Yesterday, He Who Should Not Have Been Elected decided it was time to stir the world again. Since — like Harry — I’m not afraid to say the name, I will sometimes call him “Voldetrump”.

For one thing, it’s faster to type.

First Voldetrump said that Iran was “choking like a stuffed pig.” Of course, this is not the first time for Voldetrump to use porcine pejoratives when attacking Muslims. Crude bigotry and racism is, after all, just central to his brand. During his first campaign he became famous for it. And specifically with relation to Muslims, he told the apocryphal story of General Pershing supposedly — again, the story is apocryphal and thus likely untrue — lining up 50 Philippine Muslims, shooting 49 of them with bullets supposedly coated in pig’s blood and then told the 50th person to go back and tell “his people” what had happened to scare them into submissiveness.

That story, by the way, is right on brand for He Who Should Not Have Been Elected: it’s total bullshit.

Next, he published an AI image of himself with a gun and the words, “No more Mr. Nice Guy” — a posture he has never actually held in his life — and, as usual, the markets have reacted negatively.

I started writing this piece before 6 a.m. today. Since then, things have gone a little green based on my thinkorswim scanners for the markets. Even my personal portfolio picked up, though I’m heavily invested in tech and quantum stocks which get hit hard when the market calls “risk off”. These were doing great before the war, but have been highly reactive to the shenanigans of He Who Should Not Have Been Elected.

Meanwhile, Brent remains just around $110 after having opened when I started writing this at $120. (The link is to the live quote so it may change as time passes.) Gasoline is at the highest prices since June 2022. The national average is apparently $4.30. Yesterday, I paid $6 per gallon at Von’s, which is generally cheaper for members than gasoline elsewhere. On a recent trip to a seminar, I paid $6.50 in Las Vegas and Tehachapi, California.

Also yesterday, of course, the Fed held rates Wednesday on an 8-4 vote — which doesn't happen when things are working. The ECB held too, and warned that Iran-driven inflation could push higher. The Bank of England held, and warned the same. And on May 1 — tomorrow — the United Arab Emirates formally exits OPEC, the first member to walk out of the cartel in its sixty-five-year history.

And, finally, Bloomberg’s Javier Blas surfacing the new trading-floor acronym. We thought we were getting a TACO. So far we are getting a NACHO: Not A Chance Hormuz Opens.

TACO was about He Who Should Not Have Been Elected. NACHO is about what he broke and now can't figure out how to fix.

The TACO Trade

Back on March 26 — just over one month ago — He Who Should Not Have Been Elected declared a ceasefire. The markets reacted with what I’m going to call “joy” and stocks shot up.

The key point comes in the section “Trump Lies; The Tape Doesn’t” of that article. When He Who Should Not Have Been Elected claimed he was negotiating with Iran, stocks began to move up, but I didn’t chase the rally because the underlying conditions — war, Hormuz, oil, and economic pressure — had not changed. Within minutes, the rally failed.

The structural conditions that produced the bluster were all still in place, waiting. Yesterday, they reasserted. NACHO was the market formally pricing what TACO was always going to decay into.

Half-Lives

In the world of physics, a structure that doesn’t fail on a single event but rather on a probabilistic decay is spoken of in terms of its half-life. In other words, a half-life describes the decay curve.

And, of course, this type of half-life is very much in play when it comes to things like enriched uranium — which by the way has a half-life of some 703 to 704 million years.

Probably a little longer than this Illegal Iran War will last.

Horcruxes, too, create a kind of half-life. Distributed anchors of survival. Just as Voldetrump plasters his image everywhere possible in hopes of some semblance of immortality, so we see pieces of his heart and soul pumped and dumped into incomplete projects. Venezuela. Our wounded relationships with our allies. Hormuz. Enriched uranium. These on-again/off-again claims that all has been accomplished, but we need to go to war again to do it all over.

When the time comes, there are going to be a lot of horcruxes to hunt down and destroy if we’re going to return the world to what it was before He Who Should Not Have Been Elected crawled back from the half-death he endured on January 20, 2021.

Voldetrump’s diminished existence after January 20 required him to ramp up his survival through exploiting others. But even that came at a cost.

The blood of a unicorn will keep you alive, even if you are an inch from death, but at a terrible price. You have slain something pure and defenceless to save yourself, and you will have but a half-life, a cursed life, from the moment the blood touches your lips.

— J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone 258 (1998)

The blood works because the unicorn is innocent. The curse works because slaying something innocent to save yourself is the kind of act that hollows out whatever it preserves.

The bluster posture of Voldetrump survived on the continued support of the Americans it most directly harms — the working- and middle-class voters now paying $4.30 a gallon at the pump after he promised to bring down the price of gas, watching their grocery bills climb after he promised to fix inflation, watching their retirement accounts whipsaw on every Truth Social post after he promised no more wars, and being told the whole time that the disruptions from having broken these promises are temporary and that the blockade is genius.

The host feeds on the trust of the people whose material conditions it is degrading. That’s the half-life mechanism. It isn’t sustainable in any structural sense, but it’s sustainable longer than it should be, because the people being drained are also the people being told that the draining is somebody else’s fault.

And — quite literally — buying it.

Voldetrump isn’t only a parasite, though. The unicorn-blood metaphor captures the sustenance, but it understates the agency. He hunts.

The Death Eaters in Rowling’s books are organized predation; the Dementors are something worse — feeders on hope itself, leaving their victims technically alive but emptied of the capacity to imagine a future different from the one being done to them. Dementors don’t kill. They make the kill unnecessary, because once enough joy and memory have been drained, the victim no longer resists.

And He Who Should Never Have Been Elected is the leader of the Dementors.

This is why Voldetrump’s core supporters — ironically the ones he feeds upon the most — continue to brush aside all criticism of him.

A voter who is being told the disruptions are temporary, the blockade is genius, the Iranians are choking like stuffed pigs and any day now they’ll cry uncle — that voter is being asked not just to absorb the loss but to misread it. To experience the draining as protection. That’s the Dementor’s trick. Not to take the life, but to take the framework that would let you notice what was being taken.

And no one has mastered that trick as well as Voldetrump.

Dunning-Kruger, Done Correctly

Dunning-Kruger is one of those terms that everyone uses and almost nobody uses correctly. The pop-culture version is “stupid people are confident, smart people are humble.” But that's not what Justin Kruger and David Dunning said in 1999. This modern watered-down version misses the part of the finding that matters most for what we’re watching.

Dunning and Kruger showed that competence and meta-competence are produced by the same cognitive machinery. The thing that lets you perform a skill — to write the art of any deal, to negotiate like nobody has ever negotiated before, to know more about ISIS than the generals, to know more about taxes than any accountant, to read a room, to model an opponent — it’s the same faculty that lets you evaluate your own performance at it. Which means people with the largest competence gaps are structurally unable to perceive those gaps, because the perception requires the very thing they lack. They are not failing to notice their failures. They cannot notice them. The mirror is broken in the same place the engine is broken.

He Who Should Not Have Been Elected can’t model the market modeling him. He can’t register that calling Iranian negotiators “stuffed pigs” forecloses negotiation. He can’t perceive that the Iranians have noticed the United States reneged on the last nuclear deal and have priced his guarantees accordingly. He can’t see that the same allies he spent a year tariffing and threatening are not going to bail him out of an oil crisis of his own making. Each of these failures is structurally identical: the action requires a meta-understanding that the actor does not possess, so the action gets taken anyway, and the consequences arrive as if from nowhere.

Voldetrump isn’t reading the system, he’s narrating at it. The narration moves the system for a minute, which he reads back as confirmation. And this loop has no off switch because the off switch lives in the missing faculty — the same one that makes him falsely believe he is good at these things causes him to be unable to do the meta-cognitive piece of creating the models by which he could judge his performance.

The reason this matters for tape readers is that markets do model him. Every desk on Wall Street has a Voldetrump-statement classifier running in real time. Every OPEC minister has one. Every counter-party in every negotiation has one. He is the only major actor in the system who is not also modeling himself, and that imbalance is the trade.

Unfortunately, we pay for his losses.

But here’s the rub: Dunning-Kruger only describes the actor. It doesn’t describe why the structure survives the actor. Plenty of incompetent people have been at the controls of plenty of institutions throughout history; most produce visible failures within recognizable timeframes. What we’re watching now has been running for months, and the patches keep holding. To explain that, we need to leave cognitive science and go to philosophy of science.

Popper’s Guillotine, Kuhn’s Patches

Before getting deep in the weeds on this section, I should probably acknowledge that it’s a little unfair to Popper. Even Kuhn, in his The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, took care not to completely jettison Popper’s more nuanced observations.

Popper would say his model was always meant as a normative ideal rather than a sociological description, and Kuhn’s contribution was showing what actually happens when the ideal meets the institution.

Here, Kuhn’s “what actually happens” is how we’ll address Voldetrump’s chaos.

Popper, of course, essentially said that structures fall when discomfirming evidence arrives. Kuhn disagreed. Kuhn said they get patched, ad hoc, with increasingly strained explanations, until the accumulated anomalies become unbearable. And even then the structure doesn’t necessarily collapse; it shifts.

