It is June 2029, which means Grand Theft Auto VI has still not been released, Tom Brady has once again decided to un-retire, Sam Altman has announced he believes AGI is six months away for the third year running, and Bill Ackman has announced a new SPAC targeting the vibes economy in a 47-part thread on X. It has also been over three years since a work of speculative fiction dropped on Substack and preceded a selloff that took the Dow down 821 points.

What happened after February 2026 depended on which version of Citrinitas was operating behind the scenes at the time of writing. All three possible imagined pathways were consistent with the …

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Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” sounds a bit off when you modify the lyrics like that, which just goes to show you that words have power, words disclose, and when those words sit on top of a report that moved hyperbolic billions in markets, what edits to it disclose might matter more than what the words originally said.

Since its publication, there have been material changes to the authorship claims on Citrini’s report, and these changes moved the co-author’s identity from a $262 million SEC-registered hedge fund to a friend with an idea. Interesting move considering that two days after publishing, the co-author (and fund’s managing partner) confirmed on Bloomberg Television that his firm held short positions in the companies the report named.

Read that again: the authorship attribution on a report attributed to market-moving was changed after publication, and the co-author is the managing partner of a $262 million SEC-registered hedge fund who confirmed short positions in the companies the report named.

I think this is worth examining, because it sits at the center of the vibe laundering architecture I mapped in Part 1 where the nature of disclosures and lack of transparency around positions sets the methodology for converting credibility into capital without rules around it or the content which it disseminates.

In part 2, I’ll examine who Alap Shah, the co-author of Citrini’s report is, what is and isn’t said about him, and why the changing of words for authorship are relevant. Then, I examine what the law says about all of it. In part 3 coming up after this, I evaluate three possible scenarios for what’s really happening chez Citrini in a work of speculative fiction of my own.

A necessary caveat before I continue (because I can go further, I promise, just like Kendrick): the February 23 selloff followed the Supreme Court striking down Trump’s tariffs along with Trump’s response and Anthropic’s news about modernizing COBOL systems, a two birds with one stone watershed moment rendering remaining difficult Boomer colleague(s) lording their knowledge genuinely unneeded forever (bye!) and, by the way also IBM fell 13%, its worst day since 2000. What I’m saying is the Citrini report was one element of a market that was already nervous, I’m not saying it caused the entire 821-point Dow decline. I am examining the disclosure architecture around one specific input and asking whether the regulatory framework accounts for it, because in vibe laundering, the structures which normally apply don’t and the rules which follow them seem non-existent.

Let me show you what I found.

I. Every breath you take, every edit you make, every move you make, the market’s watching you: changes in authorship for the Citrini report

Recall on Sunday February 22, a Substack email from Citrini Research went out to 100k+ subscribers on a fictional memo from the future titled the 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis, and in the email, the preface identified the collaboration by stating plainly that “CitriniResearch & LOTUS have written this.” The man behind Lotus is attributed co-author Alap Shah, but what was not stated plainly anywhere at all on Citrini’s page is that LOTUS is Lotus Technology Management LP, an SEC-registered investment adviser managing $262 million. Timing wise, Shah, Lotus’ managing partner, filed a 13F with the SEC five days before the publication of the fictional memo showing $180 million in long equity. The Form ADV describes a long/short strategy with dedicated short selling, and two days after the report and the Dow moving 821 points, during an interview, Shah confirmed on Bloomberg Television that the firm held short positions in companies the report named.

That’s why the change in language around Shah and his role has been intriguing, as the version currently on Citrini’s website does not say “CitriniResearch & LOTUS have written this.”

It says “Our friend Alap Shah posed the question, and together we brainstormed the answer.”

While it’s giving a little bit of “babe, they’re just a friend, don’t worry”, there’s more. The same directional shift in language for the pre-face appears in the acknowledgements. The original email sent to Citrini subscribers reads “Our co-author, Alap Shah of LOTUS, contributed the idea for this piece - we wrote this one.” Now, the website shows an edit to just saying “CitriniResearch wrote this party”

I assume this is a typo for “partly” though based on Citrini’s past with selling marijuana, I definitely believe he’d be fun to party with.

• On the left, the original email, on the right, the website version now

Why is this all important? Remember how I said words have power? Substack emails are immutable, meaning the moment you originally hit publish on a post and elect to send it via email, it’s your only chance to send an email. Once the email goes out, you cannot edit it. But the website can be edited after. The version that reached every subscriber, the version they read and acted on before markets opened Monday, identified the collaboration as institutional without a disclosure or mention on Citrini’s website that LOTUS holds short positions on named assets mentioned in the fictional memo they authored. The version that exists now on the public web identifies it as personal.

What is happening here with words in the changes to the preface and acknowledgements appears to be editing that reduces the institutional footprint of the co-authorship, reframes an SEC-registered fund manager’s role from co-author to idea contributor, and all this occurs after the original publication reached subscribers’ inboxes as well as hyperbolic billions in market movements.

• On the left, the original email, on the right, the website version now

In vibe laundering, disclosure and obligation are fluid depending on who does and says what where and when. So why would anyone change the specific wording on that only with relatively few to no other editorial changes in the overall fictional text?

II. The white lotus: who is Alap Shah & what is he saying

On the technical documentation front, Alap Shah is the Chief Investment Officer and Managing Partner of Lotus Technology Management LP, an investment advisory firm registered with the SEC since August 2025. The firm is also registered with the Cayman Islands Monetary Authority. Its CRD number is 335468 on the SEC’s Investment Adviser Public Disclosure database, and per Form ADV Part 2A, LOTUS has been registered with the SEC since August 2025 though having been in business since January 2024. It operates a master-feeder hedge fund structure: Lotus Technology Fund LP (domestic), Lotus Technology Offshore Fund LP (Cayman), and Lotus Technology Master Fund LP (Cayman).

On the professional experience front, Shah’s career runs through Viking Global, Citadel’s equities division, and the founding of Sentieo, an AI research platform acquired by AlphaSense in 2022. He is currently CEO of Littlebird, an AI personal assistant company whose stated business model involves AI agents performing tasks that human intermediaries currently perform, which is the central thesis of the report he co-authored.

Notice how the Citrini report said “Alap Shah of LOTUS” at the bottom? It does not identify Lotus Technology Management LP as an SEC-registered investment adviser managing $262 million. It does not disclose any positions held by the firm in companies named in the report. It does not disclose Shah’s role as CEO of Littlebird, a company whose business model is aligned with the report’s thesis that AI agents will displace human intermediaries.

The most charitable reading is straightforward and I’ll say it clearly: Shah may be one of the most qualified people in the country to write this fictional report given that he built and sold an AI company, runs a hedge fund focused on technology disruption, and is building another AI company. The report may be good analysis from someone who understands the technology better than most. His positions may reflect conviction, not a scheme. All of that can be true. My question is narrower. When an SEC-registered investment adviser co-authors market-moving research on a third-party platform, what are the disclosure obligations, and were they met?

On Shah’s own Substack, published the same day, there is a general directional disclosure,”Because I see this AI-driven displacement as a likely path, my portfolios and companies are positioned for it. If my thesis plays out, my firms will benefit financially.” That post received 289 likes. The Citrini report received 5,477 likes, 1,182 restacks, and was read by sixteen million people. That means Citrini’s report got 19x the distribution and exposure to readers, rendering the disclosure gap between those two platforms at minimum wide.

Lotus’s Form ADV Part 2A does not reference Littlebird, does not reference any arrangement for co-authoring research on third-party platforms, and describes its long/short strategy in generic terms. Shah co-authored a report arguing AI agents will displace human intermediaries. He runs an AI agent company. He runs a hedge fund that holds short positions in the companies being disrupted. Whether or not Littlebird fits into a specific ADV line item, the interconnection between these roles is the kind of conflict that fiduciary duty exists to surface. It’s also the sort of thing that vibe laundering describes happening - you know it when you see it though you can’t exactly place a name on it.

III. Lucky number 13F - what the form shows, cannot show, and how this ties into Shah admitting to holding short positions on television

As mentioned, five days before the Citrini report was published, Lotus filed their form 13F-HR with the SEC This appears to be the firm’s first 13F filing, was signed by Shah as CIO, and it reports 147 long equity positions totaling approximately $180 million in market value.

A 13F reports long equity positions. It does not report short positions. This is not a gap unique to Lotus as it applies to everyone for Form 13F.

The portfolio includes positions in companies the report named, including Uber ($1.50 million), and in companies within sectors the report thematically targeted as vulnerable to AI disruption: MongoDB ($281,000), Cloudflare ($358,000), CrowdStrike ($208,000), Twilio ($700,000), Etsy ($2.24 million), Coinbase ($204,000)

If you do the math, the firm’s Form ADV reports $262 million in regulatory assets under management. The 13F reports approximately $180 million in long equity. The difference, approximately $82 million, represents positions that 13F filings are not designed to capture i.e. in short sales, derivatives, private investments, cash, and non-US securities.

The 13F also shows that Lotus held long positions in Uber and MongoDB as of December 31, 2025, and both companies were named in the report as vulnerable to AI disruption in addition to declining on February 23. This means Lotus lost money on those long positions because of the report its managing partner co-authored. I think it is fair to say a fund running a pure short-and-distort scheme does not hold longs in the companies it is trying to drive down. The long positions are consistent with a fund that holds a genuinely mixed view, going long on the companies it thinks will adapt, short the ones it thinks won’t, and publishing analysis that reflects a thesis rather than a trade.

As of writing, there is no public filing in the United States that reveals which investment manager holds which short position. The rule designed to change this, Rule 13f-2 and Form SHO, has been delayed to January 2028. No manager has ever filed a Form SHO. FINRA collects aggregate short interest data per security, but this shows only total shares shorted, not who is shorting.

The practical consequence of this is that positions most likely to benefit from market-moving bearish research are positions the current disclosure system was not built to reveal.

Keeping this in mind (and I don’t even go into how Shah brings up his thesis in detail in various places), two days after the fictional memo went out and the Dow dropped 821 points, Shah appeared on Bloomberg Television, stating that his firm “certainly had shorts in some of these businesses” and that they “generally have a set of shorts out against businesses that we think are going to be disrupted by AI.” That means Shah confirmed the short positions on television after the market moved. It’s the only reason why the public knows about Lotus’s short positioning, as no filing nor regulation required it. Shah offered this information upon being asked about it.

Shah also stated “I thought there was going to be a small reaction. It was definitely larger than we expected.”

When the interviewer asked directly whether this was “a short seller report guised beautifully in the form of a beautiful fiction,” Shah did not say no. He said “We are constantly sort of turning our book. And we certainly had shorts in some of these businesses.” The question was about the report’s intent, but the answer was about the portfolio’s composition, and this distance between appears in the edits to the attribution of the report in the first section.

The original email named the fund, but now on the website where the report lives, it names a friend. It’s just like how the Bloomberg answer acknowledges the shorts but frames them as routine portfolio management rather than positioned exposure behind a specific publication. Words are power, power is in disclosure, and in both cases, the words used to describe the relationship between the fund and the report narrows after the fact. The edits narrow the authorship as the interview narrows the intent. Now it’s giving “Babe, they’re just a friend - I swear!”

Vibe laundering means none of this is required or planned, of course. It is entirely possible that every edit and every answer reflects nothing more than normal post-publication clarification and honest interviewing to the extent a reporter at Bloomberg views it to be part of their job. The direction of the narrative and its framing is consistent since by the time the public record settles, the fund’s connection to the report is smaller under possible scrutiny than it was when the report first hit inboxes.

Words have power, so consider this. Shah told us in his own words he anticipated market impact from the report. He published it with no per-report position disclosure on the platform where sixteen million people read it. The specific positions were confirmed publicly only after the trading session was over. It was a fictional report that he anticipated market impact from.

I want to be fair about what that means - Shah disclosed directionally on his own Substack on publication day and his short positions on TV. Not everyone would do that, of course, but the question is not whether Shah acted in bad faith. It is whether voluntary after-the-fact disclosure on a different platform satisfies the obligations the SEC has articulated for registered investment advisers, and whether the point of market impact, not the point of television appearance, is where those obligations attach.

I also want to note that at 8:33 AM on February 23, before the market opened, the @lotusaifund Twitter account, the fund’s official account, promoted both Shah’s solo Substack piece and the Citrini collaboration. That means the fund was promoting the research that the author anticipated would have some sort of reaction per Shah’s Bloomberg interview. The disclosure on Shah’s own post (”my portfolios and companies are positioned for it”) existed on his platform, but again, it did not exist on the platform the fund was directing people to read.

V. I am the law: what legal precedents exist about vibe laundering

Say it with me - words are: powerful. Consider how there is a difference between deception, omission, and influence. Legal questions are precise even when answers are not, and to be clear, I am not making legal conclusions. I am describing what the law around markets says and what has happened in the past for situations as precedents.

The strongest precedent is SEC v. Capital Gains Research Bureau from 1963, when the Supreme Court held that an investment adviser’s failure to disclose a personal interest in securities being recommended constituted fraud under the Advisers Act. The Court did not require proof of intent to injure or that clients actually lost money as the existence of the undisclosed conflict was sufficient. It seems that post-publication revision of attribution language on a market-moving report, which shifts from institutional co-authorship to personal friendship, is the kind of evidence this framework may have been designed to evaluate.

Decades later, the SEC’s 2019 Commission Interpretation, Release No. IA-5248, stated that disclosure must be “sufficiently specific so that a client is able to understand the material fact or conflict of interest.” The Commission stated that an adviser that discloses it “may” have a conflict when one actually exists has not provided adequate disclosure. Accordingly, a site-wide Terms of Service page stating team members “may have existing long or short positions” is the definition of disclosing that a conflict “may” exist, but the SEC has said that is not enough.

The most directly analogous enforcement action is In re Anson Funds Management, Release No. 6622, June 2024. In this case, the SEC charged Anson Funds for failing to disclose their collaboration with activist short publishers. The fund described its short strategy in generic terms but did not disclose that it involved working with short publishers, trading around publication, and sharing profits. The SEC found these omissions rendered the fund’s disclosures misleading and the combined penalty was $2.25 million.

Now, besides the fact that this is a speculative work of fiction (while keeping in mind what is known and said about it by its authors), there are important distinctions to these precedents. Anson involved profit-sharing arrangements and advance access to research and there is no public evidence of such arrangements between Lotus and Citrini. The question is not whether Shah deceived anyone (besides, it’s fiction, etc.). The question is instead under what standards the SEC has articulated in the past whether the disclosure was adequate at the point of market impact, and whether co-authoring research on a third-party platform with no disclosure architecture, then revising the attribution language after publication, constitutes an omission of the type the Advisers Act addresses.

Whether the Anson framework applies to a situation where a principal SEC registered fund manager co-authors research for a fictional speculative work on a third-party platform, rather than working with a short publisher in a formal arrangement, is an open question. The SEC has not addressed this specific scenario in any published guidance, enforcement action, or no-action letter I have been able to identify.

I do not have the answer, as I am just identifying what the law says and what happened.

One further note - the publisher exclusion under Lowe v. SEC protects ‘bona fide’ publications containing ‘disinterested commentary.’ Whether a fictional speculative report co-authored by an SEC-registered fund manager holding short positions in the named companies qualifies as ‘disinterested’ is a question the courts have not yet been asked to answer.

It’s a watershed moment for vibe laundering in many ways including coining the term (I want my Urban Dictionary credit, damnit).

Part 3 of the vibe laundering series, which is the speculative memo from the future, comes out soon.

After all, a work of fiction on a Substack and massive financial losses are elements that typically have no business working together (as far as I know). What I am about to describe is not illegal.

