finance

2026-01-29 · open the original ↗

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2026-01-29 · open the original ↗

• He answers the objection to yesterday's pension argument by walking through the mechanics rather than the principle. The complaint was fiduciary: funds must chase the best return. His reply is that nobody proposed all the money — the mandates are 10%, and the other 90% goes wherever the manager likes. But the flow effect arrives long before the stock effect. The moment a 10% domestic floor is announced, the portfolio manager stops buying anything new until the ratio is met. Two of the countries he covered hold around $25 trillion between them; 10% is $2.5 trillion that stops bidding and then starts selling. He sets that against the years when the US absorbed 60 to 65% of every investable dollar in the world.
• The Swiss franc is behaving the way it does when currencies come apart, and he has seen this before. Up 14% last year and 3% already this year, at a decade high, with inflation at 0.1% and heading negative — investors are paying to hold it. The stated drivers are erratic US policymaking and doubts about central bank independence, with the yen, the other traditional haven, made unusable by the relentless JGB selloff that has taken 40-year bonds down 17 points. The awkward part is that the US has accused Switzerland of currency manipulation and threatened 50% tariffs, which constrains how the SNB can intervene — and the cross that actually matters is EUR/CHF, since the euro area is about 95% of Swiss trade. The level everyone is watching is 0.90, with nobody wanting to see 0.89, and he is candid that he does not know what breaks there. He remembers the 1980s version: daily announcements of how many francs had been printed that day, purely to stop people buying them.
• The Plaza Accord is the precedent, and he uses it as a warning rather than a template. The G5 met to weaken a dollar that had produced a trade deficit of 3.5% of GDP — against 6.3% in 2024 and 5.9% last year. Coordinated selling took the dollar down 4% in days, then 50% against the yen, from 260 to 120, and 40% against the Deutsche Mark, at the urging of the American auto industry. It worked so well it required the Louvre Accord two years later to stop the fall, with the US not meeting its own commitments — and his view is that Japan never recovered from it. On crypto as the fourth haven, which he floated three years ago and never endorsed: the dollar fell 10% last year and 3% this year while crypto went from 125 to 84, so it is not an alternative currency, and against gold and silver it is not an alternative store of value either. What it is, he says, remains unanswered.

2026-01-28 · open the original ↗

• Carney's line at Davos is the framework stated by a sitting head of government. A country that cannot feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself has few options — three of the five factors in one sentence. His extension is about alliance selection rather than national capability: most countries cannot be the US or China, so they need allies, and they will choose them on the five factors. He notes the US currently believes it needs no allies and expects that to prove short-sighted, while allowing that it will be settled by events.
• Japan's stimulus package is a five-factor investment programme with tax credits attached. Takaichi's "responsible fiscal expansion" means more debt from an already deficit position, on the reasoning that not investing now costs the next ten to twenty years. The package: immediate depreciation or 7% credits on buildings, software and large-scale productivity equipment; 40% tax credits for strategic technology including AI, quantum and biotech; and five years of clean power subsidies for firms switching to fully decarbonised electricity — which matters because Japan imports all its energy, and is separately restarting the world's largest nuclear plant, closed since the tsunami. The line he fixes on is from Fidelity International: giant Japanese investors are being increasingly incentivised to sell overseas holdings and bring the money home, and it is already hurting long-dated global bonds everywhere else.
• The pension mandates are spreading faster than he expected, and the sums involved are enormous. The UK asked funds voluntarily to put 5% into domestic companies in listed critical industries; when he went back to check, a bill had been introduced in the Commons making it 10% and compulsory. Canada, Australia and Japan are running versions of the same policy; the EU's is procurement — defence contracts to EU firms only, with Macron telling the UK there is no money for non-members. His read is that on economics rather than politics there is no way the UK stays outside the EU, and the two are already discussing terms. The exposure at risk: Europeans hold a record $10.4 trillion of US assets, Japan about $2.22 trillion, close to $25 trillion between them before counting Canada. His prediction is dated and specific — within about six months, countries begin ordering their pension funds to sell US holdings and repatriate into domestic critical industries.