I actually address this very point regarding Voldetrump a while back — not using that name, of course — where the question was whether his entire forty-year business career was a single repeating mechanism the market kept misreading as genius. The relevant passage on Kuhn there holds up for the present moment too:

Paradigm shifts, Kuhn observed, do not feel like paradigm shifts from inside the paradigm. They feel like a series of manageable anomalies, each of which gets explained away, until the weight of the unexplained becomes too great and the model collapses. The people most invested in the old paradigm — the ones whose identity and worldview depend on it — are reliably the last to see it.

— Rick Horowitz, The Liquidator: The Good, the Bad, and the Very Ugly Truth About Trump’s Greatest “Business” Skills (April 14, 2026)

What we’re watching now is the same dynamic at the geopolitical scale. The anomalies are arriving on schedule. American oil companies don’t want Venezuela’s oil. Ships won’t traverse the Strait of Hormuz. The Strategic Petroleum Reserve release barely moved the price. Allies refuse to help. Iran won’t break. Each anomaly gets a patch instead of an update — they’re being unreasonable, we’ll force them; we’ll bomb Kharg Island, that'll fix it; we’ll release more reserves; we never needed those allies anyway; they’re choking like a stuffed pig, any day now.

We’re Winning! So Much Winning!

Popper would see the thesis disconfirmed. Kuhn says things won’t really fail until the patches stop holding. The half-life is the patch-holding interval.

And NACHO? NACHO is the frustrated identification that the patches really don’t look like they’re going to hold this time.

The Liquidator’s Edge and Yours

I’ve really tried to make this more of a “markets” and “trading” and “reading the tape” piece than something political. You’ll have to judge my success or failure — that’s what the comments section is for, by the way.

The point here is that tape reader’s edge is to hold the structural frame and the news cycle frame simultaneously without confusing them. The whole point of the half-life thesis is that single sessions don’t resolve anything. A green tape today — and while I’ve spent the morning writing this, mine did turn green — is not a counter-argument to my thesis. It’s a data point that fits the model.

Oil itself is still around $104 to $105, barely off from yesterday's $107, and still being very much felt at the pump.

Nothing structural happened today. The strait is still closed. NACHO still stings. The UAE still leaves OPEC tomorrow. The Fed is still split 8-4. Iran’s proposal to reopen Hormuz in exchange for deferring nuclear talks remains rejected. The CENTCOM meeting tomorrow between Brad Cooper and Voldetrump could go either way. But the algos and the short-covering desks rolled the June contract, picked up the absence of fresh bad news, and bid risk back up. That’s the patch holding for one session. Bloomberg is even labeling it as such.

Brent crude cooled off after ripping to a four-year high as the market braced for a protracted US war with Iran, in a session marked by machine-led trading and thin volumes.

— Bloomberg News via Yahoo! Finance, Oil Retraces From Four-Year High as War Fears Dampen Liquidity (April 30, 2026)

And what was posted on Schwab’s website back on April 10 still holds today.

Markets rallied on the U.S. and Iran ceasefire announcement, but these moves look to be driven more by rapid unwinds of hedges and speculative positioning than by a fundamental resolution of the conflict. Market volatility is likely to remain high with headline risk driving short-term swings.

— Michelle Gibley and Chris Ferrarone, Truce in Iran: Relief but Not Resolution (April 10, 2026)

One green session — or even a few intermittent ones during a period of ongoing political volatility — is not a refutation of my structural thesis. The retreat phase of TACO is not the resolution of NACHO. The patches will keep getting stapled on for as long as the political tolerance for the patches holds. And then one day, on no particular news, the cascade will arrive — because, as Kuhn showed, that’s how late paradigms always end.

The lesson isn’t to trade harder. We have to stop thinking a single event is going to resolve what no single event can resolve.

A Half a Life Can Still Be a Very Long Time

This war was ostensibly about enriched uranium. As I mentioned above, the half-life on that is hundreds of millions of years. The second term of He Who Should Not Have Been Elected has not yet hit its half-life.

The reality of the damage Voldetrump has done to the United States, to the world, to our markets and our alliances? Some of that damage will compound. Some will decay. None of it resolves in a single session — or even concession.

The half-life of this thing is going to be measured in years.

Not news cycles.

Late the other night, I’m sitting there watching my television.

That’s right, television. Not my iPad, not my iPhone, not Facebook, not any other social media. Not even “the Internet on my television.” Just a show on my television.

And what ad starts to run?

Ads relating to trading the stock market. Ads about software to help do the very things I’ve been doing lately every trading morning before I get ready for work. Tools to make this work better; tools to make that work better; tools to help me trade better.

But how does the television know that I’m a day trader? It’s like all of a sudden marketers know more about me than I know about me.

Seriously, though, my television?!

How It Works — The Invisible Integration

Think about it. The majority of us have our “television” delivered to us via the Internet. In my case, I signed up for Internet services and also for “television”. I went on from there to sign up via the television with Netflix, AppleTV, Prime, and a few others. (Yeah. My bills are outrageous. And to make it sting even more, we don’t watch that much TV.)

Now all this “television” is routed through our connection to the outside world.

And what is that? Our Internet connection. The same one we use to surf the web. The one we use to search for things on Google, or Amazon, or YouTube. On my computer. On my iPad. On my iPhone. Because all these connect automatically to my home wireless network when I’m at the house.

And all of these share one IP address.

Now the thing about this? My devices don’t need to talk to each other. They only need to talk to the Mothership. The Mothership keeps track of the reports from each of the devices I “own” and which are all spying on me.

It’s called “ACR” or “Automatic Content Recognition”. Or, as I like to call it: the Dossier of What Rick Likes.

You had no clue, did you? Me, either, until I started researching things after that set of bizarre late-night TV commercials. I mean, it wasn’t one commercial. It wasn’t two.

The Inversion — You ARE the Tape

It reminded me of a story my dad used to tell. If someone tells you you’re a duck and you know you’re not a duck, you can ignore it. If a second person tells you you’re a duck, you might pause for a moment. But, then, “Nah. I’m not a duck.” When the third person tells you you’re a duck?

You might want to check for feathers.

Here, you don’t need to check. The checking has already been done. You’re just being informed. Here, the ad-tech ecosystem — or you might say “echosystem” — recognized not just that you’re a duck and not just that you’re a Muscovy duck, but that your DNA shows you’re a Khaki Campbell and if they lay out the ads right, you’re going to provide them with a shit-ton of eggs.

All sterile, by the way.

And how did they get there? Every click, pause, search, and channel change is a transaction on a tape you didn’t know existed. They’re reading your psychology, finances, anxieties, and intentions in real time.

It’s amazing. As if you’d been splayed out and spread on a sammich.

Livermore’s Ghost

Livermore's edge was speed — reading the tape before the other players could react. The surveillance industry has that same edge on you permanently, because the latency is structural. You generate the data unconsciously. Just living. Making decisions — about what to watch, what to click on, what comments to post — without even making a decision.

It’s just who you are.

By the time you're aware of a preference, a fear, an intention — it's already been priced by the marketers.

You’ve been commoditized, packaged, and sold to the highest bidder.

I don’t know what Livermore’s Ghost would think of this. I suspect, like me, he would be simultaneously amazed — we’re well beyond sammiches here — and horrified.

Livermore spent his life as the one doing the reading. When the tape stopped being readable — when the edge closed — he couldn’t find another way to exist. And so he made the decision to cease to do so. I suspect he would recognize this moment immediately. Not with amazement. With dread. Because he would know exactly what it means to be on the wrong side of the tape.

Don’t misread that. I’m not talking about anything extreme here — not for me, anyway. After all, unlike Livermore, I’ve grown up with this creeping creepy corporate surveillance.

Back in the day, when we talked about your personal data being hacked, we would say you were “pwnd”. That’s passé.

Your personal data today is literally owned.

And not by you.

Plato’s Cave. Engineered.

In book VII of Plato’s The Republic, we are first introduced to the Shadows.

Prisoners, shackled in such a way that they can only see what is in front of them — like a lot of people living in the real world today — see a “false reality” which they mistake for the ultimate truth. What they see are not things in themselves, but blurry, 2D projections of physical things. Shadows thrown off by the fire that burns behind them — a fire they do not even know exists.

In a modern context, they symbolize the uncritical acceptance of cultural norms, media, and “the algorithm”. And since they cannot see the source, they believe the shadows are independent, living entities.

Other than that, though, Plato doesn’t really tell us much about the origin of the shadows.

Today, the shadows on your wall aren't accidental anymore — they're optimized. The people casting them know which shapes keep you watching, which ones trigger anxiety, which ones produce clicks. This isn't a cave you wandered into. It's a cave built to your specifications, to match your expectations, by people who know your specifications and expectations better than you do.

Reflexivity — You’re the Market

George Soros — I’ve written about this before — came up with the theory of reflexivity as a counterpoint to what he considered the defective, false theory known as the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH). The EMH assumed that prices instantly and accurately reflect all information available to the market. In this view, “fair value”, or price, is an objective fact discovered by the market.

Soros posited that humans — who comprise the market — never have complete information. One of the reasons for this is that they are participants in the market. The incomplete information and the biases of the participants have their own impact on prices. Moreover, this occurs within a feedback loop.

The reflexivity theory was first presented in The Alchemy of Finance, but Soros went on from there to apply reflexivity to politics, the “Open Society” framwork, and geopolitical institutions.

