the trading version of "not being in on the joke"

Moontower #268

Apr 27, 2025

Friends,

If you google “origin of the term meme”, you are served a snippet from Wikipedia:

The word meme was coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene as an attempt to explain how aspects of culture replicate, mutate, and evolve (memetics). Emoticons are among the earliest examples of internet memes, specifically the smiley emoticon ":-)", introduced by Scott Fahlman in 1982.

A meme, like a gene, compresses information. A killer headline can be a powerful meme. You might even parrot it, participating in a culture-wide game of telephone where nobody actually reads the article they just re-post, re-share, re-tweet.

We’ve substituted virality for nuance. You can probably feel the effects but naming them takes work.

With that in mind, I point you to Kyla’s outstanding post:

What Happens When Everything Becomes a Meme? (8 min read)

She doesn’t need an introduction from me, but just in case, you should know she’s a very smart writer who happens to be an influencer. A highly self-aware one. She brings Bane’s weight to the discussion — she didn’t merely adopt the meme she was born in it.

Her latest writings on this topic have all been fantastic but that post is the one you should start with.

I’m no fan of treating ideas like people. That’s what ideology feels like to me. I’ve expressed this many times (Antidote to Abstraction, How the need for coherence drives us mad)

I just wrapped James C. Scott’s Three Cheers for Anarchism. I have seen Scott’s work referenced in many places, usually Seeing Like A State, but this is the first time I’ve read him directly. I did a lot of nodding which is probably not an accident since I picked up the book in the first place.

But this Fragment 27 [the book is a collection of essays or fragments as he make no attempt to force them into a single song . I not only appreciate that but sensed he did, it would be off-key irony given his resistance to exactly the type of just-so reasoning that successfully sells books in terminal 3] amplifies my sense that abstraction is ethically expensive. I reprint it here with my emphasis.

Fragment 27: Retail Goodness and Sympathy
The heroism of the French town of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in the Haute-Loire, which managed to shelter, feed, and speed to safety more than five thousand refugees in Vichy France, many of them Jewish children, is by now enshrined in the annals of resistance to Nazism. Books and films have celebrated the many acts of quiet bravery that made this uncommon rescue possible.
Here I want to emphasize the particularity of these acts in a way that, though it may diminish the grand narrative of religious resistance to anti-Semitism, at the same time enlarges our understanding of the specificity of humanitarian gestures.
Many Le Chambon villagers were Huguenot, and their two pastors were perhaps the most influential and respected voices in the community. As Huguenots, they had their own collective memory, from at least the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre forward, of religious persecution and flight. Well before the Occupation, they had manifested their sympathy for the victims of fascism by sheltering refugees from Franco’s Spain and Mussolini’s Italy. That is, they were well disposed both by conviction and experience to sympathize with the plight of refugees from authoritarian states, and with Jews in particular as a biblical people. Translating that sympathy into practical and, under Vichy, far more dangerous acts of assistance, however, was not so simple.
Anticipating the arrival of Jews, the Huguenot pastors began trying to mobilize the clandestine shelter and food they knew would be required of their parishioners. With the abolition of the Free Zone in southern France, both pastors were arrested and taken off to concentration camps. In this menacing setting, the wives of the two pastors took up their husbands’ work and set about lining up food and shelter for Jews within their community. They asked their neighbors, both farmers and villagers, if they would be willing to help when the time came. The answers often were not encouraging. Typically, those they asked expressed sympathy for the refugees but were unwilling to run the risk of taking them in and feeding them. They pointed out that they also had a duty to protect their own immediate family and were fearful that if they sheltered Jews, they would be denounced to the local Gestapo, who would put them and their entire family at grave risk. Weighing their obligations to their immediate family and their more abstract sympathy for helping Jewish victims, family ties prevailed, and the pastor’s wives despaired of organizing a network of refuge.
Whether they were ready or not, however, the Jews began to arrive, and to seek help. What happened next is important, and diagnostic for understanding the particularity of social (in this case, humanitarian) action. The pastors’ wives found themselves with real, existing Jews on their hands, and they tried again. They would, for example, take an elderly Jew, thin and shivering in the cold, to the door of a farmer who had declined to commit himself earlier, and ask, “Would you give our friend here a meal and a warm coat, and show him the way to the next village?” The farmer now had a living, breathing victim in front of him, looking him in the eye, perhaps imploringly, and would have to turn him away. Or the women would arrive at the farmhouse door with a small family and ask, “Would you give this family a blanket, a bowl of soup, and let them sleep in your barn for a day or two before they head for the Swiss border?” Face-to-face with real victims, whose fate depended palpably on their assistance, few were willing to refuse them help, though the risks had not changed.
Once the individual villagers had made such a gesture, they typically became committed to helping the refugees for the duration. They were, in other words, able to draw the conclusions of their own practical gesture of solidarity—their actual line of conduct—and see it as the ethical thing to do. They did not enunciate a principle and then act on it. Rather, they acted, and then drew out the logic of that act. Abstract principle was the child of practical action, not its parent.
François Rochat, contrasting this pattern with Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil,” calls it “the banality of goodness.” We might at least as accurately call it the “particularity of goodness,” or, to appropriate the Torah, an example of the heart following the hand.
People don’t easily identify with or open their hearts or wallets for large abstractions: the Unemployed, the Hungry, the Persecuted, the Jews. But portray in gripping detail, with photographs, a woman who has lost her job and is living in her car, or a refugee family on the run through the forest living on roots and tubers, and you are likely to engage the sympathy of strangers. All victims cannot easily represent one victim, but one victim can often stand for a whole class of victims.

