The Will To Perform: Liberation Day Fallout, Part II
Gothic dread, gallows humour, and the daily theatre of the dauntless.
Read Part I Here!
Across the AXIA trading desks.
Tuesday 8 April 2025.
London, England.
How does the gothic interior meet a smiling spring? A few doors down from the traders at Endsleigh Street, a handful of white cherry trees are in full bloom. Their petals sweep in front of countless university students who spill into the nearby parks of Tavistock Square Gardens and Gordon Square. They queue at street food vendors at Byng Place. They sprawl over the grass, they picnic, they frolic, they celebrate the Sun. It’s been at a premium. They wonderfully have no care and every care in the world.
But don’t they know?—don’t they know?!—about the end of the world, the end of the monetary system, the great future fiat rug-pull, the end of humans, the NWO, inflation, economic data manipulation, market (dis)function, that time Fed hiked massive, and equities still went up! And now, the end of trade and globalisation as we know it. How can they be so happy? Don’t they know the injustice of being blown out of a great trade for stupid reasons when you give back so much… when a third-time rehash of an old headline sends your mega-trade flying the wrong way? To get squeezed so much you puke the high tick; to be hunted! To come in and lose and lose and lose… to lord over a place where the Sun only ever sets; to feel you live among the ruins of what you once were: an unending finality. Decay.
And as these pale traders brood along their crumbling castle walls, peering down at the villagers below. Don’t they know… So glints another aspect of the will to perform. To push—or, as others might say, abuse themselves—in order to drive performance. Another grindy sixteen-hour state of paused alert, mounting sleep deprivation; some smoking to sacrifice the lungs for a temporary boost or relief. That is the visceral immediate, but consider something darker. To do what they do—navigation of this complex, multi-dimensional market world requires complete exposure to it. A specific mind-body empathetic capacity to experience it all, to be sensitive yet primed to feel the nuances of sentiment, theme evolution, the plot twist. This has a cost in the way actors warp their reality and personality when they are overrun so completely by their roles. Total immersion. Here be fiends… to know that vast outperformance is emotionally Pyrrhic, as success is fleeting yet failure permanent. Here be magic… to carry the burden of knowing and seeing too much; to never really want to talk about it, or to be damned if you do. Here be beasts… to isolate their hearts in castles because who would understand the necessity to don a mask of extremes: wrath, silence, madness and badness—whatever they need to use to do what must be done. Here be…
Banter?
It’s quiet along the walls this Tuesday morning. This can only mean that whatever pundit, speaker, egghead, fund guy or fed gal they just wheeled out on mainstream TV gets hounded by the traders. A tough crowd: the TV is racked with one-liners, meek speakers savaged, and the self-aggrandising are parodied, all with the earthly hilarity that can emerge from a trader’s mouth.
Later, they pace up and around their seats, looking ahead: “What’s market pricing there...”—“Or Here…”— “Yeah, but it’s priced, no?” To reassess: “What a meek response, mate!”—“Where’s China?”—“Xi and Trump need to have a phone call; got to happen!” All of this is interlaced with lambasting and satirising of all that happens on the world stage: “China mulls… EU mulls… everyones mulling mate! Sell the mull! Buy the mull! China mulls… dumping treasuries,” says one. Ha! “China mulls… putting on a steepener!” Haw-Haw-Haw—“China mulls… dumping 2s and buying 30s!” Ho-Ho-Ho and so on and so forth.
But a trader’s most prized possession is the perfect quip, no matter how sophisticated or toilet the humour may be. They are wrapped around a very special core of irony—bitter irony—that sounds sweeter to those who know what it’s like. No matter how bad, a joke is all the more treasured when it carries the aura of this brotherly mystery. This thing of ours... a beacon to signal that you know that I know that when the Sun’s rays break through, we can appreciate it in our own tortured ways. A perfect quip or one-liner is weaponised humour, like a Trojan horse, to reach even those too paranoid to be happy. So even they can contort their face to resemble a grin or to reply with a low huff, which is as good as laughter.
