Of Fumes and Fury: Liberation Day Fallout, Part I

Across the AXIA trading desks.
Monday 7 April 2025.
London, England.

The day after runs on fumes and fury. That is how you know Monday was big; bloody—financial ultra-violence. Yet it has only continued from Liberation Day—Wednesday 2nd April. But by Tuesday these traders are full of scorpions because Monday should have been better, so should have Sunday night, and yesterday, and yesterday, and yesterday; it always must be better. But it was also worse; the ladders were thin; liquidity anaemic—the markets sometimes seem empty and whose even here? For some punctures of time, it felt as if the market’s functioning and fabric of reality were coming apart—Stoxx and DAX vol-stoppin’—trading platforms and connectivity getting all clogged up… that’s when it really started: the banging and the shouting and the wailing. 

And now you sit in the Risk Room on Monday afternoon as the crew jump into triage as if you are caught in the dark depths of some old galleon mid-gun battle—where they flip some lunch tables to create an Operating Room as the saws go in and the legless and the headless come out. An entire team, from Risk to IT, run up and down the building to help, managing hurried phone calls; flooded with Teams messages. Grey-outs! Slow Downs! Errors!—trading platforms keep going down, pulled apart by the volatility storm and floods of data. The lag and the flow and the physical execution get worse and worse; some traders are completely stuck—they can’t get in or out—and they relentlessly bang the ceiling and plaster above.

The salvaging starts———93, 93, 93—Yeah, done. Next?—I need to flat him, yeah? Flat—yea? ClickClickClick… S— go, tell me. He’s long ZF–CGBs—no, no Bunds is flat. Yeah, yep. Done. Wait, I need to flatten him too—shitshitshit. Okay, check B—… DAX! Flat position, correct? Wait, D— asked me for a pos-check. Can you check his GUI and stuff? Okay, I’ll pull his orders… again and again and again. This came to be Monday: navigation of the Liberation Day fallout and the classic duo Rumour and Denial.

You run up the stairs from the Risk Room and sit on the first floor of Endsleigh Street; if history is going to be made and you want to experience it raw, these trading desks are the place to be. This first floor, as AXIA’s Haywood said, is the best trader—this collective beast, a Frankenstein group of twelve traders whose eyes, ears, reactions, and firepower make it happen; the little and big ways they push themselves through sheer malevolence, camaraderie, retribution and anger. And they are seething; they’ve been feeding themselves to these markets and it’s about damn time it———

————What’s out? What’s out?!—— 

——Spoo is mega-bid; it screeches higher as the U.S. Five-Year is simultaneously smashed, and the other usual markets get whipped with action. Shit! Something’s Out! Already, some of the traders hit into these moves: because of the force, the pace of it and the size going through, you assume—you must assume—that there is news, a headline—something. ClickClickClick. And there it is—“Hassett: Trump Is Considering A 90-Day Pause in Tariffs for All Countries Except China.” Between 15:10–15:15 BST, a single X post was reposted by bigger accounts and soon run on-air by CNBC.