Item #1: Silver surges to $100, but also Bitcoin crashes on tariffs despite the QQQ recovering and Trump backing down.
Item #2: The “anything but Bitcoin” trade is still going strong. Whether it’s metals, AI valuations, or tech stocks, Everything but Bitcoin keeps going up. The divergence of performance between Bitcoin and QQQ is stark, as I correctly predicted in 2025:
When I claim to be one of greatest traders, money managers, and macro forecasters ever, it’s all backed by quantifiable evidence and results. I was way ahead of the pack by predicting this would happen, and profited from it, and still profit now.
Item #3: Trump Threatens 100% Tariffs on Canada Over China Trade Deal.
I am not sure what Trump is hoping to accomplish with these tariffs. They are not helping his approval ratings. Even the massive ‘liberation day’ tariffs did not confer a bump. People know they are not a free lunch, and instead are felt in the form of higher consumer prices. What good does it do to reduce the trade deficit a bit or to ‘stick it to China’, when no one can see the benefit, assuming there is any?
Nonetheless, this is why I short Bitcoin as a hedge, as I am prepared for bad or otherwise unexpected weekend geopolitical or tariffs news. During the Summer of ’25, shorting Bitcoin worked great as a hedge against Iran news. Last week, it worked perfectly against Greenland news. In October, it worked great against China tariff threat. The ‘TACO trade’ is still working great, too, and I profited by buying tech stocks on the dip last week. Combined with my Bitcoin shorts, and I had a massively profitable week.
Item #4: The ‘bullshit heuristic’ (need to flesh this out into a post, maybe)
Speaking of models and bullshit, I saw this going viral, from 2018 “Mental Models: The Best Way to Make Intelligent Decisions (~100 Models Explained)”:
Become what you want to see in the world, and the world will return it to you. If you want an amazing relationship with your partner, be an amazing partner. If you want people to be thoughtful and kind to you, be thoughtful and kind to them. If you want people to listen to you, listen to them.
This is clearly bullshit. I define bullshit as, “Advice or assertions spoken from authority that does not align with empirical reality.” How does this account for the success of Clavicular, who filmed himself nearly running someone over with his Tesla SUV, and appeared to face no legal consequences for an incident that could have been fatal, and then returned to livestreaming the next day with his popularity intact–or even increased? Or Andrew Tate, whose entire persona is arrogance? The list goes on. We’re being gaslit or mislead with this bad advice by people are already successful, as their advice is obsolete and doesn’t work anymore (if it ever did) or is survivorship bias.
The so-called “firm handshake” meme applies. Nowadays, you have to pass through HR and multiple gauntlets of screening before you actually talk to a real person. ‘Boomers’ with their bad advice is holding back later generations. This is related to one of my favorite posts, from 2022, “‘1,000 True Fans’, ‘Long Tail’, ‘Grit’, and other popular bullshit.”
Item #5: From Sebs “The R^2 vs r debate in IQ research”
I think it’s like, getting a high-paying quant/finance/tech job is highly predictive of high IQ, yet having a high IQ is not predictive of landing one of those jobs. It’s a ‘necessary but insufficient’ sort of thing. A high IQ is necessary to pass all the HR screening and to ace the interview rounds, but not all smart people aspire to high-paying professions, hence the low correlation. You got a lot of smart people who are artists, writers, or work in nonprofits, none of which are particularly remunerative. For whatever reason, Taleb fails to grasp this even when explained to him. If anyone was to debate him, this would shut down his argument completely.
Item #6: “Why Secondhand Is Now Better Than New”?
But there are other reasons—more ominous—to prefer secondhand items. For a start, you are immune to AI slop, which is now flooding the market, especially for books and music. Technology is empowering scams and frauds at an unprecedented rate.
What is the equivalent of ‘AI slop’ for a physical product? If he means means mass-produced in an assembly line, this would be almost everything. Something being secondhand doesn’t mean it wasn’t mass-produced. The comparison doesn’t even make sense. The article somehow got 870 likes. Are these humans are bots? The fact it’s so popular is further evidence we don’t live in a meritocracy unless the yardstick of merit is the ability to profit from bullshit, which ties into above.
Recall this guy was massively wrong about Meta/Facebook stock in 2022-2023, predicting that the social networking conglomerate would fail, and tried to memory-hole it. With the stock at $700 he reiterated his original prediction and hoped no one would notice how wrong he was in earlier (but we got the archive links though). Everyone gets things wrong, but just pretending otherwise will not fool everyone. This is why it’s important to call these people out. Having a big brand should not insulate people from critcism when it’s deserved.