1/ Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes (Turn and face the strange)... as futures, sit pinned @ an odd elevated morning perch awaiting Janet Yellen’s confirmation hearing & her call for the new admin to ‘act big’...this narrative has markets on high. But the truth is that it’s actually just Gary

1/x The market continues to try & shake out weak hands from overextended positioning by both HF & Retail...After a strong Vanna run up overnight, as expected, retail exuberance exploded on the open in the form of retail call buying, this fragility, paired w/a)Mean reverting flows

2/x from pinned Index Vol b) well documented, risk parity rebalancing flows & c) selling flows tied to bank EOY liquidity constraints. In combination, these flows have together have amounted to substantive selling pressures, strong enough to counteract the positive vanna/ charm

3/x flows, & point to continued likely index RVol an IVol pinning...Historically, the week of quarterly OpEx markets are notoriously volatile intraday, but also mean reverting like we saw today. I think it is fair to expect continued IVol compression & more of the same underlying

4/x chop. Vanna/Charm flows will lose their oomph after Wed 12/16 vixperation morning. There’s a window of weakness which I’ve spoken to for a month that falls 12/16-12/23. That could open a brief window that could lead to revaluation of the real risk & short interest,post 1/6...

5/x but the overwhelming 10k 🦍 of index Vol compression should still hold any correction in time & price in check in the shortterm and it’ll be hard to have anything blow up too bad in SPX land given how cheap & abundant Xmas Vol is 12/23-12/24. NTM, a stim deal & potential Fed

4/x keepers are calling in the Fed(s) (Fed/sec) for some help getting the animals back under control, so they can feed Gary & get the zoo back under control. As they are likely giving guidance to the brokers to get this under control, as every major retail broker seems to be

5/x restricting trading in the short squeeze names to closing only. The Wheel of Fortune has a taping on Fri & w/out Gary at his best the show will be overrun by the animals. If they can make it to the EOM & keep Gary above the 20 day, calm him down & start feeding him,vanna will

6/x be back & should be able to nurse him back to his usual self & save the show. But there’s a lot of time between now & then & holding the animals @ bay until then seems like a colossal task. Given the pop in Ivols & backwardation of the curve, when vanna gets back she will be

7/x refreshed & in preelection form. The only question is will the animals be so out of control so as to not even be managed by Vanna in her best shape.. This decline fits into a narrative that I’ve had brewing for 4 months, that after a monster run since Sep this is a healthy &

8/x reasonable time to expect the animals to be tired of being caged up & want to blow off some steam. All the biggest wall of worry narratives have been solved 1 by 1. Sentiment & bullish positioning was at all time highs. Hedging activity was low. Breadth was deteriorating. W/

1/x The window we have been targeting for 2 months has officially opened... i Can not imagine a more textbook display of the power of Vanna at expiration as we saw on Friday. The capital building was overrun by an insurrection, but all that that meant was a bigger late day rally.

2/x that ended at ATH on the close. Between Gary the 🦍 & his RVol suppression & his hand off to late day Ivol compression & the Vanna index bid, the 🐻’s never had a chance... but Gary’s getting tired after 2 months battling complacency & Vanna’s 2 week vacation, 1 of her only

3/x 2 week departures of the year (a 5 week OpEx) is quickly approaching on 1/15 morning. That means she’ll be increasingly absent as she prepares for her trip. W/ a $59 1 week straddle & $50 1 day range on Friday, & another $30 overnight drop, it’s hard to see why you wouldn’t

4/x want to take a chance on a little long gamma at this juncture. Especially given the obvious warning signs coming from the steepening of the yield curve, underperformance of the Growth complex, complacency in sentiment & positioning, anecdotal signs of bubbles in BTC & TSLA,

5/x NTM the growing exuberance surrounding a fiscal stimulus deal near $2 Trillion. The wall of worry of 3 months ago is gone. The vaccine is being deployed, the election is resolved, fiscal stimulus was passed & w/2 Georgia 🍑 🍑, ever moar 🚁💰is on the way. But what happened

1/x Vanna is back & ready to turn back on the charm! Overnight the market hit our weeklong target of **3705 and pulled back... We were able to take profits & play for a bit of morning digestion. It’s been a nice +3.5% in a week w/a few extra scalps along the way...But the best

