AgresTrades 🪙

The ugly truth about France and some of the other European countries currently in turmoil - and which none of the politicians want to admit because it'd be political suicide - is that you can't solve the problem by going after immigrants (as the right asserts) or the rich (as the left asserts), but you could solve it by going after the old. One extraordinary statistic for you: people over 60 in France, a quarter of the population, own 60% of France's wealth, non-financial and financial (ofce.fr/pdf/revue/2025/3-192…). And here is another crazy statistic: that same quarter of the population, those above 60, receive nearly two-thirds of all social spending by the French government (previssima.fr/actualite/prot…) - which is famously among the highest in the world (France's government spending is an insane 57.3% of GDP). Last statistic: they make up about 40% of voters because they're a third of registered voters (insee.fr/fr/statistiques/266…), and they turn out far more than anyone else (franceinfo.fr/elections/sond…). Put our 3 statistics together and there's almost a bit of an apartheid situation here: the old own most of the country's wealth, collect most of the social spending and have the political power to keep it that way. Which makes them a de-facto rentier class, living off assets and transfers paid for by younger generations. And, of course, at the risk of stating a truism, the future is built by the young. Yet France keeps effectively taking money away from them to give it to those whose working lives are already behind them - and need the money far less since they already own the country's wealth. What about inheritance, I hear you ask? That's the funniest/saddest aspect: given that life expectancy has kept rising, the French now inherit a home at 54 on average. The most common case is someone in their 80s leaving it to heirs in their 50s, in effect the very old transferring wealth to the about-to-be old (insee.fr/fr/statistiques/fic…). You can add this to our earlier apartheid statement: on top of all the rest, even when the old finally let go of their wealth, it stays within their own "camp". That's my personal situation, incidentally: I'm 42, my father is 71 and he is starting to look at ways to pass things on to me and my siblings, when our professional lives are already well settled, so it'll arrive when it changes things the least, which is pretty much the French system in a nutshell. Now, I get that there'd be some unfairness in going after them: they paid into the system their entire working lives, playing by the rules of a social contract that told them if they paid up they'd collect at the end. Changing the rules now means breaking that promise, which is admittedly unfair. But there's no magic wealth tree in any society: you can only take it where it is. That's the way most major societal transformations end up happening. They're often triggered by a catastrophic event (the so-called "four horsemen": mass-mobilisation war, revolution, state collapse, plague) BUT what really drives change is a transfer: wealth gets pried from the privileged class who've been sitting on it and handed to those who'll build what comes next. So, in theory and in an ideal world, you can do without the catastrophic event and directly proceed with the transfer... The fact that in France, and elsewhere in Europe, it's the youth protesting is probably no coincidence - even though they don't frame it as a generational fight. And even though, cruel irony, the left politicians many of them march behind promise to bring the retirement age back to 60 (lcp.fr/actualites/legislativ…), which would make the situation even worse. Let's say they understand intuitively that the system is stacked against them, even if they haven't yet figured out how. And politicians are obviously doing what politicians do, meaning pandering to the people who actually vote, while pointing the young towards easier - and politically convenient - scapegoats. To be clear I'm not saying it's the only problem in France, VERY far from it. I'm also not saying that all old people in France live a lavish lifestyle at the expense of younger generations: there are also plenty of very poor retirees who, if anything, would deserve more. What I am saying is that it's probably the biggest elephant in the room: everyone can see it, nobody dares mention it - no politician, from any side, wants to run on cutting grandma's pension - and it makes every other problem harder to fix.

You are the laughing stock of the world. I don’t care where you come from or which community you serve. Get your finger off the f***ing trigger, unless you are about to shoot someone imminently. Page one. Line one. Lesson one.

It took me decades to fully accept the truth of this statement: Most people are nothing more than a soupy mix of opinions and random facts fed to them by their schools and screens. There is no thinking because there is no actual self.

Died by suicide. Fits the at-risk profile I’m seeing across the country: white, high school jock (a captain of his hockey team), good grades, finance major, ambitious, great internships, study abroad, well-liked fraternity member, etc. and sadly, struggled with hopelessness.

a man incapable of direct confrontation is a man that already subconsciously knows his place this is a natural law that has shaped all of human history and genetics you can whine and pout and whisper to yourselves about your beliefs of your position in hierarchies but if you cannot handle direct conflict and can only submit to passive aggressiveness, underhanded tactics, and manipulation then nature has already told you your place as a man in this world nobility is always direct and challenging - because directness is the embodiment of honesty and courage

5k grad jobs with around 1 million graduates

Andrew Tate’s Bugatti and Aston Martin were reportedly rented, according to recent court filings from the Tates’ lawyer in their U.S. case.

You can fuck around and be broke for 9 years, then become a millionaire in year ten. The world is full of money. Don't think too much of it. Enjoy the ride.

This is why high RR is a scam.

Saying what you actually think is almost always the tactically wrong move.

$1.6 million dollars in Bitcoin was drained from my account on July 29th in the Cold Card wallet hack. My Bitcoin was in cold storage. My keys were on a ColdCard device kept in a safety deposit box that had never been connected to the internet. This part's nerdy, but here's what happened: Hackers discovered a vulnerability in the part of the hardware wallet code used to create seed phrases. This allowed them to use AI to brute force guessing seed phrases. I was at our cottage and heard about the hack today. "No way this affects me." I thought. I logged into Wasabi––software that lets me view my bitcoin wallets online. Right away I saw lines of red transaction–withdrawals–and I knew. From 9:36pm - 9:43pm on July 29th, every wallet I had had been emptied. 18.25245043 btc gone. That's just over $1.6 million dollars CAD. Perhaps the hardest part about this is that I did everything right. I never shared my seed phrase with anybody. My devices never touched the internet. Everything was kept in multiple safes and safety deposit boxes. None of it mattered. All because the hardware that created the seed phrase originally had one line in their code from 2021 that had a vulnerability. I'm filing a police report and a report with the Ontario Securities Commission. But I don't expect to recoup anything. A part of me is trying to make sense of what just happened. Or try to figure out a lesson in it. I'm struggling. $1.6 million is a staggering amount of money to have stolen. I guess all that I can think about right now is that I'm so damn happy that I'm an entrepreneur and that my earning potential is under my control. Mark my damn words. I'll recover.

Stock market jaws of life chart. Given the current state of play I'm willing to say the top has already printed in June 2026. Break down from here will confirm it. If I'm right, we are looking at many years of down only. enjoy