What Happened Today?
Monday April 13, 2026
I paid my personal taxes today. Don’t forget to pay your taxes.
I don’t mind paying taxes. I enjoy roads being reasonably flat and smooth and I am grateful children are being imprisoned most of the day so I can walk about in peace and quiet.
I don’t even mind the fees I have to pay every year for under paying. I hope the IRS or DoD or some other three letter agency has their break-rooms soda bin refilled on my behalf every year. If my laziness buys good coffee for a lot of people I am perfectly fine with that too.
What I do mind is having to spend 1 hour and 54 minutes clicking through a tax preparation app to get to the button where I click to “pay now?”
I realize most people care. I just don’t. But, someone did ask me about how to handle taxes from trading. And, after putting on my “what if I wasn’t an idiot” hat on this is what I came up with.
I would allocate the expected tax amount into another account. So if you expect to make $400k that is ~$115k in taxes. So this would mean you need to get your bankroll plus an additional $115k. Then figure out your actual return rate and pay quarterly taxes out of that side account. Then at the end of the year (or whenever you have rotated out of positions, quarterly, randomly, etc) move money back into that account and adjust the amount if you are exceeding your goals.
This is sort of what I do for the speculative accounts in the office. I have one account that is always minimized. I rarely look in it.
In that account, I buy the best of the best stocks and just let them sit. When taxes are due the CFO just takes whatever money is needed out of that account. This is risky if you aren’t careful so it might be safer to just leave the account as cash. But, I expect to double that account every year and so far have been able to do that.
This works because the family has a dozen traditional revenue/income streams that they use to pay quarterly.
If you continue to work while trading you can always just tell your employer to over withdraw taxes from your salary in much the same way.
But, to be honest, this is something you need to talk to an expert about (or ChatGPT.)
MACRO:
Interesting observation.
“Futures” that are trading on DEX platforms completely over short the actual futures market yesterday. There was an arbitrage on real futures open. I wonder if anyone is trading that? My guess is Jane Street is.
Tomorrow is PPI. It should be a catastrophe. But, I don’t think anyone cares. UPDATE: PPI came in cool. Very unexpected.
Banks should continue to beat earnings because they have capitalized on all this volatility.
In case anyone hasn’t been following along. Axios and the NY Post are just funneling whatever the Administration wants to readers. Whenever the Administration wants them to know it.
Today, JPM, Goldman, MS and BOA all came out and said to buy the dip in various language but that was the point.
MICRO:
Zentalis Pharmaceuticals did take off yesterday. So I did flip it lowering my cost even more as I said I would. From ACC/Consolidation (gold diamond) to the spike was 5x.
A company called RedCloud took off this morning on news it was installing servers in Saudi Arabia. We did not own this stock but it did just recently trip BOB ΔLiquidity (purple diamond) and ACC/Consolidation a few days ago so it was primed and the market was expecting something to happen.
Also running premarket was Real Messenger Corporation which was in an FST (red predicted volatility event window) and also tripped ACC/Consolidation recently. I don’t see any news on this one. But, the code saw something and up she went 100% pre-market. And then really took off. Don’t look. It will make you tear up a bit.
As always, if you think there are spelling errors update your dictionary to the latest version. Happy speculation!
— AJ