On Sunday, February 22, Citrini Research published a piece called “The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis” on Substack. It is a fictional work billing itself as a memo from June 2028 that uses a legal architecture it charitably refers to as speculative fiction while meriting none of the literary prowess that earns the label. Charting the devastation that happens when AI works too well, the Citrini memo tells us unemployment is staggering, the S&P is down 38%, and that the authors seemingly write like large language models themselves (or is it the other way around?). The work also names some companies specifically by ticker. It went out on Sunday night and by Monday the article had sixteen million views on X. By market close the selloff had spread well beyond companies named in the report. Chaos. Sheer chaos. Dramatics, etc. DoorDash fell approximately 6.6%. American Express down roughly 7%. KKR down approximately 9%. Blackstone down 8%. CrowdStrike, which the report did not name, fell roughly 10%. MongoDB, also unnamed, dropped approximately 11%. The Dow fell 821 points. The iShares Expanded Tech-Software Sector ETF hit a new 52-week low. And Citrini, who I need to send a fruit basket to as thanks, blocked me on Twitter because of my critiques of the writing itself. So yeah, a lot happened, and then it got even more fun as Michael Burry waltzed entered the chat and shared the report on X stating “And you think I’m bearish.“

We love to see it (do we?) when the Big Short guy is signal-boosting a Substack post about AI killing the economy. Bloomberg, Fortune, TechCrunch, CNN, CNBC, and at least twelve other outlets ran coverage by end of day. Won’t someone think of the children of the future, or at least the burrito taxis feeding them since no one knows how to cook or doesn’t feel like it? Even DoorDash co-founder Andy Fang responded on X, saying “We definitely believe agentic commerce will be transformative to the industry. The ground is shifting underneath our feet.“

Read that again, folks - a named CEO whose stock dropped nearly 7% felt compelled to respond publicly to a Substack post framed as fiction. When I ask won’t someone think of the children, I really should be asking - won’t someone think of the burrito taxis? Apparently no one is.

Of course, the piece contains a disclaimer doing extraordinary work stating that “What follows is a scenario, not a prediction” and in the acknowledgements “Thanks to Sam Koppelman of Hunterbrook for his help with proofreading.”

I want to name something. Influence that moves markets without triggering the legal definitions of manipulation. Information that isn’t nonpublic and isn’t false but becomes significant through the channels it passes through. The slow accumulation of legitimacy around a position until it becomes what reasonable people think. I’m calling it vibe laundering because I saw it somewhere once and it stuck with me, plus I just want to name a damn movement and my other effort is in getting people to call Alex Karp surveillance daddy. Vibe laundering is how influence passes through enough reputable channels that it comes out clean, so it’s like money laundering but for narrative. It is the arbitrage of converting content to credibility to capital conducted in plain sight.

The first rule of vibe laundering is that you don’t talk about vibe laundering, so what I’m going to do in this 1st article is explore how it happens in the case of Citrini by showing how corporate structures with a capital raise that would normally trigger disclosure obligations can be structured to avoid every single one of them, then how disclosure of positions gets paywalled so the public sees the market impact but not the exposure behind it. In part 2, I’ll show finally how all of this sits in a legal architecture that was built for a world where the people moving markets had to tell you what they were holding.

I. What you see is what you get (hypothetically): the role of disclosures and Citrini Research (the Substack), Citrinitas Capital (the business entity), and what’s in between

Citrini, née Van Geelen, is a former Los Angeles paramedic and regrettably like the author a graduate of UCLA, after which he left medical school (read: dropped out) to pursue entrepreneurship by launching a holistic healthcare venture in 2013 that was acquired by a PE firm in 2018. By 2023, he started Citrini Research on Substack and he has over 100,000+ followers on X and subscribers on Substack, making him the number one finance writer on the platform. Citrini has appeared on many media outlets many times saying many things, but since it’s late and I’m tired and I have many more interesting things to say, tldr, he’s well-known, has no actual proper finance background (just like moi) and somehow made it from the middle class bottom to Substack paid tier. Which is what brings us to what happened after the fictional June 2028 memo was published and the market sell-offs occurred (hey, could be due to tariffs, eh?).

Here’s what none of the seventeen outlets that covered the sell-off mentioned, however, or failed to for some reason, which is that Van Geelen is not just a Substack writer. He is also the managing principal of an entity that raised $5.05 million from accredited investors two months before publishing a piece of speculative fiction that moved billions in market capitalization. Let me back up for a moment to explain what the two branches of Citrini’s business interests are.

1. Citrini’s consumer-facing Substack is the paywall entity of Citrini Research where he shares the Citrini index model portfolio. This is the Substack where users need to pay upwards of 499 dollars a year to receive posts.

2. Citrini’s business interests are in an entity known as Citrinitas Capital Management Inc. a Delaware corporation formed in 2023 with offices at 515 Madison Avenue, 14B, New York, NY 10022. It does business as both “Citrini Research” and “Citrindex.” Three SEC EDGAR records exist for it, and under CIK 2089797, two Form D filings show under Regulation D, Rule 506(b) with one in October 2025 and one in December 2025. The third record is for a small position Van Geelen’s entity holds in with RoboStrategy, Inc., a closed-end fund investing in private robotics and embodied AI companies.

Though Citrinitas Capital was formed in 2023, it was only in October and December of last year that new filings appear on EDGAR. On October 21, 2025, the new filing is for $1,000,000 reported sold with one investor. The security type is listed as “Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE).” The filing lists two related persons with James Van Geelen as executive officer and director and Nicholas Reece as executive officer.

On December 2, 2025, the amended filing is for $5,050,000 total reported sold with five investors. It is still a 506(b) and SAFE set-up with zero sales commissions and zero proceeds paid to named executive officers.

Interestingly, on January 26, 2026, twenty-seven days before the speculative fiction was published, a Form N-2 registration statement was filed for RoboStrategy, Inc., a closed-end fund investing in private robotics and embodied AI companies. The fund holds positions in Figure AI, Apptronik, and six other venture-stage robotics companies. It is managed by Mechanism Capital with total assets of $147.5 million. Listed among the selling stockholders offering shares for resale is Citrinitas Capital Management Inc. with 50,000 shares (about 0.25% of total shares outstanding).

That means Van Geelen’s entity invested in a robotics fund holding humanoid robot companies, then published a speculative scenario in which AI and automation cause mass unemployment and economic collapse. The fund bets on the companies building the robots while Citrini’s memo back to the future in June 2028 - a work of speculative fiction - bets on the terror of what those robots do to the economy that they cravenly crater. Both positions can be true simultaneously and both can also make money simultaneously, from different directions, on the same thesis, since that’s what hedging is, right?

Yet as far as I’ve found, this position is not disclosed in any subscriber-facing material nor is it mentioned in the February 22 work of speculative fiction. It is on a public SEC filing that nobody has connected to Citrini Research because nobody has looked, apparently? I hope I’m wrong, and I definitely need more coffee.

The fund’s adviser (FP Strategies LLC) is a registered investment adviser in Puerto Rico that charges a 2.5% management fee on gross assets and holds positions in private companies like Figure AI and Apptronik. It was organized in May 2025 with operations starting in September 2025, and is trying to go public via direct listing in 2026.

Now, I think it’s worth pointing out that SAFEs are how startups raise capital. It is not how a hedge fund raises capital (correct me if I’m wrong, please). A pooled investment fund/hedge fund would file form D with “pooled investment fund interests” checked, but Citrinitas filed with “Other: SAFE.” The most conservative reading is that the capital was raised into the management company itself as corporate financing, not as a fund vehicle, but it’s just a reading, not the reality, I cannot be sure and neither can anyone else unless they have more information. At $5.05 million, none of the standard institutional disclosure triggers apply.

That means there is no 13F obligation, form ADV on the Investment Adviser Public Disclosure database nor FINRA broker-dealer registration required.The corporate structure of Citrinitas Capital sits well below every disclosure threshold that would typically apply to someone in a position whose publications move billions in market cap. But these are not normal times since the pandemic era new normal really wasn’t kidding around about it.

On the citricap.com mainpage, the website describes the entity as “an asset management and investment research firm focused on capturing momentum in thematic equity while utilizing shorter term derivatives strategies to protect against drawdowns.” The website’s access is restricted to accredited investors who are presumably sophisticated people.

On the Citrindex model portfolio, which Van Geelen markets as tracking “Citrini Research’s core portfolio with live updates on positions,” the legal terms say performance data is “hypothetical and presented for illustrative purposes only” and “does not represent the performance of any actual account or investment.”

On Fortune’s website, a report shows Citrini claims 200%+ returns on his “real-world investment portfolio” though the terms of Citrini’s website say the performance is hypothetical. Both are published, so it sounds like the tension between the real and the hypothetical are a tension that sits in the open like a tritone nobody wants to name but we’re all hearing.

Eventually it may become pleasant, one supposes, if this dissonance pays off? Buh bum buh bum buh bum. But with disclosures seemingly more opaque than clear, one wonders - how to launder vibes through impact? Positions, naturally.

II. Vh1’s behind the music, but make it behind the Citrini Research paywall

Examining the positions put behind a paywall costing hundreds of dollars a year is a point of entry into understanding vibe laundering from content to capital conversion through credibility. On Substack, the Citrindex model portfolio includes a basket called .AISHORTS: AI Standalone Short Basket. In late January 2025, Van Geelen made the AI basket approximately 50% short SMH. On Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast he publicly discussed shorting Blue Owl and private credit companies. Blue Owl dropped 3.3% on February 23. The report named Blackstone, KKR, and Apollo. They dropped 6 to 9%.

The model portfolio as of February 24 shows net exposure of 98.9% long. None of the companies named in the report are individually shorted. The Citrindex lost approximately 0.4% on February 23. The subscriber-facing product lost money on the day the report moved (hyperbolically) billions.

These are facts that cut against a trading-profit narrative, which is a good thing. But this is what those facts do not answer. There is no legal requirement that the model portfolio and whatever Citrinitas Capital Management is doing with its investor capital be identical. The model portfolio is what subscribers to the Substack see, whereas what happens inside the corporation is not publicly visible. The corporate structure does not require it to be. Whether Citrinitas held positions that benefited from the February 23 selloff is a question that cannot be answered from public sources to the best of my knowledge. If I am wrong, let me know please, and I will correct/update this accordingly.

The February 22 report contains no per-report position disclosure, and the site-wide terms contain only a blanket statement that team members “may have existing long or short positions.” To be clear, this is not the same thing as per-report disclosure. What happens when there’s free distribution of market-moving research through speculative fiction, but paywalled disclosure of positions? And taken a step further still, behind the paywall, there’s a corporation with no window at all? The vibes, they are a launderin’.

III. Is this real life, or is this just fantasy, caught in a landslide where hedge funds proof-read materials before publishing

Sam Koppelman co-founded Hunterbrook, a company that owns both a newsroom (Hunterbrook Media) and a hedge fund (Hunterbrook Capital). Their standard operating procedure is per-article position disclosure, which materializes in the form of disclosures on Hunterbrook piece I can find opens with a variation of something like “Based on Hunterbrook Media’s reporting, Hunterbrook Capital is short $XYZABC at the time of publication.” It is clear, consistent, and prominent.

The Citrini-Hunterbrook relationship is not new. In July 2025, they jointly published a report on Teradyne’s robotic arms deal with Amazon, and when it was published on Hunterbrook’s platform, the disclosure plainly at the top declared long Teradyne. The stock rose 6.3% that day.

Now look at February 22 with the speculative fiction of the June 2028 back to the future memo - it was published on Citrini’s Substack and Koppelman’s involvement was characterized as “proofreading.” There was no Hunterbrook Media article published because why would they publish it there? There is nothing to disclose, no position, just a speculative work of fiction involving financial markets.

The different disclosure architecture for trades and team-playing is interesting to ponder here. They are the same players with the same impact as influencers but the gap between the hypothetical and the real is also the gap between who publishes what and where. In theory, couldn’t Hunterbrook have also published it on their platform? I’m not sure of that, but it would be interesting to find out. Also intirguing would be whether Hunterbrook Capital held positions in any of those stocks in the speculative work of fiction published on Citrini’s Substack over the weekend. Has anyone asked or know?

My point here is that if there’s a real trade, like Teradyne, then the collaboration is published on Hunterbrook’s platform with disclosure at time of publication. Yet the hypothetical speculative work of fiction - which is a collaboration due to their involvement and proofreading yadda yadda - well, it was published on Citrini’s platform. Named stocks moved 3-11%. But there was no disclosure at publication. This also raises another question - Koppelman had advanced access to a written work of speculative fiction that named specific real stocks and subsequently made an impact that moved real (hyperbolic) billions. No public disclosure exists that answers whether Hunterbrook Capital held positions in any of those stocks. No journalist has asked. Prove me wrong here folks, because like I said, vibe laundering has to do with not talking about vibe laundering, but making it happen through an architecture of opacity in disclosures and positions.

Now: is any of this not kosher?

IV. Is any of this illegal? Nah, bruh. The Hamas Hospital Principle

Is vibe laundering legal, illegal, halal?

In a galaxy far, far away, local internet celebrity Roon recently posted on X/Twitter about what is called the “hamas hospital principle.“ Summed up, this was about how bad actors hide weapons wherever the sacred cows are. It works because nobody suspects the hospital, and that’s where the rot starts where you don’t see it. That’s how institutions which get coded as evil get scrutinized and watched precisely because everyone assumes they are the compromised ones when the reality is different.

Now consider how hedge funds file 13Fs while independent Substacks file nothing but copy and taxes for income for the 13 people on the website who make actual money, and then you have things like Fortune or the mass media, and Fortune is not required to file anything, except for better copy, one hopes. Fortune and other mass media, of course, boost credibility, so the credibility is the point and the cover just like Roon described.

So is any of this illegal? The honest answer is that nobody knows as securities law genuinely lacks an agreed-upon definition of manipulation. A Duke Law Journal article called “Legitimate Yet Manipulative” notes Congress deliberately avoided defining it. Like porn, the SEC has been running on “I know it when I see it” for ninety years. Prosecution happens when the heat gets loud enough, but vibe laundering and the architecture I’m describing is by design something that keeps it way below that volume.

Interestingly, the publisher exemption from the Investment Advisers Act (Lowe v. SEC, 1985) protects publishers who offer “impersonal, disinterested commentary” though the “disinterested” prong becomes a point of consideration possibly when the publisher also runs an investing business, or when a publisher is also the managing principal of a Delaware corporation that raised $5.05 million under Reg D. Crucially, the SEC’s 2015 no-action letter emphasized the test requires commentary not “timed to specific market activity.” I saw crucially because I’m hoping you know what the hell that actually means, because law, like language, can be ambiguous. So legal precedents are helpful to consider, and the most instructive enforcement precedent is Andrew Left from what I’ve found.

In July 2024 the SEC and DOJ charged Left and Citron Capital not for publishing bearish research but for misrepresenting his trading positions. Left told followers to sell while he was buying, which is apparently the line. Left got caught because he lied, but the vibe laundering architecture I’m describing doesn’t require lying, it requires structuring and siloing.

After all, we’re in a brave new world where you can use a Substack instead of a 13F, SAFE as your mechanism instead of a fund, and speculative fiction published instead of research on a platform that normally only publishes research.

What is a collaboration in one play is proofreading in another. The design of vibe laundering and its cumulative effect is a system that produces nearly the same market outcomes as Citron’s impact while sitting outside the enforcement frameworks that caught Left. Also, what is up with these citron/lemon evoking based names, is there no room for other fruits with something like Pampelmousse Partners?

I say all this keeping in mind that 61% of investors under 35 use finfluencer recommendations when making decisions, yet to my knowledge, the SEC has brought zero enforcement actions citing Substack. In 2024, SEC chair Gary Gensler testified that if the SEC stayed flat-funded “our ability to find bad actors is at risk.“

Vibe laundering in plain sight because there’s nothing illicit about it seemingly and the cops are understaffed anyways. Citrini is one example of the conduit nature between credibility and content that converts into capital conversion - there’s far more to it I will explore in part 2. There, I will explore possible pathways and architectures of vibe laundering and its manifestations as they apply from here on out by using a big surprise and guest stars. Stay tuned.

Disclosure: Definitely not financial or legal advice or allegations, just vibes. Contact me at ani@anibruna.com

Obligatory message to like and subscribe for updates or share with everyone if you hated it. Merci

So I did the rewrite anyway.

Some selected blocks from Citrini’s original report side by side with my rewrites as a case study, for the love of the game, and simply because it is fun to challenge oneself and grow to become a better writer. You can have the best research in the world, you can have all of the intel, but substance and style are a never-ending project. Sometimes the sycophantic echoes slow you down in your growth.

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Citrini’s original - Block 1:

This sounds obvious in hindsight, but it really wasn’t at the time (at least to me). The historical disruption model said incumbents resist new technology, they lose share to nimble entrants and die slowly. That’s what happened to Kodak, to Blockbuster, to BlackBerry. What happened in 2026 was different; the incumbents didn’t resist because they couldn’t afford to.