I think it works here, as well. Automatic Content Recognition isn’t just reflecting who you are. It’s bidding on who you will become. In fact, you aren’t just a participant in this scenario. You aren’t just “reading the tape”. In a very real sense, you are the price action. The mothership is a market maker front-running your next thought, pushing you toward a self-fulfilling prophecy, nudging you to feathers.

The difference here is that in explaining reflexivity, Soros knew he had a part to play in the making of the loop. Most of us sitting in front of the fire box that provides the photons creating shadows made by LEDs in the cave wall are, like Plato’s characters, oblivious to the fire and what lies behind it.

The irony of the whole thing, though, is that just as with the Efficient Market Hypothesis, the Market Maker Mothership is working off imperfect data. The you that has been read, mined, and catalogued — while perhaps a clearer picture of your consumer habits than you are aware of on your own — is still an incomplete picture of you.

A Market of One

The tape reader’s discipline is to recognize not only that he or she is the one being read, but the ironic incompleteness theorem. Does the Mothership really have a better understanding of you than you have of yourself? Are you one of our fine feathered friends whose whole story is written in what you consume? Is it true that the data collected on you tells someone else something about you that you’ve never understood?

In one sense, yes. It knows your revealed preferences — the things you actually click on when you’re tired, lonely, or bored — rather than your stated preferences, the person you tell yourself you are while drinking your morning coffee. It sees the “duck” because, statistically, you’ve been quacking for three hours straight.

What the Tape Reader Knows

But the Tape Reader’s discipline is to see what is actually there, rather than the story you brought to it. And the story the Mothership tells is just a high-resolution caricature. It sees the transaction, but it cannot see the intent. It sees the “Khaki Campbell” DNA, but it doesn’t know why you’re in the pond to begin with.

The danger isn’t that the Mothership knows you perfectly; the danger is that you might start to believe its caricature is the truth. Because let’s not forget how those shadows were built in the first place. This is the power of Soros’s theory: it’s a feedback loop. You were both the original source of the data and the market maker’s target.

If you spend enough time watching the shadows, you might forget that you’re the one casting them.

The Trailing Tape

In the old days, the ticker tape would spill out of the machine and coil onto the floor in a messy, tangled pile. Today, that tape is digital, invisible, and infinite. It “unspools” off into a void where there is no face on the other end — just an architecture too vast and indifferent to care about the soul of the duck.

That’s not a metaphor.

That’s the actual architecture.

Note that some facts in this story have been changed to protect the possibility of accidentally “outing” someone who might not want to be outed. However, I felt like this was important to write about for a variety of reasons that I hope will become obvious as you read this article.

The website in question, though, is real. So if you happen to run across it, hopefully this article will save you some heartache.

The Contact

Someone reached out. A family member had put money into jhi.top. Small amount, showing gains, but when they tried to withdraw, the site wanted a driver’s license. And when they searched for any trace of the platform anywhere online, they found nothing. Not a bad review. Not a good review. Not a Reddit thread, Facebook post, or tweet. Nothing.

And that’s when they got scared.

They were right to be scared. But they were asking the wrong question. They asked: why isn’t anyone talking about this?

The right question is: what does the silence tell you?

Reading the Tape

In trading, the absence of data is still data.

For example, one of the banes of my existence as a trader is spoofing. A bid that evaporates. What happens is that, for whatever reason, someone wants to keep a price down. Or up. Or right where it is. In the thinkorswim trading platform, which I use, there are several ways to see prices. There’s the Active Trader ladder. The Level II data. Time & Sales. And, of course, the candlestick minute or minutes (depending on what you choose), hours, days, weeks. You get the picture.

There are also tick charts, but you don’t care about those, do you?

To my knowledge, most traders — and I’ll admit I don’t know how right I am about this, but it’s my belief — prefer to watch Level II. I used to prefer — and still favor — the Active Trader ladder. Mostly that’s because the way I’ve got things set up, that ladder sits right next to where the more recent candles are printing on my one-minute and five-minute charts.

But maybe this is too much detail.

The point is that the Active Trader ladder and Level II are both susceptible to spoofing. This is where someone, or something (e.g., an algorithm) puts up fake and often outrageous numbers concerning how many shares are available for sale at a certain price and how many buyers are bidding at a certain price.

Doing this seems to scare off the ignorant traders. They see 10,791 shares on the sell side of the ladder for $7.01 and they think that’s as much as it’s worth. Or they see a similar number on the buy side and figure there’s no point bidding less. You might also see smaller amounts that move around right above that large number on the sell side or below the large number on the buy side.

What’s this got to do with the absence of data?

The tape. The tape reveals what’s real. The numbers I just talked about — the spoofs — change constantly. But if you look at Time & Sales, which is essentially the digital version of the old ticker tape, you will see that although the spoof numbers are constantly changing, no such numbers of shares are actually being bought or sold. If you depend solely on Level II or the Trader ladder, you’re watching prints with no follow-through.

This absence of data tells you the spoofers are afoot. And once you get your head wrapped around that, you also can read other things from the spoofing: like how desperate the spoofers are, how much resistance they’re running into trying to scare people one way or the other up or down the ladder.

So the first thing that absence of data tells you is that someone is spoofing you. This same principle applies outside the trading arena. Here, with jhi.top, it indicates that a scam is staring you in the face, begging you to follow its illicit lead.

Because as you know if you’ve read any of my articles, in trading, we talk about reading the tape — interpreting the flow of orders, the shape of volume, the things the market reveals when you know how to look. Sometimes the most important signal is an absence. A stock that should be moving and isn’t. Bids that evaporate the moment you lean on them. A print that comes in off-hours and leaves no trail.

The tape doesn’t lie. But it also doesn’t announce itself. You have to know what the silence means.

jhi.top is a ghost exchange. It doesn’t exist in any registry of legitimate platforms. It’s not on CoinMarketCap. It’s not on CoinGecko. ScamAdviser finds near-zero trust scores on related domains in the same naming family, flagging shared server infrastructure with other suspicious operations. There are no Reddit threads because the operation is intentionally ephemeral — built to vanish. No footprint is the whole point. Scam platforms in this category are disposable. They go up, they run a cycle, they go dark. There’s nothing to find because by the time anyone is searching, the operation has already moved. (Note there is another definition of “ghost exchange” or, more accurately, “ghost trading”, but I’m not getting into detail on that here.)

This invisibility is a feature of the scam, not a bug.

But consider the framework I discussed above to jhi.top — no index presence, no review trail, no footprint of any kind. If you’ve been around the Internet long enough, you’ll realize that any legit site is going to have left prints. Legitimate platforms, even obscure ones, generate sediment.

And as I said, the tape never lies.

Subscribe now

Why Smart People Get Scammed

Here’s the thing I want you to understand, because it matters: the people who fall for this are not stupid. They are not unsophisticated. They are often exactly the kind of cautious, research-oriented person you would expect to be immune to scams.

But this type of scam works slowly. It draws you in carefully. The scammer cannot move too fast or give you every request up-front because the scammer knows that will spook their prey.

They want to make it easy and attractive to get in. Getting back out is the hard part.

The operation is called pig butchering — a term that originated in China and describes the process with clinical accuracy. You fatten the pig before the slaughter. The initial deposit is small. No arduous requirements to set up and start using an account. The platform looks professional. The gains are visible on screen. In some cases, an early withdrawal is actually permitted — a calculated move to build trust. See? You can take money out. This is real.

The psychological architecture here is sophisticated. These aren’t amateur hour phishing emails with bad grammar. The organizations running pig butchering operations — many based in Myanmar and Cambodia, operating from what are effectively forced-labor scam compounds — run them like businesses. There are scripts just like with AT&T or Cablevision when they’re working to scam you into the deal of the century on their products. There are quotas. There are managers. The person chatting you up about a great investment opportunity may themselves be a trafficking victim sitting in a building they can’t leave.

The scam works because it exploits a fundamental human cognitive bias: we anchor to what we can see. The dashboard shows a balance. The balance shows gains. The interface looks like Coinbase. What the mark cannot see is that the balance is fabricated — a number in a database controlled entirely by the scammer, bearing no relationship to any actual asset.

The ID Demand: What’s Actually Happening

When a platform demands a government ID to “verify your identity before withdrawal,” there are two things happening simultaneously.

First, it’s a stall. You’re not going to get your money. The ID requirement is a friction mechanism — buy time, collect more deposits, string the victim along. After the ID comes a “tax hold.” After the tax comes a “release fee.” After the fee comes a new obstacle. The goalposts never stop moving because there is no finish line. There was never going to be a large or a final withdrawal. Because the goal is to take money, not to give it away.

Second, it’s a data harvest. Your driver’s license — name, address, date of birth, license number, physical description — is valuable independent of the crypto scam. Identity theft is a second revenue stream. The same operation that stole your crypto investment may also open credit lines in your name six months later.

Do not send the ID. If you already have, treat your identity as compromised and act accordingly: credit freeze, monitor for new accounts, notify your bank.

Why There Are No Reddit Threads

Back to the original question. The absence of Reddit discussion about jhi.top isn’t because the platform is too obscure for anyone to have noticed. It’s because the operational lifespan of a site like this is short by design. These platforms are spun up fast — often using off-the-shelf trading platform templates available on dark web markets — pointed at a fresh domain, run for weeks or months, and then shut down or abandoned before victims have time to compare notes publicly.

