Old Mike Yells At Cloud
A 'tip' from ya boi.
“Nowhere does history indulge in repetitions so often or so uniformly as in Wall Street. When you read contemporary accounts of booms or panics the one thing that strikes you most forcibly is how little either stock speculation or stock speculators today differ from yesterday. The game does not change and neither does human nature.” - Larry Livingston
I recently finished re-reading Reminiscences of a Stock Operator for the first time in probably ten years. If you haven’t read it before, it is very worth your time if you’re even remotely interested in trading markets. As I zipped through it again, I found myself taking pictures of passages like the one above every dozen pages or so. Written by Edwin Lefèvre, the main character Larry Livingston is heavily based on Jesse Livermore; a trading legend who round-tripped millions of dollars more than once.
Livermore’s story is a tragic one. Failure in marriage. Failure in markets (ultimately). And a failure in life if his suicide note is to be believed. However, I don’t agree with that self-assessment. While he was most certainly a flawed person (who isn't?), Jesse Livermore was also a genius and a pioneer. The way we trade and the tools we trade with have most certainly changed dramatically in the century since Livermore first entered those Boston bucket shops. Despite that, his insights into the psychology of trading still hold up very well.
Given that, it’s perhaps not a surprise that the tales shared in Reminiscences are both entertaining and just as relevant today as they were when the book was first published in 1923. This excerpt stood out to me very much:
The public was buying anything that was adequately tipped. Investments were not wanted. The demand was for easy money; for the sure gambling profit.
Sound familiar?
I think so.
Got a hot idea to make some quick cash? How about the latest and greatest AI stock? Or how about the latest dog-themed crypto coin? Perhaps a ‘can’t miss’ sports wager is more your fancy?
Ultimately, each of these three things appear to offer the same allure of filthy riches with minimal effort. And as fate would have it, confidence in the underlying activities supporting each of these easy money dreams appears to be wavering.
ChatGPT developer OpenAI is hemorrhaging money as the usefulness of the technology that company is building is, at best, debatable and possibly irresponsibly dangerous, at worst. All this while OpenAI plans to incinerate over $100 billion over the next 5 years with what is almost certainly an expectation of privatized profits and socialized losses.
AI is incredibly useful in many applications. I use it almost daily, at this point. I still wouldn’t pay for the AI products that I’m currently using and the one product that I did pay for briefly was an enormous letdown. To be sure, that letdown could certainly be due to some degree of user error. Though I suspect my issues are less due to my prompting and more a result of the limitations of the application itself.
We’ve been sold this notion that ‘AI’ has the ability to think. I’m not so sure. Emulate? No doubt. Recognize pattern? Absolutely. Create something completely new and innovative that doesn’t require human oversight? I’ll believe it when I see it.
Every g****** CEO and accountant at the top who has a failing business is going to actually do layoffs and blame it on ‘we’re going to use AI and that’ll make us more efficient’ when, in fact, their business is just failing. - Dave Collum
Elsewhere, ‘Crypto Winter’ rages on with Bitcoin having pulled back 50% from its all time high in October. Investing in the asset has never been easier. US regulators have never been more friendly to the asset class. And yet, the gamblers are leaving the casino.
Assuming this data holds with just 1 session remaining, February will be the fourth consecutive month of net outflows from spot Bitcoin ETFs. And from November through February those outflows total over $7 billion.
Why? That’s truly anybody’s guess. It could be fears about quantum computing. It could be a reaction to early Bitcoin development being partially funded by Jeffrey Epstein. Or it could be even more simple than all of that; it might just be that even with the best regulatory environment seemingly possible, network usage has stopped growing.
At the end of 2023, 15 million active addresses interacted with the Bitcoin blockchain in the month of December. No other public L1 blockchain network had more ‘users’ at that time. Fast forward to December 2025, and Bitcoin’s active addresses in the month were just 10.5 million. Six other networks claimed more active addresses in the month and yet total combined monthly active addresses across the L1 space were actually down 13% year over year.
As bad as 2022 was for digital assets, usage was at least still growing through the post-FTX collapse ‘Crypto Winter.’ That was not the case in 2025 and, so far, through two months of 2026 it seems that the negative usage trend is continuing.
