No. of Recommendations: 6
at the weird , wonderful, inseparable intersection of finance and humanities, we were recently gifted the hernan diaz instant classic "Trust'. in that spirit, i copy below a very short financial take on CS Lewis Screwtape letter by author \ podcaster Jake Taylor (and not by AI).
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...Lewis's brilliance is not really in demonizing sin in the usual sense..It’s rather more about becoming this lukewarm complacent, too busy to be thoughtful and really losing your mortal soul from that...
So, the following is a letter from Abyssmus, who’s a senior financial demon, to his eager nephew, Tick Worm
“My dearest, Tick Worm, I read your latest report with something approaching satisfaction. Your patient, I gather, has opened a brokerage account, downloaded two trading apps, opened a crypto wallet and started referring to himself without irony as early-stage capital. Excellent, you now stand at the edge of your first real assignment. Not merely to ruin him, but to ruin him in the most elegant way possible, through the rituals of self-deluded financial sophistication.
We do not wish to keep him away from markets. That’s outdated thinking. The more delicious path is to let him enter fully, but wrongly. Let him study enough to be confident, but never enough to be correct. Begin with speculation disguised as investment. Encourage him to chase stories, not actual financial statements. Momentum stocks, SPACs with vaporists, forecasts, hot tips that feel like privileged information, anything trending on social feeds. He must believe he’s early to the next wave, though he’s simply the inevitable bagholder arriving for the rug pull.
Let him believe risk is merely a byproduct of cowardice. Caution, you’ll whisper to him, is a tax on ambition. You only need to get rich once, so why not do it quickly, boldly and with an extra helping of excitement? A man of his caliber deserves good stories to woo the opposite sex, not boring business fundamentals and monk-like patience.
Next, initiate him into the cult of macro obsession. Whisper to him that every CPI release, every Fed meeting and dot plot, and every unemployment print is a tactical moment. He must trade on this data. Let him believe he’s interpreting signals that even the professionals misread. Was that a twitch in Powell’s eyebrow that only he saw? The market isn’t ignoring him, it’s simply not enlightened yet. He’s ahead of the curve.
And now, the algorithm will deliver him to one of our favorite weapons, the TikTok Financial influencer. Let him follow 21-year-old prophets who preach conviction while leaning against rented sports cars. This 'coin' will 10x they declare and your he obeys. He’s not reading, he is scrolling. He’s not evaluating, he’s imitating. This is what we call user generated misfortune. And it’s a favorite of our Dark Fathers.
From here, elevate him into options trading, where ignorance and leverage embrace in holy combustion. He will say Gamma and Theta as incantations while sacrificing premiums weekly. When he wins, let him feel chosen and smarter than all the other dumb money neophytes. When he loses, tell him he was simply early. We want him addicted to the idea of mastery while remaining functionally confused.
Finally, when he grows weary, offer him the false comfort of diversification. He must not know what he really owns as he scatters his holdings across crypto, uranium, distressed real estate, leveraged ETFs, money losing SPACs, pointless NFTs and vintage wine startups. This, he will say is strategy, but it is clutter and [this diversification] is our free lunch to his torment.
The high fee burdens of these complex instruments help ensure his road to ruin. Let him spend a decade in motion and call it growth. Let him perform diligence without discipline, conviction without clarity and action without understanding. The delicious tragedy is not that he will eventually be financially devastated. It is that he will think he was smarter than average the whole time. That eventual bitterness of his broken spirit is the sweetest fruit for a financial demon.
And by all means, never let him write anything down, lest he learn from his mistakes. Steer him away from systemization that will lead to self-awareness and an inevitable improvement. Keep the idea of a businesslike approach far from his mind. That is too boring and pedestrian for someone as smart as our man.
Yours in infinite churn, Abyssmuss.”