2026-01-27 · open the original ↗

• Silver's rally is being read as meme-stock mechanics, not metals fundamentals. One host points to February silver options pricing in roughly a 20% expected move over three to four weeks, calling that "insane" for a market that normally moves like molasses; gold and platinum show a similar but smaller version of the same dynamic.
• He predicts a GameStop-style collapse and plateau, not a gradual decline. Silver either drops $30–$40 in a single morning or grinds down roughly $10 a day for about a week before losing $50, then settles near $50–$70 for the next year — the same pattern he says GameStop followed, falling to about $25 and sitting there for nearly four years.

2026-01-27 · open the original ↗

• The "Tokyo Trap": supporting Japan's currency could undercut Trump's own weak-dollar goal. As Japanese rates rise, trillions in yen-funded borrowing must flow back to Japan, likely forcing Japan — the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasuries — to sell them, pushing U.S. yields and the dollar higher and sabotaging the administration's aim of a cheaper dollar to boost manufacturing.
• Japan's "reflation" narrative masks what the author calls a looming fiscal failure. At roughly 250% debt-to-GDP, every 1% rate increase adds an estimated 8–10 trillion yen to Japan's annual interest bill; the Ministry of Finance's assumed 2026 interest rate of 3% means Japan would spend nearly a quarter of its budget on interest alone, a trajectory the author likens directly to the UK's 2022 Liz Truss crisis.
• The 30-year yen carry trade — borrowing cheap yen to buy higher-yielding U.S. assets — is unwinding as both of its supporting conditions break. Japanese rates are rising and the yen is strengthening simultaneously; if investors are forced to unwind margin positions and repay yen loans, they must sell U.S. assets including stocks like Nvidia, creating a potential domino effect into U.S. equity markets.
• The author flags specific thresholds to watch rather than treating this as abstract risk. USD/JPY breaking 140 would signal accelerating carry-trade unwinds, a 10-year JGB yield above 2% would signal a Truss-like crisis, and further Bank of Japan intervention would likely mean more Treasury sales — with gold, silver, and copper already benefiting as capital seeks safety outside the dollar.

2026-01-27 · open the original ↗

• Circle's price correlation to Bitcoin is called pure coincidence, not logic. One host argues a stablecoin company should carry zero or even negative correlation to Bitcoin, since stablecoins are a flight-to-quality vehicle tied to Treasuries with no appreciation potential, while Bitcoin is bought precisely for upside — meaning the two assets are priced for opposite reasons.
• Quant and bot trading firms are praised as liquidity, not competition. Rejecting the framing that high-frequency traders disadvantage retail, one host says he "loves" them because their scale and competition against each other tighten markets and keep spreads penny-wide, calling them "dumb money" that makes his own fills better rather than a threat to compete against.
• None of the three hosts personally spend money on AI tools. Despite calling AI's technology "game-altering," they question who is actually paying for the buildout — one spends nothing, another guesses his son spends about $25 a month — and ask openly where the revenue to justify the infrastructure spending is supposed to come from.
• A modest bearish 2026 call draws pushback for ignoring VIX history. The hosts expect the S&P down a few percent this year, citing stretched valuations and geopolitical tension, with any weakness most likely in Q1; a caller counters that after last year's VIX spike to 40, history offers no precedent for back-to-back down years, making bullish the more contrarian call.

