Of Fumes and Fury: Liberation Day Fallout, Part I
Liquidity anaemic. Rumours flying. Systems failing. This was Monday.
Across the AXIA trading desks.
Monday 7 April 2025.
London, England.
The day after runs on fumes and fury. That is how you know Monday was big; bloody—financial ultra-violence. But it continued from Liberation Day—Wednesday 2nd April. By Tuesday these traders are full of scorpions because Monday should have been better, so should have Sunday night, and yesterday, and yesterday, and yesterday; it must be better. But it was worse; the ladders were thin; liquidity anaemic—the markets seemed empty and whose even here? For some time, it felt as if the market’s functioning and fabric of reality were coming apart—Stoxx and DAX vol-stoppin’—trading platforms and connectivity getting all clogged up… that’s when it really started: the banging and the shouting and the wailing.
On Monday afternoon, you’re in the Risk Room as the crew jumps into triage like an old galleon mid-gun battle—flipping lunch tables to create an Operating Room as the saws go in and the legless and headless come out. A team from Risk to IT run up and down the building, managing hurried phone calls; flooded with Teams messages. Grey-outs! Slow Downs! Errors!—trading platforms keep going down, pulled apart by the volatility storm and floods of data. The lag and the flow and execution get worse and worse; some traders are completely stuck—they can’t get in or out—and they relentlessly bang the ceiling and plaster above.
The salvaging starts———93, 93, 93—Yeah, done. Next?—I need to flat him, yeah? Flat—yea? ClickClickClick… S— go, tell me. He’s long ZF–CGBs—no, no Bunds is flat. Yeah, yep. Done. Wait, I need to flatten him too—shitshitshit. Okay, check B—… DAX! Flat position, correct? Wait, D— asked me for a pos-check. Can you check his GUI and stuff? Okay, I’ll pull his orders… again and again and again. This came to be Monday: navigation of the Liberation Day fallout and the classic duo Rumour and Denial.
You run up the stairs from the Risk Room and sit on the first floor of Endsleigh Street. If history is going to be made and you want to experience it raw, these trading desks are the place to be. This first floor, as AXIA’s Haywood said, is the best trader—this collective beast, a Frankenstein group of twelve traders whose eyes, ears, reactions, and firepower make it happen. The little and big ways they push themselves through sheer malevolence, camaraderie, retribution and anger. And they’re seething; they’ve been feeding themselves to these markets and it’s about damn time it———
————What’s out? What’s out?!——
——Spoo is mega-bid; it screeches higher as the U.S. Five-Year is simultaneously smashed, and the usual markets get whipped with action. Shit! Something’s out! Some traders hit into these moves: because of the force, pace, and size, you assume—you must assume—that there’s news, a headline—something. ClickClickClick. And there it is—“Hassett: Trump Is Considering A 90-Day Pause in Tariffs for All Countries Except China.” Between 15:10–15:15 BST, a single X post was reposted by bigger accounts and run on-air by CNBC.
But these finer details emerge later, ClickClickClick—we don’t have time for these details… except to shift gears again. Where do we go from here? Confirmation? What do we do then? Denial? What do we do then? But the lamentations continue, the clangour of cursing in native and foreign tongues; the traders yell, howl, roar, pound the desks, and rumble the floors: Grey-outs! Slow Downs! Errors! Everything feels like breaking point, hardly ever this bad! the traders scream. And when the going gets really good for the traders and worse for everyone else, the market function—sonuvabitch!—and technology—pieceofshit!—ceases to function—destroyed! I’m destroyed! I’m fucked! To the delight of the chaotic elements, the day forced two of the worst situations and feelings—extreme P&L volatility: up 500, down 200, up 300, down 100. When you get all chopped up like that, it roils and boils your guts, but that is second worst to the biggest hate—missing it. But consider the exponential: missing it and helplessly watching what you could’a made! All because of software failure. Unspeakable fury. That’s when some fall silent.
This is reality. Your clean strategy paper schematics don’t survive dirty friction reality. To crunch stats and look back to 2008-09 or 2020 and think how easy! But to never consider how fast things break. The map is not the territory.
Amid all the mania, risk triage, and flows, it soon came—denial-denial-denial! Traders shouted to each other, but heard it come through CNBC: the White House denied it. Cue a savage reversal in every market. Today, there was an opportunity for your order flow, correlations, dynamic navigator on the rumour, and for the smash-and-grab opportunist on the way back. Hit early, hit fast, multiple markets—pick your poison. Both demanded aggression, leaning on correlations in the initial rumour-confusion. The fundamental edge is to commit, stemming from the collective aggression of everyone around you, and trust you all got it right, multiple eyeballs, minds and convicted souls in the right place at the right time.
Then evening strikes in London. There was another escalation: “Trump threatens additional 50% tariffs on China,” and it traded the same, but it paled compared to earlier opportunities. The markets are exhausted like the traders. They want a decisive factor or decision. And so, we clock the score: virtually every P&L milestone from six figures and up from this floor alone, but so too, among others across the firm. Some traders are near the seven-figure mark but not quite. Some P&Ls are flat—some down a bit, some up a bit—and behind these numbers are vile thoughts.
Most importantly, you think of tomorrow. That’s what matters now, because the explosive volatility of Monday untethers expectations tomorrow; the markets often run on mere fumes of what came before. The fury is all there: the traders will keep pushing and pushing and pushing, more so if they have a score to settle and further if they missed out on Monday. Dangerous times are ahead.
That’s what makes the first-floor monster effective yet different from expectations. The more you push them down, the harder and harder they fight back. The usual imaginations and tropes of trading and traders don’t survive here; your abstractions are mere cave shadows. They grind and grind. One opportunity is all it takes, but you don’t know which, so you must push them all. And pay for it you must.
After nine o’clock in the evening—after the U.S. cash close—the first-floor traders quickly leave in pairs or trios. No one leaves until they all leave, especially when the sense of occasion burns within them. Do you want to miss it when everyone else stays? This is classic first-floor culture and a display of the dogged professionals within. It’s one thing to run alone, but another with the whole pack driving you—just a bit more. They traded since the Sunday futures market open and arrived early for a sixteen-hour mind-body-soul attrition, knowing the next day would be the same.
Don’t be fooled: they’ll be watching and trading from home late into the night. Where’s China in all this? There’s so much to do and so much that can happen! If the bed isn’t beside the desk, you bring the mattress. They look exhausted, yet with no relief, just wide-eyed—tousled hair—sleepwalking with their eyes open because the finishing line keeps moving. What do you say? Nice one, good luck… what bullshit is that? Well, that was Monday.
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Grateful acknowledgement to AXIA for granting access to their traders.
The photograph, provided by Axia Futures, is used with their permission, and they retain full ownership and copyright over the image.
Disclaimer: Do Not Do Stupid Financial Decisions. This Is Not A Game.