With stocks down 40-60% and boards demanding answers, the AI-threatened companies did the only thing they could. Cut headcount, redeploy the savings into AI tools, use those tools to maintain output with lower costs.

Each company’s individual response was rational. The collective result was catastrophic. Every dollar saved on headcount flowed into AI capability that made the next round of job cuts possible.

Software was only the opening act. What investors missed while they debated whether SaaS multiples had bottomed was that the reflexive loop had already escaped the software sector. The same logic that justified ServiceNow cutting headcount applied to every company with a white-collar cost structure.

My rewrite:

In the past, the historical disruption model, at minimum, afforded resistant incumbents the dignity of a slow death march. Suburban shopping plazas lit up in blue and yellow Blockbuster logos began to quietly shutter one by one. Next door at the plaza, at the same CVS where you used to wait for your photos to develop at the Kodak counter, the yellow signage came down and a bulky red Redbox machine moved in near the entrance. The company that invented the digital camera chose to die rather than use it. People went from waiting in lines at Blockbuster or for photos to develop with bulky BlackBerry phones blinking red lights in their pockets, and then all those lines, all those lights, and all those physical remnants of life disappeared nearly all at once. The touchscreen they called a fad turned out not to be and the cloud arrived.

What happened in 2026, of course, was different, as it took the dignity of a death march and turned it into a death cult due to the velocity of change.

With stocks down 40-60% and boards demanding answers, AI-threatened companies were just following orders. They complied by cutting headcount, deploying savings into AI tools, and using those tools to maintain output at lower cost. Every company’s individual response to aggressively adopting AI was rational in the way a death cult can only be. They drank the Kool-Aid because the Kool-Aid was the only thing left. The collective result, of course, was catastrophic.

Like a snake eating its own tail, every dollar saved on headcount from using AI flowed into further AI capability that made the next round of cuts possible. Software was only the opening act. What investors missed while they debated whether SaaS multiples had bottomed out was that the ouroboros of the reflexive loop had already escaped the software sector.

The same logic that justified ServiceNow cutting headcount applied to every company with a white-collar cost structure, the adage of what nourishes me also destroys me by then already long forgotten.

Citrini’s original - Block 2:

Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those constraints persisting.

It started out simple enough. Agents removed friction.

Subscriptions and memberships that passively renewed despite months of disuse. Introductory pricing that sneakily doubled after the trial period. Each one was rebranded as a hostage situation that agents could negotiate. The average customer lifetime value, the metric the entire subscription economy was built on, distinctly declined.

Consumer agents began to change how nearly all consumer transactions worked.

Humans don’t really have the time to price-match across five competing platforms before buying a box of protein bars. Machines do.

Travel booking platforms were an early casualty, because they were the simplest. By Q4 2026, our agents could assemble a complete itinerary (flights, hotels, ground transport, loyalty optimization, budget constraints, refunds) faster and cheaper than any platform.

Insurance renewals, where the entire renewal model depended on policyholder inertia, were reformed. Agents that re-shop your coverage annually dismantled the 15-20% of premiums that insurers earned from passive renewals.

Financial advice. Tax prep. Routine legal work. Any category where the service provider’s value proposition was ultimately “I will navigate complexity that you find tedious” was disrupted, as the agents found nothing tedious.

Even places we thought insulated by the value of human relationships proved fragile. Real estate, where buyers had tolerated 5-6% commissions for decades because of information asymmetry between agent and consumer, crumbled once AI agents equipped with MLS access and decades of transaction data could replicate the knowledge base instantly. A sell-side piece from March 2027 titled it “agent on agent violence”. The median buy-side commission in major metros had compressed from 2.5-3% to under 1%, and a growing share of transactions were closing with no human agent on the buy side at all.

We had overestimated the value of “human relationships”. Turns out that a lot of what people called relationships was simply friction with a friendly face.

That was just the start of the disruption for the intermediation layer. Successful companies had spent billions to effectively exploit quirks of consumer behavior and human psychology that didn’t matter anymore.

Machines optimizing for price and fit do not care about your favorite app or the websites you’ve been habitually opening for the last four years, nor feel the pull of a well-designed checkout experience. They don’t get tired and accept the easiest option or default to “I always just order from here”.

That destroyed a particular kind of moat: habitual intermediation.

My rewrite:

Over the past fifty years, the U.S. economy built a giant rent-extraction layer on top of human limitations: things take time, patience runs out, brand familiarity substitutes for diligence, and most people are willing to accept a bad price to avoid more clicks. Trillions of dollars of enterprise value depended on those limitations persisting.

Then Silicon Valley spent decades teaching consumers that friction was the enemy eradicated by technology. What followed was a silent societal Stockholm syndrome. Swipe right. One-click buy. Next-day delivery. Cancel anytime. Burrito taxis. We fell in love with the removal of friction while the companies removing it built trillion-dollar extraction layers on the friction that remained. And then they built the thing that actually removed all of it. Friction no longer had meaning.

What took years became months, months became weeks, weeks became days, days became hours. Humans don’t really have the time to price-match across five competing platforms before buying a box of protein bars, but machines do.

Even places we thought insulated by the value of human relationships proved fragile. It turned out that what we called relationships was simply friction with a friendly face, and society began tolerating this polite fiction less and less once agent swarms could handle these things through algorithms rather than aggression.

Agents re-shopped insurance coverage annually, dismantling the 15-20% of premiums that insurers earned from passive renewals. Real estate commissions in major metros compressed from 2.5-3% to under 1%, and a growing share of transactions closed with no human agent on the buy side at all. Any category where the service provider’s value proposition was ultimately “I will navigate complexity that you find tedious” was disrupted, as the agents found nothing tedious.

Companies spent billions learning how to exploit quirks of consumer behavior like the fact that you’re tired, distracted, and habitual. Then the machines showed up, and the machines weren’t tired, distracted, or habitual. Machines weren’t hostages to the Stockholm syndrome of software. Game over. The moat was never the product. The moat was you being too lazy to leave. There is no hostage remaining when the captive audience stops being captive and ripe for the extracting.

Citrini’s original - Block 3:

Permanent capital. The phrase showed up in every earnings call and investor letter meant to reassure. It became a mantra. And like most mantras, nobody paid attention to the finer details. Here’s what it actually meant…

Over the prior decade, the large alternative asset managers had acquired life insurance companies and turned them into funding vehicles. Apollo bought Athene. Brookfield bought American Equity. KKR took Global Atlantic. The logic was elegant: annuity deposits provided a stable, long-duration liability base. The managers invested those deposits into the private credit they originated and got paid twice, earning spread over on the insurance side and management fees on the asset management side. A fee-on-fee perpetual motion machine that worked beautifully under one condition.

The private credit had to be money good.

The losses hit balance sheets built to hold illiquid assets against long-duration obligations. The “permanent capital” that was supposed to make the system resilient was not some abstract pool of patient institutional money and sophisticated investors taking sophisticated risk. It was the savings of American households, “Main Street”, structured as annuities invested in the same PE-backed software and technology paper that was now defaulting. The locked-up capital that couldn’t run was life insurance policyholder money, and the rules are a bit different there.

Compared to the banking system, insurance regulators had been docile - even complacent - but this was the wake-up call. Already uneasy about private credit concentrations at life insurers, they began downgrading the risk-based capital treatment of these assets. That forced the insurers to either raise capital or sell assets, neither of which was possible at attractive terms in a market already seizing up.

My rewrite:

The long con began with what’s called permanent capital. The phrase showed up like a mantra in every earnings call and investment letter meant to reassure, and like most mantras, nobody paid attention to the details.

Over the prior decade, the large alternative asset managers acquired life insurance companies and turned them into funding vehicles. Apollo bought Athene, Brookfield bought American Equity, KKR took Global Atlantic, and the logic was an elegant sleight of hand. Annuity deposits provided a stable long-duration liability base and managers invested those deposits into the private credit they originated and got paid twice accordingly, earning spread on the insurance side and management fees on the asset management side. The same firms dealing the cards were placing the bets and keeping score with a long con that relied on one condition: that the private credit had to be money good.

The losses hit balance sheets built to hold illiquid assets against long-duration obligations. The “permanent capital” that was supposed to make the system resilient was not some abstract pool of patient institutional money and sophisticated investors taking sophisticated risk. It was the savings of American households, “Main Street”, structured as annuities invested in the same PE-backed software and technology paper that was now defaulting. Your mother’s retirement funded a leveraged bet on a customer service platform that AI just made obsolete. She didn’t know, she was never supposed to know, and that was the detail nobody paid attention to. The locked-up capital that couldn’t run was life insurance policyholder money, and the rules are a bit different there.

Compared to the banking system, insurance regulators had been docile, even complacent, but this was the wake-up call. Already uneasy about private credit concentrations at life insurers, they began downgrading the risk-based capital treatment of these assets. That forced the insurers to either raise capital or sell assets, neither of which was possible at attractive terms in a market already seizing up.

What does rewriting Citrini’s 2028 report show us?

I’ll be upfront: I only rewrote three blocks because I have better things to do, such as petting the cat on my lap. The other blocks can consider this a professional courtesy.

The research is his. It's good research. It has good ideas. But finding and having the information is never the hardest part, though it is tedious and requires effort - making someone feel it is. He spent 100 hours writing a piece about the end of the world and even though it isn’t AI, it reads like in parts and structures. At best, you can attempt to advance that AI is calibrating for writing like this. At worst, I’ll let you fill in the blanks. But there’s something far more interesting going on here than a fintwit beef over an opinion on style: what do we consider substance, what is style, and what are our standards for good taste, engagement, and intellectual honesty in the era of AI slop? My rewrites reflect what I think involves a kind of narrative cohesion, cadence, and care for the topic that reflects a through-line between the theme and the narrative of it. That being said, someone reading this could think my writing is garbage, Citrini’s is better, or that Citrini’s writing is garbage, mine’s is better, or that efinancialcareers.com is the best, we are both mid, etc. It isn’t about what is better or best or be best as our First Lady would say. It is about the love of the game and using one’s brain to be true to it. All of this being an intriguing exercise for an otherwise sleepy Sunday, I’ll end it on this note - intriguingly, Citrini offered of his own volition the following comments.

According to Citrini, 'dismissing it outright requires intellectual laziness that tends to get expensive.' This was in his original post, before I ever commented. He set the terms: critique equals laziness. Obviously I didn't dismiss it, but Citrini tells himself one story that makes a critique about the form of the writing from an unknown writer palatable and then blocks me for offering the rewrite. Professional decorum and standards of judgement are fluid, but blocking a 2,000-follower account for engaging seriously with your work through a rewrite that reflects your own ideas and research is not the flex of a man confident in his craft.

If these are the standards of intellectual honesty in our community, we should probably rewrite those too.

You can decide which version you'd rather read to the end. I just think intellectual honesty requires engaging with something rather than shutting it down. Disappointing from a fellow Bruin. But he is sure I’m the better writer, so based on him being sure about how things are, I won’t question the logic.

Timeline of posts:

1. My original post at 11:48am this morning after my initial read of the report with Citrini’s two replies at 12:32pm questioning what the future is for writers and then showing all his cards on critique:

2. Less than 30 minutes after my original post, Citrini’s post at 12:25pm reflecting the vast wound of intellectual laziness:

Reader note: For comments/consulting inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com. An obligatory message to like and subscribe follows: Like and subscribe for updates. If you do not like it, tell everyone immediately by sharing this link. Merci’

The Frenchman I met on Tinder, which is somehow embarrassing, but not as embarrassing as the fact that he had a married girlfriend he was smitten with when we met (he didn’t tell me until later, obviously, because no one ever does, and by then, it was too late for me as I had been hypnotized by the fornicating). She was manipulative, married and knew how to market martyrdom unlike any other - she even gave him a ring, had him regularly traveling long distances to see her, everything always on her own terms of course, a real power move situation, you know how this goes, right? He was spellbound, and in between all of this was yet another third party in the form of a second Frenchman I was involved with (whose name I couldn’t pronounce) basically for 75% of the time of this situation, all in a half-hearted attempt to forget the first Frenchman (who encouraged me to do the second Frenchman thing as much as possible). It was everything you wanted a ménage à trois to be except it wasn’t satisfying, so it’s kind of a bummer that it truly never worked out between the original Frenchman and his married girlfriend because all these years later you’d want a real love story to come out of all that pain, right? But maybe the mid Belgian makes him happy. I hope so. Also, I actually don’t know who she is, but she’s Belgian, so she’s mid, unless she’s a DJ (sorry, I don’t make the rules).

Anyways, the second was a Dutchman who I met because he literally walked into me at a bar, which, for context, is basically the height of romance in the Netherlands, no pun originally intended (though after I wrote it out, absolutely). On average, Dutch women are 170cm (5’7”), American women are 162cm (5’4”), and moi, I’m 168cm (5’6”), but none of these numbers matter because in the Netherlands you are short regardless and everyone’s eyeline is above your head and you get used to it and you wear high heels whenever you go biking to ensure you stay upright. The Dutchman was a bit more simple than the Frenchman situation because all that happened is that he walked into me at a bar by accident, said something in Dutch (which I didn’t speak a l’epoque natuurlijk) to me and since I’d had 2 drinks already, I just replied ‘Nice to meet you. You’re very attractive, you know.’ And that, reader, is how years of my life spent thinking about a person came to be.

Both ended as disasters, of course, and I had no business being anyone’s anything given my immaturity, of course, but looking back at it, I don’t think I was ever truly in love with either man as much as I felt in love with the possibility of one day falling in love with either considering us as an entity together. Yet I felt that potential because I can honestly say I did love their personalities and personhood, warts, good, bad, and ugly, this whole mess, so however much I idealized them and then found them to be human all too human and disappointing - frankly, even when things ended, it truly felt like someone died. I was devastated. It was unbecoming. I don’t think I have that much moisture left in my body anymore but god, I wept openly on the streets both times.

Now here’s the thing that matters for this essay that has a very joyous start to Valentine’s Day 2026 (not): funny enough, I ran into the Dutchman ages later on Bumble (when I was still living in the Netherlands). And reader, goodness, his profile was of someone I absolutely would not have swiped right on. Ever. If it had not been for the circumstances of how we actually met, the whirlwind of it, the physical reality of the charm of it all, of sitting on a swing outside a bar while making out with a man who literally collided with me in a bar in Amsterdam, minutes earlier - well, no. Never. He would have been another face I swiped past late at night on yet another rainy day in the Netherlands where everything fades to gray from dusk til dawn.

Do you know what that means? It means a relationship that came closest to love in my entire life so far would not have survived the filter of a dating app. If the Dutchman hadn’t walked into me at a bar and had simply been a profile I swiped left on, I could have saved years of my life, my love, my lament, and most importantly, years of my time! But no, that didn’t happen, I met him in person. The app would have killed it before it started. And that, reader, is the entire argument I’m about to make.

After all, haven’t you heard the news about dating app fatigue? It’s so over since we’re so back. Everyone you know has said it: dating apps are over. Dating apps don’t work. Dating apps are where battered egos go to get validation and then wilt into incelhood or findom or whatever.

The feeling is correct, but nobody has the right language for why exactly (notwithstanding Phil Collins feeling what’s in the air), and feelings without frameworks are just vibes. Vibes don’t survive contact with reality (see: every situationship you’ve ever been in), so what do we call it? Like Heidegger’s quest to make sense of the meaning of being, but far less lofty, what you’re experiencing on dating apps has a name in financial economics called market failure.

Specifically, a secondary market failure. Dating apps are secondary markets, which is a term for exchanges where previously issued assets get resold and recycled. Secondary markets have known failure modes that economists have studied for decades. Those failure modes have predictable consequences. And those consequences have a causal chain: the market rots from the inside, good participants leave, trading moves off-exchange into unregulated territory, and what you get in that unregulated territory are zombie instruments that look alive but aren’t. Every step of that chain maps onto what’s happening in dating right now, from the apps to the situationship you’re in to the reason nothing you do seems to make it move. The playbook ends exactly where you most likely are right now, which is possibly alone on Valentine’s Day or in the bed of someone who won’t fully call you their partner. Of the first two possibilities, I’m not sure which is worse. I’d rather be alone, just like Alice Deejay divined in 1999.

