on the bottom shelf, truth won’t decide. What will decide will be power. And isn’t it ironic that in our quest for “freedom”, someone gets enslaved?” — Abdu Murray
29. The Marines were right: slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
As teenagers, my friend Tyler and I were in a hurry to get somewhere quickly so we drove 120+ miles per hour for forty-five straight minutes before nearly crashing when the speed burned a footlong gash through the tire. By the time we replaced it with a spare, we were late to our destination by more than an hour. But nevermind driving. Pump the life-brakes sometimes, or at least, let off the gas. You might get there faster, with less wear-and-tear on the engine.
30. The quest for wealth is destroying life.
We’ve commodified land, water, shelter, clothing, art, time, and nearly everything else. Very little remains, and it’s amassing into fewer hands. We need a shared global vision. My invented word for it is benevitae: the sustainable flourishing of all creation. Our collective goal should be socioenviroeconomic sustainability. Where to start? We’d do well to let biology determine ecological sustainability and real democracy to determine economic fairness. Our current trajectory is worse than the Space Shuttle Challenger.
31. Most “leaders” aren’t leaders.
Celebrities, politicians, and book-hocking business gurus all call themselves leaders. They’re not. Real leadership is influence that serves. True leaders are selfless and servant-hearted. They put the best interests of others ahead of their own. Politics and media, by comparison, attracts sociopaths like flies to firelight. Never give power to those who seek it. Nearly everyone worth following is dead.
32. Divide-and-conquer is a business model.
Near the end of high school, dozen friends and I binge-watched multiple seasons of LOST in our friend Mike’s basement. It was one of the most hilarious, riotous, enjoyable experiences we had as a group. And it was the last show we ever watched together. People used to go to restaurants in large numbers, to the movies by the dozen, climbing over each other for one of the limited video game controllers, packing out our churches, cheering on our sports teams by the busload. We were almost never alone, and we were far happier. Now we order in, watch Netflix, stream Minecraft, catch the highlights, watch porn, and go to bed. It’s killing us. Resist the urge to be alone. It’s too easy, and it’s the exact opposite of what we really need. The #1 thing that’s correlated to human happiness is human togetherness.
33. Self-improvement won’t save us.
The great lie of individualist-consumerist culture is that we can improve our way to personal perfection and communal utopia. But it’s incrementalism at best. It’s just chasing infinity.
34. We know nothing +/-.
On the scale of all that is known, and all that is knowable, our individual understanding is essentially mathematically zero. The entirety of human knowledge is a rounding error. This is the beginning of humility.
35. The sun is not on fire
I was at an observatory in the Davis Mountains in Texas, and it was the first time I’d paid attention to astronomy since grade school. For three decades, I’d wrongly assumed the sun was a giant ball of flames. But there’s no fire in space because there’s no oxygen in space. (It just looks like fire because of how our eyes perceive light through the atmosphere and prism.) As I stared at the real-time image of the sun on the observatory wall, I nearly wept. The sun actually looks like a giant, boiling, grey brain. And then it hit me: I have so many assumptions to set aside and so much left to learn. So pay attention. Don’t worship the “question everything” mantra, but instead spend your life seeking truth, and wisdom, and understanding. You know what you need to do to get where you want to be.
Flatten the Curve. Part 84. Who are the What If Men. What is the People Machine? They Have Been Manipulating Society Using Simulations for a Long Time. The Worst is Yet to Come.
Previous Post Here Rock the vote! Power to the people! Get out and vote. Every vote counts. And the beat goes on. And on. And on. And on. And we buy it. Hook. Line. And sinker. Don't we? But, we live in a democracy! Yep. Sure do. We vote and then they do whatever they have planned. Seriously. Guantanamo Bay? Still there. Rich getting richer? Still happening. Gain of function testing on viruses? Still happening. Nafta? Who actually voted? No. One. Big bank bailouts? No choice. Get it? The illusion of choice is all it takes to pacify the masses. That's it. Our votes are the placebo effect. Do some of us notice? Yes. A few. For all the good that does us. So why are they able to get away with it? Surely at some point we would have noticed. Well we did notice, and they adjusted, and we're still living with the consequences. When did we notice? The Vietnam War. All the pictures of body bags and all the reports of the horrors of war were too much. We questioned why? The answer wasn't good enough. An economic system. Sure they tried to convince us back then that it was because human rights and liberty. Ok. Then we fast forward to present day and we trade with Vietnam. But nobody says, HEY! AREN'T THEY EVIL COMMUNISTS! No. One. Why? Because those in charge learned. All the images of war changed. Now we only see video game targets on screen. Now we only hear of all the amazing technology making war so advanced! War has become a Walt Disney production. Sanitized for the masses. How did they do it? How? Simple. They know in advance what stimulus will have the greatest effect on us, and what effect that stimulus will be. How? Simulations. And it's been going on for a very long time.
Simulations and Scenarios
In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party,” read the memo. “Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to: • Ted Cruz. • Donald Trump. • Ben Carson. We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously."
Oh. Ok. So Crooked Hillary's team wanted to pump up Trump. Let me say that again, Pump Up Trump (sounds like a new sex toy, doesn't it? I'll get my people to call your people and lets make this happen. It'll be huge and people will love getting screwed by it!). And then it gets worse.
“Just like everybody, I thought this was a Bush against a Clinton, that’s all it was going to be,” said former Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle. “When I saw the first set of debates, I would turn them on in an entertainment mode to see what Donald’s going to say today. It was funny." Source Here
Trump is funny. Ha. Ha. Ha. Let's get in some of that new Reality TV show called The Political Apprentice. Right. So is Trump a part of something nefarious? Or is he fighting the Deep State? But what if the answer is more complicated than that? What if all the peices are moved, including President's, on purpose, and with a plan? Crazy? Surely that's just plain nonsense and there's no way that could happen, right? Well, let me show you some additional things before the Internet of Things is in everything and we can't do anything.
They Pick, You Vote, Don't Matter. They Already Know.
What? Preposterous you say? Let's travel back to JFK and the People Machine.
Consider the strange trajectory of the Simulmatics Corporation, founded in New York City in 1959. (Simulmatics, a mash-up of ‘simulation’ and ‘automatic’, meant then what ‘artificial intelligence (AI)’ means now.) Its controversial work included simulating elections — just like that allegedly ‘pioneered’ by the now-defunct UK firm Cambridge Analytica on behalf of UK Brexit campaigners in 2015 and during Donald Trump’s US presidential election campaign in 2016. Journalists accused Trump’s fixers of using a “weaponized AI propaganda machine” capable of “nearly impenetrable voter manipulation”. New? Hardly. Simulmatics invented that in 1959. They called it the People Machine. As an American historian with an interest in politics, law and technology, I came across the story of the Simulmatics Corporation five years ago when researching an article about the polling industry. Polling was, and remains, in disarray. Now, it’s being supplanted by data science: why bother telephoning someone to ask her opinion when you can find out by tracking her online? Wondering where this began took me to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, to the unpublished papers of political scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool. Simulmatics, hired first by the US Democratic Party’s National Committee in 1959 and then by the John F. Kennedy campaign in 1960, pioneered the use of computer simulation, pattern detection and prediction in American political campaigning. The company gathered opinion-poll data from the archives of pollsters George Gallup and Elmo Roper to create a model of the US electorate.
Lasswell, whose research on communication purported to explain how ideas get into people’s heads: in short, who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect? During the Second World War, Lasswell studied the Nazis’ use of propaganda and psychological warfare. When those terms became unpalatable after the war ended, the field got a new name — mass-communications research. Same wine, new bottle. Like Silicon Valley itself, Simulmatics was an artefact of the cold war. It was an age obsessed with prediction, as historian Jenny Andersson showed in her brilliant 2018 book, The Future of the World. At MIT, Pool also proposed and headed Project ComCom (short for Communist Communications), funded by the US Department of Defense’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA). Its aim, in modern terms, was to try to detect Russian hacking — “to know how leaks, rumors, and intentional disclosures spread” as Pool described it.
Isn't that odd? Computers making predictions back in 1960. Computers analyzing human behavior in order to predict human behaviours and control the election outcome. And the scientist who it all started with came from MIT. And we wonder how all that Jeffrey Epstein money was spent.
The press called Simulmatics scientists the “What-If Men”, because their work — programming an IBM 704 — was based on endless what-if simulations. The IBM 704 was billed as the first mass-produced computer capable of doing complex mathematics. Today, this kind of work is much vaunted and lavishly funded. The 2018 Encyclopedia of Database Systems describes ‘what-if analysis’ as “a data-intensive simulation”. It refers to it as “a relatively recent discipline”. Not so. Buoyed by the buzz of Kennedy’s election, Simulmatics began an advertising blitz. Its 1961 initial stock offering set out how the company would turn prediction into profit — by gathering massive data, constructing mathematical models of behavioural processes, and using them to simulate “probable group behaviour”.
Do you really think these What-If Men are done and gone, set out to pasture like the cattle they manipulate? Really? Seriously. No. Obviously not. Or there wouldn't be such a fuss about Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. Same Crap. Different Flies. Only know there are more flies and the crap pile is bigger.
In 1963, on behalf of the Kennedy administration, Simulmatics simulated the entire economy of Venezuela, with an eye to halting the advance of socialism and communism. A larger project to undertake such work throughout Latin America, mostly designed by Pool and known as Project Camelot (Project Camelot, where have I heard that before?), became so controversial that the next president, Lyndon B. Johnson, dismantled it (sure he did). After 1965, Simulmatics conducted psychological research in Vietnam as part of a bigger project to use computers to predict revolutions. Much of this work built on earlier research by Lasswell and Pool, identifying and counting keywords, such as ‘nationalism’, in foreign-language newspapers that might indicate the likelihood of coups. Such topic-spotting is the precursor to Google Trends. Before his early death in 1984, Pool was also a key force behind the founding of the most direct descendant of Simulmatics, the MIT Media Lab. Pool’s work underlies the rules — or lack of them — that prevail on the Internet. Pool also founded the study of “social networks” (a term he coined); without it, there would be no Facebook. Pool’s experiences with student unrest at MIT — and especially with the protests against Simulmatics — informed his views on technological change and ethics. Look forward. Never look back. Source Here
Unrest and protest at MIT against Simulmatics. I guess you could call it Rage Against the Machine. Maybe we should ask Jeffery Epstein if that's a good name? He did invest a lot of money into the MIT Media lab, after all. Surely he has an opinion on it. Too bad he killed himself. Snicker. Look forward. Never back. That sounds suspiciously like a No Regrets policy, doesn't it? The ends justify the means. Let's hurry up and get those vaccines out. We can test for them along the way. It's all good.