But there is still a poise that you can feel in the room, a priming, a form of a sustained, balanced, arousal state—the athletic kind, mind you!—which is hard to maintain for newer traders. But this veteran lot snap to action, as they did with ECB’s de Guindos’ comments around 10.30 a.m. that “markets always overact,”—clickclicklclick—so these traders hit the Bund, Bobl or Schatz; probing the line to see if anything lands because you never know. Maybe the flow tumbles into something more significant on the de Guindos downplay. Or, more importantly, what the market thinks of the de Guindos downplay that can infer or alter slightly the probabilities of ECB (in)action… cuts next week?... as various markets started to price this since Liberation Day: check Euribor.
Yet the frustration builds and builds, markets directionless, their P&Ls skidding in the mud: up a little, down a little. Then comes Bessent on CNBC to talk about Energy… on the idea of getting them Europeans to buy American LNG with Tariff reductions as a reward… but the markets turn on a dime based on what lagging feed traders are listening to… in the end, nothing. Then, more Trump chatter about China “not knowing how to get it started.” Cue more chop—more mediocre headlines—the traders push and push any ounce of opportunity. But nothing! CNBC rehashes the news over and over, ensuring you can’t get rid of that lingering thought: what if this time when I happen to be in a position and the market decides to run with the fifth rehash? Damn it all!
But today, this fraternal humour is paying dividends. I mean! I mean, how can’t you laugh at all ’dis? Today, the order flow is mercilessly stupid, cunning, or both. At some point, even the intermarket correlations seemed to fragment; Spoo futures were surely pinged around by the handful of traders still hanging around. Currencies, commodities, and anything with a rate attached all answered questions at different times: Deal or No Deal? Recessionary, Inflationary, Stagflationary? Rate cut must be coming—bid, bid, bid! Only to then change the question being asked mid-sentence.
This tenacious team spirit is one of those little big edge. Here is another way to view it: keeping you committed even in the worst of markets and situations, or in this case, this agitated market state as if listening to the shriek of chalk on a blackboard. Come on, man! Wake up! Such shit markets! You must endure all of this to be there for the great parts, for the next big plot twist, and that could just mean endless days that look and feel like this Tuesday. Yet it speaks to the quality of these traders not to give back what they made on Big Monday. Today is the most crucial part. Not giving back and not giving up: that is the will to perform. How simply difficult.
*
By the afternoon, life became farcical, a blur with constant misreporting on X and newswires about 104% additional tariffs going into effect, with no response from China… a quote of a quote of a quote… everyone hit it one way, and the headlines rehashed it a different way; time zones all mixed up… going into effect Wednesday 9th at midnight, but—whats this Spoo doing man?! Leavitt comes on fifteen minutes later or so… bullshit denial, man!Cue the next pain: a huge blip on the U.S. 3-Year Note auction. Whens the last time this happened! Now of all times, on a low bid-cover! V-shape! Cue more foot stomping and venom. The market spills and begs by 7.30p.m… look at the Schatz, Look at the Schatz; whats going on! No one knows.
Contrary to the usual expectations, all these traders lament loudly no matter their P&L—and no matter that their P&L is infinitesimally small compared to Big Monday. Younger or junior traders would not fight; they would be too relaxed: I made loads yesterday, oh well! What’s a five-grand loss now? Yet these traders instead push and push and treat any position as serious as the last. Everything is a fight until the last feasible opportunity.
Such as the S&P’s Market on Close (MOC). Some got it, and some got caught: on a melting day, when does this ever happen? When does this ever happen!? Cue a floor rumble. What’s next? Waiting for Trump to speak at 8 p.m. London time, just in case. But now: Where is he? Why is he never on time? 9 p.m. grinds on. Trump then talks factories and coal, and blasts the Democrats—but nothing on China? Tariffs? The trading floor music continues: Just shut up, man! On… and on… and on. Just say the word! Just say it! Say China! But no such words were dispensed.
By 10 p.m., the traders discuss how to handle the overnight session. Most would wake up early, catch a few hours, get up at 5 a.m., and hit the office soon after. But let’s see.
Volatility is a funny thing, a difficult thing—six to nine in a blink of an eye. You don’t need to eat. Minutes feel like hours, and a day like this feels like a week, but the first five minutes after gut-spilling volatility mania are blank. A whole week has already been pressed into these traders, and that carries its own debt paid by the body. But tomorrow we go again.
The traders start trickling out again in pairs. I walk out with them. One of them got a parking ticket. Well… that was Tuesday.
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Acknowledgements, Permissions & Disclaimer
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.