Dear Fellow Masochists: A Love Letter to August Markets

An internal monologue from your correspondent, watching screens melt at 3:47 AM

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Another sleepless night. Another month where sanity goes to die. August 2025 feels like being locked in a room with a toddler throwing a tantrum, except the toddler controls trillions in global capital flows and has daddy issues with Jerome Powell.

I'm staring at three monitors. The left one shows COIN down 14% on earnings that somehow managed to disappoint despite crypto's supposed renaissance. The middle screen has become a Jackson Pollock painting of red ink. The right one? That's just pure chaos — MicroStrategy hemorrhaging 8.7% because apparently when you build your entire corporate strategy around orange coin goes up, orange coin going sideways makes investors remember you're still just a software company from the dot-com era.

But here's what keeps me awake: Trump's fresh tariff salvo — 10% to 41% across the board. The man couldn't resist. Markets were getting comfortable, yields were behaving, crypto was finding its footing. So naturally, he decides to remind everyone that trade wars are good and easy to win.

The capital flows tell the real story, though. Bonds are surging while crypto bleeds. It's almost poetic — flight to safety meets flight from sanity. Gold's having its moment again, because nothing says "I trust the system" quite like hoarding shiny rocks.

You know what I find fascinating? Coinbase's revenue climbed 3.3% to $1.5 billion but still managed to crater because Wall Street expected... what exactly? That retail would keep YOLOing into shitcoins forever? That institutions would stampede into crypto ETFs with reckless abandon? The hubris is breathtaking.

Meanwhile, Robinhood is only down 3.1% because apparently having a diversified business model beyond "crypto to the moon" actually matters. Who could have predicted such madness?

I keep thinking about something a trader told me last week: "The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent." He was quoting Keynes, of course, but missing the point entirely. The market isn't irrational — we are. We're the ones who convinced ourselves that 2025 would be different. That somehow this time, the fundamentals would matter. That central bankers wouldn't pivot at the first sign of political pressure. That Trump would stick to Truth Social instead of weaponizing trade policy.

The real kicker? We're still "near all-time highs" according to CNBC. Near. All-time. Highs. After this week's bloodbath. If that doesn't capture the absurdist theater of modern finance, I don't know what does.

So here I sit, caffeinated beyond reason, watching futures paint ugly pictures for Friday's open. The Europeans will wake up to this mess in a few hours. The Asians are probably already factoring it into their models, adjusting their hedges, preparing for another day of explaining to clients why diversification isn't working.

Tomorrow, I'll put on my professional face and write something measured about market volatility and long-term positioning. Tonight, I'm just another insomniac watching the machine eat itself, one basis point at a time.

The beautiful thing about markets? They don't care about your feelings. They don't care about your thesis. They certainly don't care about your sleep schedule. They just... are. Chaotic, brutal, occasionally magnificent forces of human emotion dressed up in algorithms and wrapped in the pretense of rational price discovery.

God, I love this job.

—Your correspondent, somewhere between despair and euphoria