Decades before Facebook and Google and Cambridge Analytica and every app on your phone, Simulmatics’ founders thought of it all: they had the idea that, if they could collect enough data about enough people and write enough good code, everything, one day, might be predicted—every human mind simulated and then directed by targeted messages as unerring as missiles. For its first mission, Simulmatics aimed to win the White House back for the Democratic Party. The University of California political theorist Eugene Burdick had worked for Greenfield in 1956, but decided not to join Simulmatics. Instead, he wrote a novel about it. In “The 480,” a political thriller published in 1964, a barely disguised “Simulations Enterprises” meddles with a U.S. Presidential election. “This may or may not result in evil,” Burdick warned. “Certainly it will result in the end of politics as Americans have known it.” That same year, in “Simulacron-3,” a science-fiction novel set in the year 2034, specialists in the field of “simulectronics” build a People Machine—“a total environment simulator”—only to discover that they themselves don’t exist and are, instead, merely the ethereal, Escherian inventions of yet another People Machine. After that, Simulmatics lived on in fiction and film, an anonymous avatar. In 1973, the German filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder adapted “Simulacron-3” into “World on a Wire,” a forerunner of the 1999 film “The Matrix,” in which all of humanity lives in a simulation, trapped, deluded, and dehumanized.
The Matrix? A people machine. A Total Environment Simulator. Yikes. That sounds extremely far fetched, doesn't it. Trapped. Deluded. And. Drumroll please. Dehumanized.
In 1967 and 1968, at home, Simulmatics attempted to build a race-riot-prediction machine. In 1969, after antiwar demonstrators called Pool a war criminal, the People Machine crashed; in 1970, the company filed for bankruptcy. (Most of its records were destroyed; I stumbled across what remains, in Pool’s papers, at M.I.T.) Source Here
A race riot machine that apparently failed? And look what happened nine months ago? Coincidence? Foreign power information warfare? AI training wheels? Kinda scary, ain't it? And guess what? We're not done yet.
Ithiel de Sola Pool
So the Simulmatics Corporation was responsible for this;
Sept 17, 2020 • In 1960, media reports of dark forces behind John F Kennedy’s winning presidential campaign caused what Jill Lepore calls a “national hullabaloo”. America’s new leader, it was widely reported, had clinched the victory with the help of a “secret weapon”: a super computer that crunched troves of data to profile voters, allowing Kennedy to better target his political messaging before the polls opened.
And now let's look deeper at somebody who worked at the Simulmatics Corporation, Ithiel de Sola Pool.
For all of Simulmatics’ efforts at automating prediction, it is company executive Ithiel de Sola Pool, an MIT academic with a focus on social networks, who in Lepore’s telling proves to be the most accurate prediction machine — foreseeing the “data-mad and near-totalitarian twenty-first century” that he was instrumental in helping to create. “In the coming atomised society, the information the citizen gets will arise from his own specific concerns,” he wrote in 1968, predicting a communications revolution, “customised news feeds” and the dismantling of party politics for a “politics of self, every citizen a party of one”. Source Here
That's extremely prescient. Did he predict the future or make it? What came first, the chicken or the egg? Don't matter. Don't care. Not at all. Because the end result is the same, So what more can we find out about de Sola Pool? How about the fact that he studied Nazis and Communists? Heck, he studied totalitarianist speeches to figure out how words could carry power and influence. Over us. Overload us. But how unethical was Pool? Well, the guy who risked everything to bring us the Pentagon Papers (the papers that proved the Gulf of Tomkins incident was a false flag) thought this: Daniel Ellsberg would later say of Pool, “I thought of him as the most corrupt social scientist I had ever met, without question.” Not cool. Definitely. Not. Cool. Because if you naively believe that Pool’s research isn't being used by the Technocrats today, then more power to you. Believe what you want. Or should I say, believe what they want. And who are "they"? They are the Rockefeller's and Rothschilds, the Technocrats, the World Economic Forum, the Bilderberg Group, CIA, NSA, and the Council on Foreign Relations. Speaking of which.
At that point in his (Pool’s) career, he was a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, advising several countries around the world. Pool felt that the world was underestimating the importance of communications and technical change. Source Here
Oops. Pool was a member of the CFR advising several countries around the world. Ok. Next step.
2004 • The transformation of the United States into a power able and willing to take a leading role in world affairs was not achieved solely through policy changes in Washington, DC, let alone simply by changes in the structure of world power. This chapter examines the vital role of the CFR in transforming American public opinion from ‘isolationist’ to ‘globalist’ as an important aspect of America’s rise to globalism. In this regard, the Council focused its energies to undermine and marginalise isolationism while promoting its own internationalist views as the best means to achieve the American national interest. Source Here
So if a bunch of unelected officials are officially changing policy, why do you vote? Rock the vote? Don't make me laugh. More like Don't Rock the Boat. They started running simulations back in the sixties. Remember, Nixon was the odds on favorite to win. Kennedy was a long shot. And then, Kennedy was the President. Nixon probably wasn't happy. After all, he was part of the power structure. He went to Bohemian Grove. And then he had the rug pulled out from underneath him. And what did he end of calling Bohemian Grove attendees? A bunch of fags. Oops. Who pissed in his cornflakes? They run simulations. Then they have different scenarios that dictate policy. Then they use the CFR, the WEF, the Rockefeller Group, and other NGO'S to adapt and shape future policy decisions to steer society. Heck. They probably even use the Mickey Mouse Club at this point.
November 21, 1971 • Of the first 82 names on a list prepared to help President Kennedy staff his State Department, 63 were Council members. Kennedy once com plained, “I'd like to have some new faces here, but all I get is the same old names.” Source Here
So a "People Machine" helped get JFK "elected" and his State Department list was mostly comprised of Council members. It's starting to look more and more like our heads of state are manipulated just like us, doesn't it? Let's jump back into the Pool one more time.
In 1965, he wrote "The Kaiser, the Tsar, and the Computer," an essay about a computer-simulated international crisis. Later, his interest in quantitative analysis and communications would contribute to computer models to study human behavior.
Computer Models aren't Playboy Centerfolds
It doesn't matter who gets voted in. They may think they're in charge. They may go along. Or they may think they're making changes. But, I guarantee you the changes they make are the changes those behind the scenes want. Even if our leaders know it or not. No way! Thats crazy! Insane! Ok. Sure. But remember this, in a world of insanity, a sane man is always perceived as being insane. So let's dive into the DEEP END OF THE POOL and see what we can find.
October 2, 2019 • With AI, the models suddenly become more realistic. “One of the things that has changed is an acceptance that you really can model humans,” says F. LeRon Shults, director of the Center for Modeling Social Systems at the University of Agder in Norway. “Our agents are cognitively complex. They are simulated people with genders, ages and personalities. They can get married, have children, get divorced. They can get a job or get fired, they can join groups, they can die. They can have religious beliefs. They’re social in the way humans are. They interact with each other in social networks. They learn from each other, react to each other and to the environment as a whole.”
Hold on. Agent's are cognitively complex? That's scary, isn't it? And this is a very strange situation we find ourselves in, isn't it? Agents. Simulations. Viruses. Sentinels. Didn't they try and block out the sun? Ahem. Bill Gates. And I've read that originally the script didn't have humanity as batteries, but instead used humans as their RAM. In other words, we we're used for our brains ability to think. More on this in an upcoming post. Just think about it for now.
Final Thoughts
The what if men and the people machine. They model society and we see what they want us to see. Kind of like the model in the Matrix wearing the red dress. We're too busy looking for danger everywhere but where we should look. And that's a mistake. This is why we can't dismiss anything. We have to question everything. In the previous post I said that it was called the Sentinel World Simulation. I found the article. I made a mistake. It's called the Sentient World Simulation. Words matter. Always. But I still don't think my mistake alters what's going on. We are being steered by an unseen group. And this is why China + Russia + USA are heading towards a cliff. He who controls AI controls humanity. But who controls who? More soon.
$SLV is not going to get squeezed...$SLV IS THE TROJAN HORSE FOR THE SILVER SQUEEZE THAT'S ALREADY HAPPENING
I have no horse in the GME "fight" right now. I wish you all the best, and it is the biggest trading mistake of my life so far. I was talking about GME with my friends in March 2020, and even did trade some options then for a loss. I must have read DFV at some point, as we were discussing Burry and a "technical short squeeze" happening. But I missed the real boat, so good on DFV and all of the rest of you degenerates. Instead, I focused my market attention during quarantine on precious metals. My opinion is that in the long term (10+ years) they will provide the only real hedge against inflation in the world as every CB on the planet is exploding the supply of fiat to deal with COVID economic disruption. In the short term, I believe that the "powers that be" are engineering the largest short squeeze in the history of markets. We do not have the power to effect whether this happens, it is simply an inevitability. HFs, banks, and other large institutions are going to extract an enormous amount of wealth from the world during this squeeze. This money will be taken from the future pocket of every consumer of industrial goods for the next several decades in the form of inflated prices on everything: batteries, electronics, solar panels, EVs...even jewelry and silverware. We cannot stop them, but I have decided to try to hop on for the ride. The last few months aside, I never saw WSB as a force for societal change, because the people who control the money are always going to win the most in the end. WSB is a place where we can learn the tricks of a market that is structurally rigged against us, and use those tricks to our advantage. To use an analogy that I think we all know: I am not, and will never be, Ender. But I can learn that the Enemy's Gate is Down, and play The Game that way. The tl;dr is this: the market for silver is the most manipulated physical market in the history of the world. $SLV is the vehicle that is currently being used behind the scenes to vaccum up ownership of every available physical bar of silver in major bullion vaults in the world. When it has completed doing that, the "paper" markets that have held down the price of silver for decades will become disconnected from the physical markets. The energy that has been artificially held back for decades by this paper will explode the price of physical silver, and I have no idea how high it will go. $SLV will stand (mostly) alone as the world's exchange traded product for electronic trading of physical silver.
