"Say Anything" was a great movie with an all-time boom box meme; "Trade anything" is how retail investors live now.

The big picture: The so-called dumb money has evolved from the 2021 GameStop meme stock moment.

• Retail investors now move in and out of commodities, precious metals, currencies, Oscar ballots — trading on the latest hot macro or geopolitical trend or even a news event.

Where it stands: This "post-modern" trade, as one proponent is calling it, was impossible to ignore over the past few weeks as retail investors flocked to trade oil futures.

Between the lines: Trading oil futures is typically not for the fainthearted. It is the province of big institutional investors, hedge funds and large corporate consumers.

• The barriers to entry, until recently, were high. You can't just trade a contract on, say, a single barrel of oil. CME sells contracts in blocks of 1,000 barrels — and investors need ample reserves to protect against margin calls.

State of play: Trading activity for options on the United States Oil Fund exchange-traded fund was 76 times that of typical volumes on Apex's retail platform, according to a report the company released yesterday.

• It also surged on TradeXYZ, an offshore exchange where you can trade "perpetual" oil futures and other things using digital currency 24 hours a day. Just yesterday, when we checked, $1.5 billion in volume had traded on its popular Brent oil future contract over the previous 24 hours.
• TradeXYZ, is basically an app than runs on Hyperliquid, a popular new crypto-trading exchange that operates offshore and was founded by a Harvard grad.

Flashback: Before oil was the big thing, it was silver — retail traders drove a squeeze in the precious metal earlier this year.

Zoom out: It's not simply that retail is trading oil. It's that retail is trading everything, says Kaledora Kiernan-Linn, a Harvard grad who cofounded Ostium, another offshore platform where you can trade futures, stocks, metals and crypto using ... crypto.

• "The whole concept of being a crypto trader or being a stock trader or an FX trader has almost eroded," she says, calling the phenom "post-modern."

Follow the money: It's why Polymarket and Kalshi have also gained traction. People are trading and betting on whatever they can.

• "I think it's a bigger phenomenon in culture, which is just ... the trading culture and the hyper-financialization culture that's broadening," says Cosmo Jiang, a general partner at Pantera Capital, which is invested in Hyperliquid.
• "People like to call it financial nihilism."

Friction point: This is risky stuff. The new crypto platforms operate outside the U.S. and aren't regulated or backstopped. They're technically off limits in the U.S., but that hasn't stopped them from growing in popularity.

The bottom line: Back in the GameStop era, traders thought, "Cool company. Do I like the stock?" says Mike Treacy, vice president of risk at Apex.

• Now, investors are asking very different questions about geopolitics and the macro economy, and making moves well outside the confines of a strip mall video game store.

🔮 What to watch: Kalshi founders Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara talk prediction markets vs. gambling, insider trading and Donald Trump Jr. with Dan Primack on the latest episode of "The Axios Show."

Watch the episode on YouTube.

Emerging market stocks and indexes surged in yesterday's ceasefire relief rally.

Why it matters: Earlier this year, international stocks were growing in popularity as investors looked for ways to invest in AI outside U.S. market standbys like the Mag 7 stocks.

• The Iran war snapped that streak, but perhaps now the stocks are back.

Zoom in: The iShares emerging markets ETF, a popular fund that tracks an index made up of stocks from big developing economies, rose 5.5% yesterday — the biggest one-day increase since exactly one year ago, when it bounced up nearly 7% after Trump announced a tariff pause.

• The ETF offers exposure to popular AI companies outside the U.S., including Samsung, Tencent, SK Hynix and Taiwan Semiconductor.
• Investors are looking to buy what was working before the conflict, one portfolio manager told Bloomberg.

The latest: South Korea's Kospi — perhaps most emblematic of the international AI play — shot up after the ceasefire.

The bottom line: To paraphrase an old Coca-Cola campaign: A Trump pause refreshes.

The TACO trade has landed in Tokyo.

• Japanese broadcaster Fuji News Network explained the TACO concept in an evening segment yesterday covering recent developments in the Iran war.

Why it matters: Trump's mixed messaging has market and geopolitical implications far-reaching enough to merit a segment on non-English news broadcasts overseas.

Zoom in: On the show, announcer Koki Adake explained that the acronym stands for "Trump Always Chickens Out" and that it was popularized in financial circles last year to describe the president often backing off from tariff threats.

• 🐙 The panelists noted the word "taco" is pronounced the same way as the Japanese word for octopus, "tako."

Watch the segment on YouTube.