Here’s the plan. First, I’m going to explain what a secondary market is and why dating apps are one. Then I’m going to show you the specific financial mechanism that’s been degrading them since inception (spoiler: it won a Nobel Prize). Then I’m going to show you where trading goes when the market breaks, which is off-exchange, which is situationships, and why the one you’re in right now is a zombie company surviving on cheap credit. Then I’ll tell you the one thing that kills it.

I. Download

If you thought redownloading Hinge to get back on the dating apps meant you were inevitably dealing with damaged goods, well, no, let’s reframe, what you’re dealing with is a secondary market, so let me explain.

A primary market is where assets first get sold to the public. That’s the IPO, the initial offering, the moment something enters circulation for the first time. When a company like Airbnb goes public and sells shares for the first time, that’s a primary market. When you buy a new car off the lot from the manufacturer, that’s a primary market. When a developer sells a condo in a building they just finished, that’s a primary market. You’re the first buyer, the asset is fresh. You know its full history because there is no history yet.

A secondary market is where those assets trade after that initial issuance. The stock exchange where you buy Airbnb shares from someone else who already owns them? Secondary market. A used car lot? Secondary market. Zillow listings for that same condo three years later with “minor cosmetic updates” for a “charming” place that may or may not be concealing water damage? Secondary market. The asset has been previously owned already, which means the information is asymmetric in that the seller knows more about what they’re selling than you know about what you’re buying. You’re working with whatever’s been disclosed, which is not always everything and honestly (just like getting involved with a Frenchman, I’m just saying). Now apply this to dating.

In dating, primary markets are organic meetings through friends or work or whatever. A friend’s dinner party is as much of a primary market as a Dutchman literally walking into you at a bar is a primary market. They have original issuance, fair price discovery, and actual context for you to get to know the asset you’re dealing with directly. In other words, it’s the equivalent to a real human standing in front of you whose vibe you could never have extracted from a 500-character bio and three badly taken photos.

In contrast to a primary market, a secondary market is where assets trade after that initial issuance. They are, in Daft Punk voice, resold, recycled, marked up, marked down, traded between, all of this exchanged by people who weren’t there at the beginning and don’t know the full history of what they’re buying. That’s dating apps in a nutshell with their recycled inventory, previous investors’ leftovers, photos from 2019, heights rounded up by two inches if not three, and a universal agreement to pretend this is a functioning marketplace when it is, in fact, a lemon lot at best. I’m being charitable here because the Dutchman’s Bumble profile proved it. The man I almost loved was, on the secondary market, indistinguishable from the men I’d never look at twice. Yes, it gives me shudders to think about it. I spent years of my life - years - yearning for someone whose profile description simply read ‘passionate about positivity’. At times I think if I discovered his profile earlier, it would have knocked me into sense far more quickly, to be honest.

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When I say a lemon lot, I don’t mean the kind on a Dolce & Gabbana majolica print dress, I mean the kind of defunct or broken down thing that should not be on the road or in your bed. Of course, the lemon lot mafia is aware of this, given that several of the most popular dating apps in the United States are owned by Match Group. That means every time you quit Tinder in frustration and download Hinge to find something more palatable or seemingly serious, you are migrating between products in a single corporation’s portfolio. There is really not much market choice - you will have the lemons, and you will like it. Match’s dominance in this area means they have you hook, line, and sinker. Imagine breathlessly storming out of a Zara and going to Massimo Dutti to cool off. Joke’s on you, house always wins, it’s the same parent company. Just like how all the same apps seem to have the same people being the same but presenting differently is the environment for this sameness to flourish to begin with.

II. Smothered Hope

Have you ever felt like you were in a Kafka-esque nightmare if you’ve returned to dating apps after a long time and you swore you’ve seen this person somewhere before? Well, it’s not just you (though screenshots help to remember). If you want to understand why your dating app matches are terrible, consider an unlikely source: an economist’s 1970 paper about used cars that won him the Nobel Prize. George Akerlof’s work showed that in any market where sellers know more about quality than buyers, the market degrades over time. That’s because the quality picks - as in the good cars - leave (owners keep them or sell to friends). Yet of the choices left, the bad cars, well, that’s what’s here to stay. Buyers can’t tell the difference, so they offer average prices. As good car owners refuse and exit, quality drops, and more and more good cars leave. Eventually the market is all saturated by all the bad cars, colloquially known as the lemons.

On dating apps this plays out with the precision of a Swiss watch that nobody asked for. Good partners find relationships and leave. Bad partners can’t maintain relationships and stay. New users encounter the lemon density, get demoralized, and either leave (depleting volume) or lower their standards (degrading norms further, which is how you end up on a date with a man who tells you he’s “not really into labels” before the appetizers arrive). Only 11% of users say their app is “good at matching them.” 45% feel more frustrated than hopeful.

Tinder lost 594,000 users in the UK alone in one year. Bumble lost 368,000. More than half of Gen Z reports feeling burned out on the apps. The good money is leaving. There’s an economic principle called Gresham’s Law that says bad money drives out good, and this is Gresham’s Law executing on schedule, which honestly makes it worse because it means the math was always going to do this. The apps were structurally destined to degrade. You just happened to be swiping while it happened.

So the secondary market is broken and the lemon problem is accelerating. The question is: what happens next? In financial markets, when an exchange fails, trading doesn’t stop. It moves off-exchange. Dark pools, private deals, no clearing house, no standardized contracts, nobody regulating anything. The alternative is not trading at all and humans don’t do that. In dating, the off-exchange equivalent is the situationship. About half percent of aged 18 to 34 have been in one. A peer-reviewed study on situationships, out of Baylor in 2024 found they feature the same behaviors as committed relationships but with lower satisfaction and almost no conversion rate into anything real. That’s not a relationship category. That’s off-exchange trading in a failed market. And the instrument it produces has a name.

III. Dead Lines

A zombie company is a firm that generates just enough revenue to service its debt but not enough to pay it down. It is like many people roaming amongst us alive but not alive, sustained by interest rates so low it’s cheaper to keep refinancing than to force a reckoning. Japan has been studying this for thirty years. After their bubble burst in 1991, banks kept lending to insolvent firms rather than recognize losses on their books. This resulted in a generation of zombie firms absorbing capital that could have gone to something viable, blocking new market entrants for decades.

A late-night text here, an Instagram like there. A “we should hang out soon” that has no date, no time, no specificity. This is a zombie company in human form which generates just enough revenue to service its debt. The modern minimum viable product of human intimacy is a story tapback reply or a meme at 1am. The subprime instruments of modern romance are low-cost, low-effort, and high-volume, accordingly requiring no collateral whatsoever.

Even worse still, zombie firms don’t just fail to die. The Bank for International Settlements found they actively prevent healthy companies from forming. Every dollar lent to a zombie is a dollar not lent to something viable. Every hour spent decoding a text is an hour not spent on someone who would make plans on a Wednesday. The situationship doesn’t just waste your time, it destroys the future by crowding out the possibility of something that works. There is some good news though. After 20 something odd years, the Bank of Japan finally raised interest rates in 2024. Twenty-five basis points, a quarter of one percent, and zombie bankruptcies surged 13% year over year. That’s all it took. A tiny increase in the cost of capital and the things that were never alive started dying for real.

The equivalent of raising rates in a situationship is asking “what are we?” One small, reasonable, twenty-five-basis-point request for clarity. And the thing collapses instantly because it was never viable. It was only ever surviving on cheap credit. A willingness to not ask is the low interest rate, and the moment it is withdrawn, the entire enterprise files for emotional bankruptcy with its read receipts still on.

So that’s what a situationship is: a zombie company. Yet how is it dealt with, how does knowing the diagnosis somehow seemingly still not cure the disease?

IV. Love

The apps are a secondary market in structural decline where Gresham’s Law drove the good money out, the lemons stayed, and the lemons won for survivorship bias. Trading moved off-exchange, into situationships, where zombie companies survive on cheap credit and your willingness to not ask questions. Your situationship is a zombie company with no business plan and you keep refinancing it because the alternative is recognizing the loss. But do you know something cool?

The whole thing about Valentine’s Day is that the true story behind it seems to oft get forgotten: St. Valentine was beaten with clubs and beheaded for performing illegal marriages. The Catholic Church couldn’t even verify which martyr they were honoring, so they put a kibosh on the Valentine feast day in 1969 due to insufficient due diligence. The patron saint of love is defined by execution and the holiday named for him lost its own regulatory approval. Yet the commercialization and importance of this day through inflation means things changed because the market for how to deal with St. Valentine itself also changed. Now it has become the market itself.

Our key lesson to take away from this transfiguration from martyr to money making palooza?

Raise your rates. Even a quarter of a percent. Watch what dies. Give change a chance. Try a new marketing campaign. There’s always more options around you than just merely what’s in front of you on your screen.

Happy Valentine’s Day!

Reader note: For comments/consulting inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com. An obligatory message to like and subscribe follows: Like and subscribe for updates. If you do not like it, tell everyone immediately by sharing this link. Merci’

My future first husband has no idea about this plan simply because I haven’t run it past him and that’s because I am not sure where he is at the moment. More pressingly than what my future first husband thinks, I have a flight to Canada in a few hours, so we’ll deal with this when it comes.

Besides, I already met the love of my life (myself, tbh) and I’m not sure it’s socially acceptable to throw a wedding for my love for myself, though to be fair, the entire global financial system, just like a wedding, is also a fiction.

1. Once in a lifetime: why markets and weddings are the same ki…

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In the part one essay, Love in the Time of Cap Tables, I made the case that marriage is angel investing. You’re betting your entire emotional portfolio on one unproven asset with no liquidity, no diversification, and a 50% historical failure rate.

Here’s what’s coming in part two where I go more deeply into how angel investing is like marriage through founder-market fit, runway, and all the due diligence you didn’t do and forgot about because they always made you laugh.

If we survive the audit, the return on investment becomes our focus. This is important considering that I have tried to examine all the reasons one should not marry. God, there were so many.

Servant and master: founder-market fit, runway, and the due diligence nobody do…

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After you’ve seen enough people marry and divorce and try to make it work with all sorts of measures in between and after you’ve read enough about venture capital, it becomes striking how taking the leap of faith to marry is just like investing. You’re betting…

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So dizzying is the uncertainty of whether I’ll hear from him or not, the uncertainty of the countless other fires in my life, the uncertainty of what happens when I leave the country in a week and what that bears for my goals for my career, much less if I’d be on this person’s mind (and vice versa), that instead of figuring out what any of it means, I’m writing an essay about the Black-Scholes formula that prices uncertainty because I don’t know what to do with uncertainty in my life. What I am certain of, however, is my thesis that attraction is volatility.

Since volatility is the star of the Black-Scholes model as the variable everything else orbits (because the more volatile something is, the more valuable the option on it becomes), that means that the cost of not knowing what happens next is also the engine of desire.

That’s why this options pricing model that sounds like a nefarious law firm is actually a way we can understand something about attraction and maybe ourselves.

1. Kiss off: how options pricing is actually derived from the desire

In 1973, the economists Fischer Black and Myron Scholes solved a problem that had haunted finance for decades: how do you price uncertainty? Specifically, how much should it cost to buy the right, but not the obligation, to do something later, once you have more information? The formula changed finance forever. Similarly, when you meet someone whose future moves you cannot predict, your nervous system prices that uncertainty to make it feel like excitement, anticipation, or even need (in lieu of trauma bonding, attachment styles, and whatever else is in the zeitgeist of self-evolving nowadays). Every single person that you have ever wanted to take to bed has been your body running Black-Scholes this whole time.

For those blissfully unaware of the Black-Scholes before reading this post, a brief explanation here is helpful. Black-Scholes prices financial instruments known as options. A call option gives you the right to buy something at a set price by a set date. A put option gives you the right to sell. You pay a small fee upfront, called a premium, for this right. If you’re wrong, you lose the premium. If you’re right, you can make multiples of what you paid. Capped downside, uncapped upside means the asymmetry is the appeal. Do you know what else is also asymmetrical? The fact that I had to learn about Black-Scholes during a set of 6 week lectures spanning 4.5 hours every Saturday and Sunday during the prime exact weeks where there is actually consistent sun in the Netherlands.

When it comes to options, think of it like buying someone a drink and where that can go. Sixteen dollars for a campari is the premium. You’re purchasing the right, not the obligation, to a conversation. If something happens, you exercise into a phone number, a walk, maybe a night you’ll think about for months. If nothing happens, you’re out sixteen dollars, maybe some dignity, and definitely lost time. That is the price of keeping your options open, literally.

Black and Scholes figured out you can calculate what that premium should be if you know five things: where the stock is now, the price you’re betting it crosses, how much time you have, the opportunity cost of your capital, and how much the stock tends to move around. That last variable is called volatility. It’s measured by standard deviation, which is the number that captures how far things tend to swing from their average. I know some of you forgot what it means because you repressed your statistics course memory and TikTok has rotted your brain, so it’s fine, I get it.

Consider how a stock that goes up 1% then down 1% then up 1% has low standard deviation. It’s calm and predictable, whereas a stock that goes up 8% then down 12% then up 15% has high standard deviation as it is chaotic and volatile. The individual experience of holding these two stocks is completely different even if their average return is identical.

Now imagine two people’s moods on a scale of 1 to 10 over five days. To make this example stick, imagine they are people you have had entanglements with.

Person A goes: 6, 7, 6, 7, 6. They text you good morning. They text you goodnight. You go to dinner on Thursday. It’s nice. You go to dinner next Thursday. It’s nice again. You know exactly what you’re getting and you’re getting it. The experience with them resembles a fad about a set of numbers children are constantly calling out instead of embracing the classic of how seven ate nine.

Person B goes: 2, 9, 3, 10, -5, then 11, because this man is spinal tap. You have an innocuous talk with them that initially feels like you’re pulling their teeth, you say something autistic about how just let me know what time to wrap this up, and then he’s kissing you at a transit point, and also is the same person who won’t look at you as you leave because they are enraptured with their phone. I’m not sure what to make of those signals.

When you calculate the numbers out, they can have the same average but it feels like a completely different experience depending on who it is. Person A is calm while the experience of being around Person B is not always that. Person B has high standard deviation. Person B is volatile. Person A has low to no standard deviation. Person A is low volatility. Person A has inspired someone’s writing somewhere to justify their life, much like Person B has inspired my writing to justify it in my mind.

Volatility in markets is how much a stock moves. Volatility in attraction is how much someone moves you. It all maps out when you consider the five Black-Scholes inputs of current stock price, strike price, time to expiration, interest rate, and volatility - and how they connect to attraction.

2. Add it up: how the Black-Scholes variables connect to attraction

So how exactly does each variable of Black-Scholes map onto attraction?

S, the current stock price, is where you are with them right now. “We matched but haven’t met” is a different starting point for value than “your husband is a good kisser.” Everything else is calculated from here.

K, the strike price, is the threshold you’re betting they’ll cross. It’s the line in the sand like “I’m betting they’ll want something serious by month three”, “I’m betting they will introduce me to their company holiday party this year”, or “I’m betting that the person drowning in a room full of people who all want something from them stops choosing the chemical that makes you feel like love is everywhere and nothing hurts because that’s how people end up accidentally dying, and I don’t know what happens when someone realizes the thing they thought was nourishing them is the thing destroying them visibly.”

Something like that. All thresholds, all bets, all lines in the sand. The further that strike is from your current reality, the cheaper the fantasy and the less likely it pays off. That part I also find dizzying, personally.

T, time to expiration, is the deadline. “They’re moving in six months.” “If they don’t text by Saturday I’m done.” Every option has an expiration date. After that, it’s worthless. The less time you have, the more every interaction matters. This is why I think, for example, vacation flings hit so hard. You’re at expiration, and everything is maximally charged. The scarcity is inherent to the entire pricing mechanism. It’s also how some of my friends have ended up married to foreigners, which has another set of results entirely.

r, the interest rate, is opportunity cost. Every hour spent refreshing their Instagram is an hour not spent on your work, your friends, someone who might actually show up for you, or with a therapist who is a professional trained to understand and treat this neuroticism. We treat attention like it’s free, but it’s your most expensive asset. The carrying cost of obsession is everything else you could be doing with your life, like reading much of my other writing.

