Today's Markets Are A Digital Casino On Cocaine | Chris Irons, Quoth The Raven

**Chris Irons** (0:00)
Between the options market and the passive bid and the unlimited liquidity, this is a completely different stock market than it ever was. And thus, we return back to my comment today, that it's a digital casino on cocaine because that is really what it's become.

**Adam Taggart** (0:26)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money Founder and your host, Adam Taggart, welcoming you here for a very special discussion with Chris Irons. Those of you who may not know Chris, he's the author and publisher of, quote, The Raven Fringe Finance. It's one of the best-selling financial substacks on substack in the entire world. I just checked, Chris, I think you're still at like number 26 or something like that out of all the financial substacks in the world. So anyways, thanks so much for joining me here today, Chris.

**Chris Irons** (0:55)
Thank you. Thanks, dude. I was just telling you, I was just kissing your ass before we started recording, and now I'll kiss your ass after we started recording and let you know, I love your show.
It's like one of two or three podcasts that I listened to religiously, and because the content is great, and so I love it. Happy to be here.

**Adam Taggart** (1:12)
Well, thank you. It's a great honor. Chris, those who do know of you, which I'm guessing is most viewers here, know that you are an excellent writer.
There's a very valid reason why you're one of the most successful financial substackers in the world.
You are not one to shy away from what you truly think, and you have a really wonderful gift for putting things very colorfully, but in a way that really puts their finger on what is true. The reason why you're here today, and again, I owe you a big thanks for dropping everything that you were doing when I called it to come on here, because I had just finished reading one of your latest pieces, where a couple of things. First off, you had a great statement there. You said that the financial markets have become a digital casino on cocaine. And folks, that is a classic Chris Irons zinger there. We're going to talk about why you feel that way, Chris, but if you don't mind too, I'd like to talk about some of the both professional and personal changes that you're making based upon a number of the insights that you share in this most recent piece. Are you open to doing that?

**Chris Irons** (2:22)
Yeah, of course. I'll talk about anything anytime.

**Adam Taggart** (2:24)
Okay.
So let's start here with the markets being a digital casino on cocaine, which again, I think is very apt.
I've got a number of quotes I pulled from your most recent post here. And if you don't mind, maybe we can just go through a few of them one at a time and get you to expound on them. But let me read the following paragraph. You said that, One of the hardest lessons markets have taught me is that objective truth and market outcomes are two completely different things. You can be fundamentally correct and still lose money. You can have the right thesis and the wrong timing. You can understand valuation perfectly and still get steamrolled by liquidity, momentum, central bank intervention, sentiment, or some exogenous event that nobody could have predicted. And the market does not give an F about your idea of fairness, justice, facts, or timing. It does not care about logic and it certainly does not care about your ego. So start mapping these things together, right? The market doesn't care about your feelings, it doesn't even care about...

**Chris Irons** (3:28)
We'll start with my ego needing to be torn down and we'll work backwards from there, I guess.

**Adam Taggart** (3:34)
Great, great. Okay. So anyways, why did you choose to write about all this now?

**Chris Irons** (3:40)
Well, for a couple of reasons. One is, I've grown sick and tired of myself getting things right and then not having the discipline to trade things the right way. And so part of the reason that I wrote that piece was to kind of make it permanent that I'm not gonna be trading. About a year ago, I decided, hey, I was gonna stop trading options.
Now I'm really trying to back away completely from active trading. Not because I feel like my analysis hasn't been decent at points, but because I just don't have the discipline to do it. And the more that I trade, the worse I do. And to do that while you are correctly analyzing things and missing out because you are botching the trade or you're not holding it long enough or you're over trading or whatever is, it's a very frustrating enterprise. And so for me, believe it or not, I mean, I get an immense amount of satisfaction from just being able to analyze situations correctly. And to be able to write those things out and for them to be of benefit to the people that subscribe to me. And that number is growing because more and more people have, for one reason or another, found some value in what I've been writing. For me, it's just easier to focus on that and to back away from what I'm just not good at. And it is an ego problem, at least for me, because it's difficult. Being an Austrian economist, you're one of these people who walks around swearing up and down that you understand everything and nobody else does. That's the siren song of an Austrian economist or of somebody who is a sound money person.