2026-01-26 · open the original ↗

• He has now been throttled on two platforms in two weeks, and the mechanics are worth recording. A video posted around 4:30 in the afternoon did not finish uploading until 7am the next morning — fifteen hours for a clip about the yen — and then drew about twenty views, having never entered the For You page. On X he remains banned after repeated appeals in which the stated reason changed from impersonation to inauthenticity to posting someone else's authentic material, with no example ever produced when he asked what he had actually done.
• The audience is migrating rather than disappearing, and the numbers show where. YouTube is running 500 to 800 views against 10 to 20 a few months ago, with 578 on the video in question. Substack is at about 25. Bluesky he calls difficult. He names other creators seeing the same pattern and says he expects TikTok to become unusable, which he regrets specifically because of the comment quality — he rates the questions there and on YouTube as outstanding, and X as more trader-oriented and closest to the news.
• The market content is a pointer back to his 5 January call, which he thinks is starting to confirm. That video proposed a large move down in the euro and a large move up in the yen. The euro has drifted lower; the yen, he argues, may be at the beginning of the big move. His suggested reference point is 1985 and what happened between the dollar and the European currencies then, with a gold leg he may cover separately. His closing observation is the flat one: they control the means of communication, he is not in it, and unless a viewer happens to be an oligarch there is nothing they can do to help.

2026-01-26 · open the original ↗

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2026-01-25 · open the original ↗

• He came on unplanned to contradict a claim spreading on X, and the objection is directional. The posts say the Fed is preparing to sell dollars and buy yen to rescue a collapsing currency — that yields are soaring while the yen tanks, a sign the market is broken. His response is that the yen is not tanking. It closed Friday at 155.71 and trades 154.44 in the shadow market. The chart is going the other way from the thesis built on it, which he calls the math not mathing.
• The reason the yen is rising is that three policies are pulling in offsetting directions. Takaichi is running a stimulus and cutting taxes, which alone would sink the currency — and briefly did. But after twenty-three years of negative rates the BOJ is raising, with another hike due this week, and she said on Friday she does not believe in restrictive monetary policy while it happens anyway. Stimulus plus tax cuts plus rising rates nets out to a stronger yen, which he says makes perfect sense and is precisely what is bad for the carry trade. He also insists on scale: the yen has run 80 to 160 and back; moves between 153 and 158 are not moves, and institutions in a trade that size cannot turn positions the way a retail trader can.
• The trades are structured for yield, not for war, and that is his correction to the whole genre. The yen carry trade uses 40-year JGBs because they pay the most over the borrowing cost; the Cayman basis trade uses T-bills; the gilt carry trade uses ten-year gilts. Each instrument is chosen for the carry, not because anyone intends to break a currency — the only question any of them is answering is how to maximise profit for the least risk. Which is why he thinks the intervention story is backwards on its own terms: with the 40-year JGB at 3.99 against the US ten-year at 4.23, an administration openly wanting the dollar 25 to 30% lower, and Takaichi doing what she is doing, a trillion-dollar manager sells Treasuries and buys JGBs on the investment case alone. And if the market believed the Fed was selling dollars to buy yen, the institutions would front-run it by selling America — which is the outcome Washington least wants. He notes the Friday move in the 40-year was large enough to imply serious money buying, and says plainly he does not know what the Fed is doing.