σ, volatility, is attraction itself. How much they keep you guessing, how much uncertainty they generate in your nervous system.

Black-Scholes highlights to us how options become more valuable as volatility increases. The model says uncertainty is worth paying for. But now that we’ve established volatility drives attraction, here’s the catch - there’s volatility you expect and the volatility you actually get.

3. Blister in the sun: implied volatility vs realized volatility & why you are deeply unhappy in your relationship’s reality

Four of the five inputs are observable as you can look up the stock price, the strike, the time, the rate. But you don’t actually know future volatility since it hasn’t happened yet. The entire Black-Scholes model depends on a number you have to guess, which is why traders work with two numbers via implied volatility and realized volatility.

Implied volatility is what the market expects as extracted from what people are willing to pay right now. Realized volatility is what actually happens. If everyone in your neighborhood suddenly starts paying triple for home insurance, you can infer they’re expecting a disaster. Nobody had to tell you. The prices revealed the belief. But the disaster might never come. The gap between what people expected and what actually happened is the gap between implied and realized.

Implied volatility in attraction is fantasy. It’s the dating profile, the first date, their reputation, whatever projection you have built from limited data about the person scrambling your brain due to pesky hormones or unresolved past life contracts or some death drive. Realized volatility is who they actually are, masks off, what happens when you spend real time together in the reality that emerges after the projections burn off.

The gap between implied volatility and realized volatility is where most romantic suffering lives.

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You thought they were going to be exciting with some mystery, edge, intensity, maybe they’re kinky. The implied vol is high, but they turned out to be boring, predictable, and a proud Swiftie or something. Realized vol is low. You overpaid for the option. Classic disappointment, sorry, you’re sleeping with someone mid. Or the reverse: you thought they’d be safe and predictable. Their implied vol is low, but they turned out to be chaos with a sheer force of depth, damage, and disaster that was hidden. Your realized vol is high as you were unprepared for what you bought. It’s not that they are kinky, it’s that they are sheer chaos.

What I think is that the real best trade, the arbitrage, is finding someone where implied vol is mispriced. They look boring on paper but they’re fascinating in person. They look chaotic on the surface but the underlying asset is actually stable. Reading the fundamentals under the price action, that’s the trade of a lifetime if you’re a romantic. Or Midwestern, I guess.

4. Good feeling: how delta, theta, gamma, and vega describe the emotional exposure, time decay, instability, and uncertainty of attraction

Options traders use something called “the Greeks” to describe how their positions behave - these are known as delta, theta, gamma, and vega. If Black-Scholes tells you what an option is worth right now, the Greeks tell you how that value changes when conditions shift. They’re the dashboard. They tell a trader how exposed they are if the stock moves, how much value they’re losing every day they hold the position, how unstable things get near a deadline, and how sensitive the whole thing is to uncertainty itself. Each one measures sensitivity to a different variable and I think they measure onto relationship dynamics with eerie precision.

Delta is emotional exposure, or how much your mood moves when they move. Delta runs from 0 to 1 for calls (negative for puts, but the idea is the same). At 0, you feel nothing. At 0.1, you’re mildly interested. They’re cute, whatever. At 0.5, your day bends around their behavior. Good text, good day. No text, you’re checking your phone in the bathroom at dinner. At 0.9, your emotional state is tracking theirs in near-perfect lockstep. At 1.0, you are them. Your mood is their mood. This is codependency wearing a trench coat. Think of someone you matched with on an app and never met. Low delta. Think of someone you’ve been sleeping with for four months who won’t call you their girlfriend. The delta is 0.9 and you both know it. Also girl, dump him.

Theta is time decay. Options bleed value every day since like a situationship, the clock eats your investment. Every day you don’t know where you stand, you’re paying theta. Every week of “let’s just see where things go” turns into a month as time marches on. What is mildly annoying at month two is excruciating at month eight because theta accelerates. You feel this in any relationship once the resentment begins. You know exactly what month it stopped being fun and became a burden. You also know that theta benefits sellers. The person with less investment is collecting the premium of your attention without paying any carrying cost. You’re buying, they’re selling, the short side always has the better deal.

Gamma is instability near the moment of truth. The closer you get to a decision point, the more unstable everything becomes. Small signals can produce wildly different interpretations. “They said ‘I had a great time’ with a period instead of an exclamation point.” Crisis. “They took two hours to respond. Usually it’s forty-five minutes.” Catastrophe. This is why people spiral before The Talk. Every text is either confirmation or annihilation. There is no neutral input. This is also why I don’t text as much as possible or keep things short/curt/neutral. Texting is a weapon of mass destruction. I am a woman in my thirties, I do not need to belabor a point by sending paragraphs and blowing up a phone. Seriously, people, it isn’t worth it. Miscommunication abounds, dopamine spikes, disaster much?

Vega is your relationship to uncertainty itself (not the person), to the not-knowing as an abstraction. Some people are long vega: they’re aroused by not knowing. They lose interest the moment someone becomes available because the chase was the point and resolution kills it. Some people are short vega as they need clarity to function and ambiguity causes them pain. Uncertainty isn’t exciting to some people while others need it to breathe. Most relationship failures are vega mismatches. One person’s “we’re just vibing” is the other person’s nuclear event. Neither is wrong, but they’re just positioned differently relative to volatility. They have opposite vega. If you’re wondering which position I hold here, my vega is that I’m going to a cabin in Canada for a month and I’m pretty sure that as much as someone wants to say out of sight, out of mind, I’m just not a person you forget, but maybe I forget.

5. Gone daddy gone: the problem with assumptions about volatility

The Black-Scholes model and its assumptions have problems, like the ones that blew up Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM) in 1998, the global economy in 2008, or that YouTube options guru’s entire Discord on Christmas 2025.

Black-Scholes assumes volatility is constant, but people change. Your model of them at month one is already wrong by month four. Your ex who bored you might be fascinating to someone else who decides to marry him and doesn’t know he randomly emailed you right before their wedding. The person who consumed your every thought for years might one day bore you. The model doesn’t account for people becoming different people. The model doesn’t account for people encountering different people. Worse still, the model doesn’t account for when people become different people as a result of who they encounter.

The model also assumes your bets are uncorrelated. That your career, your friendships, your hobbies, your sense of self are all independent of one relationship. How many people do you know where this is actually the case? For example, the SNL skit Man Park always brings to mind how to consider the social lives of men and their dependence relative to a female partner’s network. What happens to that social fabric when the relationship ends? On paper, it becomes the end of all endings, but the reality of that is assuming the same network is one that stands to withstand any extreme event to begin with. You can't stress-test the status quo enslaving you without first allowing for new mental models, and most people aren't ready for that. What I find more overwhelming is denying that, because assuming that dominoes always fall in line is a dangerous assumption when it comes to romance and in reality. For example, LTCM assumed their diversified bets wouldn’t correlate. In the Russian debt crisis of 1998, correlations spiked to 1, then everything crashed at once.

Reality for LTCM disagreed just like it does in relationships. Romance does that, too depending on how entwined things are, as your friends, career, hobbies aren’t separate bets. They’re linked, which means one crisis and your emotional portfolio collapses. It becomes havoc and engulfment where the considerable degradation of emotional experience reflects in the worst possible way that a “diversified” emotional portfolio was one big bet the whole time, and one skewed not at all to your advantage. It’s exhausting and the opposite of life-affirming, if not one of the biggest signals of something that is not working in reality.

Reality can also be something like meeting someone you’re attracted to while believing you’re madly in love with someone else already, and the model assumes you can exit cleanly which is no small feat. In markets, you click “sell” and it’s done. Feelings can outpace readiness or circumstances can cause complications, but you can’t click sell on a relationship. Exits can be messy and sometimes they’re also engineered to seem impossible because of their structure to prevent it to begin with, which lends new meaning to the phrase no exit. Sometimes the same person is both the market maker and the compliance department, so they set the prices, surveil the trades, and call it risk management. Their leverage is emotional, baked into counterparty positions, and allows them to exploit that asymmetry to make a trade where someone becomes a captive position without realizing they were ever being priced. It’s kind of a genius move if you think about it, because it means someone becomes a call option held at a strike price that never needs to be exercised as long as the primary position doesn’t blow up. The option never realizes it’s the product, not the trader.

All the convexity flows one direction, and it is to the benefit of one person who exploits this asymmetry. Some structures exist not to make people happy but to keep them available, which is part of the asymmetric upside they don’t profit from because it is being extracted from them. They pay a premium in being the out-of-money call option.

Sometimes this goes on for years, decades, or a lifetime. Sometimes this involves kids, sometimes it does not. Sometimes some people remain married to someone until their last child is 18 and has left the home. All sorts of volatilities are occurring behind closed doors you’ll never peek behind.

Sometimes you realize that there is no clarity to this reality, at least for now, because sometimes people run multiple positions that contradict each other in their own form of doing risk management. Sometimes you encounter a person so acutely in pain that the public performance takes precedent over their actual well-being. Many such Instagram cases.

Sometimes an entire life can be built on the idea that volatility can be modeled, measured, traded, but some people themselves exceed the instrument and its capabilities.

6. Violent femmes: when the model breaks but it’s liberating since volatility is not risk, but possibility, and that’s beautiful, really

Spectacular blow ups in finance occur when people forget they are merely using a model, just like we do when we’re attracted to a person and built a model of who they are, all of this rallying fueled by desire. When reality diverges, we don’t always update the model, but instead deny what’s in front of us.

Black-Scholes tells me that the spark I feel is not chemistry, but not even a spark to begin with - it’s just the spark of uncertainty. It’s not knowing where I stand since the uncertainty generates perceived value for some, and volatility inflates that premium I keep paying because the option feels expensive, which my brain interprets as worth something.

But volatility is not value, much like excitement is not compatibility. An option on a volatile stock isn’t inherently better than an option on a stable stock. It’s just priced differently, and the excitement of the volatile option doesn’t mean it’ll pay off. It might expire worthless. So thanks for nothing, because the model is useful but the model is not real. Yet there’s a part that the model gets wrong that I think I might be getting right - volatility is not about risk at all, but about possibility.

The model assumes volatility is risk. Something to hedge against, neutralize, minimize.

When I say what if volatility is not risk but possibility, I mean that the beauty inherent to volatility is to be celebrated for its expansiveness rather than reduced to what it represents. We expand through pain as we expand through pleasure, or at least I hope we do, because risk is inherent to everything we do in life. The expansiveness of risk is what facilitates the space for possibility, and they go hand in hand. How much you’re willing to risk for human connection is your choice, and that can’t be priced, it shouldn’t be ever.

My point is that the model was always wrong because it assumed the underlying was stable. I have spent my whole life being the fat tail in every distribution of virtually every system I have operated in and I am not interested in being priced by a bell curve that says I shouldn’t exist. I’m also not a fan of certain thresholds and I know how many standard deviations before I draw the line. And desire allows us to derive that point if we ask ourselves honestly what it is we need versus what we want versus where we are going and how. It’s worth the risk of attraction, in my view.

After all, desire is also representative of possibility, for any possible future, implied to then be realized. Sometimes the price of an option is worth the glimpse of the upside. Sometimes some markets are so chaotic that the only thing you can do is acknowledge the reality of this to see if it sorts itself out. Sometimes you just keep your options open and dip when someone else arbitrages or a delisting event occurs. Anything can happen.

Love means never having to say you’re sorry, according to the 1970 film Love Story. They got it all wrong. You definitely have times in your life where you have to say and mean that you’re sorry. What they should have understood is that love is long vol. Love has always been long vol. Just read the posts from early investors on Palantir’s subreddit and you’ll see it in action.

Besides, this isn’t love. It’s only a kiss, it was only a kiss, which I just know will be playing at a wedding I’ll be going to in Idaho, it’s a millennial classic, and I’m dreading it already because the better nostalgia play really is “When You Were Young”. I don’t expect anything from this man. I don’t even know what he’d say to me. He is, however, to my surprise, a damn good kisser, and that particular premium was worth every penny. Maybe. I think the move here is to let the volatility do what volatility does, which is resolve on its own timeline. There’s plenty of other market forces to be occupied with.

Reader note: For comments/consulting inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com. An obligatory message to like and subscribe follows: Like and subscribe for updates. If you do not like it, tell everyone immediately by sharing this link. Merci’

What exists now are parallel systems in situations like when I as a woman have interviewed for roles to be asked out on a date by my interviewer, or be seriously told ‘we don’t know what to do with your unconventional background for PE, have you thought about going into sales or investor relations instead, it may be easier’ - this is a system that somehow exists suspended alongside a parallel world involving a recruiting pipeline that seriously treats 22-year-olds doing keg stands like fissile material.

There are a lot of incompetent men in finance who never really graduated maturity-wise and have been coddled their entire lives. Perhaps that explains the structure of the private equity recruiting cycle in the U.S., which resembles fraternities and sororities on college campuses. I’ve wondered why the American finance industry places such a frenzied premium on a cohort of candidates who are, broadly speaking, children who must be secured immediately.

I.

In the 1980s, a young man named Philip Waxelbaum was getting recruited to Wall Street. Dinners with managing directors. Interviews that felt like auditions. Decades later, after becoming a finance recruiter himself, he wrote about it on LinkedIn: “I wasn’t in queue for a job. I was pledging and this was rush week.” When he received his offer, he called it receiving a “pledge pin.” When he declined Lehman Brothers, he described it as “returning his pledge pin.”

Forty years later, in 2024, an analyst told the Financial Times his interviews began at 7:30am on a Monday and by 9pm, he had accepted an offer. The job itself however starts in twenty months. Classmates reportedly skipped work to shuttle between Park Avenue buildings, abandoning one firm mid-interview when another texted. One candidate hid in a bathroom stall to text a competing firm while his interviewers waited outside. He called it the most stressful twelve hours of his life and also the best day of his life. I suspect he’ll feel the same way about his first divorce in the future.

II.

Do you know why it’s called rush week?

The word “rush” in Greek life comes from a game theory phenomenon called market unraveling. Alvin Roth won the Nobel Prize for studying it. Chapters used to recruit juniors. Competition pushed it earlier. Sophomores. Freshmen. Freshmen during orientation week. Each chapter, acting rationally, tried to lock in pledges before competitors could. No one could stop because defection meant losing candidates.

They called it rush because everyone was rushing. The etymology is the diagnosis.

Private equity recruiting follows an identical pattern. Fifteen years ago, firms hired analysts about 13 months before start. By 2023, it was 20 months. By 2024, some firms were interviewing candidates before they had started their first day at the banks meant to train them. The timeline moved from August 29 in 2022 to June 24 in 2024.

Framed another way, the frenzy of the private equity recruiting cycle is mimicking the rush for Labubu releases. Think about what that means and how the secondary market for Labubus falls apart.

III.

Let me be specific about who gets rushed.

The typical candidate is 22 or 23 years old. Graduated from one of roughly 15 universities the industry has decided matter. Completed a summer internship at an investment bank, received a full-time offer, started as an analyst in July or August.

They have been working for approximately four months when the headhunters call. They haven’t closed a deal. Most haven’t worked on a deal that closed. They’ve built some models, sat on some calls, fetched coffee, learned where the bathrooms are, figured out how to expense dinner. They have not even passed the rite of “pls fix” on a slide deck.

And now they’re being evaluated for a job that will determine the next decade of their career, in a process lasting 48 to 72 hours, with offer windows that close in 24 hours or less.

Headhunters control access. Firms like CPI, Henkel, SG Partners serve as gatekeepers to the megafunds. They’re paid on commission, around 20 to 30 percent of first-year salary. A $250,000 placement generates $50,000 to $75,000 in fees. The incentive optimizes for pure speed.

Who benefits from this?

How does this timeline actually work? The 22-year-old accepts an offer for a job starting in twenty months. They spend the remaining time at Goldman in limbo. Still pulling all-nighters, still getting screamed at, but mentally checked out. Running out the clock. Tick, tick, tick. When they finally start at the PE fund, they’re 24 or 25 with two years of banking experience. They can build a model. They’ve closed some deals. That’s…it.

This is who private equity actually employs, as the 22-year-old with four months of experience is just a future claim and a pledge who won’t be initiated for two years.

IV.

