Market On Open, Monday 23 February

Market On Open, Monday 23 February
Photo by Brett Jordan / Unsplash

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Psyops 101

by Alex King, CEO, Cestrian Capital Research, Inc.

Finance Twitter today has been won by Citrini Research, a high quality small fund manager and research shop. They published a long form note in recent days considering all the bad things that could happen if AI development continues in the current vein. And the response to them has been overwhelmingly negative you-guys-are-idiots-you-just-don’t-get-it. Which tells you that there are a lot of people on Finance Twitter who are either (1) vehemently pro the current trend and won’t for some reason countenance any change to that, and/or (2) paid to say so by forces unknown. Anyway whenever I see this kind of pile-on, to me it reveals much more about the stress levels in the prevailing narrative than anything else. If you really have the whole of FinX jumping on someone’s head because they dared to consider plan B … is plan A really a slam-dunk given? Or is it just a psyop being sold to the little people by the big people?

Psyops and narrative is everywhere at all times and it is hard to navigate using your mind alone, because it is specifically constructed to make it difficult for humans to do so.

Want to know the best way to not be fooled by narrative and psyops? Use an algo to help you. Because algos are completely unreceptive to narrative. They only speak price. As should we all.

For single-stock investing and trading in the top names, don’t miss out on our YXI Systematic Signals service. This service is extremely easy to use. Each morning, before the New York open, you receive a simple set of signals for each of the 15 tickers it covers - these are all highly liquid stocks and ETFs. A signal of “1” means “buy” or “hold” (if the signal was 0 yesterday it means buy, if it was 1 yesterday, it means hold). A signal of “0” means “sell” or “do nothing” (if the signal was 1 yesterday it means sell, if it was 0 yesterday it means do nothing). You can do with these signals what you will - trade them mechanically, factor them into your own analysis - whatever. But if you had traded them mechanically from inception, this is what the model has achieved:

Image Source: Yimin Xu

This 26.8% gain, from inception on 1 April 2025 to date, has been achieved with a Sharpe ratio of 1.91 and a maximum drawdown of 8.3%. Or to translate: doubleplusgood.

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Righto. The market. Let’s get right into it. Today’s note is for our Inner Circle and Circle members alike.