2026-01-24 · open the original ↗

• He rebuilds the carry trade from the inside so the break point is visible. A Japanese insurer or city bank buys a 40-year JGB yielding, on a 2014-onward average, about 1.5%. It then borrows 100 cents on the dollar against it — no haircut, exactly as with US Treasuries — at a BOJ rate of roughly 0.25%, netting 1.25% of carry. The borrowed money does not go abroad. It buys another $100 million of JGBs, which are borrowed against again, twenty to forty times over. Only then does the resulting $2 billion go overseas into US stocks and Treasuries. For scale, the Cayman basis trade funds average 56 turns and some exceed 100.
• Ueda's normalisation attacks the trade from both ends simultaneously. The borrowing cost has gone from 0.25% to 0.75% and he has said it goes to 1% — so carry compresses from 1.25% toward 0.5% on a 1.5% asset. That is survivable. What is not is the price: the 40-year has fallen from par to 83.50 over six months, so a position levered twenty times into bonds bought at par is carrying a mark-to-market loss on the whole stack. And since every bond was borrowed against, the loss arrives as a margin call — on the JGBs, not on the yen. These institutions run at twenty to thirty times leverage and hold no idle cash, so the choice is post or sell. Selling is what breaking looks like.
• Friday's tape shows the sequence running, and it explains why Washington is nervous. The New York Fed contacted counterparties at Treasury's direction for rate checks in the yen market, fuelling intervention speculation. Meanwhile the yen reversed from around 158.50-159, where everyone expected 160, and strengthened; the 40-year JGB went from nearly 4.40 to 3.93. Both moves are what a margin call looks like from the outside: sell US securities, convert the dollars into yen, buy JGBs, retire the margin. The awkwardness for the US is that it wants a weaker dollar and a stronger yen as stated policy — 20 to 30% on both — but not delivered through forced liquidation of American assets. What they are actually worried about is not the currency but which market gets sold to fund the repatriation.

2026-01-23 · open the original ↗

• Section 4 of the 25th Amendment exists but is deliberately built to be nearly unusable. It requires the Vice President and a majority of the Cabinet (or a congressionally-created alternate body) to declare the President unable to serve, followed by a two-thirds vote of both the House and Senate — a higher bar than impeachment, which needs only a simple House majority and two-thirds in the Senate alone.
• The amendment's drafters intentionally left "inability" undefined and distinct from unpopularity. Written after the JFK assassination to solve a continuity-of-government gap dating to the 1841 "Tyler Precedent," Section 4 was meant to address incapacity — a stroke, kidnapping — not disagreement with a President's performance or policy choices, and it has never been invoked or interpreted by the Supreme Court.
• Applying Section 4 to Trump today is legally live but practically near-impossible. It would require Vice President Vance to risk his political future by leading a Cabinet revolt he'd likely lose, or a Congress controlled by Republicans to create a new commission under Section 4's "other body" clause — both scenarios the author calls effectively zero-probability under current political conditions.
• Even the attempt would carry severe market consequences. The author cites the S&P 500's roughly 23% decline across Watergate and the NYSE's early closure after the 1981 Reagan shooting as precedent for how markets react to presidential-transition uncertainty, arguing an actual Section 4 invocation would likely trigger a flash crash, a VIX spike, and a gold rally as markets questioned who held authority.

2026-01-23 · open the original ↗

• Silver hit $100 and he uses it to restate the original recommendation rather than take a victory lap. The relative he mentions bought around $11.50; the call covered gold, silver and the commodity complex broadly, with an explicit instruction to find a vehicle giving direct commodity exposure rather than buying the companies that consume commodities. He passes along the Bank of America view that in 2026 the charts for all commodities look like gold and silver did in 2025, with the caveat that he does not know if it is true.
• Intel down 15% on earnings gets the same treatment: this was never a stock argument. He quotes his own first video on it from two years ago — as a stock there is no reason to own it, none, zero. The reason to own it is that roughly 95 to 97% of high-end chips are made sixty miles off the coast of China, and the morning after Taiwan is taken, Intel is the most valuable company in America while Nvidia and AMD trade below $5. The Davos quote he cites makes the same point independently: the single biggest point of failure in the world economy is that 97% of high-end chips come from Taiwan. On the fundamentals he offers a comparison rather than a model — Intel at $13 billion of quarterly revenue against a $500 billion valuation on a company expected to lose $40 billion on $20 billion of revenue — plus the ramp from 18A to 14A and the big tech packaging commitments already signed.
• He spends the rest correcting stories he thinks are wrong, including ones that flatter his own thesis. China did not just cut anyone off: the export licensing laws went in in 2019 and no silver application has been refused in the years since, so the cutoff story is false. Three weeks ago the internet had JP Morgan bankrupt on $500 billion of losses, along with Bank of America, Goldman and COMEX itself; none of them are. There is real stress, but he refuses the suppression narrative outright — you cannot suppress the price of a global commodity — and locates the paper discount instead in genuine uncertainty about whether COMEX can deliver, which persists until miners and refiners physically add supply on a timeline he says he has no ability to estimate. On Europe he notes that Trump's tariff and Greenland threats did in a week what no one else managed: 80% now want a European armed force, 61% favour federalising against 27% who would dissolve, and the right-wing parties tied to Putin are polling badly for it. And he flags what is buried in the $2.5 billion critical minerals agency bill — the US will set an elevated global price for critical minerals so producers can profit, meaning it pays $110 for what China sells at $30, and subsidises the rest of the world while doing it.