No other country does this. In the United Kingdom, PE firms recruit candidates who have been working for two or three years. Hiring happens three to four months before start, not twenty. The process spans weeks. One London professional called the American system “absolute lunacy.”

In continental Europe, German funds wait until candidates have actual deal experience. French firms evaluate over months. Stockholm, Amsterdam, Madrid hire on rolling timelines. In Asia, the compressed psychodrama does not exist. Hong Kong and Singapore recruit year-round. Hillhouse Capital runs six interview rounds over two months.

The US is the only market that does this, and when it comes to money? US and European funds generate roughly the same returns. Both produce approximately 14 percent net IRRs over a decade. In Q1 2025, Europe actually outperformed.

The psychodrama produces no alpha.

V.

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Now let’s look at the research on this.

London Business School partnered with Capital Dynamics, a fund of funds that conducts extensive due diligence on private equity managers. With access to 25 years of internal data across 500 funds, 138 PE managers, 5,772 deals, and nearly 6,000 professionals tracked over time, this is the largest dataset ever assembled on private equity human capital.

The researchers, Francesca Cornelli (now Dean of Kellogg School of Management), Elena Simintzi, and Vikrant Vig, wanted to know whether team stability affected fund performance. This is the conventional wisdom in the industry that stable teams are good. Investors write key-man clauses into fund documents. Limited partners get nervous when senior people leave. Everyone talks about retention. The data said otherwise and found that funds with higher turnover outperformed funds with lower turnover

Funds with higher turnover outperformed funds with lower turnover. The top tercile of turnover, the firms that churned through the most people, produced 25 percent net IRR. The bottom tercile, the most stable teams, produced 11.5 percent. That’s a gap of thirteen and a half percentage points. That means revolving doors of hires made more money, but wait, hold on, it gets better (or worse, depending on what you believe) - can you guess what happened when they broke down turnover by professional background?

Researchers were examining established PE investors who were not 22-year old recruits but an average age of 37 with an average tenure of six years in roles like partners, vice presidents, and principals.

They specifically examined three categories of professional backgrounds in PE funds: those with operational experience, those with prior private equity experience, and those with a financial and investment banking background.

When teams regularly refreshed their operational expertise, fund performance improved. Operational skills need to evolve with market conditions, so churning through fresh hires with diverse industry backgrounds actually helps.

When people with PE backgrounds left, performance declined.

When people with investment banking backgrounds left?

Nothing. Per the researchers, they had “little impact on returns”, along with the mic drop that “financial skills appear to be a commodity.”

VI.

Do you know what that means?

The entire private equity recruiting apparatus and all its psychodrama exists to sort and secure candidates whose departure, according to the largest study ever conducted, does not meaningfully affect fund performance.

Midnight modeling tests, hiding in bathroom stalls, 2:30am interviews, candidates skipping work, flying cross-country for a single meeting. All of it is for nothing. It’s but a walking shadow, a poor player in financial markets that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more. A tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

Shakespeare clocked it 400 years ago. The system optimizes for the one talent pool that doesn’t move the needle.

Pls fix.

VII.

So why the frenzy, why the rushing, why the insanity that mirrors Greek life on university campuses? American PE runs on a fraternity-to-firm pipeline. I’ll state the obvious - it is not about meritocracy, it is about class and social reproduction.

Meritocracy in finance is a mirage, and the system self-selects not for competence but for cultural fit. After all, why doesn’t Europe recruit this way? Their infrastructure of social reproduction is different, they typically don’t have the same undergraduate Greek system feeding into the same banks feeding into the same funds feeding into the same failure of hiring for actual talent (excepting the Dutch, whose undergraduate fraternity/sorority system combines the worst of both worlds by bringing in Eurosmug along with the elitism).

None of it is merited, it just has to do with money and socioeconomics of whose family you were born into and how that shaped your access. Sociologist Lauren Rivera studied how elite firms hire in her book “Pedigree”, which documents this. The metric always comes back to not about if a person can do this job but would I want to be stuck in an airport with this person. The problem with that, of course, is what your barometer is for who you’d speak to.

Think about a time in your life where you have unexpectedly been in a situation where you’ve ended up making conversation with someone you didn’t expect to and it turned out to be a wonderful exchange or moment. Think about how unexpected that was and how it worked out to be a good time, good vibes, good rapport, whatever. Now think about how selecting for certain factors excludes that possibility from happening to begin with, and how that scales on a massive basis when an entire ecosystem is based around hiring for it. The person you’re not even considering interviewing could be the best airport lounge buddy and slide deck fixer and deal maker your firm has ever encountered. But they never made it to this pipeline to begin with because you didn’t even bother to consider them due to arbitrary criteria. The inanity of this hazing to hiring pipeline exists because systems perpetuate it.

A 2013 Bloomberg investigation found that at some investment banks, fraternity brothers outnumber women four to one in analyst programs. JPMorgan alone employs 140 members of Sigma Phi Epsilon. A reporter interviewed a UPenn Sigma Chi chapter president who approached a banker at a recruiting event with a secret handshake, and the banker’s response was that “Every Sigma Chi gets a business card. We’re trying to create Sigma Chi on Wall Street, a little fraternity on Wall Street.” In what other industry would this be considered good judgement or publicity to promote? Think about that, but we all know the other angle - do you know why he said that to a journalist out loud? Because just like Simon Le Bon of Duran Duran was once said to respond to the question - why do rockstars date supermodels?

Because they can. Because he can. Because the system selects people who are not always competent but have the confidence of the coddled, which would be fine if confidence compounded returns, but it turns out it doesn’t. The coddled are commodities, as the Cornelli study confirmed it.

So what does this mean for evaluating the recruiting arms race in finance? The research findings suggest this frenzied competition for IB analysts into PE may be solving for the wrong problem because if IB-trained professionals are highly substitutable even after years of experience, then capturing candidates 4 months into their banking career provides no clear performance advantage.

That means the key differentiator isn’t the IB training itself. Rather, the study’s emphasis on operational expertise and team evolution capability points toward a different hiring philosophy where I’m going to use everyone’s favorite buzzword right now (not): diversity. That’s right - PE funds might actually benefit from hiring people with different and diverse professional backgrounds instead of winning bidding wars over identical IB-trained candidates from the same fifteen schools. The research says so. But I’m sure the firms will get right on that…not? Perhaps - in June 2025, something cracked.

Apollo announced it would not participate in on-cycle and shortly thereafter General Atlantic followed along with TPG. For the first time in memory, megafunds opted out.

Jamie Dimon told incoming JPMorgan analysts they’d be fired if they accepted PE offers during their first 18 months while Apollo’s Marc Rowan said "When great candidates make rushed decisions it creates avoidable turnover—and that serves no one.”

Notice how Rowan used the word rushed? Deliberate or not, it’s on the nose for the PE recruiting cycle and how it resembles Greek fraternity and sorority recruiting as I’ve been describing throughout this piece.

As I publish this in January 2026, we’re going to see how this plays out in the future. Will it hold? Will someone defect? Will it even matter? It’s telling that the people running the system are admitting it serves no one. The research says to hire differently for candidates with more diverse backgrounds. Money in the bank shows that results in higher returns. The writing is on the wall. Whether anyone reads it is another question.

Reader note: For comments/consulting inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com. An obligatory message to like and subscribe follows: Like and subscribe for updates. If you do not like it, tell everyone immediately by sharing this link. Merci’

Send me money, send me green, heaven you will meet

Make a contribution and you’ll get a better seat

Bow to Leper Messiah — Metallica, Master of Puppets (1986)

In Part 1, I showed you how an iron condor (four options contracts arranged in a specific configuration) is structurally identical to a Celtic Cross tarot spread (ten cards arranged in a specific configuration).

In Part 2, I introduced you to Gerolamo Cardano, the gambling addict and astrologer who invented probability theory, to illustrate how his work underpins the financial models running on Bloomberg terminals today and how those models are structurally identical to astrological natal charts.

Part 3 is about what happens in fortune telling and fortune making when the prophecy fails and nobody blames the oracle. Here’s the plan - first I’ll show you how ancient prophecy worked at Delphi as the structure is identical to how trading gurus operate today…

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“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” — Donald Rumsfeld

Back when I used them, my dating app profile description said that I’m looking for my first husband in someone smart, pre-IPO, and/or a poker teacher.

I considered it due diligence that selected for certain signals in matches and assessed risk factors for future matches, just like financial models assess signals and outcomes to determine theirs.

Just like in the quest to meet my first husband, the world’s known unknowns drive our risk appetite and curiosity to figure out the future before it happens, which is why finance bros are actually astrology girlies. Mercury is in Zyn, y’all, since that’s the thesis I’m exploring for part 2 of the div…

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“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” - Leo Tolstoy

“All fintwit communities are alike; each fintwit community is unhappy in its own way.” - Me (Ani Bruna)

Is there any time of year more fraught and tense for families than the holiday season? Thankfully I’m Armenian and I’ve never celebrated a proper version of the holidays because my people do the whole January 6th/7th eastern orthodox thing, and while I found it devastating growing up, I totally get it now, have you seen all the discounted items at TJ Maxx in the days immediately following December 25th? Cha-ching, score! But score-keeping of another kind is happening within the finance community via fintwit (finance twitter for the uninitiated) due to derivatives drama going on right now since this year’s Christmas involved a man who calls himself Captain Condor tweeting through the liquidation of his entire trading community’s accounts in real-time. When I read about it, I realized two things:

1) I absolutely need to write about this and explain what is going on and

2) Derivatives were my least favorite course in my international finance master’s program, so of course my first pure finance concept essay should be an homage to this dark period of my life where I also lost my favorite scarf when bicycling to make that lecture on time…it’s been two years since then and i have been unable to find it. Damn you, Dam Square)

While I’m aware we live in challenging and interesting and uncertain times and timeline this, timeline that, the decidedly existential bent to Captain Condor’s Christmas Crashing Out Event also involved messages to his followers (who had just watched their money disappear) such as the existential lament of Captain Condor, oh captain, my captain, declaring “There’s a 100% probability we will eventually die.” Incidentally, this is why you want to take a Heidegger course before your brain ossifies too much, folks. But yeah, George Michael was a little too on the nose when he sang Last Christmas, I gave you my heart / But the very next day, you gave it away. Captain Condor is no George Michael, but it’s basically the same as Last Christmas, your account is gone/But at least we are all mortal.

While Wham! wrote that holiday song about a breakup, they could have written it about a brokerage account too. When I initially read about this quadruple C rated event (the Captain Condor Christmas Catastrophe ™), I was curious as to why I kept seeing tweets about iron condors, as I’d never heard of it before. Could it perhaps be a Game of Thrones sequel or something? (I’ve never seen the series so I wouldn’t know, fun fact). Given that the vox populi in Patagonia also don’t tend to be into heavy metal as they tend to be into showing off heavy metals on their wrist, I was wondering why so many men in finance were posting about iron condors last night.

At first I suspected it may be because I have a theory (finance guys absolutely have a thing for alt women/goth girls, that’s another discussion for another time) but when I found out that iron condors involve derivatives in this disaster, it hit me immediately: it may be 4am, but options strategies are actually divination systems.

The actual entire structure of what these traders were doing (all the fancy math, all the probability talk, all the “systems”) is architecturally identical to reading tarot cards. That’s right - I’m going to prove it to you, and I don’t need a crystal ball.

I do however need your patience as I first explain one of the most boring concepts in finance. Sorry, not sorry. I told you, I hated that class. Here is the plan: first, I will explain what an iron condor actually is and why it does not involve Norwegian black metal. Then I will tell you what Captain Condor did with them. Then I will prove to you that this derivatives strategy is structurally identical to a tarot spread.

In Part 2 of this series, I will show you why this keeps happening, why trading education functions as religion, and why the guy who invented probability theory was also a professional astrologer.

What Is an Iron Condor and why does it not hail from Norway nor involve burning down churches?

I am going to explain this because I had to learn it at 4am and now so do you. Also because the shape of this thing is the whole point of what I am arguing.

When most people think about the stock market, they think about buying stocks. You buy a piece of a company, hope it goes up, sell it later for more than you paid. Simple. The advice is to buy low and sell high, but I have had the good luck of buying high and selling low enough times to be aware that there may be greener pastures to play the market. Ever heard of a derivative? No, I am not referring to a work of art that is tepid and bland while obviously trying to be something it is not. In finance, a derivative is a contract whose value is based on something else. You are not buying the thing itself; you are buying a contract about the thing.

One type of derivative is an option, named as such because an option gives you the right to buy or sell a stock at a specific price by a specific date.

Think of it like this: imagine you want to buy a house, but you are not sure yet. You could pay the owner $1,000 for the right to buy the house at $500,000 anytime in the next three months. If the house price shoots up to $600,000, great, you can still buy it at $500,000 because you locked in that price. If the price drops, you simply do not use your contract and you are only out the $1,000.

Basically, an option is a deposit that gives you the right to do something later, just like a roster of people you can flirt with when you’re bored or need ego validation or if you get too into a person who isn’t feeling the same way. When it comes to understanding options, just remember the expression about keeping your options open both fiscally and in fornication.

There are two types of options known as calls and puts. It is going to take everything I have in me to not run a parallel to how puts and calls also apply to the hotline bling of optionality in dating, but maybe another time.

A call gives you the right to buy at a set price. A put gives you the right to sell at a set price. If you think a stock is going up, you buy a call. If you think it is going down, you buy a put.

But here is where it gets interesting, as you can also be on the other side of these contracts. Instead of buying options, you can sell them and collect money upfront.

When you sell a call, you are betting the stock will not rise above a certain price. When you sell a put, you are betting it will not fall below a certain price.

When you buy options, you pay a small amount and can win big if you are right. When you sell options, you collect a small amount but can lose big if you are wrong.

Buying options is like buying a lottery ticket, and selling options is like being the casino.

An iron condor is when you set up four of these contracts together in a specific arrangement - you sell a put, buy a put at a lower price, sell a call, and buy a call at a higher price. The two you sell generate income. The two you buy cap your losses if things go wrong.

Pay attention to that word: arrangement. It is going to matter.

You are essentially making a bet that says: “I bet this stock stays between Price A and Price B for the next day or week or month.” If you are right and the stock stays in your range, you keep the money you collected. If the stock moves outside your range, you start losing, but the way you have arranged the four contracts caps how much you can lose.

Four pieces in specific positions, and each piece is only meaningful in relation to the others. The position of each piece determines whether it protects you or exposes you.

If this is starting to sound like something other than finance, hold that thought.

Also, wondering why it’s called an iron condor? It’s because when you graph out what you would make or lose at different stock prices, the shape looks vaguely like a bird with wings spread out. Someone figured this out on Excel once and it was a moment of their life that they will never forget. I am so happy for them. Since finance people usually don’t have a chance to be artistic or creative unless it involves a corporate or accounting scandal, we have to give them every little indulgence we can because god, yeah, the lack of creativity is absolutely reflected in the naming of the damn derivative stratagem to begin with.

What Captain Condor actually did just like Nic Cage

David Chau is a 31-year-old college dropout from Nevada who built a trading community called InsideOptions with over 1,000 members paying upwards of $5,000 a year for his daily trading recommendations. The Wall Street Journal profiled him. Forbes covered him. They call him Captain Condor because I suspect finance people love giving themselves nicknames that sound vaguely military due to some internal inadequacy fear.

Now that you know what an iron condor is, here is what captain Chau was doing with them and how he earned that nickname. Chau placed these bets every single day on the S&P 500, which is the stock market index and a number that tracks the 500 biggest companies in America. Chau was doing them with very short-dated SPX options, often effectively 0DTE by the trading session. (0DTE means zero days to expiration, meaning options that expire that same day.) These bets were essentially the most volatile, fast-moving version possible of them - in my mind, I imagine they embody Nicholas Cage and the title of the classic Gone in 60 Seconds.

When you are betting on something that expires in hours, everything happens fast. A small move in the market that would barely register for a normal investor can wipe you out before lunch. There is no time to wait it out, no let’s see what happens tomorrow - every day is all or nothing.

His system had one other aspect to it, which is that when Chau lost, he doubled the size of his bet the next day. Then doubled again if he lost again. The idea is that you will eventually win, and when you do, you recover all your losses plus profit.

If this sounds like what your mysterious but fun uncle from Florida does at the blackjack table in Vegas, that is because it is. It is called martingale betting, and casinos love people who do this.

