Over the past couple of days, I’ve been seeing a bunch of discussions about re-pledging and shared security—it sounds like an old tape rewinding over and over: returns stack layer by layer, and your mind can easily start stacking illusions too. Put simply, security can’t be copied out of thin air. If you keep “lending out” the same collateral as a guarantee, and something really goes wrong, you end up with a chain reaction. The returns look like addition, but the risks are more like multiplication. Meanwhile, on the macro side, people are also talking about rate-cut expectations, and the US Dollar Index moving up and down together with risk assets—I’m actually even less willing to treat “tailwinds from sentiment” as a protective charm.