We trample over each other in the name of some contrived ideal of consistency…which we don’t ever achieve anyway. And thankfully. Because that is the cover for history’s greatest butchers.

[If interested…my Zeroth Commandment]

Money Angle

I impulsively tweeted this on Wednesday while ~~procrastinating~~ taking a break.

The trading version of not being in on the joke is to not know which side of the market is fake on the lean. How many times do you have to watch someone hit their own bid to learn?

Offer it to buy it. Bid it to sell it. It's always the game. Everywhere. Yes in SEC markets you can't spoof but that's only one way to do this. And man outside SEC markets, this game is on full display everywhere. I'm more convinced that spending a week in an open outcry pit could teach quite a bit about bottlenecks, the hierarchy of information flows, second-order knowledge You can get all these lessons elsewhere, but the pit speedruns it.

I decided it was needlessly esoteric so I indulged the procrastination for 30 more minutes and explained it on camera. There’s nothing technical here, it’s more about tradecraft and being a bit less naive.

If you’re looking for something meatier this morning, grab a coffee, a cozy chair, and your spectacles:

A Tale of Two Tariffs (27 min read)

Citrini writes terrific investment pieces. But this one is a departure from his typical posts (and unlike the others…free).

It’s been more than two years since I’ve published a history piece to CitriniResearch. After all, our tagline is “you’ll never have to ask ‘what’s the trade?’”, and these pieces are not necessarily actionable. However, the last one I wrote - an examination of how markets have failed to price in geopolitical risks through the lens of WWI (similar to the one we’ve just seen that was…not priced in) - has aged relatively well.

It’s a history lesson and an inquiry into what might be relevant or not from prior tariff expeditions. While I enjoyed the history lesson, my favorite part of the piece was Citrini’s discussion of the current moment.

Money Angle for Masochists

I replaced my IBIT shares into long calls when BTC vol got crushed this week while selling my VIX futures which held up quite well on the equity rally, a possibility I suggested when I explained that the elevated but also flat term structure of VIX suggested vol was here to stay in 2025. From vol speed round:

As I was looking at IBIT I thought I’d share a habit I picked up from distant past of ETF arbitrage — estimating the prem/discount baked into the ETF price I’m about to trade:

Go to the IShares web page to grab 3 values (highlighted)

Enter them in my spreadsheet to compute the ratio of NAV to BTC price. The cells with the box around them are via the previous close values. I then apply the fair ratio to the live BTC price compute IBIT’s live premium or discount.

From My Actual Life

I’m very excited for this kid to play his gig ever later this afternoon (he’s just performing 1 tune with the house band). Practicing the song with some dirty modulation:

Stay Groovy

☮️

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