LET'S START AT THE BEGINNING: WHY IS SILVER IMPORTANT?
Silver has been used as real currency for thousands of years, and there is an argument to be made for returning to "sound" money through the use of silver and gold. However, that is not the argument that I am making. Silver is a highly industrial metal, and it's usage for industry will only continue to expand as we electrify the future. Silver is important for electrical applications b/c it is the most-conductive / least-resistive metal in the universe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_conductivity#Resistivity_and_conductivity_of_various_materials). It is used heavily in all electronic applications (even more since RoHS has pushed us away from Tin/Lead and towards Tin/Silver solder blends, with silver being added to mitigate the longevity problems of 100% Tin solder growing Tin whiskers and shorting out components). But the largest new demands on silver are going to come from solar panels and EVs. Utility-scale solar is now virtually tied with wind as the cheapest new sources of energy in the world and is only getting cheaper every year. As fossil fuel plants continue to reach the end of their service life, they are going to be replaced with solar and wind technologies. As EVs become more prevalent, their components (ESPECIALLY their batteries) will produce additional demand for Silver. As smart investors are wont to do, this coming demand for industrial silver has been front-run and large quantites of silver have been sucked into investment products so that they can produce financial returns when demand begins to increase. 2020 showed remarkable investor interest in silver, to the tune of an estimated 350Mtoz moving into exchange traded products like $SLV. $SLV alone added ~200Mtoz of silver to it's holdings in 2020. Unfortunately for the market, supply cannot meet demand: Of the 930.9Mtoz estimated for 2020 demand, only 236Mtoz was available for physical investment, because the rest was consumed by industrial uses. This means that $SLV alone absorbed almost the entire world's capacity for silver investment in 2020, and as you'll see soon, this is only accelerating in 2021. Source for demand/supply/investment numbers: https://www.silverinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/SilverInstitute2020InterimPR.pdf
LETS GET PHYSICAL, PHYSICAL
Now it's important to understand that huge amounts of "silver" is traded on "paper" markets, and these markets have historically decided the approximate cost of physical silver in the world, in the form of the "spot price". I'm not going to give anyone a primer on how this works, go read about the London Fix and COMEX paper on your own time. But the important thing to know is that there are a bunch of silver bars in vaults in London and in the U.S., and electronic claims on them are traded on the LBMA and COMEX continuously, without the silver ever leaving the vaults. However, these vaults have concrete numbers of physical bars in them, and trading contracts against them technically means that you can show up at a window somewhere and demand your 5x 1000oz bars that a COMEX warrant entitle you to. This redemption happens all the time, and it can be used to extract physical silver from the unallocated storage at bullion vaults and release it to industrial or consumer bullion uses. However, these bars can also be moved into "registered" or "allocated" accounts without them leaving the overall vault storage. This means that a quantity of individual silver bars that an owner holds title to can be physically moved inside the vault onto a different rack, and the owner has individual serial numbers of bars that they own. These bars can be withdrawn on demand only by their owner and are not available for general redemption of a COMEX warrant. So how many bars are there? Well between LBMA and COMEX, there are 1480.3Mtoz sitting in vaults (sources below when I start doing math). This includes all allocated AND unallocated bars. Now, obviously London and NY are separated by an ocean, but people always like to bring up that bars could be moved b/w London <-> American COMEX vaults. This is an enormous undertaking, but let's make a "spherical chicken in a vaccuum" level assumption and say that LBMA + COMEX vaults are a singular source of inventory for both $SLV and other market participants. If you read the $SLV S-1 (which I did: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1330568/000119312505127244/ds1.htm) you would learn that the custodian of the $SLV trust is required to hold all silver weight (with an exception for 1100toz of unallocated, lol) that is owned by the trust in allocated accounts, where the individual bars are physically segregated inside the vaults, and the serial numbers of the owned bars are explicitly recorded. The idea that there is "no physical silver" backing the SLV trust and "you could get settled with cash" is ridiculous. iShares publishes a report listing every serial number of every bar that is owned by the trust, along with the total weight contained in the bars. It is 10847 pages long (you can read it here if you have trouble sleeping at night: https://emea-markets.jpmorgan.com/metalicsWebAppJanus/publicUnauthenticated/BONY_SLV.pdf) and is updated frequently. The underlying silver is owned by the trust. It cannot be removed from the trust unless "baskets" of 50000 shares are redeemed by an "Authorized Participant" which is only a few large brokers. It cannot be removed by the bullion vaults and given to other customers because it is physically segregated inside the vaults. People who have recently beaten down the idea of a silver squeeze love to talk about how JP Morgan is the custodian for the SLV trust. And because JPM just paid a $1B fine for historical manipulation of the paper silver market, they aren't going to be honest about this. This is crazy talk. When it comes to the dishonesty of a big bank, there is "fraud" and there is FRAUD. "Fraud" would be them saying "Oh sorry, we didn't realize that a laundromat bringing in $300k/week of dirty dollar bills was out of the ordinary". "Fraud" happens all the time, and the banks get away with it regularly. FRAUD would be them saying "Oh yes, 3rd party customer (iShares) who services dozens of other large banking institutions in the world, here is objective evidence, with serial numbers, that we have these silver bars in the vault" and then just making up the data. It is QANON-level crazy, IMHO, to think that JPM is going to commit FRAUD by publishing a list of serial numbers that is completely fake. I believe the exact opposite: since they have just gotten caught, they are playing it straight this time and have just switched sides in order to go long. On the COMEX alone, JP Morgan Chase is long 193.9Mtoz, or just north of $5B. The problem for the futures and options markets is that their continual trading of paper contracts is chasing a smaller and smaller amount of physical silver that is not owned by $SLV. And the market participants (minus, now, JPM) who have gotten away with naked selling of paper contracts and mostly settling them for cash are going to soon find the underlying vaults empty and no metal to give to warrant holders who come looking for it.
HOW BIG OF A PROBLEM IS $SLV FOR THE NAKED SHORTS IN THE PAPER MARKET? LET'S DO SOME MATH.
$SLV inventory math: $SLV is holding 669,357,789.40 troy ounces in trust, and has 720,500,000 shares outstanding. (If you are curious why $SLV/share trades below the spot price, it's because: 669.4Mtoz / 720.5M shares = .929 toz / share) ($SLV data from here: https://www.ishares.com/us/products/239855/ishares-silver-trust-fund?qt=SLV#/ ) (screenshot from tonight for posterity: https://imgur.com/a/0sqcMFr) Bullion vault inventory math: London (LBMA) silver stocks are 1080.5Mtoz (http://www.lbma.org.uk/london-precious-metals-physical-holdings-statistics) US COMEX silver stocks are 399.8Mtoz (https://www.cmegroup.com/delivery_reports/Silver_stocks.xls) 669.4/(1080.5 + 399.8) = 45.2% of the vaulted silver in the world is already owned by SLV Subtracting what SLV already owns, leaves us with: (1080.5 + 399.8) - 669.4 = 810.9Mtoz (This is completely ignoring the fact that a lot of that remaining silver is owned in registered or allocated accounts by individual owners. E.g. there is 150.2Mtoz in "registered" on the COMEX which means those bars are already specifically deeded to an individual owner. But they could theoretically sell it to SLV so I included it as available.) 810.9Mtoz is the ABSOLUTE THEORETICAL MAXIMUM available in LBMA + COMEX silver that is not already owned by SLV. Now how short are the shorts? Some more math: OI on COMEX futures: https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/metals/precious/silver-futures-and-options.html
in currently open interest that could be demanded for delivery. Just on the COMEX, there could be demand for twice as much silver as there is in the combined LBMA + COMEX vaults that is not explicitly owned by $SLV right now. Caveats:
I have not included any London futures contracts that may have claims on metal here. I am not versed in their contracts at all and don't have a good data source right now. If anyone knows how to calculate the short obligation for London I would be glad to add it.
I have not analyzed any of the strike prices on COMEX options or dates on COMEX futures...some of them could be way out of the money or way in the future. Many silver producers sell futures years in advance to lock in prices, and then deliver the physical to satisfy the contracts.
Using the same basic methodology–total shorts divided by shares [toz in this case] outstanding–as is used on a stock to calculate short interest (and gave us the infamous 140% short interest on GME) we get......drumroll please: 1563.9 short / 810.9 physical = 192.9% short interest. OPEN INTEREST ON COMEX SILVER FUTURES AND OPTIONS IS EQUIVALENT TO A 192.9% SHORT INTEREST AGAINST ALL LONDON AND U.S. AVAILABLE INVENTORY. But it gets even worse.
WANNA ADD A GAMMA SQUEEZE??
I pulled the data for all current OI in SLV options. There is a large number (5.7 million) of call contracts open (here are the totals: https://imgur.com/tiqPA34) Using the .929toz/share number, we can calculate that there are up to 527.2Mtoz that would have to be bought during an absolute runaway Gamma Squeeze. Call options on $SLV max out right now at $55, so the spot price would only have to increase by around 122% to reach the point that all of that weight would need to have been purchased. But at some point, it could become self-reinforcing, and the gamma squeeze continues to cause more gamma squeezing. I believe that this almost happened Sunday evening (2021-01-31) as evidenced by the huge premium that $SLV was trading to the futures price for a few minutes when trading opened. (My comparison chart: https://i.imgur.com/UPjL3zm.png) The Silver ETF that trades on Sunday in Tel Aviv (https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/TCHF82:IT) closed up >6% (and was consistenly rising for the entire session) before any american spot markets opened. I believe that hedging algorithms at MM firms that write options saw this spike as a need to buy shares in $SLV to cover their deltas, and so they bought the opening of $SLV like crazy. $SLV opened up 17.6%, while paper only opened up about 6%. Paper market players had to sell 23.8Mtoz of paper in the first minute of trading to keep the price under control. I have never seen an imbalance like this before, and it was covered up quickly (within 2 hours of trading). But to me, it sounds like Vincent's heartbeat monitor in GATTACA when he runs out of fake signal: there was a cover up required to hide this explosion. When the day comes that this cover up is not executed properly, stuff is going to get ugly, b/c $SLV won't just gamma squeeze like a normal stock...