The domain jhi.top generates no web index results, no review site entries, nothing. It has never accumulated the normal sediment of legitimate internet presence — no organic search traffic, no user-generated content, no business listings. By the time the first victim is angry enough to post on Reddit, the operation has likely already pivoted to a new domain.

This is why the FBI’s IC3, the FTC, and California’s DFPI all want reports filed immediately — not because you’re going to recover your money (you probably aren’t), but because rapid reporting helps investigators map the infrastructure before it moves. Like the tape, the blockchain doesn’t lie either. Every transaction leaves a trace. Forensic blockchain analysis has actually clawed back funds in some cases — but only when law enforcement can act quickly.

Reading the Tape on the Scam Itself

Let me put on my tape reader hat and give you the signals — the things that, in retrospect, are the equivalent of a stock that gaps up on no news, with no volume follow-through, at a price with no history.

And for these last parts of this post, I fed what I’d already written to an LLM and asked it to help generate quick kind of checklists based on my article and an Internet scan. I hate making bullet lists. So the bullets are AI-generated, though I removed some parts that I thought were wrong and tweaked some others. But after that, I approve of them or they wouldn’t be here.

• No footprint anywhere. Legitimate platforms, even small ones, generate organic discussion. Zero results is not neutral — it is a red flag.

• The initial amount was “small.” That’s the opening position. The intent is always to scale up.

• Gains appeared on screen quickly. Real trading rarely works this way. Fake platforms can display any number they want.

• Withdrawal triggers a new requirement. The first ask for fees or ID before you can withdraw, when it wasn’t required before, is the tell. Legitimate exchanges do not function this way.

• The platform is unavailable on any recognized exchange registry. If it’s not on CoinMarketCap, CoinGecko, or verifiable through a regulated financial authority, it doesn’t exist in any meaningful sense.

Any one of these is worth a pause. All of them together is a hard stop.

What To Do

If you or someone you know has been victimized:

• Stop. Don’t send more money. Don’t send the ID. Don’t pay the “tax.”

• Document everything. Screenshots of the platform, wallet addresses, transaction IDs, all communications.

• Report to FBI IC3 at ic3.gov

• Report to FTC at reportfraud.ftc.gov

• If you’re in California, report to DFPI at dfpi.ca.gov — they have an active crypto scam tracker and investigators with actual jurisdiction

• If a credit card was used to purchase crypto, call the issuer immediately about a chargeback — time matters

• Watch for the recovery scam. Someone may contact you offering to recover your lost funds for a fee. This is the third act of the same operation. Block and report.

The tape on jhi.top reads clean in all the wrong ways. There is no volume. There is no history. No footprint. No data.

That’s not a quiet or spoofed stock. It’s worse. That’s a dark pool designed to take your money and disappear.

The Tape Doesn’t Lie — It Never Did

[T]he best of all tipsters, the most persuasive of all salesmen, is the tape.

— Edwin Lefèvre, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator 335 (Jon D. Markman annotated ed., John Wiley & Sons 2010)

The core premise of Reading the Tape is pattern recognition applied to real data. Not imagined data. Not hoped for data. It’s not anything speculative at all. Rather than listening to what someone says, you read the tape.

The extension of this premise is that anything can be the tape. That was the rationale behind creating this Substack. I didn’t want to dilute my first Substack, Probable Cause, with non-criminal-defense-related posts. Reading the Tape was a natural move to achieve my goal because I was already using the metaphor when discussing criminal law issues.

Today we’re reading the tape on a man whose tape has been consistently printing the same pattern for at least forty years. There’s nothing hidden. Nothing ambiguous. Somehow, at least it seems to me, it has been consistently ignored by people who preferred the narrative to the data.

Not everyone can read tapes and my intent in reading this tape is about pattern recognition; not politics.

The Good — Giving the Devil His Due

Intellectual honesty requires acknowledging what the man actually does quite well. Brand creation. Narrative salesmanship. Getting sophisticated people — banks, investors, voters — to extend credit on the basis of a story rather than fundamentals.

George Soros, in his book The Alchemy of Finance, introduced the theory of reflexivity. When people believe something about the market, they act on that belief, and those actions actually change the market — so the belief partly creates the reality it was trying to predict. It’s like during the pandemic when everyone believed for some odd reason that stores would run out of toilet paper. So people rushed to buy it all — I saw people wheeling two grocery carts stacked above and below with large containers of toilet paper — and then the store actually did run out. The belief made itself true.

Underlying Soros’s reflexivity theory (if you can really call it a theory) is the Human Uncertainty Principle. Sounds like the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, right? But

Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle does not influence the behavior of quantum particles one iota; they would behave the same way if the principle had never been discovered. The same is not true of the human uncertainty principle. Theories about human behavior can and do influence human behavior.

— George Soros, The Alchemy of Finance 7 (2d ed. 2015)

I seriously doubt Trump has the neuronal capacity to actually understand reflexivity or anything else George Soros might say. But he somehow appears to have developed one great skill related to it to the utmost: his self-mythology fed back into reality. People believed the brand, which made the brand real enough to borrow against, which funded the next venture, which reinforced the brand.

But the reality is that Trump is a genuinely talented liquidator who convinced everyone they were hiring a builder. I mean, come on, name one other person in the history of the world who could sell Trump steaks (until he couldn’t) AND got elected President failed to get re-elected (until he did) AND launched a crypto coin (which has lost 96% from its highest value reached two days after it was launched).

The salesmanship is real. It’s just entirely decoupled from the underlying product.

The Bad — The Business Autopsy

In November 1987, Donald Trump published The Art of the Deal — a book that would sell millions of copies and cement his reputation as America’s premier businessman. It was ghostwritten by Tony Schwartz, who has since said publicly that he deeply regrets it and that the version of Trump he created was largely his own invention. Schwartz coined a phrase in the book to describe Trump’s promotional style: “truthful hyperbole.” It is, on reflection, the most honest sentence in the entire volume. It is an oxymoron that accurately describes a con.

What almost nobody noticed at the time was the tape that was already printing underneath the mythology. Trump Plaza Hotel had opened in 1984, three years before the book dropped. The Taj Mahal casino — the one that would become his most spectacular bankruptcy — was already in motion. The Trump Shuttle airline would be purchased the following year. The book that supposedly explained his genius as a dealmaker was published in the middle of the wreckage, not before it. He was selling the prospectus while the enterprise was already failing.

The Art of the Deal is, in retrospect, not a business book. It is a liquidation manual dressed as a success story. The core move of the book is consistently the same: leverage narrative to extract capital, use other people’s money to fund the brand, and make sure the story is always bigger than the underlying asset. There is no framework for creating value. There is only a framework for appearing to create value long enough to borrow against it. Trump presents this all as genius.

The deals that followed confirmed what the tape had been saying all along.

Casinos: Trump’s Atlantic City properties (the Taj Mahal, Trump Plaza, Trump Castle) filed for bankruptcy multiple times between 1991 and 2009. Bondholders were wiped. Contractors went unpaid. Employees lost jobs. Trump himself, through a combination of debt restructuring and equity dilution, managed to reduce his personal exposure while others absorbed the losses. The mechanism involved extracting the licensing fees and management income while ensuring the debt sits on someone else’s balance sheet.

Then there was Trump Airlines. Purchased in 1988 for $365 million, just one year after The Art of the Deal told the world what a genius he was, the shuttle service never turned a profit. He defaulted on the loan, surrendered the airline to creditors in 1992, and walked away. The mechanism this time? Borrow against the brand, collect the prestige, leave the debt for the lenders.

Trump Mortgage is the next new kid on the block about to hit the block. Launched in 2006 with Trump declaring on CNBC that it was “a great time to start a mortgage company” and that “the real estate market is going to be very strong for a long time to come.” It closed eighteen months later as the housing market collapsed around it. The mechanism will sound familiar: license the name, collect the fees, bear none of the actual risk.

Trump University operated from 2005 to 2010, charging students up to $35,000 for real estate seminars that delivered essentially nothing of what was promised. New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman called it a “straight up fraud.” Trump settled for $25 million in 2016 — without admitting wrongdoing, naturally. By now, you should start seeing a pattern. The mechanism that drove it was to sell access to the myth, collect the tuition, leave the students holding worthless certificates and empty bank accounts.

One of my favorites was Trump Steaks. Two months. $50,000 in total sales, if that, according to the Sharper Image CEO who ran the licensing deal. Trump put in nothing — no minimums in the contract, no financial exposure, no risk. Again, the mechanism was to license the name, let someone else absorb the loss, move on.

And if you can’t sell steaks? Maybe you should move on.

And, finally, the USFL where Trump purchased the New Jersey Generals in 1983 and promptly lobbied to move the league’s games from spring to fall, where it would compete directly with the NFL. The strategy was widely understood to be an attempt to force a merger — or an antitrust lawsuit that would pay out damages. The league folded in 1986. The antitrust suit succeeded in court but the jury awarded damages of exactly one dollar, tripled under antitrust law to three dollars. The familiar mechanism you should be able to recite by heart. In this case, it was to use other people’s franchises as leverage for a personal play, exit when the play fails.

