In-depth market analysis from a professional trader with 25 years of institutional experience across FX, precious metals and macro — not a journalist, not an algorithm.
The original argument was straightforward: too many signals pointing the same direction at once — an escalating war, oil breaking higher, a BOJ trapped between a fiscal crisis and a currency collapse, gold decoupling from risk-off. None of that was wrong as a description of the moment. The conclusion drawn from it — step aside, let the market show its hand before re-committing capital — is the part that didn't hold up.
What follows isn't a defence of that call. It's an account of what happened to my own thinking in the three months after making it, because that turned out to be the more useful lesson.
↑ Back to topThis is the part of the last three months I found genuinely exhausting, and the part worth being honest about, because I don't think it's talked about enough. Going from invested to cash is sold, implicitly, as a return to a clean slate — no position, no stake, no reason to care. That's the theory. It isn't what happens.
"Bitcoin is the control case. I hold no view that needs the price to move a certain way, so I feel nothing either way. Cash after a disinvestment decision carries the opposite of that — it carries the full weight of the decision that produced it."
The mechanism is simple once you see it: you don't disinvest because you're indifferent to the outcome. You disinvest because you've concluded the market is more likely to go down than up. That conclusion doesn't evaporate the moment the trade is flat — it sits there, quietly needing to be proven right, for as long as the cash position lasts.
↑ Back to topThis is where the bias compounds itself. A wrong call, once the bearish mindset has taken hold, doesn't get re-examined — it gets defended. Every piece of genuinely bad news becomes evidence that the fall is still coming, just delayed. That is a very specific and very false kind of hope: the "just watch, it's about to happen" hope that keeps getting pushed out another week, then another.
"The entire result of a wrong call is hope. And frankly a false hope — forever saying 'you watch, this is where it'll happen,' and yet it hasn't."
The uncomfortable part is that the evidence genuinely was bad. This wasn't a case of imagining threats that didn't exist. It was a case of the threats arriving roughly as expected, and the conclusion drawn from them — that markets had to fall — simply not following.
↑ Back to topIt isn't a clean story, and it's worth being precise rather than just declaring victory for the market. The headline index tells one story. What sits beneath it tells a different one. GMD's own cap-weighted breakdown of the market excluding its 20 largest tech and AI names implies that broader slice is running roughly 5% off its own mid-August high — a separate, later peak from the index's own record. The Russell 2000, a cleaner small-cap proxy, is off about 8% from its own early-August high.
So the part of the market away from the largest 20 names has, in fact, behaved roughly as the bearish case expected — it corrected. What didn't materialise was the drag coming through to the headline number, because the 20 largest names did the opposite of what a yield shock and funding-cost story would typically imply for debt-laden, rate-sensitive balance sheets. That's a genuinely separate error from the war/oil/inflation call, and arguably the bigger one: not misreading the macro, but badly underestimating the concentration that's currently masking it at the index level.
↑ Back to topThe rule and the psychology are the same lesson told twice. The rule says: don't wait for the market to force the admission — recognise the error as early as the evidence allows. The psychology explains why that's so much harder in practice than it sounds: once cash has made you bearish, every piece of confirming evidence feels like vindication, and the very discomfort of being wrong gets mistaken for conviction.
"There is never a point where one is beyond learning. The market teaches something new every day, and the only requirement is the humility to actually listen to it."
None of this is a call on where the index goes from here, and it isn't framed as one. It's a record of a positioning decision, made for reasons that remain this author's own, and a account of what three months of holding that decision actually felt like — which turned out to matter as much as the decision itself.
↑ Back to topGMD Trader spent 25 years as a professional trader at ABN-Amro, ANZ and JPMorgan, covering FX derivatives and precious metals markets across London, Amsterdam, Singapore, Melbourne and Asia. Retiring as Managing Director in 2016, the last decade has been spent managing a personal portfolio across equities, fixed income, funds and alternative assets.
This article represents the author's personal views and positioning, shared for transparency, and is published for informational purposes only. Nothing here constitutes financial advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any financial instrument. Global Macro Drivers is not authorised or regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority or any other financial regulatory authority. All trading involves risk, including the risk of loss beyond initial capital on leveraged instruments.
Every article is written by a professional trader with 25 years of institutional experience. No fluff, no filler — just direct market analysis from someone who has managed real money.
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