A financial-advisor friend of mine turned me on to QTR some time ago, and I've subscribed to the Substack ever since, enjoying the author's writing and thinking even more than his market analysis.

Here, he's produced a good description of the Anon (or any honest, non-malicious, thoughtful) person's mind-set, and I thought some here might enjoy reading it.

https://quoththeraven.substack.com/p/i-too-am-full-of-shit

At the end of the day, I am full of shit, too. Just like everyone else in this industry.

That’s not false humility. It’s not some clever branding exercise. It’s just reality. Anyone who spends enough time in markets eventually learns that certainty is usually just confidence wearing a cheap suit. In my case, I currently do not even own one (1) suit and/or tie. But I have a lot of hoodies.

I don’t know you. I don’t know your financial situation. I don’t know your risk tolerance, your goals, your income, your debts, your timeline, or what keeps you up at night. I don’t know whether you’re trying to maximize returns, preserve capital, retire early, send kids to college, avoid the end of the world or simply avoid getting wiped out. And because I don’t know those things, I have no idea what’s best for you.

Hell, there are plenty of times I haven’t even known what’s best for me.

I joke a lot about the people on CNBC, and in my mind it is well deserved. A lot of my friends have been on the network as guests. Some of the people I’ve met from the network are great. I love Guy Adami and his takes. I’m friendly with the Najaraian brothers, who were always nice to me. And I met Tyler Matheson one year at an even in Vegas and he was an incredible nice guy.

Others provide 'analysis' that makes me think we'd struggle to reach consensus on the shape of a circle.

There are guests who get rolled out every day to explain why the market is only going to go up, why Bitcoin is going to $250,000, why the economy is stronger than everyone thinks, and every dip is a once-in-a-lifetime buying opportunity.

My problem isn’t even the bullishness anymore. Markets need bulls. They have a place.

What bothers me is the lack of a counterbalance. The lack of anyone saying, “Okay, but what if that’s wrong?” The lack of anyone asking whether the assumptions underneath the narrative actually make sense. They bring the legendary Rick Santelli on once a week for 12 seconds to have a stroke on some abandoned trading floor in Chicago, and then we return to 58 straight hours of this sorry-ass look:

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The financial industry has become one giant used car sales operation. Nearly everyone involved benefits from keeping money moving, keeping people invested, and keeping optimism elevated. The incentives are obvious once you start looking for them.

The clerk at your local bank wants you buying something and won’t let you take out more than $100 in cash. The wealth manager at the branch wants to “introduce” themselves to you anytime you’re within a 30 foot concentric circle of the bank. The sell-side analyst putting out price targets every morning wants you buying stock. The investment bank wants you in their private credit products. Financial media wants you watching, clicking, and staying engaged. The crypto influencer wants followers. The guy with laser eyes on social media wants you buying the exact thing he already owns and to trust him that’s it totally not about him eventually selling. And finally, me, the newsletter writer, wants subscriptions.

Everyone has inventory. Everyone has a narrative. Everyone has a reason why the future is brighter than you think and why the thing they happen to be selling is the answer. So here’s my bullshit explanation: I try to, at least, provide some friction to whatever this is:

Not because I’m smarter than those people. That’s Brian Kelly. He has an M.B.A. from Babson Graduate School of Business with a concentration in finance and econometrics. In college, I majored in Advanced Theories, Practices and Principles For Hand-Crushing Natural Light Beer Cans On One’s Forehead.

Not because I have access to some secret data terminal hidden in my basement. These guys all have $25,000/year Bloomberg terminals and I use Yahoo Finance while annoying my actual professional friends with DMs all day that say: “Hey man, sorry this is the last time, but can you pull this chart for me?”

And certainly not because my own performance has earned me the right to lecture anyone about investing. As I wrote last week, I should be wearing a safety helmet at all times while attempting to trade…which is why I stopped trading actively altogether.

I’ve found plenty of ways to light money on fire without assistance from Wall Street. The only real difference between me and some of the professional forecasters is that when I screw up, fewer cameras are pointed at me and there are a lot fewer zeroes attached to the damage. And I’ve disclosed in advance to my readers that I’m not a mind-reader and can’t predict the future. I can only offer up my best guess based on my analysis, which is based on my nearly 15 years in the industry.