This is where Thomas Kuhn becomes useful. Kuhn observed that paradigm shifts don’t announce themselves — they accumulate at the margins as anomalies the existing framework keeps trying to explain away. Each collapse in Trump’s business record was treated as exactly that: an anomaly. A bad market. Overly aggressive lenders. Jealous competitors. Biased media. The framework of Trump as genius businessman kept absorbing the contradictions because the people most invested in the myth were always the last to update.

The tape, however, was printing the same thing every time. It wasn’t failure. Failure happens to everyone. What tied everything together was the mechanism. In every single case, Trump extracted value for himself while the enterprise collapsed around him. Contractors stiffed. Bondholders wiped. Students defrauded. Banks left holding paper. Shareholders diluted. The pattern is too consistent to be accident. It is the business model.

The Art of the Deal didn’t foreshadow this accidentally. It described it explicitly, in plain language, and called it genius. The readers who made it a bestseller weren’t misled. They just didn’t know how to read the tape.

The Very Ugly Truth — Same Play, Bigger Stage

Because the majority of Americans are not very good tape readers — in fact, many don’t even understand there is a tape they could read, apparently — Trump is now running the identical mechanism on the United States and the Western order. Same skill set. Same extraction pattern. But, man, are we on a wholly different scale.

I’m not even going to get deep into the grift here. Grift has always been part of his game. His use of power to obtain emoluments including $400 million jets, multi-million dollar “donations” (a.k.a. bribes) from corporations (which didn’t work), pardons for purchase (which also cheated victims, again), and other grifts allegedly bringing in billions. Nor do we need to speak much about the $1.25 billion he essentially allegedly pilfered from the State Department by having transferred to his bogus “Board of Peace”, created just before he started the war on Iran that is where the tape has begun printing the real liquidation of U.S. assets.

This all constitutes one-half of the tape we’ve already seen on Trump. The part where he takes from the company he’s about to liquidate.

The second-half is the most damaging to the United States. Eighty years of work, all headed for liquidation. Trump went into his new term rattling the world stage by talking about taking Greenland. (And Iran has only intensified that threat.) Canada, he said, should be our 51st state. Then he went after Venezuela, sweeping in with the U.S. military and kidnapping their President — after having spent weeks killing their fishermen under claims they were running drugs that were killing U.S. citizens — and, when he was finished with that, salivating over the U.S. taking their oil.

And then, of course, there is the constant alienation of allies. Talk about your Art of the Deal. The same allies who have helped the United States maintain some semblance of world order over the last 80 years.

Soros’s insight was that in human systems, perception and reality are not separate. They interact. Belief shapes behavior, behavior shapes outcomes, and outcomes reshape belief — in a continuous loop that can run in either direction. Markets can inflate beyond any rational basis because enough people believe they will, and their belief makes it so, until the moment it doesn’t. The same mechanism runs in reverse. Once enough people believe a system is unreliable, they act as if it is unreliable, and their actions make it so.

Which doesn’t absolve Trump from blame. He is, after all, the catalyst for the current shift.

This is the reflexivity argument at full power — and it is not a metaphor for what is happening to American institutional credibility. It is the actual mechanism.

Consider what American institutional reliability actually was, structurally. It was not merely a reputation. It was load-bearing infrastructure. The entire post-war global order — NATO, the dollar as reserve currency, freedom of navigation, the nuclear umbrella, the credibility of American treaty commitments — was built on a single foundational assumption: that the United States means what it says. Allies made defense decisions based on it. Central banks held dollars because of it. Supply chains were organized around it. Shipping lanes stayed open because of it. The belief was not incidental to the system. The belief was the system.

That belief was already under strain before Trump was re-elected. But, as with all good liquidators, it’s that already stressed “asset” — U.S. credibility — that he’s hit the hardest.

When you begin liquidating that credibility, you are not merely damaging a reputation that can later be repaired with better public relations. You are triggering a reflexive process that accelerates itself. (This is part of Soros’s reflexivity insight.)

Here is how the loop runs:

This is not speculation. It is what the tape is printing right now.

And there is a reason this is happening now rather than in 1975 or 1955. Institutional memory is generational. The people who built the post-war order built it with living memory of what happens when it doesn’t exist. Eighty years later, that memory is gone. What remains is habit without understanding, rules without the visceral knowledge of why the rules exist. That is a different kind of vulnerability than mere political disagreement. It’s structural. And a talented liquidator can feel structural vulnerability the way a good card player feels the table.

The Strait of Hormuz is functionally closed — a forty-year assumption of American naval supremacy over the world’s most critical energy chokepoint, broken. Though its actual status is less clear and seems to change by the hour.

The Trump Tape prints what it always has: everyone but Trump himself (so far) is taking the hit.

Our closest allies are organizing frameworks for freedom of navigation that do not include us. They are not doing this to punish us. They are doing it because the rational response to an unreliable partner is to stop depending on that partner. Meanwhile Moscow is selling oil at a premium to energy-starved buyers while we absorb the geopolitical and economic cost of a war whose principal beneficiary wears no American uniform. Consumer confidence has hit record lows — not because Americans have carefully analyzed geopolitical theory, but because they can feel the instability even if they cannot name it. The feedback loop does not require sophistication to transmit. It only requires consequences.

The Kuhn dimension here is worth pausing on. Paradigm shifts, Kuhn observed, do not feel like paradigm shifts from inside the paradigm. They feel like a series of manageable anomalies, each of which gets explained away, until the weight of the unexplained becomes too great and the model collapses. The people most invested in the old paradigm — the ones whose identity and worldview depend on it — are reliably the last to see it. From inside the American exceptionalism paradigm, each of these events looks like a temporary disruption. The Hormuz situation will resolve. The allies will come back. The markets will stabilize. The president will pivot.

The tape does not share that optimism. The tape is printing what is actually happening — not what we hope will happen, not what spokespeople say is happening, not what cable news is arguing about. And what is actually happening is that the load-bearing belief is being liquidated, at scale, by someone who has spent forty years perfecting exactly this mechanism.

In markets, we have a name for an asset whose value depends entirely on the continued belief that it has value. We call it a confidence game. The moment enough participants update their model, the asset reprices — not gradually, but all at once, because everyone is watching everyone else watch everyone else.

American credibility is not a confidence game. It is — or was — something real, built over decades through consistency, sacrifice, and institutional reliability. But it can be treated as a confidence game by someone who understands, instinctively or otherwise, that perception and reality are not separate. That once you control the narrative long enough, you can borrow against it. That by the time the creditors figure out what happened, you will have already moved on.

The liquidator always moves on.

Reading the Intent vs. Reading the Tape

As I wrote in a recent Note, with each passing day it becomes harder not to see Trump as the greatest Russian asset in history for undermining the United States — and I was precise about what I meant. I was not making a legal argument. I was making a pattern recognition argument.

The distinction matters.

When I wrote about the suspicious pre-announcement trading in the hours before Trump posted his Iran ceasefire announcement on Truth Social — volume spikes in S&P e-Mini futures and oil contracts that only made sense if someone already knew what the announcement would say — I didn’t need to know who placed those orders to read what they meant. The tape printed what it printed. Intent is for lawyers. Behavior is for traders.

The same lens applies here. Whether the damage to Western institutions is by design, by affinity, or by the simple chaos of a personality that mistakes domination for strength — the tape reads the same either way. Russia spent the better part of a century trying to accomplish what one election cycle has. You don’t have to read the intent to read the tape.

The Losing Trade

In markets, we have a word for a position that keeps moving against you while you construct increasingly elaborate reasons the thesis is still intact.

We call it a losing trade.

The reasons accumulate. The market doesn’t understand yet. The fundamentals will reassert themselves. The catalyst is coming. Smart money is accumulating. This is just noise.

Meanwhile, the position bleeds.

Every trader knows this feeling. The refusal to update. The sunk cost masquerading as conviction. The story you keep telling yourself because the alternative — that you were wrong, that the tape was right all along, that you held through the damage because you couldn’t face what the prints were saying — is too uncomfortable to sit with.

The question worth sitting with — while oil trades above $100 and our allies hold their own meetings without us and the dollar loses its automatic safe-haven status — is who exactly is holding that position.

Who’s long on American credibility at current prices, constructing reasons why this resolves.

And who’s on the other side.

The liquidator always moves on. He has already moved on from the casinos. From the airline. From the mortgage company. From the university. From the steaks. From the crypto coin.

The question is never whether he moves on.

The question is what he leaves behind.

The tape doesn’t lie. It never did.

In my “inaugural post” I told you where tape reading started — a child walking into a bedroom, a crying mother, a false “nothing's wrong.”

What I didn't tell you is where storytelling started. Turns out they were born in the same house, at roughly the same time, for the same reason.

After all, I quickly figured out that everyone else was telling stories. Their stories were often pure fiction. Nor did anyone want to hear any painful truths.

I closed out my inaugural post with these words from Kierkegaard:

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must Be lived forwards.

— Søren Kierkegaard, 2 Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks: Journals EE–KK 179 (Alastair Hannay et al. eds., Bruce H. Kirmmse trans., Princeton Univ. Press 2008) (1843)

It’s fitting, then, that only in retrospect did I myself realize that actual, deliberate storytelling became the outlet for me to talk about my own feelings.

When I was a young child, my “journals” took the form of short stories of Snoopy and the Red Baron. Complete with drawings of dog fights (haha!) with bullets zipping through the air. Snoopy’s doghouse spiraling: sometimes up, sometimes down. The Red Baron zigging and zagging. Ilustrated stories that I call “journals” because often, how things were going for me determined how things went for Snoopy.

