tl;dr
You might want to have your Sunday morning breakfast before diving into today’s CCC.
Market Snap
Market Wrap
BTC breached $80k to the downside yesterday afternoon and very briefly threatened to go through $79k before a rapid reversal. IG’s weekend markets appear to be marking Wall Street significantly higher before tomorrow’s open, though it isn’t clear to me exactly why that might be.
Occasional Series – This is disgusting
I have read today that HMRC is able to deduct money that it believes it is owed directly from your bank account if that amount is more than £1,000, and that at least £5,000 is left across your accounts. It is expected that the £1,000 threshold will soon be cut to just a few pounds.
For taxpayers who cannot afford to pay accountants but still must submit a tax return, it is estimated (by me) that nearly 100% of the completed tax returns are wrong, both to the upside and the downside, due to the unfathomable complexity of the UK tax code.
If HMRC decides unilaterally to withdraw money from your personal bank account, previously known as “theft”, but now redefined as a state right, your grounds for challenge are limited to “… engaging with HMRC”. The thirteenth labour of Hercules would have been to not only engage with a penpusher from HMRC, but also to engage with someone who knows anything at all about tax. Neither of those objectives has been achieved by any individual this millennium.
If you remain unconcerned by the prospect of a sterling CBDC which will ramp up the state’s ability to thieve from you at will, may I gently suggest you try to get a grip on life?
Curious Cryptos’ Commentary – This is insane
A new leveraged trading platform built on Hyperliquid offers leverage up to an utterly ridiculous 1000x on your collateral.
What does that actually mean in real life, I hear someone ask.
Post 81 USDC as your collateral, set the leverage to 1000x, and you synthetically own a whole BTC. Sounds good, huh?
Nah.
I took 100 USDC from the CC Treasury hot wallet (that pretty much emptied it) for the experience of trading at 1000x leverage. It doesn’t get more degen than that. It is also deeply concerning.
This is the TikTok of trading.
Not that I have ever looked at TikTok.
The first time I became aware of it was on an early morning train to Glasgow. First Class is meant to be an oasis of serenity, but one young chap (too frightening for either me or the ticket inspector to challenge) was frequently falling asleep, waking up and logging into TikTok for a few minutes of a dopamine hit, then falling asleep again. His brain has been fried for evermore, if that is his usual lifestyle, which I sadly suspect to be the case.
What I can tell you for sure after my brief experiment on this new platform (which I will not name because it is so wrong) is that literally no-one, except the house, can ever win whilst trading at 1000x leverage. Any trade you do is almost immediately underwater, and even if just briefly there is positive unrealised PnL, it does not last long.
Which does rather support one of my fundamental rules of life – never ever use leverage, except when you take out a mortgage to buy a house.