I’ve been wrong before. I’ll be wrong again. In fact, if you’re in markets long enough, being wrong isn’t the exception, it’s part of the job description. The people who pretend otherwise are usually the ones you should trust the least. The ones who have a chance to hold people accountable on their bad calls…and then don’t…well, they should be trusted even less.

What I do try to do is challenge my own views. I try to understand the bull case even when I don’t agree with it. I try to ask what if the consensus is right. I try to consider the possibility that things really are different this time, even though history suggests those four words have probably destroyed more capital than almost any phrase ever spoken in finance.

Sometimes I succeed. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I end up changing my mind, and sometimes I end up more convinced than when I started. But at least the exercise forces me to think instead of simply picking a side and defending it like a sports fan. It’s funny being always called a “permabear” when I’m literally making a list of potential long ideas every year. This is what happens when you show just one iota of skepticism toward the prevailing sentiment about monetary policy.

My goal isn’t to become another talking head shouting predictions into the void. The world doesn’t need another person confidently forecasting where the S&P will close twelve months from now or pretending to know exactly where Bitcoin will trade next quarter.

My goal is simply to add one voice pulling in the opposite direction of an overwhelmingly one-sided conversation. When almost everyone is leaning one way, there’s value in at least asking whether they’re missing something.

Because markets don’t need more cheerleaders. They don’t need more people treating every asset like it’s destined for the moon. They don’t need another parade of experts explaining why this time the risks don’t matter. They don’t need crypto convictions for coins and networks no one has ever heard of being turned into tattoos and then talked about on-air or in print as though they are some kind of discounted cash flow model.

What markets need is skepticism. They need doubt. They need people willing to ask uncomfortable questions and point out inconvenient facts. And they need people to do it with attitude, because bulls and monetary policy defenders simply act like arrogant hyenas and outright total cowards (see this and this) sometimes.

Not because the skeptics are always right, but because the presence of skepticism forces everyone else to sharpen their arguments.

Someone has to stand in front of the tidal wave of bullish bullshit and ask whether the emperor might be missing a few articles of clothing. It can be done. Here’s Guy Adami calling out Wharton Professor Emeritus (or whatever bullshit Latin title he has) Jeremy “He Who Should Not Be Named” Siegel:

(Video)

And here’s former CNBC guy and all-around solid market anlayst Jeff Macke showing what actual balls look like at the start of Covid:

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The point is that none of this makes me an expert, either. If anything, it just makes me another participant trying to navigate the same mess as everyone else.

I’m trying to separate facts from narratives, probabilities from certainties, and information from marketing. Some days I do a decent job of it. Other days I convince myself I’ve discovered something profound only to realize later I was just inventing a more sophisticated way to be wrong. Sometimes you chase your tail for years before you realize you’re not doing anything productive and you can just…stop.

My job isn’t to tell you what to think. My job isn’t to tell you what to buy, what to sell, or how to allocate your money. What I can do is try to put as many cards on the table as possible. The good cards. The bad cards. The facts that support the bullish case and the facts that undermine it. The information people love talking about and the information they conveniently leave out.

After that, it’s on you. You take the cards. You weigh the evidence. You challenge your own assumptions. You try to get as close to reality as possible, knowing you’ll never get all the way there. Then you make the decision that’s right for you, your circumstances, and your goals.

Not for Tom Lee. Not for CNBC. Not for Wall Street. Not for your neighbor. And certainly not for me. Because if there’s one thing markets have taught me, it’s that everyone is full of shit. The bulls are full of shit. The bears are full of shit. The economists are full of shit. The strategists are full of shit. The influencers are full of shit. The people predicting crashes are full of shit, and the people predicting endless prosperity are full of shit.

The only difference is the flavor.

My hope isn’t that you trust me. Either I’ll earn that from you or I won’t. My broader hope is that you trust nobody completely, including me. My hope is that this corner of the internet just serves as a counterweight to the overwhelming pressure to buy, believe, chase, and conform.

Just remember: I’m full of shit too. I’m just trying to be full of shit in the opposite direction as everyone else.