The problem with this, however, is not subtle. It’s when you hit a losing streak that is longer than your wallet is deep, and then you lose everything. Not some of it. Everything. Everything, everything, everything. Unlike the eponymous Dramarama song about figuring out a relationship’s difficulties, this aspect about martingale betting is not hidden knowledge. This is literally the first thing anyone learns about martingale systems. It is in the Wikipedia article. It takes thirty seconds to Google. I mean c’mon, as Gob Bluth would say.

For two and a half years, Chau’s system worked beautifully anyway. His system reportedly won the vast majority of its trades. His trades got so big (sometimes involving contracts worth tens of millions) that analysts noticed he was actually moving the market when he placed them.

Yet there was wariness with this already, as one expert warned back in April: ‘If he knows what he is doing, great. But the size is kind of crazy. Doubling down on each trade is literally gambling’

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Chau himself also shared another existential sentiment earlier this year, saying “I have always been worried about the impending doom. Nothing good lasts forever.”

Chau isn’t wrong - nothing lasts forever indeed, not even cold November rain. And reader, yes, the doom doomed two days ago.

What happened is that the market moved against him day after day and as described, under his system, you have to double down after each loss. So he did, and the bets got bigger. By late December, his positions had grown to risk millions on single-day trades.

Yet the market kept moving against him, and accounts started liquidating. That is the polite finance framing for “bro, your money is gone and there is nothing you can do about it.”

Reviews from his community, dated December 24-26, tell the story in real-time:

“Algos reacted weird, streaks turned endless... and boom, whole account vanished by evening.”

“We are essentially picking up pennies in front of a steamroller.”

People lost real money, the tune of which I don’t know, but it may be possibly if not probably perhaps millions of dollars across the community. Some members had sold businesses to fund their trading accounts based on years of winning.

Meanwhile, Chau had reportedly been earning upwards of $200,000 per month in subscription fees. And on Christmas Day, as it was all falling apart, he tweeted about the certainty of death.

I’m not sure how I’d feel reading that tweet if I lost everything on that bet, but my Substack is free and none of you have yet to even buy me a coffee for my wonderful writing (granted, it’s only been a few weeks, but you know, it is the holidays. Don’t be greedy with the wit, it needs to be fed).

How Iron Condor as an options strategy is actually literally like seriously a card game metaphorically allegorically example-y

Remember how I said to pay attention to the word “arrangement”? Here is where it pays off.

An iron condor has four parts arranged in a specific configuration. Each part only makes sense in relation to the others. The position of each piece changes what it means and what it does.

One of the most famous divination systems in the world, Tarot, also happens to have a famous spread called the Celtic Cross, where ten cards are arranged in a specific configuration. Each card only makes sense in relation to the others. The position of each card changes what it means.

Ring any bells with a certain derivative strategy?

For those unfamiliar with the dark arts, Jungian archetypes, or originally from Los Angeles: regardless of whatever preconceptions you have, the tarot has a rich history and is used for symbolism to prediction to dramatic scenes in movies, TV, etc. In the tarot, The Tower card (the one with the lightning bolt destroying everything) means completely different things depending on where it lands in the spread. In the “hopes and fears” position, it means you are terrified of sudden change. In the “outcome” position, it means that change is coming whether you like it or not.

Same card. Different position. Different meaning.

In an iron condor, the same contract (let us say, the right to buy stock at $105) means completely different things depending on how it relates to the other three pieces. In one configuration, that contract is protecting you from disaster. In another configuration, that same contract is exposing you to massive loss.

Same contract. Different position. Different meaning.

Both systems derive meaning from arrangement, not from any individual piece.

The parallels between options strategies and tarot continue. For example, in the Celtic Cross, one card literally lies across another. It is called the “crossing” card, and it represents whatever is blocking you or working against you. In an iron condor, you have protective contracts that “cross” your risky contracts, limiting how badly things can go wrong.

Same structural logic. Different costume. Different material outcomes.

Anthropologists who study divination practices describe them as “moving from a boundless to a bounded realm.” You take infinite possibility (the chaos of the future, which could go literally anywhere) and force it into a structure that you can read. The spread creates a methodology in the form of a container for interpreting randomness, and that is exactly what an iron condor does. You take the chaos of the market, which could go anywhere, and create a bounded methodology in the form of a container where you can profit if it stays in a range and where your losses are capped if it does not.

Both systems are technologies for making randomness feel legible.

Beyond structure, both systems also share rhetorical techniques. Tarot readers use cold reading, which are statements that feel specific but are vague enough to fit anything. “I sense a transition coming in your life.” “Someone from your past may reappear.”

Trading gurus do the same thing. “The market is at an inflection point.” “We could see movement in either direction.” “Watch this level closely.”

All these statements sound like predictions but are unfalsifiable, and regardless of whatever happens next, the guru can claim they called it.

Both practices also impose narrative structure onto randomness. Tarot readers do not just read individual cards, but they construct a story. “Your past was this, which led to your present situation, and this obstacle is blocking your desired outcome.”

Traders do the exact same thing with charts. “The market found support here, broke out here, faced resistance here, so it is heading toward this target.”

Both practices have a beginning, middle, and end. Both derive cause and effect. The human brain cannot tolerate randomness. It must find patterns, and tarot and trading exploit this compulsion.

Tarot deals in archetypes: The Fool, The Magician, The Tower, Death. These are universal patterns that recur across human experience. Trading also deals in archetypes of The Fool, The Magician, The Tower, and Death in the form of ‘pls fix’ emails sent about decks.

Even trading technical analysis has its own archetypes through Head and Shoulders, Cup and Handle, Double Top, Rising Wedge. Traders see these shapes in charts and believe they predict future behavior.

Both systems say that this shape, this symbol, is salient with meaning something. When you see this pattern, this outcome follows. Both are imposing archetypal meanings onto noise and the sheer chaos of existence.

Both create the illusion that chaos can be understood and subverted through knowledge.

Captain Condor’s community learned this the hard way on Christmas Day. But here is the thing - as the Dutch love to say, he is not special. This exact pattern has played out before, with Nobel Prize winners, with beloved ETFs, with legendary traders, and even with suburban Karens. When it comes to divination and derivatives, the links between fortune telling and fortune making run much deeper than we’d think.

In Part 2, I will show you the history of traders who thought they had conquered chaos, explain how trading education became a religion, and tell you about the 16th-century astrologer who invented the math these finance bros still use today. The cards were already laid a long time ago.

Reader note: For comments/consulting inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com. An obligatory message to like and subscribe follows: Like and subscribe for updates. If you do not like it, tell everyone immediately by sharing this link. Merci’

He absorbed the culture of D, internalized it, and made the D his imperative. Of course, if I’m telling you I love the D as did the head of the CIA’s Paris office, then you should appreciate my transparency in clarifying immediately that 1) I love French D and that 2) the French D is specifically système D — a cultural concept known as débrouillardise.

Système D is a concept of French culture which roughly speaking is about the art of being resourceful, being a problem-solver and figuring out how to make things or situations work through ingenuity and irreverence. Se débrouiller literally evokes clouds, meaning like figuring it out as clouds pass, making one’s way through, “je me débrouille,” I’ll figure it out, I’ll make it work, rules are merely suggestions, why would I fill out paperwork when I could simply not, etc. etc. and that’s how this financial crime story unfolds when an American patriot fell for the charms of French D.

Dale Britt Bendler, former CIA chief of station in Paris, pled guilty to two federal charges, of failing to register as a foreign agent under FARA while secretly working for the governments of France, Angola, Venezuela, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and making false statements to federal investigators about it. He did this while still employed as a CIA contractor with daily access to classified systems. In December 2024, a federal judge sentenced him to a year and a day in prison. His crime wasn’t dramatic — no dead drops, no microfilm, no honey traps in the traditional sense, nothing hidden in a peanut butter sandwich. Dale’s crime was…paperwork, or rather, the absence of it. Which is also something very French in and of itself, and it’s giving système D taken to its logical conclusion.

Mais oui, oui, oui, plus forte les conneries - today I’ll tell you a story about a rogue spy who unfortunately spent too long in France and lost his work ethic along the way. Eventually, his betrayal of his country mirrored the frenetic behaviors of a rogue recruiter using the company’s access to LinkedIn Sales Navigator on their own free time a little too much, but you’ll see.

One of the things you learn when you live in France, or anywhere in Europe really but especially France, is to love the D, and by that I mean the concept of système D. To love the D means to have a casual, even hostile, relationship with official procedures, if not through sheer creativity and will to power.

Système D is beautiful when it means you have procured, produced, pilfered paperwork that doesn’t exist but is demanded of you. It’s beautiful when your neighbor rallies around you in solidarité against l’administration ridicule, helps you navigate the prefecture, vouches for you at the city hall, all this while proudly declaring their allegiance to you because you’re one of the good immigrants, you see (that’s because you speak French, you’re not too loud, and you’re not from the wrong country, but that’s another discussion). My point is, système D has conditions, and it’s less beautiful when it means the former CIA chief of station in Paris decides that registering as a foreign agent is really more of a suggestion.

Now that you know I love the D and my reasons for it, meet our aforementioned CIA chief of the Paris office Monsieur Dale Britt Bendler. Sixty-nine years old, three decades in the CIA, chief of the agency in Paris from roughly 2011 to 2014. A man who, between 2017 and 2020 post-CIA service, earned $360,000 moonlighting for foreign principles and actors linked to France, Angola, Venezuela, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo while simultaneously employed as a CIA contractor with daily access to classified systems. Like a true Frenchman, Dale did not believe polycules as a concept really have any limits — neither did policies.

When he finally stood in federal court to explain himself, he said — and I need you to imagine him shrugging his shoulder offhand, saying in the most blasé deadpan Parisian accent you can muster — well, zee FARA is not zeee most compliqueeee zing! I ask you to imagine that, reader, because the plain English version of what he actually said loses all charm when I write that he literally said at his own trial “Well, the FARA isn’t that complicated”

Non mais allô quoi. See why I made it more spicy with the accent? It’s because the man absorbed the entire French approach to paperwork and applied it to American federal espionage law.

On the importation of French work ethic to American intelligence

Here’s what I think happened, and I’m speculating, but I’m speculating based on years of living in Europe and watching what happens to Americans who stay too long.

You spend enough time in France, you start to absorb things. First it’s the obvious stuff like the complaining about taxes, pouting, exaggerated physicality, whatever. Then someone asks you for one too many stamps for one too many pieces of paper which don’t exist. You snap. Something in you changes. You start to internalize the débrouillard mentality. You realize that rules in France exist to be interpreted, negotiated, occasionally ignored if you have the right connections. You learn that the technically correct path is for suckers and tourists.

Dale was chief of station in Paris and that’s not a posting you get by being rigid. That’s a posting where you need to navigate French intelligence services, French bureaucracy, French everything, and their neverending acronyms for all 17 different branches and offshoots of each office. You need to be flexible, resourceful, clever. You need to se débrouiller.

During the court date, the U.S. government’s framing of his conduct was poetic in rendering how Dale searched classified databases “like it was his own personal Google.”

This is système D applied to espionage - why go through proper channels when you can just... look it up yourself? Why file paperwork when you can simply handle it? Il se débrouille. He’s figuring it out. The American way is forms in triplicate; the French way is a shrug and a “ça ira” — it’ll be fine, except it’s not because there is a blatant conflict of interest to using American resources for foreign work, n’est pas?

The allocution, or when even apologizing feels like too much work

Dale loved système D so much that the night before his federal sentencing, he queried ChatGPT for an example allocution. An allocution is a fancy term for the part of sentencing where you express remorse and regret for your (alleged) behaviors. It’s your one chance to be human, to show the judge you understand what you did, to maybe, just maybe, get a lighter sentence because you’ve demonstrated genuine reflection. In other words, an allocution is like a text from an ex with no agenda or no sex possible because they’re on another continent.

You heard that right: the head of the CIA’s office in France, one of America’s oldest and most exasperating allies, decided to open up ChatGPT, a large language model chatbot, and type something like “how to say sorry for crimes.” I’m surprised that’s not a crime in and of itself really, but I digress.

And then — wait for it….and then — mais oui, mais non — the former head of the CIA’s office in France who used ChatGPT to figure out how to say sorry for committing crimes told the court about it. Dale announced this. He said, out loud, on the record, that he had queried ChatGPT the previous night for an example allocution for his offenses.

Pourquoi? Why would you admit this? I have so many questions, and each more dizzying. This is like telling your professor you had ChatGPT write your essay. This is like telling your therapist you googled “how to have emotions.” In a way, it is so absurd that it is French by the nature of the absurdity involved. Hear me out — this is débrouillardise taken to its most absurd conclusion: I needed to apologize, so I asked the robot, what’s the problem? Et alors? As an action, what it’s insinuating, which is a surface far more darkly, is that there is no need to reflect on one’s own words, one’s own thinking. In this operating system of DalePT, it’s input/output, classified/unclassified, me/mine/ours, America, foreign work, money has no allegiance, yeehaw, click, click, oops, I got caught.

Don’t accuse me of being mean, because his actual statement, after promising to save the court time was an honest “I was stupid.”

Put another way, the GPT incident highlights the stunning decline of his work ethic. Dale had three decades of intelligence work running covert operations across multiple continents before système D claimed him fully. He personally witnessed 9/11 from Manhattan. And when the moment comes to account for it all, he can’t even be bothered to write his own apology. The French 35-hour work week has claimed another victim

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.

The client list, or the incredibly low, low price of treason ($30k a pop)

Now, why was Dale’s sidehustle post CIA career so problematic? Let’s talk about his side hustles. While employed full-time by the CIA with daily access to classified systems, Bendler was simultaneously working for foreign principals connected to France (naturellement), Angola, Venezuela, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. I think the last time these four countries ever came together for any other work project must have been a Shakira music video where she collaborates with Wyclef Jean.

Nevertheless, he persisted with all four for a combined $360,000 over three years.

That’s $120,000 per year, which is $30,000 per country per year. Frankly, that’s nothing, the amount is so…little for what it entails as a betrayal that I find it insulting. If you’re going to commit federal crimes involving four different foreign actors linked to different countries and classified intelligence access, at least have the dignity to charge properly. This is like offering to betray your country for the price of a mid-range Hyundai annually. This was the head of the CIA’s Paris office, not some study abroad student looking to score party drugs. It’s like if Emily in Paris decided to give up all her spoils and kooky wardrobe and paid for an apartment to become a YouTube series shilling for Albania in a rundown hostel full of drunken Brit surfers instead.

Yet this decision is also very French, in a way. Why optimize for one high-paying client when you can spread yourself thin across many and do a mediocre job for all of them? It’s a little bit cinq à sept and definitely mimics stereotypes of two-timing, cheating, affairs, etc. It’s the consulting model. It’s the je me débrouille approach to treason. It’s the lazy version of treason with quantity over quality, breadth over depth. I can feel his satisfaction with himself already. But he of all people should have known salaries are already so low in Europe — why sell himself at such a bad exchange rate given his access and abilities otherwise?

The sentencing: joyeux Noël, here’s your prison date

Judge Rossie D. Alston Jr. sentenced Bendler to two concurrent one-year-and-one-day terms, comparing him to a drug dealer rather than a drug user, which is the kind of analogy that really lands in federal court. Bendler was peddling the good stuff, because he wasn’t just hoarding classified information, but was actively selling access to it.The “greatest shame” of the punishment, the judge noted, was Bendler having to face other government employees in the courtroom. As if the GPT admission was not enough, another brilliant ‘quoi’ moment naturally occurred in this spy saga when out of sympathy for Madame Bendler, the judge allowed Dale to spend the holidays with his family before reporting to prison on January 5th, but his lawyer couldn’t remember the name of the prison he was recommending.

Can you imagine being sentenced to prison and then your lawyer saying oh my bad, I forgot, it’s somewhere in Florida, I think? Your lawyer is also a fan of système D, one supposes. After all, he couldn’t be fussed to remember the actual trial and judge and everything, but he’ll figure it out. There’s a prison somewhere in Miami, probably, he’ll find it when he needs to. Tranquillement, calmly, he’ll figure it out. Se débrouiller until the very end.