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! A TRADITIONAL GAMMA/SHORT SQUEEZE WILL SEEM LIKE NOTHING IN SILVER
The squeeze in silver will be FAR WORSE than the combination of a gamma and short squeeze in a stock, because shares of stock cannot be removed from the market. Eventually somebody holding $VW or $GME is going to say "sure, I'll sell at $42,000.69 per share" and that share can go back to cover a short. But if instead of doing that, the holder of that share withdrew it from the market by converting it to a physical token b/c they thought that the physical token would be more valuable than the share (the retail premium on physical silver vs. paper silver), the short interest would INCREASE as shares were converted into tokens. And since there are currently more "shares" of silver than there are bars of silver in the vault, the shorts can be caught with a literally illiquid market that has nothing to buy. Zero. Zilch. No silver available. The doomsday scenario (for paper silver holders and writers) is the following combination:
holders of COMEX warrants will see the rising premium of physical bullion to the spot price and decide to redeem their warrants for physical
a rising spot price will Gamma Squeeze the writers of $SLV options into buying more shares in a runaway fashion and the trust will absorb all available vault inventory as it issues new shares
COMEX warrant holders who try to demand metal that doesn't exist will literally break the market. The CBOE will probably step in and decide to force settle the contracts for cash at the last known good price, and COMEX paper warrants will cease trading forever. The physical market price will then be disconnected from the paper market, and $SLV as an exchange traded product will stand (mostly) alone as the new "paper" market for silver.
SO WTF DO I DO? [NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE]
Well I could always buy physical silver, if I can stomach the premium and wait 8 weeks for it to show up. Or, I could just get long on $SLV. Since I believe that $SLV will stand alone after the dust settles as the one true claim on bars in the vaults, I could be long the actual $SLV ticker in several ways:
Buying shares (duh, but it worked for $GME)
Buying long dated calls (Gamma Squeeze go BRRRRR, but who knows when)
$SLV is not going to get squeezed...$SLV is the Trojan Horse for the squeeze THAT'S ALREADY HAPPENING
I have no horse in the GME "fight" right now. I wish you all the best, and it is the biggest trading mistake of my life so far. I was talking about GME with my friends in March 2020, and even did trade some options then for a loss. I must have read DFV at some point, as we were discussing Burry and a "technical short squeeze" happening. But I missed the real boat, so good on DFV and all of the rest of you degenerates. Instead, I focused my market attention during quarantine on precious metals. My opinion is that in the long term (10+ years) they will provide the only real hedge against inflation in the world as every CB on the planet is exploding the supply of fiat to deal with COVID economic disruption. In the short term, I believe that the "powers that be" are engineering the largest short squeeze in the history of markets. We do not have the power to effect whether this happens, it is simply an inevitability. HFs, banks, and other large institutions are going to extract an enormous amount of wealth from the world during this squeeze. This money will be taken from the future pocket of every consumer of industrial goods for the next several decades in the form of inflated prices on everything: batteries, electronics, solar panels, EVs...even jewelry and silverware. We cannot stop them, but I have decided to try to hop on for the ride. The last few months aside, I never saw WSB as a force for societal change, because the people who control the money are always going to win the most in the end. WSB is a place where we can learn the tricks of a market that is structurally rigged against us, and use those tricks to our advantage. To use an analogy that I think we all know: I am not, and will never be, Ender. But I can learn that the Enemy's Gate is Down, and play The Game that way. The tl;dr is this: the market for silver is the most manipulated physical market in the history of the world. $SLV is the vehicle that is currently being used behind the scenes to vaccum up ownership of every available physical bar of silver in major bullion vaults in the world. When it has completed doing that, the "paper" markets that have held down the price of silver for decades will become disconnected from the physical markets. The energy that has been artificially held back for decades by this paper will explode the price of physical silver, and I have no idea how high it will go. $SLV will stand (mostly) alone as the world's exchange traded product for electronic trading of physical silver.
LET'S START AT THE BEGINNING: WHY IS SILVER IMPORTANT?
Silver has been used as real currency for thousands of years, and there is an argument to be made for returning to "sound" money through the use of silver and gold. However, that is not the argument that I am making. Silver is a highly industrial metal, and it's usage for industry will only continue to expand as we electrify the future. Silver is important for electrical applications b/c it is the most-conductive / least-resistive metal in the universe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_resistivity_and_conductivity#Resistivity_and_conductivity_of_various_materials). It is used heavily in all electronic applications (even more since RoHS has pushed us away from Tin/Lead and towards Tin/Silver solder blends, with silver being added to mitigate the longevity problems of 100% Tin solder growing Tin whiskers and shorting out components). But the largest new demands on silver are going to come from solar panels and EVs. Utility-scale solar is now virtually tied with wind as the cheapest new sources of energy in the world and is only getting cheaper every year. As fossil fuel plants continue to reach the end of their service life, they are going to be replaced with solar and wind technologies. As EVs become more prevalent, their components (ESPECIALLY their batteries) will produce additional demand for Silver. As smart investors are wont to do, this coming demand for industrial silver has been front-run and large quantites of silver have been sucked into investment products so that they can produce financial returns when demand begins to increase. 2020 showed remarkable investor interest in silver, to the tune of an estimated 350Mtoz moving into exchange traded products like $SLV. $SLV alone added ~200Mtoz of silver to it's holdings in 2020. Unfortunately for the market, supply cannot meet demand: Of the 930.9Mtoz estimated for 2020 demand, only 236Mtoz was available for physical investment, because the rest was consumed by industrial uses. This means that $SLV alone absorbed almost the entire world's capacity for silver investment in 2020, and as you'll see soon, this is only accelerating in 2021. Source for demand/supply/investment numbers: https://www.silverinstitute.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/SilverInstitute2020InterimPR.pdf
LETS GET PHYSICAL, PHYSICAL
Now it's important to understand that huge amounts of "silver" is traded on "paper" markets, and these markets have historically decided the approximate cost of physical silver in the world, in the form of the "spot price". I'm not going to give anyone a primer on how this works, go read about the London Fix and COMEX paper on your own time. But the important thing to know is that there are a bunch of silver bars in vaults in London and in the U.S., and electronic claims on them are traded on the LBMA and COMEX continuously, without the silver ever leaving the vaults. However, these vaults have concrete numbers of physical bars in them, and trading contracts against them technically means that you can show up at a window somewhere and demand your 5x 1000oz bars that a COMEX warrant entitle you to. This redemption happens all the time, and it can be used to extract physical silver from the unallocated storage at bullion vaults and release it to industrial or consumer bullion uses. However, these bars can also be moved into "registered" or "allocated" accounts without them leaving the overall vault storage. This means that a quantity of individual silver bars that an owner holds title to can be physically moved inside the vault onto a different rack, and the owner has individual serial numbers of bars that they own. These bars can be withdrawn on demand only by their owner and are not available for general redemption of a COMEX warrant. So how many bars are there? Well between LBMA and COMEX, there are 1480.3Mtoz sitting in vaults (sources below when I start doing math). This includes all allocated AND unallocated bars. Now, obviously London and NY are separated by an ocean, but people always like to bring up that bars could be moved b/w London <-> American COMEX vaults. This is an enormous undertaking, but let's make a "spherical chicken in a vaccuum" level assumption and say that LBMA + COMEX vaults are a singular source of inventory for both $SLV and other market participants. If you read the $SLV S-1 (which I did: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgadata/1330568/000119312505127244/ds1.htm) you would learn that the custodian of the $SLV trust is required to hold all silver weight (with an exception for 1100toz of unallocated, lol) that is owned by the trust in allocated accounts, where the individual bars are physically segregated inside the vaults, and the serial numbers of the owned bars are explicitly recorded. The idea that there is "no physical silver" backing the SLV trust and "you could get settled with cash" is ridiculous. iShares publishes a report listing every serial number of every bar that is owned by the trust, along with the total weight contained in the bars. It is 10847 pages long (you can read it here if you have trouble sleeping at night: https://emea-markets.jpmorgan.com/metalicsWebAppJanus/publicUnauthenticated/BONY_SLV.pdf) and is updated frequently. The underlying silver is owned by the trust. It cannot be removed from the trust unless "baskets" of 50000 shares are redeemed by an "Authorized Participant" which is only a few large brokers. It cannot be removed by the bullion vaults and given to other customers because it is physically segregated inside the vaults. People who have recently beaten down the idea of a silver squeeze love to talk about how JP Morgan is the custodian for the SLV trust. And because JPM just paid a $1B fine for historical manipulation of the paper silver market, they aren't going to be honest about this. This is crazy talk. When it comes to the dishonesty of a big bank, there is "fraud" and there is FRAUD. "Fraud" would be them saying "Oh sorry, we didn't realize that a laundromat bringing in $300k/week of dirty dollar bills was out of the ordinary". "Fraud" happens all the time, and the banks get away with it regularly. FRAUD would be them saying "Oh yes, 3rd party customer (iShares) who services dozens of other large banking institutions in the world, here is objective evidence, with serial numbers, that we have these silver bars in the vault" and then just making up the data. It is QANON-level crazy, IMHO, to think that JPM is going to commit FRAUD by publishing a list of serial numbers that is completely fake. I believe the exact opposite: since they have just gotten caught, they are playing it straight this time and have just switched sides in order to go long. On the COMEX alone, JP Morgan Chase is long 193.9Mtoz, or just north of $5B. The problem for the futures and options markets is that their continual trading of paper contracts is chasing a smaller and smaller amount of physical silver that is not owned by $SLV. And the market participants (minus, now, JPM) who have gotten away with naked selling of paper contracts and mostly settling them for cash are going to soon find the underlying vaults empty and no metal to give to warrant holders who come looking for it.
HOW BIG OF A PROBLEM IS $SLV FOR THE NAKED SHORTS IN THE PAPER MARKET? LET'S DO SOME MATH.