In addition to the fight scenes, sometimes my drawings were of maps. After all, if you go down, you need to find your way home afoot! To this day, I occasionally like to doodle maps.

As alluded to, I was Snoopy. Fighting to stay in the sky. Aiming to take the Red Baron out of the sky. But, although I was Snoopy—I was otherwise myself—I was frequently shot out of the sky. Down the doghouse would spiral, a stream of smoke trailing behind. Maybe two. Maybe more.

— Rick Horowitz, I Kept Journals…And Then I Was Gone (September 5, 2024)

I imagine this is how it is for all writers. For me the child who couldn’t read his own reality directly encoded it into fiction where he could examine it from a safe distance.

I’ve done that my whole life: with varying levels of self-awareness, I’ve printed the tape so that the tape reader in me could read myself. The doghouse spiraling down trailing smoke wasn't fantasy. It was reporting.

In the evolution of me reading the tape, I’ve moved beyond reporting to self-analysis.

Anticipation & Pattern Recognition

And there are the maps. A child who draws escape routes inside his stories isn’t playing — he’s anticipating the next print before it arrives. Pattern recognition as survival mechanism, rendered in a child’s pencil drawings. The earliest form of what Livermore did with ticker tape. The maps weren’t decoration. They were the whole hidden point. The kid knew he was going down. What was needed was a plan for what to do next.

The maps were his view of the troubled landscape he was going to need to figure out how to navigate if he wanted to make it to safety.

Sadly, those maps — along with the stories, as I explained in I Kept Journals — are long gone. I have often wondered what happened to them and wished I could read them for clues — reminders, actually — of what I was like as a small boy. I strongly suspect that the Snoopy stories were the most faithful record of my interior life (without my realizing it at the time) that I ever kept. They would have been more honest than my later journals, because the fiction didn’t know it was confessing.

And yet those are the stories that didn’t survive. Everything that was too painful to say directly got encoded in the stories — and the maps probably contained hints of the dangers I thought I needed to avoid in order to escape — which is why losing them was different from losing, say, a box of school papers. (Though I actually mourn some of those, too.)

The problem is that I don’t really remember that much of my childhood. It comes in snippets and foggy memories. The road from my childhood to who I am now is full of potholes.

I blame the Red Baron.

In reality, the SDAM I mentioned in Evolution of a Tape Reader probably should rightly shoulder that blame. The Rambler where last I saw Snoopy and the Red Baron is gone. The folder containing the stories is gone. But I remember the pale green color of the car. I remember shoving the folder under the seat. I remember that Snoopy went down more often than he prevailed.

The tape kept the pattern and lost the record. Which is exactly what SDAM does. The episodic context gets stripped but retains the shape of the memories. The stories are gone but their emotional weather has been informing everything I've written and pretty much everything I’ve felt since.

Storytelling as Reading the Tape

I now realize that storytelling is tape reading by another name. The fictional frame permits me to examine realities that direct examination won’t allow. The writer and the tape reader are the same person doing the same thing with different tools.

Or as another writer put things:

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

— Joan Didion, Why I Write, Literary Hub (January 26, 2021)

I think this originally appeared in N.Y. Times Book Rev. (December 5, 1976) but the version where I found the quote is on the Literary Hub.

Anyway, I said a very similar thing when explaining why I wanted to write The Afterlife Bus.

The “why,” then, is that I must tell this story so that I can read this story. So that I can know what it is that I want to do. Call it platonic self-examination.

— Rick Horowitz, The Afterlife Bus: What Kind of World Should We Build? (September 20, 2021)

So I write the story — the tape prints — then I read the tape to understand my own self. As a child, I did this unknowingly. Snoopy and the Red Baron constantly battling things out in the sky help me to ground myself. The maps (and I still like to draw maps sometimes) cut a path through fear and uncertainty. By drawing them, I not only gave my fear and uncertainty a voice, but I gave myself a safe path through them.

Until the Tape Runs Out

There’s a story I’ve been carrying around for years, unwritten. A man is shot in the head on a city street. The bullet enters. The story begins. It’s told in the first person — because of course it is — and it’s the story of his life, unreeling in the dying brain’s final prints. Periodically, I report the bullet’s progress. As the bullet reached the optic nerve, I remembered being ten years old... The tape playing out to its last tick.

I don’t know yet if I’ll ever write it. What I know is that I’ve been drawing the map for it for a long time. I want to write it.

And unless someone could find The Snoopy Files, any evidence that I know how to write fiction is gone. I’ve written snippets of fiction. But I’ve never yet completed a story.

But the pale green Rambler is long gone. The folder under the seat is gone. Snoopy and the Red Baron are probably somewhere in a landfill for all I know, or dissolved into soil, or — and this is the version I prefer — still fighting it out somewhere over where the North Sea meets the English Channel, neither one willing to go down for good.

That record didn’t survive. But the pattern did.

The tape keeps printing. It always does.

Until it doesn’t.

Yesterday, I posted about the TACO trade and how when the news first came out, I refused to allow it to influence my trading because I knew that it was not going to last. I knew he was going to start to TACO.

This morning, CNBC is using the exact same phrase in a headline:

The ‘TACO’ trade fails: Trump’s Iran extension fails to boost markets

— Fred Imbert, The ‘TACO’ trade fails: Trump’s Iran extension fails to boost markets (March 27, 2026)

The article is behind a paywall, so you may not be able to read it. Doesn’t matter. My point is just that I predicted that there would be such a tiny bounce on the news before the market continued sinking that I didn’t let the news float my quote.

My article was about a prior announcement that teased the idea of peace talks. The CNBC article is about Trump’s announcement yesterday about ten minutes after the markets had closed. Both had the same impact: pretty much nada.

Hopefully that word doesn’t bring ICE down on my head.

The first TACO event — the one I wrote about — cause a very, very brief uptrend that lasted literally minutes before failing. This morning, I was up watching the market off and on since pre-market opened at 1 a.m. my time.

I haven’t been doing a lot of trading, since I prefer scalping. Right now, I’m kind of “trapped” in some swing trades I made and so I’m mostly sitting tight.

I say “trapped” because I still believe the original theses behind my trades are good. But they were made before the Illegal Iran War started and, like the rest of the market, they all dropped when Trump took a dump on the world.

So I’ve been taking advantage of this situation to buy up some income ETFs that are normally quite a bit more expensive than they are right now. I’m doing it in dribbles and drabs because, no matter how low I buy, they keep going lower.

Claude and I are having fun over it.

So all morning, since pre-market started, I’ve been buying 20 shares here, 10 shares there, and no matter how low I go, it’s always going lower.

This has led Claude and I to come up with a plan to really fix things.

And I need to get crackin’ on it, because I believe the Dow had already dropped 500 points before Trump’s latest announcement. His 10-day extension changed nothing structurally. Brent (oil) is back up to $110 the last I checked. That link goes to a live chart, so the number may be different if you check it. Chinese ships were turned away from Hormuz today. Dow futures were down 400 before the open. VIX — for those who don’t know, a measurement of volatility in the market and sometimes called the “fear index” — was up at around 30.

It hangs out a lot there lately.

Even luxury stocks are taking a billion-dollar hit. The drag is on almost all stocks (except oil). And every nation is showing “red” today except that other nation that made red famous before MAGA came along — which is now apparently green!

All this happened despite Trump’s attempts to put out the dumpster fire he started in the Middle East. Iran so far has rejected Trump’s overtures.

And so, like our former allies whom Trump had already alienated to the point that they refuse to rescue him from a war they didn’t start, there’s nothing left for the tape reader to do today but sit on his hands, maybe collect some more income ETFs, and wait.

CNBC called it the TACO trade this morning. The tape called it days ago. I wrote about it yesterday.

Lately, the market has so preoccupied me that candles form even in my dreams.

When I can’t sleep, I (mentally) say to myself, “In…out…in…out…in…out…” as I breathe. Sometimes while I do that, I visualize things that I won’t get into here, because I’m a smooth operator.

(We’re talking about the stock market, people!)

I pop out of bed off and on throughout the night — in…out…in…out…of bed — and if it’s after 1 a.m. my time, I look in on thinkorswim (TOS), the trading platform that I use.

How’s the market doing? Did Trump post something on Trump Social that’s moving the markets against me today? For his friends, today? For his kids today? (I guarantee you the kids come after the transactional friends.)

And Then It Happened, Again

And then it happened, again. The market was quiet. I was working several swing trades on theses I had carefully researched. And then…

An account trading under the username "Magamyman" made more than $553,000 placing bets on the prediction market site Polymarket about Iran and its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, just before an Israeli strike killed him on Saturday.

— Bobby Allyn, Prediction market trader ‘Magamyman’ made $553,000 on death of Iran’s supreme leader (March 1, 2026)

Whoever Bobby was reporting about, he was “allyn” on that bet. A cool half-a-million profit. Apparently trying to catch up with Jesse Livermore’s friend “Bet-a-Million”.

Of course, a million then, a million now, a million here, a million there…regardless, I’d love to have that million.

Wouldn’t you?

But you don’t know “the Donald.”

The Grifter-in-Chief, a.k.a., TACO

The Orange Wonder, the Grifter-in-Chief, or, depending on your astuteness, simply TACO, stuck to his pattern.

