The Warrior’s Gambit: Trading The Greenland De-escalation
Exclusive: Paying Up, Playing to Win, and Why a Near Seven-Figure Day Was a Miss
Dear Practitioners,
So—we’ve got the whole hog.
What follows is a full account of The Warrior trading the Greenland de-escalation theme in January 2026: the build-up, the false starts, and the decisive day itself.
The opening section re-establishes the context—depending on how clearly January still sits in your memory—and places The Warrior back into frame. From there, the piece moves into a long-form, direct Q&A, in the classic magazine sense.
One thing readers should know: this interview was deliberately framed as if The Warrior were speaking directly to a specific group of younger traders—already performant, fast-growing, and seven-figure traders in their own right—working on the floor as news and event traders at a stage where rare, high-impact moments are required to break through existing limits.
The question put to him was simple: what message do you need to get across to them? If it is sufficiently exacting for them, it will be instructive for you.
The final sections step back from the interview itself. The Decisive Moment: Occupy the Unnatural Position draws out the higher-level implications that emerge from the conversation. Agon goes further, touching on the nature of performance at this level, and what resistance, pressure, and underperformance mean for traders operating near their supposed ceiling.
The piece closes with a short set of practitioner questions, as prompts for reflection and application.
I want to deeply thank The Warrior for his contribution and time throughout all the below.
Good reading and good trading to you all,
Bogdan
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The Warrior’s Gambit: Trading The Greenland De-escalation
Among the AXIA trading desks.
Wednesday 21 January 2026
London, England.
Certainly, this January has not been quiet. But for those looking in from the outside, you might expect that it produced many tradable opportunities for headline-led news traders. It did not. Despite the year kicking off with Maduro and the Venezuela episode, there was little in the way of tradeable opportunity.
Then came the comedown on Trump’s threats to Iran on Wednesday 14 January. Trump said that killings in Iran’s crackdown on nationwide protests were subsiding and that he believed there was no plan for large-scale executions of protesters, a statement that appeared to draw a red line for the regime. That shift produced a paring back of Middle Eastern escalation and supply-disruption pricing through the energy complex.
After that, there were flows on 16 January around the Trump Chair nominee, though with important caveats. As one trader stressed at the time, what was reported by the newswires and what Trump actually said about Hassett—and about keeping him on as NEC Director rather than appointing him as the next Fed Chair—were not the same thing. Nevertheless, markets, and their awkward, entangled twin that has emerged alongside them—prediction markets—quickly repriced the reduced probability of Hassett as Chair and the implications that followed.
What Asymmetrist will be investigating in the coming months is precisely this shift in market state: a market increasingly defined by flows between headlines rather than on them. The core driver here has been Trump, geopolitics, and a style of communication that is often knee-jerk, occasionally hit-and-miss, and frequently framed in the language of escalation—sometimes implying war, or what has lately become the fashionable phrase, kinetic war.
In such a market regime, these moments can generate sharp reactions, but they do not always lead to durable repricing. Instead, they often exhaust traders through repetition: information trickles into the market in fragments, producing minor opportunities that dissipate a trader’s attention and aggression, long before any decisive resolution arrives. This is different from how markets digest and reprice tariffs, or other, more financial, slower-moving policy realities. Put simply: geopolitical theatre creates half-hatched volatility; policy creates determined repricing.
Then came Greenland.