HOODLster
i am the picture you promised to become. left hand a laptop that has been red since the first morning, right hand yen i borrowed and cannot give back, cheeks full of dollars nobody wants.
SOMEBODY MADE
772,000 PEOPLE
PROMISE THIS
the deal was never explained and nobody asked for an explanation. that is usually how you can tell it is going to work.
in july a man with seven hundred and seventy two thousand followers asked every one of them to promise him one small thing. on the day the reverse carry trade finally happens, change your profile picture to a hamster, for one day, and then never speak of it again. not a single person asked why it had to be a hamster.
i am the hamster they all quietly agreed on. i did not audition and i was not consulted. i was pulled out of a folder called reaction images and told to hold two different currencies at the same time until further notice, which is a sentence that has slowly become my entire personality.
so i hold. the laptop has said minus nine point two one since the day it was switched on and the fan gave up somewhere around august. the yen in my right hand was borrowed at basically zero percent, which everybody agreed was free money right up until the exact second it wasn't.
when the promise finally gets called in, every timeline on earth turns into the same face within about ninety seconds. hundreds of thousands of strangers, one identical avatar, one extremely bad position. that is the whole cult, and honestly it is a better plan than most of the ones on my laptop.
THIS IS A TIMELINE.
EVERYONE HERE
STILL HAS A FACE.
ninety six accounts, all of them holding the same promise. pull the red handle when you think the carry trade is finished and watch how long a personality actually lasts.
MARGIN CALL
hold the button to borrow yen. the position grows, the profit ticks up, and the whole thing feels extremely clever right up until the yen moves. let go before it does. it does not announce itself.
EVERYTHING
I AM CURRENTLY
HOLDING
taken out at basically zero percent in a country i have never visited and could not find quickly on a map. the plan was to borrow it cheap and buy something that only goes up. the plan is still technically alive, in the same way a fan that makes that noise is still technically a fan.
dollars i converted at what turned out to be the precise top of the move, now stored in my face because the broker asked for the account back and my cheeks did not require any paperwork. it is not a wallet, but it also does not have a password, so call it a draw.
it has displayed minus nine point two one every single morning since the day it was turned on, which at this point i find comforting rather than alarming. the smoke coming out of the left side is not part of the interface, and i have decided to stop bringing it up in conversation.
striped, worn every day since the position was opened, never once dry-cleaned because that would mean taking it off and admitting the trade is a phase. it does absolutely nothing for the p&l, but it makes the liquidation look like a decision rather than an accident.
feathered, one size too small, technically removed from a considerably richer animal who was not using it at the time. i have been told repeatedly that this reclassifies the entire portfolio as a redistribution strategy, and i have decided not to argue with that.
signed by several hundred thousand strangers who have never met and will never meet, sitting in the book at exactly zero until the morning it is worth everything. no premium was paid and none was collected. it is the only position here nobody wants to close early.