Patterns, of course, are the specialty of readers of the tape.

“War” was declared on Iran. Bombs rained — and reigned — from all quarters. The United States bombed Iran. Israel bombed Iran. And Lebanon. Iran retaliated by bombing Israel and numerous of its neighbors.

Nobody knows to what end. Other than maybe the end of world peace and prosperity.

Because then the Strait of Hormuz — not to be confused with Straight Up Hummus — became the completely unexpected, totally out-of-the-blue-as-far-as-the-United-States-was-concerned center of attention.

Gas prices soared. Fertilizer prices began to stink as much as the fertilizer once did. Stock markets tanked. Around the world.

Not gonna lie. I was working several swing trades that were supposed to last days. Now I’m worried they’re going to last months. If not years.

It’s hard to tell, because TACO has figured out his words manipulate the market. His tweets twist tickets on the exchange.

But this time, things were different.

Oh, not the miscalculations. Let’s face it: TACO’s miscalculations are no miracle or mystery. “Demented Dickwad Donald” — my preferred way to think of this potentially syphilis-addled brain — is somehow great at the Art of the Steal, but has never actually seen success at the Art of the Deal.

His two great skills — three if you count grift and theft as separate skills — are “self-promotion”, “grift”, and “theft”.

That’s it. That’s all you get. And a lot of times, it’s not even that: it’s luck. He says something stupid and before the spit blows back in his face, his even stupider followers actually buy into it.

That, however, does not stop him from “TACO-ing” out.

TACO, of course, refers to the idea that “Trump Always Chickens Out.” He can’t help it. And, under the circumstances, I don’t totally blame him. I mean, come on: you shit on the world, thinking nothing happens except the pressure in your lower abdomen is relieved. Then you realize that someone saw you shit on the world.

And, of course, the world went to shit.

And they’re all blaming you for having shit on the world.

Back pedal! Back pedal! Back pedal!

So, now, Trump, as Always, Chickens Out.

Hegseth Takes the Bus to Work

And so, after starting an Illegal Iran War (henceforth, IIW), and realizing as any sane person does that it is not going well for the world, the news today reports that Trump channeled Flip Wilson and said, “A staffer made me do it.”

That “staffer” — soon to be little more than a Carry My Water Boy for Trump — is none other than Pete Hegseth.

The detail that makes this so adorably Trump is the physical scene. Trump said it with Hegseth sitting right next to him. In Memphis. At a crime task force roundtable. Hegseth stayed quiet. That’s the tape right there. It’s not in the words, but the silence.

And there’s a beautiful contradiction buried in the reporting: Trump had previously said after last year’s joint US-Israeli strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities that they were “totally obliterated.” Hell, the pronouncement remains to this day on the White House website.

So the nuclear justification he’s now pinning on Hegseth — “you can’t let them have a nuclear weapon” — contradicts his own prior claim that the nuclear threat was already eliminated.

But it was Hegseth’s idea. And nobody — not even Hegseth — apparently thought things could go sideways.

But…hmm…Trump was warned internally that Iran could launch retaliatory attacks on neighboring Gulf states. Trump ignored the warnings. Then when Iran did exactly that, Trump told reporters: “Nobody was even thinking about it.”

The tape doesn’t lie. The reader just has to know where to look.

Hegseth about to give his next briefing from under the bus.

— Jon Favreau, Twitter X post (March 23, 2026)

Trump Lies; The Tape Doesn’t

So here I’ve been. Sitting in Fresno. Trying to trade in a Trump Market. It’s worse than a bear market. Because for reasons that boggle my mind, there are still a helluva lot of people who actually believe the words that come out of Trump’s mouth.

When Trump first said that he was negotiating with Iran. I literally said to myself, “No, he’s not.” And what happened next?

Stocks started moving up. But I’d already read the tape. Stocks had been heading down steadily for days on worries about the war, the Strait, the Oil, and the long-term impacts all this would have on the economy.

Trump lies. The tape doesn’t.

So for yet another day, I sat pat while stocks started going up. I didn’t even try a scalp trade.

And, sure enough, within minutes, the rally — which never got yuuuuugly big to start with — was over.

Fake news.

But it was all there for anyone who knows how to read the tape. Not just the market tape. Definitely not just the words Trump speaks. I waited for the true print.

Because as someone once said, “history doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.” Trump often repeats himself, seldom rhymes, but always lies.

So Why the War?

As I’ve read the Trump tape, I’ve often wondered who holds the real tapes. You know, the ones likely filmed on Epstein’s island.

The Illegal Iran War was, after all, unnecessary. Whether he was telling the truth or not, Trump had previously claimed (as I noted above) that he had totally obliterated Iran’s nuclear program. In addition, even regarding the latest round of tensions between Trump and Iran — note that I did not say “the United States and Iran” because this one is really all Trump — Iran and the U.S. supposedly had negotiated the beginnings of a peace agreement.

“A peace deal is within our reach … if we just allow diplomacy the space it needs to get there,” Al Busaidi said in an interview with CBS News in Washington, DC, after Oman brokered the third round of indirect talks between the US and Iran in Geneva on Thursday.

— Al Jazeera Staff and AFP, Peace ‘within reach’ as Iran agrees no nuclear material stockpile: Oman FM (February 28, 2026)

But peace was not what Trump wanted. Peace would not be the proper distraction. It would be the opposite. Trump needed to Wag the Dog.

For those who never heard of this, it’s an old movie that is strikingly apropos right now.

The President of the United States is caught making advances on an underage girl inside the Oval Office less than two weeks before the election. Conrad Brean, a top spin doctor, is brought in by presidential aide Winifred Ames to take the public's attention away from the scandal. He decides to construct a fictional war in Albania, hoping that the media will concentrate on this instead. Brean contacts Hollywood producer Stanley Motss to create the war, complete with a theme song and fake film footage of a fleeing orphan to arouse sympathy. The hoax is initially successful, with the president quickly gaining ground in the polls.

— Wikipedia, Wag the Dog (last visited Mar. 24, 2026).

But this wasn’t the only thing Trump needed to distract us from. He had other issues that were starting to tank his poll numbers.

I would say “first and foremost” there’s the whole problem of ICE and how poorly that has been handled and received across the United States. Masked men assaulting, kidnapping, and killing immigrants and United States citizens alike. For some reason only Trump’s core supporters liked that. But not even all of them are happy about how ICE operates.

But the reason I said, “I would say” is that I think Trump’s core “issue” — to the extent Trump ever really cared about any issue — was the economy. He promised to fix the problem with the cost of gas, the cost of eggs, and instead the cost of everything was already going up — despite what people kept saying gas was not coming down; at best, it was holding — before the Illegal Iran War.

MAGA is feeling the pinch.

More than one-third of President Donald Trump’s own voters believe the cost of living in the U.S. is the worst they’ve ever seen, according to a new poll. And more than half say that the president bears at least some of the blame.

— Brendan Rascius, MAGA feels the pinch: Over a third of Trump voters say they’re facing the worst cost of living crisis yet (December 5, 2025)

And now, the ultimate irony: the war that Trump hoped would distract us from these issues has actually made (most of) them worse.

Because, you see? This wasn’t a fake Albanian war. This is a real Illegal Iran War. And Iran is a bit of a honey badger.

And as everyone knows, honey badger don’t give a f___. When the United States and Israel launched missiles on Iran, Iran fired back. Not just at Israel. Not just at American bases in the Middle East. Iran started shooting at its neighbors, gas and oil assets, and essentially closed off the Strait of Hormuz.

It remains to be seen how this will end. No one knows because no one ever knew. Apparently, so far as anyone can tell, the only plan was to distract. That plan has blown up in everyone’s faces. And the war has worsened most of what we needed to be distracted from.

But perhaps I can interest you in some TACO and a movie?

It seems fitting since this is the inaugural post for this particular Substack — Reading the Tape — that maybe I start off by talking about what Reading the Tape is all about and why I decided to create a Substack of that name.

The Tape Doesn’t Lie

Not long ago, I got interested in maybe retiring some day. I realized that I’d done something really stupid: I’d never thought about retirement. I kind of assumed I wasn’t going to live long enough for that.

I don’t know why. It’s just how I felt.

But now here I was getting closer to 70 than I am to 60 — or even 65! — so it occurred to me I might want to find out whether I even had enough money to retire. (I might.)

I found that I had a bunch of money — just over $100,000 — sitting and wasting away in a poor forgotten money market account at a local bank that was collecting a whopping $1.89 per month.

Yeah. I hear you. I said that same four-letter word.

So I decided to take a chunk of that money — $75,000 — and moved it to a brokerage account. I thought, “Well, I’ll maybe buy some stocks.” And I did. I bought a bunch of income ETFs. But I reserved a small portion to try my hand at some day trading.

I don’t know where I got the idea to do that. But I had some time on my hands as Google AI was doing its darndest to kill off my primary job and almost succeeding.

If I were going to do this kind of thing, I thought, I maybe should know a little bit about what day trading was. So I bought some books. Some were about “How to….” Some were about related things. One of those books I ran across was this really great copy of Reminiscences of a Stock Operator With New Commentary and Insights on the Life and Times of Jesse Livermore by Edwin LeFèvre, the Annotated Edition by Jon D. Markman.