2/x part has been the gift of Vol compression, which along w/ short Vol profits, has given us significant calendar expansion & dispersion opps, as predicted. I expect this to continue this week as well, as Ivol oversupply should continue to be the dominant force until 12/11.This,

3/x paired w/ the significantly increasing Vanna & Charm flows, will make it hard for any decline until 12/14 to catch meaningful momentum. This said, the narrowing of 20 day RVol as well as the 2 stddev of the 20 day just overhead should cap any rallies, given the dramatically

4/x overextended retail (8-day SMA of P/C equity is the lowest in 20 years) & institutional positioning. This push/pull, should ultimately keep the market fairly pinned this week...Jan 8th call’s on back are incredibly cheap w/ a GA runoff event straddle of only $55, which given

5/x the potential macro-cyclical consequences of the next 2 years of fiscal stimulus seems absurd...& In terms of a more short term trade,Tesla Vol is either too high or 12/18 on back calendar spreads in the SPX are too low, as there’s no premium being priced in for the inclusion

Shocking fact: Millennial men are less likely to work than any other age and gender demographic in America.

Today, there are 500,000 young men missing from the U.S. workforce.

Research suggests video games & improved leisure tech plays a role in the problem. 👇 Thread:

Following the 2007 to 2009 recession, 25 to 34 year old men exited high school with fewer middle-skill job opportunities than years prior.

During this time, we saw an increased number of men living with parents & choosing unemployment over lower paying jobs.

It's estimated that 24M millennials live w/ their parents.

1 in 4 living in their parents’ home neither go to school nor work.

What's more surprising? 9 in 10 who lived with their parents a year ago are still living there w/ no plans to leave.

Economists are calling millennial men a lost generation.

According to economist David Dorn:

“If you get to the point where you’re turning 30, you’ve never held a real job and you don’t have a college education, then it is very hard to recover at that point.”

Economists suggest this choosiness is a generational trait.

Forbes interview w/ a high school educated man:

"I’m very quick to get frustrated when people refuse to pay me what I’m worth."
“People feel that they have choice nowadays, and they

1/ Something strange is happening with people’s sex lives. 20-somethings are having sex later and less frequently than previous generations. I spent several months digging into this for @theatlantic. https://t.co/5ehzmWY9wi

2/ This phenomenon—I’m calling it a Sex Recession—really surprised me. It seemed improbable in the age of Tinder, digital porn, and attitudes that are generally permissive and sex-positive.

3/ What’s happening isn’t exclusively American: Similar trends are being observed in other countries, including Japan, Australia, the U.K., Finland, and the Netherlands.

4/ One cause is obvious: Adults under 35 are less likely to be living with a partner than in recent decades, and more likely to be living with their parents—which, it’s safe to say, isn’t great for one’s sex life.

5/ But I also found other explanations, each with profound implications. The first, unsurprisingly, has to do with internet enticements. Netflix and other online entertainment may be substituting for sex.

When it's railroading time, you get railroads.

When the railroads turn into the personal satrapies of rail-barons, you get trustbusters.

A couple decades ago, it was online service time. We had the users, the telcoms systems, the computers, the modems, so we got platforms.

1/

We had that, but we lacked something important: effective antimonopoly enforcement. Lax merger laws allowed companies with access to capital markets to buy out or neutralize all their competitors, so we got monopolies.

Right on schedule, we're getting digital trustbusters.

2/

Now, some people aren't technically sophisticated, but they do understand a lot about competition law. That's how you get meat-and-taters antitrust proposals like @amyklobuchar's #CALERA, which address the structural problems with antitrust

Klobuchar's bill is hugely important. The reason we have monopolies is that we stopped enforcing anti-monopoly law 40 years ago. Monopoly isn't a tech problem, it's everywhere from sneakers to glass bottles to pro wrestling to candy to

Klobuchar's CALERA doesn't just seek to apply antitrust law to tech - it also explicitly restores the pre-Reagan basis for fighting monopolies: we fight monopolies because they concentrate power and corrupt our politics. All monopolies are guilty unless proven otherwise.

5/