The Will To Perform: Liberation Day Fallout, Part II

Across the AXIA trading desks.
Tuesday 8 April 2025.
London, England.

How does the gothic interior meet a smiling spring? A few doors down from the traders at Endsleigh Street, a handful of white cherry trees are in full bloom. Their petals sweep in front of countless university students who spill into the nearby parks of Tavistock Square Gardens and Gordon Square. They queue at street food vendors at Byng Place. They sprawl over the grass, they picnic, they frolic, they celebrate the Sun. It’s been at a premium. They wonderfully have no care and every care in the world.

But don’t they know?—don’t they know?!—about the end of the world, the end of the monetary system, the great future fiat rug-pull, the end of humans, the NWO, inflation, economic data manipulation, market (dis)function, that time Fed hiked massive, and equities still went up! And now, the end of trade and globalisation as we know it. How can they be so happy? Don’t they know the injustice of being blown out of a great trade for stupid reasons when you give back so much… when a third-time rehash of an old headline sends your mega-trade flying the wrong way? To get squeezed so much you puke the high tick; to be hunted! To come in and lose and lose and lose… to lord over a place where the Sun only ever sets; to feel you live among the ruins of what you once were: an unending finality. Decay.

And as these pale traders brood along their crumbling castle walls, peering down at the villagers below. Don’t they know… So glints another aspect of the will to perform. To push—or, as others might say, abuse themselves—in order to drive performance. Another grindy sixteen-hour state of paused alert, mounting sleep deprivation; some smoking to sacrifice the lungs for a temporary boost or relief. That is the visceral immediate, but consider something darker. To do what they do—navigation of this complex, multi-dimensional market world requires complete exposure to it. A specific mind-body empathetic capacity to experience it all, to be sensitive yet primed to feel the nuances of sentiment, theme evolution, the plot twist. This has a cost in the way actors warp their reality and personality when they are overrun so completely by their roles. Total immersion. Here be fiends… to know that vast outperformance is emotionally Pyrrhic, as success is fleeting yet failure permanent. Here be magic… to carry the burden of knowing and seeing too much; to never really want to talk about it, or to be damned if you do. Here be beasts… to isolate their hearts in castles because who would understand the necessity to don a mask of extremes: wrath, silence, madness and badness—whatever they need to use to do what must be done. Here be… 

Banter?

It’s quiet along the walls this Tuesday morning. This can only mean that whatever pundit, speaker, egghead, fund guy or fed gal they just wheeled out on mainstream TV gets hounded by the traders. A tough crowd: the TV is racked with one-liners, meek speakers savaged, and the self-aggrandising are parodied, all with the earthly hilarity that can emerge from a trader’s mouth.