If you have any interest in the stock market or history or just want to read a great book, I highly recommend it. In fact, I’m listening to it in my car now, even though I already read through it with the (absolutely magnificent) annotations. Maybe I’ll do a book review on it here later.

But what is a tape? What is a tape reader? And why did I title this section, “The Tape Doesn’t Lie”?

Back in the day, as we Old Timers say — back when Jesse Livermore was perhaps the greatest tape reader who ever lived — they had these ancient machines.

Ticker tape was the earliest electrical dedicated financial communications medium, transmitting stock price information over telegraph lines, in use from around 1870 to 1970. It consisted of a paper strip that ran through a machine called a stock ticker, which printed abbreviated company names as alphabetic symbols followed by numeric stock transaction price and volume information. The term “ticker” came from the sound made by the machine as it printed.

— Wikipedia, Ticker Tape (last visited March 15, 2026)

And Jesse Livermore was a “tape reader” extraordinaire.

In early 1929, he amassed huge short positions, using more than 100 stockbrokers to hide what he was doing. By the spring, he was down over $6 million on paper. However, upon the Wall Street Crash of 1929, he netted approximately $100 million.[6] Following a series of newspaper articles declaring him the “Great Bear of Wall Street”, he was blamed for the crash by the public and received death threats, leading him to hire an armed bodyguard.

— Wikipedia, Jessie Livermore: Career (last visited March 15, 2026)

According to Google AI, which is trying to put me out of business, $100 million in 1929 dollars would be $1.9 billion today. Imagine making $1.9 billion in one day.

But I feel like I’m distracting us from the point of this section.

This ancient machine that generated the ticker tape used the telegraph to spit out price information. Livermore’s great skill was being able to “read” the tape and understand what was likely to happen to prices next.

The tape “explained’ the market to Livermore. In Reminiscences, mentioned above, he said that the tape did not lie. And the tape did not care what you thought. He said, “Don’t argue with the tape.” Nothing good could possibly come of it.

It is what it is.

There’s a lot behind the price that a tape prints. We’ll almost certainly get into that in some future posts. But the key point of this section is just to explain what the tape is: the tape is what prints reality.

Share

My Footprints: My Tape

Here’s the thing about tapes: they’re everywhere, once you know what you’re looking for.

I’ve been a criminal defense lawyer in Fresno, California, for almost a quarter century (if you count my internships in law school — and you should, because I sat second chair on three “special circumstances” murder trials and argued before the 5th Appellate District Court before I ever took the Bar Exam).

On Probable Cause, I’ve written extensively about how the stock market fits hand-in-glove with criminal defense. Plea bargaining, in particular, I’ve compared to the process of the market finding the right price for a stock. I’ve talked about the pressure on buyers and sellers and defendants and prosecutors.

But I could easily go back even further than that. My work as an undergraduate student with McClelland & Rumelhart’s work on Parellel Processing and my membership in the Society for Philosophy & Pyschology, when I got to hang and — and get drunk with — numerous “big name” philosophers. (You haven’t lived until you’ve gotten drunk with a bunch of these folk and chatted about the origins or reality or non-reality of consciousness.)

I had sit-down conversations with Paul Churchland (I don’t remember him getting drunk). His wife, another well-known philosopher, Patricia. I read drafts of John Searle’s The Rediscovery of Mind (Amazon Affiliate link) before it was published. I discussed Sellars with one of my many mentors, who had co-written a book about Sellars’ philosophy. (Amazon Affiliate link.)

I wrote a letter to Endel Tulving — a cognitive psychologist at the University of Toronto who was then rewriting how scientists understood human memory — because something he'd published in Nature had stopped me cold. I thought about my own life story which, in some ways, didn’t really exist. In my letter, I explained that I had a theory about why certain things they were finding in their work might be happening. My idea was slightly different than what he had posited in the article. And I explained that I’d been actually thinking of this a lot because of how my brain is very good at remembering concepts, theories, and ideas, but not so good at remembering where I learned them: just last week, I started explaining the concepts behind some books I’m reading to a friend at lunch. Embarrassingly, he reminded me that he was the one who introduced me to the books!

Tulving told me that his team had started thinking about the same idea I was discussing with him. They eventually figured out that "remembering an event from your life" and "knowing a fact" are two completely different systems in the brain. Tulving’s ultimate distinction between episodic memory (remembering events from your own life) and semantic memory (remembering concepts and facts without necessarily remembering where or how you learned them) became foundational to everything that followed in neuroscience and psychology.

I’m not going to say that I presaged this theory. I didn’t. I did suggest that there might be these different kinds of memories and that some people were better equipped — due to their particular brain structures — than others at one or the other. What Tulving’s work eventually led to was the discovery that some healthy, high-functioning people naturally strip episodic context from information and retain only the pattern. They named it SDAM. I apparently have it.

Buy Me a Coffee

Expanding the Tape Reading Universe

After realizing the added benefit of being apparently a natural at “tape reading”, that is why I first decided to start talking about markets and criminal defense, and then, when I wanted to write more general articles, it’s why I latched onto the title Reading the Tape for my new Substack.

“Larry Livingston”, generally accepted as the stand-in, slightly fictionalized version of Jesse Livermore, was an exceptional “tape reader” with regard to the stock markets. But I realized in reading Reminiscences of a Stock Operator that — although he never labeled this as a piece of his tape reading — that the importation of events (such as the San Francisco earthquake and its subsequent impact on railroads and their stocks, or the sinking of the Lusitania and the market for coffee beans) was another piece of tape reading.

I don’t know if Jesse had SDAM. Reminiscences make me think he did not. But he was definitely applying his skills at tape reading to other areas of life.

Above, I mentioned that I first started realizing that my own reading of the tape applied to a wider universe than just that of Time & Sales in thinkorswim. I’ve been reading a different tape for 25 years without knowing that’s what it was called. I began to see the correlation between markets and how the modern criminal-judicial complex work. Witness behavior, prosecutorial tells, jury patterns. Same skill, different instrument.

Leave a comment

Shadows on the Cave’s Wall

My philosophy background reminded me of something else: In Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, the shadows represent the lowest level of human understanding and perception of reality. Chained prisoners in an underground cave see only these shadows projected on a wall, which are created by a fire behind them casting light on objects carried along a raised walkway.

The prisoners believe the shadows are the only true reality because they have never seen the actual objects casting them. They are unable to turn their heads to see the fire. Because of this, they never understand that their sense of reality is incomplete. Even when the “shadows” speak, their voices echo off the walls — the very walls that provide the “screen” for them to see the shadows in the first place — and to them, it is the shadows which are producing the sounds.

There’s no need here to get into all the details of Plato’s thinking on this. I’ve come to realize that my whole life has been driven by a recognition that there is more to the world — my cave — and that I’ve always been looking for the cause.

I even remember when it started: the day when, as a very young child, I walked into my parents’ bedroom and found my mother lying on the bed, crying. I asked what was wrong. Her reply that “nothing” was wrong threw me into a state of confusion. I was young, but not so young that I didn’t realize that a person crying indicated that something was wrong for the person crying.

And, of course, something was wrong. She just didn’t want — for whatever reason I’ll never know — me to know. She wanted me to believe something different than my own read of the tape.

This would become a major trend pattern in my childhood.

The Deliberate Reading of the Tape

So here I am: my lifelong quest has been to understand the reality behind the thing I can actually see. I can see what people do; I strive to understand why they did them. I can see patterns all around me; I want to know the potential impact on my life before the impact arrives. To be prepared in advance and make myself safe.

In Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist, the protagonist Macon Leary spends his life writing guidebooks for people who hate to travel — people who want to move through the world without ever truly touching it, “encased” in the safety of the familiar. For years, I was a version of that traveler. I was an accidental tape reader, instinctively decoding the shadows on the wall to protect myself from the misdirected “nothing’s wrong” of my early life, yet I was still fundamentally passive regarding the patterns I saw.

I became very good at reading the tape without realizing that that is exactly what I was doing.

But there comes a point where, like Macon, you have to stop trying to alphabetize the chaos and instead choose to step into the mess of it.

The stock market, by introducing me to the concept of reading the tape, has helped me to more clearly say what it is that I’ve been doing all my life. From reading the books about reading the market — and my own apparent abilities with reading the tape — I’ve evolved from an accidental tape reader into one who has a better understanding of what my life is about.

By finally naming the skill, I’ve moved into the deliberate reading of the tape. I am no longer just a passenger trying to avoid the bumps; I am a participant who understands that the tape isn’t just printing prices or court transcripts — it’s printing the very fabric of the life I am finally choosing to lead.

And it only took 68 years.

Oh, well. As one of my favorite philosophers when I was younger once said — in a statement that both explains a bit why it’s taken me 68 years to evolve into a recognition that I’m a tape reader, but also why reading the tape is necessary:

Life can only be understood backwards, but it must Be lived forwards.

— Søren Kierkegaard, 2 Kierkegaard’s Journals and Notebooks: Journals EE–KK 179 (Alastair Hannay et al. eds., Bruce H. Kirmmse trans., Princeton Univ. Press 2008) (1843)

And with that — our inaugural article for Reading the Tape complete — I already have my next article in which I anticipated that a certain someone was lying when he said a certain thing and so avoided the trap when the markets temporarily bounced a little on the lie.