2026-01-23 · open the original ↗

• The FIRE early-retirement movement is "economic delusion". The speaker rejects the idea of retiring within about seven years, arguing that most people who reach the end of a long career find they do not want to stop working. The clip offers no figures, and it cuts off just as it starts giving "the Lossdog take" on how hard success is.

2026-01-23 · open the original ↗

• Gold functions as a dollar alternative, not a commodity metal. Tom Lee argues price-to-sales logic fails for gold because total industrial and jewelry demand is about $120 billion against a roughly $30 trillion network value; viewed this way, other assets are effectively debased against gold.
• Most portfolios are underweight gold relative to recommended allocations. He notes Ray Dalio has suggested up to 10% and that he himself has previously floated 15%, while most investors currently hold zero.

2026-01-23 · open the original ↗

• Take-maximal-risk is offered as the best business advice, over caution. One host says never holding back — modeling the acquisitive habits of firms like Google, which buys roughly one company a day knowing most fail — matters more than any single piece of advice; the other credits watching his entrepreneur father repeatedly fail and rebuild, distilling the lesson to sheer resiliency instead.
• Across-the-board "peanut butter" raises are called a lazy shortcut, not fairness. With 55% of Fortune 500 companies planning uniform percentage raises in 2026, hosts say the practice avoids the harder work of individual evaluation; they favor a base raise plus a separate bonus pool sized to performance, while cautioning that nearly every employee believes they personally outperformed.
• Gold near $4,900 is called bad pot odds even by its own bulls. With gold up from roughly $2,000 about a year and a half ago, hosts say the setup now risks roughly 10% downside to capture perhaps 3% more upside toward $5,000, and neither would buy it here, though one holds gold only as a hedge against a separate short-silver position.
• Large banks are called priced for perfection; fintech looks cheaper. Hosts say traditional banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan trade in the "stratosphere" on legacy technology and fee-driven "annuitized returns," while post-selloff fintech and crypto-linked names like Coinbase (down over 50%) and Robinhood (down about 40%) offer better relative pot odds, despite carrying the same disruption risk.

2026-01-22 · open the original ↗

• Five rate cuts have moved the ten-year the wrong way, which is the fact the whole episode turns on. Short rates came down 1.75%, from 5.25% to 3.75%, trading around 3.64%. The ten-year was about 3.82% when cutting began and is 4.27% now — half a point higher after all of it. And the supply argument cuts against the administration too: Treasury has stopped issuing at the long end, so with supply withdrawn the yield should be compressing, and it is rising anyway. Whatever the theory was, it is not working out that way.
• The maturity wall is why control of the Fed matters so much to them. The debt is heavily front-loaded, with $10 to $11 trillion to roll in the next year, moving from a 0% funds rate at issuance to 3.75% — roughly $375 billion of additional annual interest on a $10 trillion roll. Last week alone, $654 billion was sold across nine auctions, $500 billion of it bills at four to twenty-six weeks, meaning it rolls again by June and July; of the $154 billion in coupons, only $50 billion was the ten-year and the rest were notes of three years or less. Around 83% of the debt now sits inside a two-to-three-year roll, with another $3 to $4 trillion to issue this year. His read is that the administration expected to control the Fed by now and to be rolling at 2% rather than 3.75% — Miran having voted for 1% — and notes Miran is heading back to the Council of Economic Advisers, by his reading with no credibility left on the Board.
• The composition of who holds the debt has quietly changed, and not in a reassuring direction. Foreign central banks hold around $4 trillion; the category labelled foreign private holders is above $9 trillion, and those are hedge funds — roughly $4 trillion domestic and $3 trillion foreign — running basis trades, gilt trades and yen carry trades. Central banks are strong hands; leveraged funds forced to sell on a margin call are the weakest hands there are, and they are now the largest block. He also flags the measurement problem underneath all of it: PCE is reported at 2.8% and he thinks it is at least 3.5 to 3.8%; the BLS head was fired after the numbers came out and the Fed has since questioned the data quality; and GDP has not been published for two months pending a reconfiguration. For someone who has watched these series for fifty years, that is not a good place for a country to be. The closing observation is that Takaichi's administration is using the same language about the BOJ that Washington uses about the Fed — more debt, at lower rates, with restrictive policy rejected — because every indebted government has reached the same conclusion and is crowding into the short end, which is the only end a central bank controls.

