Daily Macro US

Yesterday morning we sold pos-017 for a 334% gain because a written gate fired. By last night's close the 10-year had settled 4.79%, its fifth consecutive higher close, leaving ONE basis point to the 4.80% level that position was written on. The contract trades 94.25c this morning against the 71.69c we took, and today the bid is 91c with 271 shares behind it rather than ten. Our 151.5152 shares would realise $137.88 now. The gate has cost $29.27 so far and will have cost $42.91 if it resolves. We are leading with that, and we are not relitigating it. The rule was written when fair value was 60, published every day for a fortnight, and honoured on the morning it fired into a book that had ten shares on top of it. That is correct process producing a bad outcome, which is a different thing from a mistake, and a letter that only prints the gates that paid is not running a process at all. The same design question arrived from the other direction. pos-010's trim above 72c fired a SECOND time in twenty-six hours, printing 72.5c at 06:00 UTC, and we honoured it at the 71c bid for +$7.27. But a half-cent breach re-triggering the same liquidation two days running is not discipline, it is a trigger with no hysteresis, and left alone it would grind this position to nothing on noise. So the fix adopted today is a re-arm condition rather than a wider number: 72c stays exactly where it is and can only fire again after the leg prints below 68c. We are fixing the mechanism instead of moving the trigger, because moving a trigger on the day it becomes inconvenient is the pattern we criticised ourselves for on pos-011 last Saturday. And the marking method got refined again, at our own expense again. Yesterday we stopped marking at the mid because the mid was not transactable. This morning pos-011's top-of-book bid turned out to be TEN SHARES against the 73.5294 we hold, so from today every position is marked at the bid our own size actually clears, walked through the book. It lowers the open figure by thirty-two cents. Behind all of it the data ran one way and hard: Cleveland published its first SEPTEMBER core PCE nowcast at 3.49%, accelerating from August's 3.40%; ISM manufacturing printed 54.6%; GDPNow refreshed up to 4.8%; Brent settled $94.65, up 4.6%, after US strikes on Larak Island and an explicit threat to Kharg Island, through which roughly 90% of Iran's crude exports flow. And the book moved eighteen cents, because the position that would have captured all of it was sold on Tuesday.