$SLV inventory math: $SLV is holding 669,357,789.40 troy ounces in trust, and has 720,500,000 shares outstanding. (If you are curious why $SLV/share trades below the spot price, it's because: 669.4Mtoz / 720.5M shares = .929 toz / share) ($SLV data from here: https://www.ishares.com/us/products/239855/ishares-silver-trust-fund?qt=SLV#/ ) (screenshot from tonight for posterity: https://imgur.com/a/0sqcMFr) Bullion vault inventory math: London (LBMA) silver stocks are 1080.5Mtoz (http://www.lbma.org.uk/london-precious-metals-physical-holdings-statistics) US COMEX silver stocks are 399.8Mtoz (https://www.cmegroup.com/delivery_reports/Silver_stocks.xls) 669.4/(1080.5 + 399.8) = 45.2% of the vaulted silver in the world is already owned by SLV Subtracting what SLV already owns, leaves us with: (1080.5 + 399.8) - 669.4 = 810.9Mtoz (This is completely ignoring the fact that a lot of that remaining silver is owned in registered or allocated accounts by individual owners. E.g. there is 150.2Mtoz in "registered" on the COMEX which means those bars are already specifically deeded to an individual owner. But they could theoretically sell it to SLV so I included it as available.) 810.9Mtoz is the ABSOLUTE THEORETICAL MAXIMUM available in LBMA + COMEX silver that is not already owned by SLV. Now how short are the shorts? Some more math: OI on COMEX futures: https://www.cmegroup.com/trading/metals/precious/silver-futures-and-options.html
in currently open interest that could be demanded for delivery. Just on the COMEX, there could be demand for twice as much silver as there is in the combined LBMA + COMEX vaults that is not explicitly owned by $SLV right now. Caveats:
I have not included any London futures contracts that may have claims on metal here. I am not versed in their contracts at all and don't have a good data source right now. If anyone knows how to calculate the short obligation for London I would be glad to add it.
I have not analyzed any of the strike prices on COMEX options or dates on COMEX futures...some of them could be way out of the money or way in the future. Many silver producers sell futures years in advance to lock in prices, and then deliver the physical to satisfy the contracts.
Using the same basic methodology–total shorts divided by shares [toz in this case] outstanding–as is used on a stock to calculate short interest (and gave us the infamous 140% short interest on GME) we get......drumroll please: 1563.9 short / 810.9 physical = 192.9% short interest. OPEN INTEREST ON COMEX SILVER FUTURES AND OPTIONS IS EQUIVALENT TO A 192.9% SHORT INTEREST AGAINST ALL LONDON AND U.S. AVAILABLE INVENTORY. But it gets even worse.
WANNA ADD A GAMMA SQUEEZE??
I pulled the data for all current OI in SLV options. There is a large number (5.7 million) of call contracts open (here are the totals: https://imgur.com/tiqPA34) Using the .929toz/share number, we can calculate that there are up to 527.2Mtoz that would have to be bought during an absolute runaway Gamma Squeeze. Call options on $SLV max out right now at $55, so the spot price would only have to increase by around 122% to reach the point that all of that weight would need to have been purchased. But at some point, it could become self-reinforcing, and the gamma squeeze continues to cause more gamma squeezing. I believe that this almost happened Sunday evening (2021-01-31) as evidenced by the huge premium that $SLV was trading to the futures price for a few minutes when trading opened. (My comparison chart: https://i.imgur.com/UPjL3zm.png) The Silver ETF that trades on Sunday in Tel Aviv (https://www.bloomberg.com/quote/TCHF82:IT) closed up >6% (and was consistenly rising for the entire session) before any american spot markets opened. I believe that hedging algorithms at MM firms that write options saw this spike as a need to buy shares in $SLV to cover their deltas, and so they bought the opening of $SLV like crazy. $SLV opened up 17.6%, while paper only opened up about 6%. Paper market players had to sell 23.8Mtoz of paper in the first minute of trading to keep the price under control. I have never seen an imbalance like this before, and it was covered up quickly (within 2 hours of trading). But to me, it sounds like Vincent's heartbeat monitor in GATTACA when he runs out of fake signal: there was a cover up required to hide this explosion. When the day comes that this cover up is not executed properly, stuff is going to get ugly, b/c $SLV won't just gamma squeeze like a normal stock...
BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE! A TRADITIONAL GAMMA/SHORT SQUEEZE WILL SEEM LIKE NOTHING IN SILVER
The squeeze in silver will be FAR WORSE than the combination of a gamma and short squeeze in a stock, because shares of stock cannot be removed from the market. Eventually somebody holding $VW or $GME is going to say "sure, I'll sell at $42,000.69 per share" and that share can go back to cover a short. But if instead of doing that, the holder of that share withdrew it from the market by converting it to a physical token b/c they thought that the physical token would be more valuable than the share (the retail premium on physical silver vs. paper silver), the short interest would INCREASE as shares were converted into tokens. And since there are currently more "shares" of silver than there are bars of silver in the vault, the shorts can be caught with a literally illiquid market that has nothing to buy. Zero. Zilch. No silver available. The doomsday scenario (for paper silver holders and writers) is the following combination:
holders of COMEX warrants will see the rising premium of physical bullion to the spot price and decide to redeem their warrants for physical
a rising spot price will Gamma Squeeze the writers of $SLV options into buying more shares in a runaway fashion and the trust will absorb all available vault inventory as it issues new shares
COMEX warrant holders who try to demand metal that doesn't exist will literally break the market. The CBOE will probably step in and decide to force settle the contracts for cash at the last known good price, and COMEX paper warrants will cease trading forever. The physical market price will then be disconnected from the paper market, and $SLV as an exchange traded product will stand (mostly) alone as the new "paper" market for silver.
SO WTF DO I DO? [NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE]
Well I could always buy physical silver, if I can stomach the premium and wait 8 weeks for it to show up. Or, I could just get long on $SLV. Since I believe that $SLV will stand alone after the dust settles as the one true claim on bars in the vaults, I could be long the actual $SLV ticker in several ways:
Buying shares (duh, but it worked for $GME)
Buying long dated calls (Gamma Squeeze go BRRRRR, but who knows when)
This post is mod-approved and I hope it's helpful. My name is Jared A. Brock and today is my 35th birthday. It’s been a wild ride: I’ve walked across hot coals, swam up an underground river by candlelight, eaten bull’s testicles, and roasted marshmallows on flowing lava. I’ve written three books, directed four films, published 400+ articles everywhere from Esquire to The Guardian to TIME Magazine, road-tripped through 45 American states and nine Canadian provinces, helped get some laws changed, and traveled to forty countries including North Korea and the Vatican. I’ve enjoyed nearly thirteen years of marriage to my seventh-grade sweetheart, and we’ve been blessed to fundraise hundreds of thousands for charity. Though not without tons of mistakes and some major setbacks — financially, physically, emotionally, spiritually — it’s been a pretty decent trip so far. I’m lucky, blessed, downright spoiled. And even though I certainly don’t claim to be wise in any way, shape, or form, here are 35 things I wish I’d learned far sooner. None of these are rules or commands for you to follow, just personal reflections from a decade of journaling. I hope they save you a lot of time, energy, struggle, and life:
1. “Save the best for last” is terrible advice.
A French monk taught me this one. Every morning, I put on the newest pair of socks in my drawer. Why wear the rattiest pair? When I sit down to eat, I eat the tastiest bits first. Why let them get cold? After every shower, I put on my favorite clean t-shirt. I have a great bottle of 10-year-old Laphroaig scotch in my cupboard, but I probably won’t drink it for months because I received two bottles of reactor-aged Lost Spirits single malt for Christmas. Why? Because life is hard enough and we aren’t promised tomorrow. This doesn’t mean we should throw caution to the wind and “live in the moment” at all times, but it does mean we should try to find the golden middle and glean a little bit of pleasure from every day we’re blessed to live. “Save the best for last” is poverty-mentality thinking. It expects worse in the future. Enjoy the best right now — in your marriage, parenting, work, travel, faith, friendship, contribution. Keep all the chips on the table. Be ready at all times to leave without regret.
2. Tools use us.
A hammer literally cannot hit a nail without using a human.A saw cannot cut through a board without using a human.A phone cannot deliver ads without using a human.
3. Avoid false dichotomies.
When given two great options, choose both.When given two horrible options, choose neither.
4. Failure is overcome by one word.
“Next.”
5. Give yourself a shove.
The best way to eat more candy and drink more vodka is to leave them side-by-side on the kitchen counter. You get it. Willpower is useless. Instead, line up a series of little nudges to automatically get you through your day. If you want to work out, leave your shorts by the door or your cleats in your fridge. My blue diode glasses rest on top of my laptop so I have to protect my eyes before logging online. I can’t not see my vitamins when I brush my teeth, or chia seeds when I reach for the Brita. There’s a book beside my bed, toilet, desk, and car’s gear shifter. Line up enough nudges and you can shove yourself in the right direction.
6. Awkward is awesome.
My best friend says that The Office gave society a beautiful gift: the ability to embrace cringe. When you meet someone new and it’s slightly weird, pretend you’re Michael Scott. Just glory and bask in the discomfort. You can awkward-proof your life by being bold: Ask for discounts. Ask for refunds. Ask for phone numbers. Ask for pay raises. Ask inappropriate questions at inappropriate times. Lather yourself in awkward and pretty soon nothing sticks.
7. Ambition is ruinous for your happiness.
Most goal-setters (myself included) live much of life in anticipation of tomorrow, and when that day arrives, they’re either disappointed by their failures or underwhelmed by their successes. Instead: trust the process. Whiskey, pasta, bread, beer, and cereal all require just two ingredients — wheat and water — but the outcome is completely different based on the process. Identity precedes action. Determine what you want to be, then determine the process that will get you there every single time.
8. The Marines were right: slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
As teenagers, my friend Tyler and I were in a hurry to get somewhere quickly so we drove 120+ miles per hour for forty-five straight minutes before nearly crashing when the speed burned a footlong gash through the tire. By the time we replaced it with a spare, we were late to our destination by more than an hour. But nevermind driving. Pump the life-brakes sometimes, or at least, let off the gas. You might get there faster.
9. Most “leaders” aren’t leaders.
Celebrities, politicians, and book-hocking business gurus all call themselves leaders. They’re not. Real leadership is influence that serves. True leaders are selfless and servant-hearted. They put the best interests of others ahead of their own. Politics and media, by comparison, attracts sociopaths like flies to firelight. Never give power to those who seek it. Nearly everyone worth following is dead.
10. Old people know better.
Honoring our elders is one of the most underrated practices in our newness-obsessed society. Sure, there are a ton of old crazy far-right conspiracy theorists, but there are also good people who have survived four wars, six recessions, and twelve presidents and are somehow still smiling. Get to know them. Also: meet your old-person self. I try to invent a new word every week — one of them is preflection. To ponder the present through the eyes of your future self. Take an hour in silence to listen to your eighty-year-old self. They might know something you don’t.