2026-01-22 · open the original ↗

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2026-01-21 · open the original ↗

• A 2% pullback isn't a real buying opportunity, one host argues. He says he didn't buy the dip and still favors "pot odds to the downside," mocking a Bloomberg guest who called the session "the best buying opportunity so far in 2026" after just one down day.
• He wants a genuine washout — at least 5% — before buying. With the S&P near 6,900, he puts that threshold at roughly 6,650, calling anything less, including yesterday's selloff, not a washout at all.

2026-01-21 · open the original ↗

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2026-01-21 · open the original ↗

• The historical record says currency moves alone have never broken this trade. Since 1995 the yen has run from 160 to 80, back to 150, down to 80, and back up again, through the whole ZIRP era — and the carry trade never came close to breaking, not once. He walks the chart back to 1960 through the Plaza Accord iterations to make the point stick. So the popular version, in which a yen rally kills the trade, has no precedent behind it. The trade is a multi-leg structure — buy the yen, buy the JGB, borrow against it at 25 basis points against a 1.5% coupon, take the carry overseas into higher-yielding assets — and the question is which leg actually fails.
• A regulatory change has removed the natural buyers of the long end, and that is new. Rules running April 2025 to March 2026 compel Japanese life insurers to match 30- and 40-year policy liabilities against long-duration assets using market-consistent discounting on current curves — sensible in itself — but with duration-risk penalties, solvency hits of 20 to 30% for mismatches, and targets that extend duration from 12-15 years to 20. The effect is that insurers are now saturated: they cannot buy more 40-year JGBs without taking capital charges they will not take. City banks and trust banks are stepping back on the same charts. So a country at 230-240% debt is cutting taxes and running a stimulus while its principal domestic buyers of long debt have been regulated out of the market.
• Who replaced them is the question he says he cannot answer, and he asks the audience directly. Overseas buyers are now 53% of ultra-long JGB issuance, a shift that started around 2019. He wants to know who they are and, more to the point, why — and says outright that he is fascinated and may be missing something. What he is confident about is the break mechanism, and it is a price mechanism rather than a currency one: the 40-year was at par six or seven months ago and is 83.55 now. A bank that borrowed the full value of bonds bought at par gets a margin call, and the only way to meet it is to sell US securities and bring the money home. He opens by setting Greenland aside as irrelevant to any of this, and notes that Takaichi called a snap election promising to abolish food taxes with no offsetting rise — which is what sent the 30-year, 10-year and 40-year yields vertical the day before.