Meanwhile, two of the four major US sports leagues have had at least one gambling scandal in the last calendar year. On top of that, the NBA is completely unwatchable even as an entertainment product. The NBA’s problems are actually much deeper than just the gambling and that circus really deserves its own post. Maybe someday. Here’s a little taste; I’m a Celtics fan. I’m two years removed from a banner. And yet I literally have not watched a second of this league since this happened back in October:
Essentially, what you’re seeing here is a man fouling another man’s leg with his balls during a shooting motion that is entirely unnatural. Fitting, perhaps, that it came on a play where a guy with the build and skill set of a classic back-to-the-basket big was chucking a three pointer.
Interestingly enough, Philadelphia was trailing Boston by 9 points with 6 minutes remaining in the fourth quarter when Hugo Gonzalez fouled Joel Embiid with his testicles on a three point field goal attempt. Embiid made all three free throws. The Sixers were 1.5 point dogs prior to that game. Final score: Boston 109, Philly 108. By hook or by crook, Philly ATS bets won.
The 2020’s NBA also has a G-league level talent getting NBA minutes to placate his daddy. And we’re also not too far removed from a generational star’s migration to Los Angeles when no other team even knew he was available. Don’t feel too bad for Dallas though. The Mavs ended up winning the Cooper Flagg sweepstakes with just a 1.8% chance at the 1st overall pick required to get him.
Thus, I would posit that in light of what is probably the worst professional sports gambling scandal since Tim Donaghy (also the NBA), the NBA product itself is trash and can no longer be trusted.
Perhaps the speculator’s game hasn’t changed, but the pro-basketball game certainly has. And Gonzalez fouling Embiid with his nutsack was sort of a straw that broke the camel’s back for me back in October. I had had enough. It was just the cherry on the sundae that it helped Philly eventually cover a 1.5 point spread. While I have no interest in betting on sporting events that are manipulated, I’ll certainly bet on commodities markets that are.
Circling back to Reminiscences of a Stock Operator for a moment, one of the big lessons from Livermore’s approach can best be summed up as ‘tip avoidance.’ Livermore did what the tape told him was right, not what tipsters said was correct. A trading legend repeatedly detailing how his success hinged on not following the words of others impacted me in a way that I did not anticipate.
While it could certainly be interpreted by some that I’m giving ‘tips’ through my work here or on Seeking Alpha, I’ve always felt that what I’m doing is more akin to transparently and un-apologetically talking my own book. Maybe that’s the same thing. Ultimately, that’s for you to decide. But I’ve always believed that explaining why I’m doing what I’m doing was more valuable than what I’m doing at any given time.
So here’s the what; Silver at $88 per ounce looks increasingly primed and ready for another shot above $100 and beyond.
Here’s the why; simply put, what we’re seeing out of the CME looks like desperation. And that desperation is invariably working to suppress Silver’s price and seemingly buy time for short sellers who can’t exit their positions without XAG turning into a runaway train. I’m going to just share some facts. You can verify them all yourselves and draw your own conclusions:
First, on November 28th a cooling issue at one of CME’s contracted data centers helped slow down a technical breakout in Silver as the metal was making a new all time high during thin holiday trading hours at the end of the month.
Then during Silver’s 35% single session meltdown on January 30th, circuit breaker protection failed to trigger as designed for Silver’s long position holders. This was clearly a benefit to Silver’s short position holders.
Finally yesterday, on February 25th we experienced a CME trading halt and an order book purge just as Silver was about to break out of technical resistance at $92 per ounce.
It seems timely ‘technical issues’ struck again and the metal was subsequently whacked down under $88. Look, I love a conspiracy theory as much as the next guy. The problem with conspiracy theories in the post-COVID era is most of them end up being conspiracies rather than theories. I don’t believe in coincidences. If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably
the CME doing everything it can to buy time before its paper price suppression scheme blows up in spectacular fashion
a duck.
I'm a superstitious man, and if some unlucky accident should befall him—if he should be shot in the head by a police officer, or if he should hang himself in his jail cell, or if he's struck by a bolt of lightning—then I'm going to blame some of the people in this room, and that I do not forgive. - Don Vito Corleone
Disclaimer: I’m not an investment advisor. I share what I do, why I do it, and why I see things the way I do. I’m long Silver.
Yea the CME silver stuff is super suss.