You Can Trade Anything. You May Own Nothing.

The financial world is removing the difference between accessible and inaccessible assets. I am not convinced investors understand what they are giving up in return.

For most of my life, markets had fairly obvious borders. If a company was public, you could buy it. If it was private, listed in the wrong country or blocked by capital controls, you probably could not.

This week, investors found new ways to trade a Chinese chipmaker they could not directly access. Robinhood revealed that yes-or-no bets are becoming a serious business. And one of Wall Street’s most powerful market makers placed a $400 million bet on a crypto exchange.

I think these are three versions of the same story: the future broker will let you trade almost anything. The uncomfortable question is whether you will actually own any of it.

Chinese memory-chip maker CXMT rose 466% on its first day of trading in Shanghai. At its peak, it was briefly valued at roughly $547 billion—more than Tencent.

Many foreign investors could not buy the shares, so crypto exchanges filled the gap. Platforms including tradeXYZ and Gate.com offered perpetual futures linked to CXMT and other Chinese technology companies. A “perp” lets you speculate on an asset without owning it and has no expiry date.

With a stablecoin and an internet connection, a trader can gain synthetic exposure to a market designed to remain closed.

But I want you to notice what has changed. The platform is not making settlement faster. It is manufacturing access. You are entering a contract whose value is supposed to follow the share price, without receiving voting rights, dividends or a direct claim on the business. You also inherit counterparty risk and funding costs.

That trade-off will not stop demand. In fact, I suspect it is exactly why this market will grow. Investors hate being told that the most exciting asset is unavailable to them. Finance has learned that frustration can be turned into a product.

Robinhood’s latest results contained a number I would not dismiss as a novelty.

Revenue from event contracts reached $156 million in the second quarter, more than ten times the level a year earlier. Crypto transaction revenue, meanwhile, fell 38% to $100 million. A product that asks users to choose “yes” or “no” on an outcome now generates more quarterly revenue for Robinhood than cryptocurrency trading.

Prediction markets began with a respectable intellectual promise: aggregate dispersed information and produce better forecasts. Inside a brokerage app, their economic advantage is simpler. An election, a football match or an interest-rate decision can all become inventory—even when stocks are closed and Bitcoin is quiet.

Robinhood is reportedly discussing a deeper prediction-market relationship with Crypto.com, even as it builds its own exchange infrastructure. I do not read that as a side experiment. I read it as a competition to become the interface through which people express every financial opinion.

Prediction markets can produce useful probabilities. They can also erase the boundary between investing, trading and betting. When every belief has a buy button beside it, activity becomes easier to monetize than good judgment.

The business can still be excellent. It does not need the average customer to become wealthier; it needs the customer to return.

Citadel Securities has invested $400 million in Crypto.com at a $20 billion valuation. It is Crypto.com’s first institutional fundraising round, and the choice of investor matters more to me than the headline valuation.

Citadel Securities is one of the world’s largest market makers. Its business is built around liquidity, spreads and the infrastructure that allows enormous volumes of assets to change hands.

Crypto.com plans to use the capital to expand into tokenized securities and derivatives. In plain English, it wants to become much more than a place to buy cryptocurrency. It wants to become an exchange for stocks, event contracts and financial products that may not fit neatly inside traditional markets.

The analogy I keep returning to is cable television.

The old financial system gave you separate channels: a broker for stocks, another venue for futures and specialist funds for private assets. The new platforms want to bundle every channel into one interface and collect a small amount each time you switch.

Citadel Securities does not need to predict which contract wins. It benefits when the number of tradable contracts expands. The speculative product gets the attention; the market maker and distribution platform get paid for the activity.

If you want to see how this trend reaches private markets, I recommend reading “The $1.8 Trillion SpaceX Proxy Thesis” from Macro Notes.

SpaceX is a perfect example of the demand these platforms monetize. Millions want exposure, the company remains difficult to access, and synthetic tokens promise a shortcut. But a shortcut to its price is not ownership. The Macro Notes analysis takes a more disciplined route: it examines public companies that could provide indirect exposure to SpaceX and the wider satellite economy.

I believe universal market access is coming faster than most investors expect. Within a few years, a single app may let you trade a public stock, a private-company proxy, an election outcome and a football match from the same balance.

That sounds like democratization. It also resembles a casino with almost infinite tables.

My rule is simple: whenever a platform says it has made an inaccessible asset accessible, I first ask what I legally own, who owes me the money and what happens if the platform disappears. The product may reproduce the price perfectly—right up until the moment those questions matter.

If everything becomes tradable, I would rather study the companies manufacturing access than chase every new synthetic asset they manufacture…