A free, serialized journal
Confessions from the desk of an institutional trader who has seen too much and learned just enough to be dangerous.
Every week or so, Craig writes. About the flow, the spread, the psychology of sitting inside a market that does not care about you. About the conversations you can't have with anyone who wasn't there. This is the place he puts it all down.
Who is Craig?
Craig is a pseudonym. Behind it is someone who has spent the better part of two decades working institutional flow on a Canadian equity desk — the kind of job where you spend your mornings reading research you don't believe, your afternoons managing risk you didn't ask for, and your evenings wondering how you ended up here.
He is not a pundit. He does not have a hot take on the Fed. He has no product to sell and no firm to protect. What he has is a peculiar vantage point on how markets actually work — the gap between the way things are explained on television and the way they feel from inside the machine — and a compulsion to write it down somewhere.
This journal is that somewhere.
What is this, exactly?
It is a diary, more than anything. Entries go out when they're ready — sometimes weekly, sometimes after a long pause when markets have been boring or Craig has been busy or both. Each one is self-contained enough to read on its own, but there's a thread running through all of them if you start from the beginning.
The topics drift. Risk management. Desk culture. The particular loneliness of knowing things you can't explain at dinner. The mechanics of how a block trade actually gets done. The psychology of watching your book move against you for no reason you can identify. The strange comfort of a market that keeps going regardless.
There are no charts. There are no ticker symbols (mostly). There is jargon, but it's explained — hover over any underlined term and a definition appears. Craig writes the way he talks: plainly, occasionally with profanity, sometimes with more sentiment than he'd admit to.
Why is it free?
Because charging for it would make it a product, and products require optimizing for engagement and building an audience and all the things that turn writing into work. Craig already has a job. This is not that.
Subscribe if you want to get entries in your inbox. Or don't — the archive is right there. No paywalls, no tiers, no nothing. Just a guy writing things down.