11. Fire all your employees.
The employer-employee relationship creates an unhealthy power dynamic between humans that simply didn’t exist when we worked cooperatively to feed our clan or village. I love my work life so much more now that I only work with independent entrepreneurs who are my equals. For me, it’s either a one-man show (my writing business), an equal partnership (my film company), or a co-operative endeavor. Life’s too short to be a boss or be bossed around.
12. Accept that you are a voracious locust of doom.
Nail a roll of paper to the wall and write down everything you consume for a year — food, toilet paper, electricity, car fuel, movies, music, social media content, other people’s time, everything. See what I mean? Saint Augustine said that the human heart can only fully be satisfied by one thing aside from God himself: everything. All the sex, all the money, all the power, all the possessions, all the glory. All of it. Nothing short of everything could ever fully satiate the human heart. We are wired for more. Understanding this truth is the first step toward real contentment.
13. Forget what the market wants.
Listen to your gut. Your body knows the difference between good and great. Someone said you should never record a song or code an app or write an article unless it makes you laugh, cry, or orgasm. If an idea doesn’t move you, it won’t move an audience, no matter how “commercial” you think it is.
14. Happiness isn’t the purpose of life.
Hitler really was following his bliss by offing millions of Jews. I’m sure Jeffrey Dahmer genuinely enjoyed the taste of human flesh. Bernie Madoff seemed content to bilk charities for decades. Happiness isn’t the purpose of life. It’s not even in the top ten. Happiness is a seasonal fruit, not a foundational root. Find firm and fertile ground.
15. There is no ugly.
My grandpa re-proposed to my grandma on their fiftieth wedding anniversary and called her the most beautiful woman he’s ever known. Old wrinkly grandma? Yes. Because we choose our definition of beauty through our thoughts, disciplines, habits, and patterns, be they conscious or otherwise.
16. We are what we consume.
The statistical average American is a walking bodybag of sugar, alcohol, caffeine, porn, pills, and digital stimulus. Imagine how different life would be if our only inputs were nature, sleep, sunlight, organic food, and embodied human interaction? Guard your inputs carefully.
17. We’re going to die quite soon.
Make sure you live first. Practicing memento mori will help.
18. Fame is poison.
One in four Gen Zers thinks they’ll be famous by age 25. One in 3.9999999 Gen Zers are going to have a miserably disappointing life. Why do people desire the attention of strangers? Because we all need to love and be loved, to know and be known, but are too afraid to risk personal heartbreak to seek it out. Attention is not affection. Influence is not intimacy.
19. Boomers are to blame for half our troubles.
The Me Generation took a free ride at the planet’s expense and is hellbent on taking the rest of it with them. They’re statistically low on empathy — blame the lead, asbestos, and hairspray if you must — but at least acknowledge the reality that life is hard for everyone, and no one has it easier.
20. Children are dope.
Kids are the blood transfusion in our sick system. We need to stop manipulating, brainwashing, colonizing, and propagandizing them, and learn from them instead.
21. It doesn’t have to hurt.
Joy is a choice.
22. Watch comedy before calls and meetings.
Five minutes of gut-busting laughter will prime you for even the most tedious conference call. Your co-workers and customers all have tough lives like everybody else, so brighten their day by pre-brightening your own.
23. No ragrets.
Tattoo it on your neck. Most people play it far too safe. Instead: optimize your life for the least number of regrets and the most amount of selfless contribution.
24. There are better ways to vote.
I’ve manned several local voting stations, and I’ve also hob-nobbed with politicians in Canada, America, and the UK. The reality is that they don’t work for us. They work for their corporate sponsors and private interests. Democracy isn’t dead. It just hasn’t happened yet, with all attempts to date being stillborn or aborted. Democracy = one voice one vote. Athens wasn’t a democracy — women, slaves, and tenants had zero say. America isn’t a democracy either — no representative system is, because it’s far too easy for private interests to buy politicians. The charade of voting is illusory. All elections are sham elections. So what to do? Vote with your money and time and attention. One sham vote every four years versus tens of thousands of dollar-votes each year? It’s a no-brainer. My wife and I haven’t stepped foot in a Walmart in more than a decade because thousands of its suppliers are based in China, the billionaire heirs are anti-democratic tax-avoiders, and they treat their employees like indentured servants. Vote for pro-democracy third-party candidates if you must — just understand the game, and also vote in the ways that actually matter.
25. Everything easy has already been done.
So run a little further. And if it hasn’t been done, it won’t be as easy as it appears. The question to ask is: what’s been standing in the way this whole time? Achievement is all about knocking down obstacles. Just make sure what’s on the other side is rightly worth the effort.
26. Broccoli still tastes terrible.
But you’re not a child anymore. Adults do hard things.
Discipline is great, but it’s also subject to the law of diminishing returns. Life is just too dynamic to schedule with military precision. Free yourself from the tyranny of “only people who wake up at 5 AM are successful.” All hours are not created equal. It depends on your sleep drive and chronotype. Know yourself. Unapologetically get some sleep, then do your best work at your best time in your best state.
28. “Freedom” isn’t freedom.
America wasn’t founded on freedom. America was founded on violent autonomy. The ancient Greeks had an entirely different definition of freedom: it was the ability to choose the right regardless of circumstance.
“We talk about freedom all the time, but we’ve stopped talking about freedom a long time ago. Now we’re talking about autonomy. Freedom is different than autonomy. Freedom has boundaries. Truth is one of those boundaries. And morality is one of those boundaries. Autonomy is the ability to do whatever you want whenever you want in whatever way you want.The problem is this: If I’m autonomous and another person is autonomous, and I have preferences and those matter more than the truth, and that person has preferences and their preferences matter more than the truth, when two autonomous preference-seeking beings come together and their preferences don’t match, who is going to win? If truth is on the bottom shelf, truth won’t decide. What will decide will be power. And isn’t it ironic that in our quest for “freedom”, someone gets enslaved?” —Abdu Murray
29. Grandma didn’t use toilet paper.
She used pages from the Sears catalog. Splinter-free wasn’t available until 1935. The Romans used sponges. The Greeks used clay. Francois Rabelais recommended using “the neck of a goose.” Arabians used their left hand. Never assume our extremely unique cultural moment is “normal.”
30. The quest for wealth is destroying life.
We need a shared global vision. My invented word for it is benevitae: the sustainable flourishing of all creation. Our collective goal should be socioenviroeconomic sustainability. Where to start? We’d do well to let biology determine ecological sustainability and real democracy to determine economic fairness. Our current trajectory is worse than the Space Shuttle Challenger.
31. Ninety-nine isn’t enough.
Water boils at 100 degrees Celcius. The difference between 99 and 100 is the difference between zero and one. Not-boiling, boiling. Corollary: 101 doesn’t make it any more boiling.
32. Divide-and-conquer is a business model.
Near the end of high school, dozen friends and I binge-watched multiple seasons of LOST in our friend Mike’s basement. It was one of the most hilarious, riotous, enjoyable experiences we had as a group. And it was the last show we ever watched together. People used to go to restaurants in large numbers, to the movies by the dozen, climbing over each other for one of the limited video game controllers, packing out our churches, cheering on our sports teams by the busload. We were almost never alone, and we were far happier. Now we order in, watch Netflix, stream Minecraft, catch the highlights, watch porn, and go to bed. It’s killing us. Resist the urge to be alone. It’s too easy, and it’s the exact opposite of what we really need. The #1 thing that’s correlated to human happiness is human togetherness.
33. Self-improvement won’t save us.
The great lie of individualist-consumerist culture is that we can improve our way to personal perfection and communal utopia. But it’s incrementalism at best. It’s just chasing infinity.
34. We know nothing +/-.
On the scale of all that is known, and all that is knowable, our individual understanding is essentially mathematically zero. The entirety of human knowledge is a rounding error. This is the beginning of humility.
35. The sun is not on fire
This whole list began in Texas. I was at an observatory in the Davis Mountains and it was the first time I’d paid attention to astronomy since grade school. For three decades, I’d wrongly assumed the sun was a giant ball of flames. But there’s no fire in space because there’s no oxygen in space. It just looks like fire because of how our eyes perceive light through the atmosphere and prism. As I stared at the real-time image of the sun on the observatory wall, I nearly wept. The sun actually looks like a giant, boiling, grey brain. And then it hit me: I have so many assumptions to set aside and so much left to learn. So pay attention. Don’t worship the “question everything” mantra, but instead spend your life seeking truth, and wisdom, and understanding. You know what you need to do to get where you want to be.
