Philip Stafford
@staffordphilip
Reporter at the Financial Times Bits of UK retail, markets, bits of market structure, bits of crypto or mix of all of them. If you've been spammed in your DM with a crypto scam, it's not me.
So many things in the letter but let's start with this disingenious part: CME's leverage on bitcoin futures is 2x. Assets have different leverage levels to reflect in part their stability but also the depth and liquidity of their markets. www.ft.com/content/49eb...
How do you portray financial markets in the 2020s? This par comes close to perfection.
Naturally, this story shows up in the week I give up the retail beat. Sigh.
Didn't realise there was a fear Fifa would ever lose control of it. I'm all reassured by the plan now. www.ft.com/content/d280...
Which again begs the questions: What exactly was OpenAI testing? What was the chatbot prompt? How secure was the sandbox?
Brother of Trump's son in law as lead investor. There's always an angle, a thread that ends up in the same place.
After last year's strawberry & creme sandwich, this summer M&S is bringing out a chocolate, strawb & pistachio version. It looks, er, indescribable.
Well Sam, I wonder why this could be. www.ft.com/content/1d37...
Scrolling as academic research. Preferred political identity of partisans in the Messi-Ronaldo wars. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
Another leg down for bitcoin overnight. Harder to sneer about 'having fun staying poor' when tech stocks are making huge gains. Crypto benefits from likely to be diffused into infrastructure, making gains hard to capture as an investment. It's an existential moment for the market. Why bother?
The divergence between tech gains and crypto losses has extended massively since April but crypto has really not got over last Oct's market crash. finance.yahoo.com/markets/cryp...
Plus this only holds if you ignore the competition's dominant team.
Case in point being this. Polymarket dot com is the international site, supposedly inaccessible to US persons (who can use Polymarket US).
Low key obsessed with the details of this Trump presidential bookless library. eg is there or isn't there a gold escalator by AF1?
The Food and Drink Federation has drastically upgraded UK food inflation forecasts for '26 (Assuming SoH opens within 2-3 weeks and ME energy production returns to normal within a year)
@brokenbanker.bsky.social @jmackin2.bsky.social Think something has gone wrong with the BRC website. That's not the embargoed version that went round yesterday. This would chime more with the headline.
Did they offer to buy "huge, very great" amounts of $TRUMP memecoin in a newly minted crypto coin called Hormuz?
When people say to me, ‘Oh, would you rather be thought of as a funny man or a great boss?’ My answer's always the same: to me, they're not mutually exclusive. www.ft.com/content/e5fb...
The Fifa peace prize winner. He creates a desert, calls it peace.
Maybe the real treasure was the "oil at $120" story research we did along the way
Meanwhile, for some a good crisis is an opportunity to unveil their "drone-roll up/publicly traded golf courses" play www.wsj.com/politics/nat...
This is strategising steps ahead of the opposition. Trump struggles to explain why he launched another Middle Eastern war www.ft.com/content/fd31...
Gold, you say? What an unexpected new colour addition. And dark blue now now longer an issue. What fortune.
It looked like an artificial price jump in the run-up to people heading off for Chinese New Year, and seems to have played out.
Donald Trump’s top antitrust enforcer Gail Slater to leave DoJ. www.ft.com/content/19f8...
Intercontinental Exchange off another 4% today, LSEG barely moved pre Elliott news. Exchanges that jumped furthest into data hit hardest by AI fears. Market yet to buy the argument proprietary data is a potential goldmine in AI world.