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. Yet it has only continued from Liberation Day—Wednesday 2nd April. But 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 always must be better. But it was also worse; the ladders were thin; liquidity anaemic—the markets sometimes seem empty and whose even here? For some punctures of 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.
And now you sit in the Risk Room on Monday afternoon as the crew jump into triage as if you are caught in the dark depths of some old galleon mid-gun battle—where they flip some lunch tables to create an Operating Room as the saws go in and the legless and the headless come out. An entire team, from Risk to IT, run up and down the building to help, 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 the physical 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 are 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 other usual markets get whipped with action. Shit! Something’s Out! Already, some of the traders hit into these moves: because of the force, the pace of it and the size going through, you assume—you must assume—that there is 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 soon run on-air by CNBC.
But these finer details emerge later, ClickClickClick—we don’t have time for these details… except to reflexively 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 as if 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 that be, 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 inside out, but that is only second worst to the biggest hate of all—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 sheer reality. Your clean strategy paper schematics do not survive dirty friction reality. To crunch stats and to look back to 2008-09 or 2020 and think how easy! But to never consider just how fast things break. The map is not the territory.
And somehow, in between all of this mania, risk triage, and flows, it soon came——denial-denial-denial! The traders shouted to each other, but they heard it all come down through CNBC TV: the White House denied it. Cue a savage reversal in every market that moved originally. Today, compared to other days, there was an opportunity for both your order flow, correlations, dynamic navigator on the rumour, and your smash-and-grab opportunist on the way back. Hit early, hit fast, multiple markets—pick your poison. But both demanded aggression, leaning on correlations in the initial rumour-confusion. Yet the fundamental edge is to commit, much of it stemming from the collective aggression of everyone around you, and trust that you all got it right, multiple eyeballs, minds and convicted souls in the right place at the right time.
Then the clock wears into the evening in London. There was another escalation: “Trump threatens additional 50% tariffs on China,” and it was traded all the same, but it paled compared to earlier opportunities. The markets are exhausted like the traders. They want some decisive factor or decision more than anything else. And so, too, 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 not too far from the seven-figure mark but not quite. And some P&Ls are virtually flat—some down a bit, some up a bit—and you know that behind these numbers are vile thoughts.
Yet, most importantly, you think of tomorrow. That is only what matters now, because the explosive volatility of Monday untethers expectations tomorrow; the markets often run on mere fumes of what came before. And 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 is also what makes the first-floor monster so effective, yet so obscenely different to what most expect, because the more you push them down the harder and harder they fight back. The usual imaginations and tropes of trading and traders do not survive here either; your abstractions are mere cave shadows. They grind and grind and grind. All it takes is one opportunity, 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 traders on the first floor quickly trickle out in pairs or trios. Because no one leaves until they all leave. Especially when the sense of occasion burns with each one of them. Do you want to be the one to miss it when everyone else stays? This is classic first-floor culture and a powerful display of the dogged professionals that reside within. It’s one thing to run for miles and miles alone, but another when the whole pack is there with you, driving and pushing you—just a bit more. They traded since the Sunday futures market open and arrived early in the morning for a sixteen-hour mind-body-soul attrition, knowing that the next day would be the same as the day after that.
But don’t let any of this fool you: they will be watching and trading anything from home that could be happening into the late hours. Where’s China in all this? There is so much to do and so much that can happen! If the bed isn’t beside the desk, you bring the mattress. They all look like they ran a marathon, yet with no real sense of relief of finality, just wide-eyed—hair tussled around—as if sleepwalking around with their eyes open because the finishing line keeps moving further and further out. What do you say? What could you say? Nice one, good luck… what bullshit is that? Well, that was Monday.
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