Funny thing about humans — we’re all hypocrites:
If liquidity is the friction between theory and reality, then hypocrisy is the friction between morality and reality. Alcohol can be considered “life liquidity”, in a sense — it eases this friction between what we think we are and what the world around us perceives us as, which is enjoyable and necessary at times to not strain ourselves too much. Of course, alcohol is also an amplifier — why people act hypocritically while drinking is because it paradoxically increases this friction dependent on the interplay between your tolerance and rate of consumption. It’s a stimulant and a depressant, after all, a true sign that you are operating in the liminal space between your thoughts and actions.
And, almost a year to the day after I wrote “Postmodern Society and its Future”, when I completed liquidity theory, I didn’t really do what I say I would:
I’m never going to stop trading, because I have to continue to validate my intuition indefinitely. But there is nothing more I can do to explain the postmodern market state, the attention economy, and how all these cross-correlated markets fluctuate and disperse. The entire attention economy revolves around this theory.
But just when I thought I was out, the craziness of 2025 extending beyond the 2024 election pulled me back in. I tried to retire, and then fall comes around and, even though we are facing the most critical problem in society — how do we pull people off the attention economy, the random wealth transferal of the people stuck in the algorithm — I returned to keep playing around in it. There’s nothing new in anything I’ve written since I found golf to be too boring — indeed, the patterns are so obvious and clean that it’s very obvious how algorithmic reality and actual reality has converged.
You need there to be enough uncertainty in the market so that there is organic flow to market-make.
In a sense, everyone is “market-making” when they interact with public markets. Proffering an idea fills the proverbial orderbook just like an order is made or took in the level 2. And, even though I have noticed how the ideabook has gotten thinner to the point of literal collapse, I haven’t done anything other than offer Malt Liquidity.
I think it took a pure shock to the algorithm to get me off of it. This is the point of no return, and there’s nothing left to say about the state of the world. Value must be created again, but it’s not in terms of a new idea of currency. It’s just going to take a new form, and I’ve made enough as a provider and consumer of flow.
Lost in the sauce about the “permanent underclass” is that even using the term puts you there. The inverse of the term is “new aristocracy”, where the understanding that staying on the treadmill of “what is post-fiat” and “trading returns” is the loop that I didn’t quite defeat on the golf course. Post-fiat is understanding that not only do the intraday returns not matter, the market itself does not matter. I put 2 and 2 together in the intuitive way to connect all the graphs in my own head, from the retail noise flow to the institutional players, but I kept scratching at that idea of “everyone being trapped in the same trade” without realizing that I was part of “everyone” put together. By scripting narratives about stocks, you’re not building companies that become stocks. And, while the market state is dismal for building ideas, that doesn’t mean you just keep playing the same game. I’ve always known that trading gains are a liquidity suck unless spent in the real world, and I’ve spent as much as I could possibly enjoy without just perpetually money-sinking.
So, I’ll rephrase my conclusion from last year:
I’m never going to stop curating, because I have to continue to validate my intuition indefinitely. But there is nothing more I can do to explain the postmodern market state, the attention economy, and how all these cross-correlated markets fluctuate and disperse. The entire attention economy revolves around this theory, and the attention economy is something I don’t want to be a part of anymore.
I kept trying to write fiction and found myself unable to, probably because I keep describing financial analysis as a form of fiction and referring back to all my old ideas. My self-referential looping style bricks an AI model because it is my own, personal AGI. If I stay in this loop, I’ll continue to make money at the same rate as the world goes to shit around me.
There’s a piece of writing that resonated with me deeply a while ago called Five Prophets, and I couldn’t quite pick up why Sam Kriss oneshotted me so cleanly:
I am convinced that all of history is a message, and this message is addressed specifically to me. The message tells me that this thing I take to be the material universe is actually something else. It is a machine, a contraption, built for an entirely different purpose I cannot possibly understand. Maybe it’s only a toy. Somehow, I’ve become trapped inside this machine, and I’ve confused it for the world, but it is not. I think the message is telling me how to escape.
All of finance is a message to me, and taking profit is the escape. If you don’t want to escape, you preach.
Five Prophets is a story about, well, prophecy, and the tale is about a guy who is convinced the structure of the universe is a microwave:
Early in 1995, he suddenly realised that he too had seen the Tabernacle, perched next to the sink in his lightly fetid bedsit. He couldn’t explain how, or why, but Adelheid of Augsburg had been receiving mystical visions of a Samsung M6234 Primo microwave oven.
It took some time for Göz’s discovery to be fully recognised; for obvious reasons, much of the academic community was highly resistant to his ideas. But in the end, the sheer weight of evidence spoke for itself. Symposiums of historians of medieval Europe, distinguished in their gowns, all gathered around a microwave. Staring in anguish at the little marker, between five and ten minutes on the M6234’s timer dial, that indicated the optimum microwaving time for a jacket potato.
I have constructed the microwave as a thread of my content from chat, to tweets, to blog posts, to frame my own thoughts. And, in a circular fashion, I figured out that I had the answer the whole time:
Taking profit is the escape.
“Retirement” failed for me the first time because I was still in the same “+1 minute” cycle. One more trade, it’s always one more trade to spread to my friends! It’s such a good idea!
This time, I truly am done. I simply do not care about public markets anymore, and I have everything I need to actually spend time away, in perpetuity if needed, and experience the world as it authentically needs to, before this is potentially taken away from us all.
So, I’ll rephrase my passage from last year’s “final” Malt Liquidity (I just did the same thing in another name, lol) for good:
I’m never going to stop writing because I have to continue to validate my intuition indefinitely. But there is nothing more I can do to explain the postmodern market state, the attention economy, and how all these cross-correlated markets fluctuate and disperse. The entire attention economy revolves around topicality, and I don’t need to bother with that anymore. My time is truly my time, at this point, and it is my time to shine.
So, I’m going to hypocritically break my rule at this point:
I truly believe that my writing should be free, but the market does not. The market pays me for my ideas. And, while I’ve been struggling to figure out how to structure the writing I want to do — fiction, lifestyle — I’ve been stuck in this microwave of a site for too long.
Everything on this site will remain free for spelunking, and for those of you who have supported me by voluntarily paying for a sub, I truly appreciate it. I’ll happily return and refund the money as soon as I figure out the proper mechanism to do so.
I’m going to take a bit of time off — I need time to aerate my thoughts and figure out what the next writing structure and project will be. I definitely want to write some fiction, but I need a much, much bigger perspective of the world than the predictable timeline if I truly want to amplify my thoughts to the next level — aka, actually create some value.
Thank you all for reading, this has given me a life I never thought I’d have again on the public internet. The only way to win is to not play the game, and I’m not going to bother with worrying about inflation anymore. I’m truly content to leave it here.
If you’re interested in the next iteration, please do drop me a note. It will be completely private, curated, and paywalled, and a money-losing venture for everyone involved, because that’s the only good country club — and, frankly, I’m the best at creating a certain type of internet country club.
From a project that started out of boredom due to a lack of Money Stuff to some weird, insane, beautiful autofiction that I pulled out of myself:
Here lies Malt Liquidity: Nov 30, 2020 — September 11, 2025