The volatility and liquidations of the past week are a near-perfect preview of the market structure being built and the world we're heading toward that I reference below. Highly recommend a skim if you haven't read. Markets are becoming easier to access, more entertaining to participate in and increasingly difficult to survive. We are financializing and gamifying nearly every part of life at the same time that leverage is becoming frictionless. Options, perps, 2-3x leveraged products, prediction markets, 24/7 trading, etc will bring more people into markets than ever before but it will NOT necessarily create more profitable investors. In fact, the opposite may be true. Situational Awareness is the institutional version of this lesson. The fund had a coherent long-term thesis around AI and generated extraordinary returns from it. But once that thesis was expressed through concentrated, leveraged positions, an eventual-return question became an immediate-liquidity problem. The fund sold the bulk of its public-equity portfolio to Citadel.....I mean wow. Being right about the themes of the decade did not protect it from being overextended. South Korea is the retail version. Investors were offered extreme margin through the tap of a button as the country’s equity market surged. As prices began to reverse, brokerages liquidated positions and margin calls reached record levels at $38.7B When enough investors own the same assets with leverage, market makers will hunt overexpose positions and what would be an ordinary correction quickly become a mechanical liquidation event. The next decade may have the highest market participation in history while also producing the greatest number of people who were directionally correct and still lost everything. Sounds contradictory, but it is exactly what leverage does.