D.A.R.E. to resist système D: “Don’t be me”

Before his ChatGPT-assisted apology, Bendler told the court he’d spoken to “twenty guys and gals” whom he advised “Don’t be me.”

“You think you’re smart,” he warned, “but those eggs can get mixed and become scrambled.”

This is D.A.R.E. for spies. One can appreciate how the 1990s initiative known as Drug Abuse Resistance Education (which turned out to be rather counterproductive apparently) also lends itself to loving French D if you swap out the words.

Imagine Dale Bendler, formerly of the Central Intelligence Agency, on a cautionary roadshow telling colleagues to just say no. Except instead of a cop in a middle school gym with a fried egg and a frying pan, it's a disgraced station chief working the K Street cocktail circuit: "Kids, don't do what I did. This is your career on système D. Any questions?” Dale shared his one-man Débrouillardise Abuse Resistance Education program, and like the original D.A.R.E., it probably didn’t work.

But here’s what is interesting - why would he share that? Why would twenty people need the warning?

Twenty people means twenty people doing something similar enough that Dale felt compelled to intervene. Twenty people with clearances, with access, with their own potential foreign principal arrangements and their own casual relationships with classified databases. The barbarians aren’t at the gates but they have been inside for years. The barbarians have security clearances and K Street contacts and they’re all warning each other not to get caught the way Dale got caught falling for French D.

Ça fait réfléchir, non?

My take on what Dale represents - self-preservation maxxing

I think Dale represents the opposite of preservation or when self-preservation goes wrong, actually. He’s selling to whoever’s buying, and when someone asks him to account for it he outsources his remorse to a chatbot. That is telling of a larger issue - how did this man become the chief of the CIA office in Paris, and what does that tell us about the system versus the symptoms of the sycophantic or succubic use of it? Dale also acknowledged filing out forms is not that complicated even though he didn’t do it. But the tell is that filing forms is for people who still believe in the system they work for. Filing forms is for people who haven’t realized that everyone around them is running their own side hustle, their own arrangement, their own little scheme. Why would you follow rules that nobody else is following? Se débrouiller. Figure it out. Everyone else is. Alloooo!

Bendler will report to that Miami prison (name still TBD, apparently) in January and somewhere, an iteration of GPT perhaps still has that allocution draft saved. Maybe it’ll be ready to help the next spy who absorbed too much of that good stuff in the form of French D, système D, and can’t be bothered to apologize in his own words.

Joyeux Noël, Monsieur Bendler. Profitez bien des fêtes. The barbarians send their regards.

Reader note: For comments/consulting inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com. An obligatory message to like and subscribe follows: Like and subscribe for updates. If you do not like it, tell everyone immediately by sharing this link. Merci’

Back to the bolt cutters - so I imagine, you know, your run of the mill bike thief loser. What I do not typically imagine is a Russian governor’s son using bolt cutters to remove his court ordered ankle monitor before embarking on a multi-country exfiltration operation that would make Jason Bourne blush.

Reader, let me introduce you to Artem Uss, the subject of this financial crime which focuses on this most dramatic fugitive I am henceforth naming Boris Bourne.

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Artem is the son of Alexander Uss, who was serving as governor of Russia’s Krasnoyarsk region at the time of his son’s arrest. The younger Uss was arrested in Italy in October 2022 on U.S. charges related to sanctions evasion, money laundering, bank fraud, and a scheme to smuggle sensitive U.S. military technology to sanctioned Russian entities. The technology allegedly included advanced semiconductors and components used in fighter aircraft and missile systems. Some of this technology was later found in Russian military equipment captured on the battlefield in Ukraine.

In the six months between his arrest and pending extradition to the U.S., Uss was held in Italy and placed under house arrest near Milan. The day after an Italian court approved his extradition, on March 22nd, 2023, Uss used bolt cutters to remove his electronic ankle monitor and fled.There is a lot one can say about this but at least he was prompt about it right after getting the news, I guess? Uss just straight up cut that thing off like he was opening a particularly stubborn Amazon package later resurfacing in Russia.

Nowadays, the U.S. government offers up to seven million dollars as a reward for information leading to Uss’s arrest or conviction.

Seven million dollars. That is a lot of moolah, folks. That is not a typo. That’s “we really want this guy” money. That’s “someone in D.C. is very annoyed” money. From memory, I think that’s something like 70 times more than what the Dutch police offered for their biggest fugitive at the time (crime boss Ridouan Taghi, who famously lamented how miserly the Dutch were in their offer to capture him as compared to other countries)

So what was Uss’s deal, how did he end up being a modern day everyman’s Boris Bourne?

Uss operated oil, coal, and timber businesses in Russia through various corporate entities tied to his family, including a coal company and a major Siberian timber exporter linked to the Krasnoyarsk region. He also held a senior position at a Rosneft subsidiary. His father’s position gave him connections and protection, which is really just nepotism with extra steps and significantly higher stakes.

Apparently, the world of Russian integrated energy is not enough, as Uss also allegedly ran a separate operation procuring controlled technology from the United States and Europe for Russian buyers who could not legally obtain it because of sanctions and export controls. This is where things get interesting, as for these illicit purposes, Uss used a German trading company called Nord Deutsche Industrieanlagenbau GmbH, which we’ll call NDA GmbH because I refuse to type that full name again, as a front together with his partner Yury Orekhov. This operation became a sustained and organized multi-year thing until Uss got bused.

NDA GmBH became the front for the operation which worked through shell companies and intermediaries in the way that all good sanctions evasion schemes work, which is to say with maximum complexity and minimum transparency. Russian end users would identify technology they needed. Uss and his network would find suppliers in the U.S. or Europe willing to sell. They falsified paperwork claiming the parts were going to places like Malaysia instead of Russia. The technology would be shipped to intermediate countries, then rerouted to Russia. Payment flowed through multiple accounts, shell companies, and even cryptocurrency to obscure both source and destination.

On the day of the escape, according to U.S. court filings, a Bosnian national linked to a Serbian organized crime group went to Uss’s house with other conspirators and handed him bolt cutters. Uss used them to cut off the ankle monitor and tossed the device out the window (like a boss!) before being driven out of Italy. He was then smuggled through Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and into Serbia, eventually flying to Russia from there.

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One wonders if he had a nice time going through the Alps. I’m kind of envious of the views I’d imagine such a trip to have, if I’m going to be completely honest.

How Uss actually moved at each stage of the exfiltration isn’t fully known in public documents, but investigations and media reporting point to a pre planned route, multiple vehicles, and help from a Balkan criminal network. There’s also speculation about coordination with Russian intelligence or other Russian actors, which seems possible given the sophistication of the operation, but I’m noting that as speculation rather than confirmed fact. The one thing that isn’t speculation is that Uss had sophisticated assistance. You don’t just bolt cutter your way across four countries without a very good plan and very connected friends. I suppose it’s not a bad barometer to have around in terms of life goals, the ability to bolt across places with ease…

Nonetheless, by fleeing in such a dramatic fashion involving multiple countries, organized crime networks, and bolt cutters, Uss sent a very clear message about how he viewed his odds of winning in a U.S. courtroom, which is to say, duh, not good, chances are not good at all for Boris Bourne indeed.

The U.S. investigation was conducted by the FBI and the Commerce Department’s Office of Export Enforcement, with support from the Justice Department’s Task Force KleptoCapture and other agencies that focus on export control enforcement. Task Force KleptoCapture is a real name for a real task force and I need everyone to appreciate that for a moment.

They traced technology from U.S. suppliers through intermediaries to Russian end users, including sanctioned defense firms. Financial records showed Uss and his network were involved in the transactions and payments. I bet Palantir was somehow involved in these investigations. I just know it.

And if I’m wrong, well, somehow something figured out all these parts and pieces as communications and court filings describe how the conspirators misrepresented end users, used shell companies, and discussed evading sanctions.

In October 2022, the U.S. unsealed a 12 count indictment in the Eastern District of New York charging Uss and several co-conspirators in a global sanctions evasion, export control, bank fraud, and money laundering scheme. The charges included conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to violate the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA, which sounds like something from a sci-fi novel but is actually very real export control law), bank fraud conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy. Other defendants also face additional counts involving export control violations and smuggling goods from the United States. IEEPA violations can carry up to 20 years in prison per count, and money laundering up to 20 years per count, which means the math on potential sentences gets very large very quickly.

My take

Russia’s defense industry depends heavily on Western technology for certain components, particularly semiconductors and precision electronics. Sanctions are supposed to cut off that supply. Yet procurement networks like the one Uss allegedly ran can circumvent sanctions by routing purchases through third countries, shell companies, and false end user statements. This is a lot of fancy footwork but that comes with the territory of sanctions evasion as tradecraft nowadays. These come with costs not just on paper but in terms of the lives they can take or mutilate as the technology is used for weapons.

What I mean by this is that Uss’s work had real impact as U.S. prosecutors say Uss’s network helped procure Western technology that ended up in Russian weapons systems used against Ukraine. Investigators have found U.S. origin semiconductors in captured Russian equipment, and part of the technology Uss shipped around included semiconductors and microprocessors with both commercial and military applications. Semiconductors are essential for modern military equipment, including targeting systems, communications, drones, and missiles. They are subject to tight export controls when destined for Russia for extremely obvious reasons.

Also notable is how the charges and supporting court documents also describe efforts to source aircraft related parts used in Russian Sukhoi fighters and even the U.S. F 22. That is the kind of detail that makes you wonder about the sheer audacity of trying to procure parts for an American fighter jet to ship to Russia. Who? What? When? Where? Why? Who? Who the hell was doing this, and why? Is there perhaps an oligarch somewhere who is a huge fan of Top Gun and is building an American fighter jet replica?

After Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, sanctions enforcement became more aggressive in the way that active warfare tends to focus the mind on who’s getting what technology and why. When investigators and open source analysts started finding Western technology in destroyed Russian military equipment on Ukrainian battlefields, it’s because of people like Uss and what he helped procure.

Reader note: For comments/consulting inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com. An obligatory message to like and subscribe follows: Like and subscribe for updates. If you do not like it, tell everyone immediately by sharing this link. Merci’

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Much like teens claiming to be going to the mountains when instead they’re piling on mountains of cheap vodka in Caesar’s Palace and their beleaguered parents, insurance systems rely on honesty when they handle claims, which forms the basis of this debut post on an incredibly absurd scam that was caught out. This whole tension between the truth and stretching it is also why an inaugural post for my website is accordingly an homage to my roots in southern California and the absurdism of such a cultural pathos taken to its stereotypical end.

Crime requires creativity, and today’s topic - Operation Bear Claw - involves a cohort of luxury vehicles, wildlife biologists, misused kitchen instruments, and a large furry costume of the non-sexual kind.

While it does not involve any delicious pastries of the same name, and beyond the un-kinky use of a bear costume in this insurance fraud scheme, this crime is also a cautionary tale about details and why they matter as you’ll see when you read on (such as the number of claws bears have versus the number of prongs on meat claws sold at Williams Sonoma.)

Now, let’s start from the beginning - I mentioned I grew up in LA, and Lake Arrowhead, if you’re unfamiliar, is a small mountain resort town in the San Bernardino Mountains about 90 miles from LA. People often vacation there for weekend trips for reasons unknown to me as I have zero tolerance for bugs, water, or skiing (best I can give you is a hike). Given the region, black bears are often known as a nuisance in the Lake Arrowhead area as they regularly break into cars looking for food (in this economy, who can blame them), but since this happens enough, area locals know not to leave anything edible in their vehicles. Bears in the area are a known problem, and just as known is their dexterity in having learned to open car doors.

On January 28, 2024, one particularly enterprising bear broke into three luxury vehicles parked in Lake Arrowhead. It appears this bear is a fan of gaudy status-signaling, as it happened to break into one 2010 Rolls-Royce Ghost, one 2015 Mercedes G63 AMG, and one 2022 Mercedes E350 for a total claimed amount of damage between the three cars in the amount of $141,839 (which averages out to about 47k per car). Indeed, four people from the Glendale area filed insurance claims for bear damage to their three vehicles on the same day. Now, nothing about the story’s elements per se seemed immediately suspicious. On paper, sure, bears are in the area, the setting made sense, the narrative was plausible enough (though why would you leave the doors open to a hundred and twenty thousand dollar car), but the medium carries the message just as much. Enter the void or rather the video footage of the bear attacks on the luxury vehicles, which is where it got messy…and dear reader, you can view it yourself here too (sourced via AP news)

The video footage of this enterprising bear showed the bear approaching the cars, opening the doors, getting inside, and…pawing at the leather interior. That’s right: apparently a brown bear got into a Rolls-Royce presumably in search of food but instead decided to claw at the interior leather to absolutely destroy it. This enterprising bear almost got away with it, if it hadn’t been for those meddling bear claw skid marks being the incorrect number of claws to begin with.

The crazier part? The four defendants of this crime all filed their claims about the bear break in on the same day. For three different luxury vehicles. With three different insurance companies. One could say they certainly laid their cards bare (sorry, I couldn’t help myself). They almost pulled it off, but if only they had been a little more attentive and cared about patterns.

Something about this coincidence (to say the least) triggered a deeper look by the insurance companies involved who then handed it off to the state investigators. Here’s where it gets interesting - the plot twist is that the scheme worked right up until someone at the California Department of Insurance actually paid attention to the pattern in the video for the supposed bear clawing. When investigators pulled the videos, the problems became obvious. The “bear” was grabbing door handles in ways that didn’t match how bear paws actually work. The gait was wrong. The body positioning inside the vehicles was wrong. This thing moved like a person crouching and reaching around, not like wildlife investigating an enclosed space looking for snacks. So they called in an actual wildlife expert from the state - it turns out the California Department of Fish and Wildlife employs biologists who spend their entire careers studying bear behavior. These are people who can tell you the biomechanics of how a bear opens a cooler versus how a human in a bear suit opens a cooler.

Today I learned all of these were even a thing, but more pressingly, here’s where attention to detail becomes critical (remember when I said that matters?). Real bears leave irregular scratch patterns. Different depths, varied spacing, uneven pressure because bears aren’t precisely dragging their claws across surfaces with systematic intent. They’re just, you know, being bears.

Dear reader, bears have five toes! The claw marks reflected six toes.

I need to emphasize this because it’s important. Someone had gone to a kitchen supply store, purchased meat claws (the kind with six metal prongs designed for shredding pulled pork), squeezed into a bear costume, and decided the best path to $141,839 was filming themselves trashing luxury vehicles. Bears are chaotic and their claw marks should reflect this instead of perfectly matched scratches from a food shredding device.

When investigators executed their search warrants in November 2024, they recovered the pictured bear costume and meat claws. Six metal prongs. Perfect match to the scratch patterns on the vehicle seats.

All four defendants were arrested and charged for insurance fraud and conspiracy.

In my view, the meat claws are what make this case legendary. They aren’t specialized fraud equipment, nor special. They are literal barbecue accessories you can buy on Amazon for $15 with Prime shipping. In fact, Williams-Sonoma has one on sale for $7.99 right now (I’m not a shill, I swear. Though looking at that website while writing this makes me want a steak. Stay away from the grilling accessories subpage if you’re hungry.)

Someone looked at those six metal prongs and thought “close enough to bear claws” and just fully committed to the bit. That’s the kind of confidence that either succeeds spectacularly or fails completely.

Details! Details! The devil is in the details because one more thing - the bear costume choice reveals another detail problem. Scroll up to look at it again - it’s a light brown bear costume, right? California only has black bears. Brown bears went extinct in California in the 1920s. We no longer have cuddly soft grizzly bears even though it’s on the state flag! So this is like filming footage of a penguin waddling around the Mojave Desert and claiming it is native fauna. I was always the picky person for group projects in school but I was right more often than I was wrong, goddamnit - details matter!

Anyways, to this cohort where details amongst other things did not seem to matter, if convicted, each defendant faces years in federal prison for what amounts to a YouTube quality costume and kitchen supplies from Amazon.

The gap between “this might actually work” and “this will definitely not work” turned out to be basic biology and one professional who knew how to count bear toes. One can barely stand it.

Reader note: This is not legal advice or anything in the form of advice so don’t @ me with legal tomfoolery. Nonetheless, for comments/consulting inquiries, reach me at ani@anibruna.com. An obligatory message to like and subscribe follows: Like and subscribe for updates. Merci