Inside the murky world of investment advice on YouTube
First-time traders are getting a free financial education on YouTube, but not everyone is as they seem: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2021/02/13/inside-murky-world-investment-advice-youtube/ Alternative link to article: https://archive.vn/qLxkd edit - added full article text Kayla Kilbride decided to teach herself how to trade during a dinner at her family home in Los Angeles last November. Her sisters had been showing her their smartphones, displaying recent winnings on the trading app Robinhood and the conversation around the table kept turning to stocks. Unemployed and in the midst of the pandemic, the 24-year-old quickly became hooked, waking up at 4.30am to study the markets before they opened, watch YouTube tutorials and simulating trades for six hours a day, four days a week. “When I first heard the words bullish and bearish I had to Google them,” Kilbride says. “YouTube has been the most educational platform for me, which is so funny. I never thought I'd ever say that.” Kilbride is one of hundreds of thousands of young people bored and stuck at home turning to YouTube to learn the tricks of the trade. Apps like Robinhood, WeBull, ThinkorSwim and eToro have allowed anyone to buy and sell shares and financial instruments, but many have no idea what they are doing. Top trading channels have up to half a million subscribers each, and live streams of traders studying their screens are watched by thousands at a time. Some are drawn by clips that attract clicks with colourful thumbnail images showing the presenter surrounded by dollar emojis and green arrows pointing up. Titles like “How one 19-year-old took his brokerage account to $187,000 (£135,000) in two months”, “How I made $1,000 in 25 minutes, and “This stock is about to explode!” promise stories of traders having fun and making fortunes at the same time. One teenage YouTuber known as Biaheza regularly posts about the money he makes on trading apps Robinhood and WeBull to his 725,000 subscribers. In one, he lets a stray cat decide whether he should buy $10,000 worth of Tesla puts or calls - leveraged options betting against and for the stock respectively - by placing the words “puts” and “calls” on a piece of paper placed under two dishes. The cat picked puts, Tesla shares went down, and Biaheza made $1,000. This week, the 19-year-old shared a video in which he borrowed $70,000 from Robinhood to place on Tesla, eventually making himself $5,000. Reddit, a very different social network, has been put at the centre of the GameStop bonanza that rattled markets last month. But YouTube also lit up with videos explaining or promoting the phenomenon. One of the heroes of the saga was Roaring Kitty, a YouTuber who also worked as a financial advisor. A Massachusetts securities regulator is now investigating whether the trader, real name Keith Gill, broke securities rules by advising which stocks to buy. Arguably YouTube's broadcasts have more power over the market than forums because they hit the web as a finished product that cannot be altered, allowing one skilled presenter to broadcast to many. Tom Sosnoff, who sold his brokerage ThinkorSwim to TD Ameritrade for $606m in 2009, has since become a hit on YouTube with his Tasty Trades channel becoming a stop-off for more risky investment strategies. Tasty Trades is focused on grey area instruments, like leverage, options and futures. Financial experts warn that these are challenging, high risk and can be low reward. Sosnoff, says the interest in alternative trading is a reaction to the tedium of traditional financial TV. “There was a demand for intelligent, challenging financial content, because to me, Bloomberg and CNBC and places like that were full of stuff that anybody can watch, but it wasn't intellectually challenging,” he says. “Who cares what somebody else thinks? Who cares what the news is? I'm not looking for somebody to repeat the news to me. I'm looking for somebody to explain to me how the markets work and how can I make this actionable.” Kilbride, who now trades just one hour a day after finding a job, says YouTube creates more good than harm. When she decided to move from fake trades to real money she started small and, after one big loss, is now up around 20pc from a starting point of $500. But not everyone will take her measured approach. “I think overall it's probably good for markets that more people are educating themselves and that you don’t need a fancy Ivy League degree to do it,” says Vincent Deluard, a macro strategist for the brokerage StoneX and Professor of finance at Saint Mary's College in California. “Information should be public.” "The people who fall for the YouTube videos with the man standing by a fancy red car will lose money, that is just the way markets work." Clem Chambers, chief executive of stocks, shares and cryptocurrency website ADVFN, says people are falling for “conspiracy theories” on YouTube that promise thousands of dollars. “They’re all rubbish,” he says. Chambers, who has 30 years of trading experience, says he recognises a similar pattern as during the dotcom boom, which he says scared an entire generation off investing. “It is a tragedy because investing in the stock market is one of the few ways a normal guy can become wealthy,” he says. “But there's a whole group of people that try to ensnare the beginner. There's a whole gauntlet of people that will strip the unwary of their money.” eToro, a social trading app which is available in the UK, warns on its website that 67pc of retail trader accounts lose money. Even amateurs with a level head are likely to make 3pc gains at most. Those pushing between 5 and 10pc would be destined for some of the best firms in the world, not YouTube. YouTube traders can still generate revenue from their streams even if they make a loss trading. Those with more than 10,000 views are eligible to receive a cut of YouTube's targeted advertising revenue. Many sell merchandise and some receive compensation for promoting trading apps. “The problem is when you have got videos saying how to spot ‘hot stock’,” says Susannah Streeter, senior markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdown. “It’s almost like it has become a game and people are treating the market like it is a form of entertainment, not a strategy.” Ironically, Streeter says the vast amount of videos and user commentary on YouTube is helping the industry the presenters are trying to disrupt. “I would expect that hedge funds are analysing the YouTube videos that are being posted, as they are watching social media posts,” she says. With algorithms that take into account what is trending on Twitter, it should come as little surprise. "YouTube is completely unregulated. When you get official investment advice published by a broker then the person publishing the advice is a licensed individual who is certainly culpable for the statements that they make.” says Kevin Mak, a lecturer at Stanford Graduate School of Business, “And that's not really the case for YouTube broadcasters.” YouTube says it doesn’t allow “get rich quick” schemes but did not return the Telegraph’s inquiries into what it was doing to curb "pump-and-dump" schemes where an investor hypes to stock to sell at the peak. As regulators will attest, it is incredibly hard to prove market manipulation. Many of the accounts that appear to be spamming comment sections with the names of certain stocks are pseudonymous. The Federal Trade Commission says it is keeping an eye on influencers who promote gambling, and British politicians have called on a ban of celebrities from Love Island and Geordie Shore promoting unregulated foreign exchange trading. Vocal critics of the disruptors fear speaking out after a social media pile-on for anyone who dared to fault them. Hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen left Twitter after his children received threats amid the GameStop backlash. Short-seller Andrew Left, whose company Citron was one of the hedge funds to spark the battle with small-time traders, said in a YouTube video last month that his company - once the anti-establishment - would no longer publish short-selling research. Professor Joel Hasbrouck, Stern School of Business, New York University, says he occasionally finds teachings of value on YouTube, although these are few and far between. “For better or for worse, YouTube is a repository of popular wisdom, experience and folklore,” he says. “It appeals to our affiliation tendencies. We're told that maybe if we all pull together on this one we can bend the market to our advantage,” he says. This coordination would be prosecuted by British and US officials if it were arranged by two large banks and caught on trading room chat transcripts, he says. But don’t expect this Wild West to be tamed anytime soon. “In this instance the players are small and dispersed,” he says, “and the coordination is loose and casual, so regulation seems unlikely.”
Surviving getting relationship ghosted : long but hopefully helpful to my fellow ghostees
I posted about being ghosted by my ex earlier today. I’ve put together some of the best resources and wisdom that I found on that lonely journey. Sorry it’s really long, but hope maybe bits of it help someone desperately searching for answers in the silence! x TLDR: if you get ghosted, unless you’re violent or abusive it is a THEM thing, not you. Here are some insights that may help. The only (& most powerful) thing you can do is NC! DO NOT continually reach out. Not texting someone back after one date is rude, but ghosting in a relationship is other level. Here are the key insights I discovered when it happened to me: FIRSTLY
The pain you’re feeling is valid. You’re not weak or crazy, it hurts BADLY. Some say it's a form of emotional punishment/torture. You can only control your actions. Allow yourself to feel your feelings. Let tears flow if you need to.
As soon as it becomes apparent you’re being ghosted go NC. If you have been repeatedly reaching out, STOP it immediately. Forgive yourself if you cave at some point, try not to do it again.
HOPE / DISBELIEF
You are still really HOPING initially that this is all a mistake and they’ll be in touch soon. With each passing day, hope turns toward despair. When the 1 week mark comes and goes, you are bewildered.
With each small milestone you get a glimmer of hope: 'two weeks today since I heard anything, maybe today they'll reply' ... 'we had planned to be seeing each other today, surely they'll call' ... it's like a fresh dagger to the chest every time. You know they know. Yet silence.
On some level you start to realise that if they came back now, and you took them back, that you wouldn’t be able to look yourself in the eye because what they’ve done is so disrespectful. But you still get those bursts of hope even though you try to be rational.
YOUR FEELINGS
You are going through the stages of grieving a loss, with a bonus extra portion of denial. You get all the pain of rejection you get from having been dumped, but wait, have you actually been dumped or not? Is this just the silent treatment, or is it like silence forever?
The lack of closure leads to feelings of abandoned. You feel disposable. Online articles say 'no answer is an answer' but frankly, I beg to differ, no it's not. Ok, you know you're not wanted, but they have left you in suspended animation.
Breaking up is never fun, but ghosting further wastes your precious time by delaying your healing.
You have all the symptoms of heartbreak, which also manifests as a physical pain, by the way - take a paracetamol (genuinely) and some CBD oil if that's your bag.
You're suddenly deprived of the source of your happy hormones: their love, touch, texts. I suggest reading up on the chemical process that occurs in our bodies after a break up, and also about love addiction in case this applies to you. This article may help explain.
How sudden this was adds to the pain. You probably feel blindsided. Maybe you had a minor disagreement, or maybe they just disappeared. Regardless of what precipitated it, you never imagined that that would have been the last time you’d hear from them. Never knew that had been the last kiss ..
REALITY CHECK
You convince yourself that if they just came back, it’d stop the pain, you could just hug and make up. You crave this. Why don’t they want that?
Now, listen: if they did come back, they will not be the same person that left. They will not be the same person they were in the beginning either. The second they chose to ghost you, the relationship irrevocably changed. That old version of them is gone now.
For whatever reason, their mask has fallen. That is hard to accept, but: 'when someone shows you who they are - believe them’ - Maya Angelou.
WAS ANY OF IT REAL?
Now this does not mean that your nice memories of them are false or that you didn’t share lovely times with them, in fact, I’m sure you did. People will say 'if they ghost you they were secretly really unhappy' and you may question whether they ever 'loved/cared/enjoyed you' at all or if they faked every second.
The truth usually resides somewhere in the middle of the extremes.
I'm sure they enjoyed themselves, a flake like them wouldn't have stuck around so long if they were getting no pleasure. However, something flipped for them internally. Maybe it was a culmination of small things, or one big unknown thing, we will never know. Even if they did speak to you again they probably wouldn't be honest. Maybe they aren't even capable of articulating it.
Old them is a memory now though. They left you for dead, and you need to leave your fond perception of 'old them' (pre-ghosting) for dead too - grieve it. Old them is not coming back.
LET THE LACK OF HUMANITY SINK IN
You used to share with them your happy news, they were also a sounding board? Not anymore. As with any ex, the source of your pain cannot be your source of comfort.
They've let you know you're alone in this. Do yourself a favour and do not even message them to ask them for that bracelet you left at their place back. It will not illicit a response. They have wilfully noped out on all levels with no explanation.
I had this epiphany at a certain point, up until the day before the ghosting, we were sleeping together: imagine I'd found out I was pregnant and I literally have no way of contacting him, simply because he's ignoring me. He doesn't give a damn about my health. Let that sink in. They can be tapping that one day, dust the next, no Fs given for your wellbeing.
WHY DO GHOSTERS GHOST?
What goes on in their mind when they choose to do this? Because make no mistake, it is a conscious choice. Just like NC is for us. They chose that line.
Don’t they care how much this is hurting us? I would never leave a loved one hanging like this, so why would they do it to me? Taking responsibility for anything (other than their own selfish needs and desires) is not part of a ghoster's vernacular. They are cowardly too. Their sole modus operandi is their own comfort so if that means chucking you in the bin to avoid an awkward conversation, so be it.
