The First Entry

I've been telling myself I'd write this for three years. Every time something genuinely interesting happened on the desk, I'd think: someone should put this down. The texture of it. Not the trade — anyone can describe the trade — but what it felt like to be inside it.

So here we are. I'm going to write this the way I'd explain it to a friend who knows roughly what a stock is but has never sat behind a Bloomberg terminal at 7:45 in the morning trying to figure out why flow has gone sideways overnight.

A few things you should know before we start.

I work on an institutional desk. That means my clients aren't retail investors trying to build a retirement portfolio — they're funds, pension managers, asset allocators. People moving real size. The conversations are different when someone can move a market just by asking you a question.

I'm not going to pretend this is comprehensive market education. There are textbooks for that, and they're terrible. What I'm offering is something narrower: what I actually think about, most weeks, when I'm trying to make sense of what's happening.

My name, for these purposes, is Craig.

···

The market did something last week that reminded me why I started writing this in the first place. I was watching a name — I'll leave the ticker out — and the spread started to widen in a way that had nothing to do with the news. No headline, no earnings, no macro data. Just a quiet, persistent widening that told me someone wanted out and wasn't going to announce it.

Twenty minutes later, a filing hit. Someone had reduced their position by twelve percent.

The spread knew before the filing did. It almost always does.

That's the thing I keep trying to explain to people who are new to this. The prices you see on the screen are not just numbers. They're conversations. Some of them are arguments. You learn to read them the same way you learn to read a room.

I'll write more about that.

—C