I read posts that said stuff like: ‘if a person cares they’d be in touch, he’s just not that into you’. I had been asking myself if he was truly indifferent about me - but how could that be, when that very morning pre-ghosting things had been good.
Did I really never mean anything to him? To be able to brush me off like a piece of dust on his arm. It was unbearable to think my cuddly, sweet, intelligent man, who days before was massaging my feet while we chilled on the couch just ‘didn’t give a damn’ and 'wasn't into me'.
Humans are complex, the psychology of a ghoster is not as simple as: 'don't care, what's their name again?' Perhaps it is when ghosting after a single date, or if just texting on a dating app with someone having never even met. But for those of us that get ghosted in the context of a relationship, after there's been lots of tiny (and big) intimate moments, it's fair to assume that the majority of ghosters DO feel. Give yourself some credit.
In fact, it's likely their inability to manage and communicate whatever big feelings they are experiencing that leads to them ghosting. It may appear like their memory has been wiped, and they may indeed be adept at shutting down and compartmentalising, but they haven't forgotten your name or how good you smelled.
To be clear, I am not trying to suggesting ghosters deserve compassion. I am saying this for you, the ghostee, to validate YOUR worth and impact.
DON'T SELF-BLAME
I came to the conclusion that MY behaviour must have been so bad that I’d scared him in some way. I was so cut up. I had him on the pedestal - that old classic.
I actually reached out to my ghoster to APOLOGISE and take the blame. I thought he'd come back to me if I took full responsibility (I truly believed I deserved it by this point).
Turns out it wasn’t my fault... you can read my post about my ghosting experience if you’re curious, but suffice to say, the phone call may have precipitated the ghosting, but it wasn’t because I’d acted inappropriately - say it with me: THIS IS THEM, NOT YOU.
Also, my apology message did not prompt him to contact me - he let me sit with the guilt he knew I was needlessly feeling. He could have set me free, but no. It probably gave him an ego boost, which I'm sure he enjoyed. At the least, it didn't make him uncomfortable enough to break his silence. When he eventually breadcrumbed me yesterday, he did apologise but he didn’t take full responsibility either.
WHAT TO DO?!
Should I turn up at their door? I say this slightly tongue in cheek, but my god the thought crossed my mind so many times.
I have a new level of sympathy for the ‘crazy’ things people do when heartbroken. At one point, I had to talk myself out of doing a drive by of his place, I was telling myself it would make me feel better. That I was 'worried' something bad had happened to him (I knew it hadn’t and he was online on WhatsApp a lot, yes I kept checking..)
CONFRONTING A GHOSTER - WHY NOT TO
Remember the way they used to look at you and smile? That is NOT the look they will give you, if you have turned up uninvited.
Don’t kid yourself they’d be pleased to see you, or receptive in any way. Their ghosting is not accidental. Save yourself that further heartache and embarrassment. It actually is better for the last visual memory of their face to be that last smile.
There’s a good chance if you did go to confront them that they’d react like a hunted animal, retreat further or lash out. If they don’t threaten to call the police (not cute), they will probably get REALLY angry.
Don’t convince yourself that they would never do that, because frankly, if they are capable of ghosting you, then they have a lot more simmering away in that brain of theirs than you knew about, whether you care to admit it or not.
They have asked you (through their silence) for space - grant them their wish and go quietly. Disappear from their life and leave them with memories of all your goodness, not begging or insults, that do not show your best self. You owe this to yourself. This is not for them, it’s for you.
They don’t want to be persuaded out of their decision to throw your love away. If you need to convince them of how great it was - I’m sorry, but it didn’t have a stable foundation.
I am not saying for a second that you both didn’t have amazing chemistry. I’m not saying they weren’t loving, or that they didn’t enjoy their time with you. My ex deserves an Oscar for his performance of loving and caring bf right up until the point of ghosting.
CLOSURE
Do not kid yourself that they can give you ‘closure’. We WISH they would, there’s a million ways they could, things they could say: but they are withholding that from you. Ghosters are withholders.
You need to soothe yourself and I promise you can. It might not be a 'eureka' closure moment, in fact it probably won't be. I've had very dark thoughts and moments on this horrible journey but each day I get a bit better. You can do all sorts of symbolic things to help you process, there are lots of posts and articles on this. But only time will truly bring acceptance.
GHOSTERS ARE NOT THE FULL EMOTIONAL SHILLING
The ghosting was not caused by something that was lacking in the relationship on your side, or something you could have given them. Yes, there is a missing piece, but it is within their heart and mind.
Ghosting behaviour is symptomatic of them being broken / limited / stunted in their emotional intelligence or resources, which is actually pretty sad really. The only one that could heal them is THEM, by the way. Rarely they truly just are a bad, rotten egg, plain and simple.
At this point the ghoster probably hasn’t even identified that they have an issue. If someone was receptive and willing to work on themselves, then that’s different. But some people will NEVER get to this point - so do not waste your love by sitting in their metaphorical waiting room hoping for them to have that epiphany.
Whatever you do, don’t waste your time trying to educate them on your perception of their issues/the error of their ways. You might be bang on the money but you’re wasting your time and you’ll be met with more deafening silence.
GHOSTERS ARE FICKLE
The ghoster has shown that they are a fair-weather friend. Imagine, down the line once you were yet more invested in them, if you got seriously sick, suffered a bereavement, lost your job, or became vulnerable, and had to rely on them in any way, and they freaking ghosted at that point? You deserve a person with broad enough shoulders to be in it with you 100%.
Most people with traits that allow them to relationship ghost will never be ‘fully in it' with any person, so DO NOT do that mental gymnastics that equates them not being committed to your relationship with any reflection of a shortcoming on your personality/looks/behaviour etc.
Some ghosters are just selfish, maybe they simply changed their mind and don't have the skills to be able to communicate that. Maybe they don't even know why. And sometimes the truth is so painful, it is better not shared (or so they convince themselves).
It's not appropriate to rush to put labels on people, but on rare occasions maybe they do have narcissistic traits or are actually sociopaths. In which case you had a lucky escape, my friend. They went quietly (silently in fact lol).
Your ghoster may have an avoidant attachment style. They may be emotionally unavailable even though they seemed incredibly loving. Perhaps they have a fear of commitment thrown in there too. They are possibly severely averse to conflict and go into 'shut down' when faced with conflict. This is an excellent resource to learn more.
It is NOT your job to fix or educate the ghoster (or anyone) about themself. If it helps you to contextualise things by reading for your own education and awareness, it is a great idea, but don't share your ponderings on your ghoster’s psyche with them.
DESTINY MINDSET
Some articles say that ghosters more often have a ‘destiny’ mindset as opposed to a growth mindset about relationships. If they believe in ‘the one’ and have ‘grass is greener syndrome’ too it could explain partly how they can just cut people off like that.
People will these attributes will struggle to find contentment in a relationship. We all know there is no such thing as perfect. They keep fulfilling their own prophecy.
According to this logic, the ghoster may have been secretly 'testing' you all along, and you didn’t know it. You might have unknowingly not been measuring up to some abstract idea they had in their mind, but they did not share this with you nor try to communicate to rectify it. You were never gonna win this one, because they aren’t playing fair. They were working to corroborate their own repeating narrative.
If you didn't even know you were on trial, or that you’ve caused offence, how could you possibly even try to fix it.
NO COMMUNICATION SKILLS
Ghosters have very poor communication skills. They could have come across as articulate, they might be highly educated, successful, able to verbalise plenty of loving feelings and have friends etc. But they have a deficit when it comes to their emotional communication.
Respectful disagreements in relationships are healthy and should not END a relationship. Think back, was your ghoster a bit of a ‘yes man’ ?
Were you able to have healthy and robust discussions about issues where your opinions diverged and you compromised? If not, this might be because they don’t have those emotional tools.
RUMINATING
I read a lot of articles that say things like 'stop ruminating', 'move on'. But your brain needs to go through it's process. The silence leaves you with only the echo chamber of your mind and you will find your own way to cope. Yes, you can distract yourself, but it's unrealistic to expect that everyone can just 'snap out' of it.
It's natural to puzzle, and think through the relationship, allow yourself to do it. This is a truly excellent article, what really stuck with me was the advice to run back through the relationship like a playbook, in your mind, pay attention, don't miss anything. Were there red flags? Even if you didn't notice them at the time, there might have been intuition moments that you dismissed, that you can identify if you take your time to reflect. What can you learn?
This is about you healing and about you making healthier choices in the future. What happened is not your fault, but we need to level up.
IF THE GHOSTER REACHES OUT
If they do eventually reach out, which they may not ever do (prepare yourself for that), you will be flooded by emotions. Pause for breath, minimum 24 hours, if you can bear it. Ideally stick to NC but if you must reply, keep it brief. Keep in mind that this is likely to be the last ever time you hear from them, they are a ghost after all.
DO NOT prove them right (in their warped mind) by using this as a chance to blame/question them or give them a row. Frankly, what’s the point? They aren’t thinking of your feelings, they don't want your insight. They know they've been a toad. They haven’t cared enough about your feelings all along.
A ghost reaching out (similar to any ex) is all about them, not about genuine concern for you - their ego, their conscience, maybe idle curiosity, maybe they got dumped by their side chick. They haven't suddenly realised what they've done and come to their senses.
You remain dignified, you wish them well and you send them on their way. I repeat, in a brief message. No more than a couple of sentences. I don't care if they sent you a wall of text - they get bare minimum, if anything.
If they’ve come back apologising you ‘accept it, wish you well. bye’. If you feel you want to, and if you feel they deserve it (they probably do NOT), throw in a ‘thanks for the nice times we shared’. You are the bigger person.
You may be seething, but do not give them any access to your inner sanctum, that door is shut and locked to them. This is a long game, my friend, and the best revenge is your success and composure.
You can sob and scream privately, but do not feed their ego by revealing your suffering to them.
Being dignified, or better still not responding at all, will drive them more nuts/ intrigue them more than any wall of text. Plus, if you give an explosive/desperate response, you validate whatever (pathetic) ‘reasons’ they concocted for ghosting you in the first place .. and they’ll just ghost you again anyway!
You are loveable and you deserve an enduring love.
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