2026-01-21 · open the original ↗

• Nvidia's valuation gap with Cisco rests on the CUDA ecosystem, not just chip demand. At ~46x P/E backed by record net income, Nvidia is far below Cisco's 200x dot-com peak, and unlike Cisco's unused "dark fiber," Nvidia's hardware is actively used — 4.5 million developers now build on CUDA (up from 1.8 million in 2020), creating switching costs Cisco never had and that AMD and Intel haven't matched.
• Export controls function as a regulatory moat, not just a risk. The U.S. government lets Nvidia sell H200 chips into China in exchange for a 25% cut of that revenue — a state-capitalism arrangement the author has criticized on principle but argues gives Nvidia government-backed skin-in-the-game support against Chinese alternatives like Huawei, which remain several generations behind on frontier AI workloads.
• The author's base case (50% probability) projects a $3.5 trillion market cap by 2028, below today's price. That scenario assumes the AI market reaches $400B with Nvidia holding 60% share and margins compressing to 55%; the bull case (25%) reaches $8T on 70% share and 60% margins, while the bear case (25%) falls to $1.35T if the AI market stalls at $250B and share drops to 50%.
• The author names concrete sell triggers rather than holding unconditionally. He will consider selling if any two or more of the following deteriorate: hyperscaler capex growth decelerates, gross margins fall below 58%, data-center GPU share drops below 80%, China revenue weakens, or AMD/custom chips (Google TPU, Amazon Trainium, Microsoft Maia) show real production traction — and would buy aggressively on a "Liberation Day"-style drop to $80–90/share.

2026-01-21 · open the original ↗

• The bond market, not the Fed, is called the one setting rates. With bond prices sliding to a 113 handle and the 10-year yield near 4.3% even as Trump pushes for faster cuts, hosts argue the Fed always plays catch-up to the bond market rather than the reverse, calling any attempt to predict what moves bonds long-term essentially unknowable.
• Prediction markets are called worse than legal sportsbooks on price. Despite covering far more markets, hosts say prediction-market fees run 1-2% per side, effectively making a binary market roughly 10% wide once costs are included — no better than DraftKings or FanDuel — and argue only a shift to true exchange-based pricing would let them compete on execution quality.
• Naked puts' record is credited to years without a real crash. Hosts call selling naked puts the historically most consistent options strategy, outperforming passive long positions with little pain since 2009 — but they caveat that every sell-off in that stretch, including last April's near-20% drop, snapped back quickly, and the strategy's edge would erode if that pattern breaks.
• A short-silver position was "annihilated" even as scalp trades kept winning. With silver near $94 and the gold-silver ratio near 50, a multi-decade low, one host describes scalping the short side profitably on every trade since Sunday night while his core short-silver, long-gold position took heavy losses — a correct short-term read alongside a badly timed core position.

2026-01-20 · open the original ↗

• He expects 2026 to extend the bull market that began in 2022, with resilience more visible. But he flags three transitions the market still has to absorb: a new Fed, a more aggressive White House picking sector and country winners and losers, and lingering doubts over the AI narrative.
• A newly confirmed Fed is typically "tested" by markets, which can itself cause a correction. The identification-and-confirmation process is, in his view, enough on its own to trigger a pullback.
• The White House is set to pick winners and losers across many more sectors and countries in 2026. He contrasts this with 2025, when disruption was concentrated in IT consulting and healthcare, and reads gold's rally as reflecting that broader uncertainty.
• He guesses the combination of these transitions could produce a drawdown that feels like a bear market. This is his own forecast, weighed against offsetting positives he sees, such as a turning ISM and a possible housing recovery as rates are cut.

2026-01-19 · open the original ↗

• The structural change since 2008 is who holds the debt, and it is a move from strong hands to weak. Before the financial crisis the largest block of US Treasuries sat with central banks — unlevered, not trading, no forced sellers. Today foreign central banks hold around $4 trillion while the hedge fund category is above $9 trillion, and the growth traces the Fed balance sheet: from about $3 trillion in 2014 to $4 trillion by 2020, with M2 going from roughly $10 trillion to $22.4 trillion. The expansion supplied the collateral and the funds bought it. The Cayman Islands is the largest single domicile, and the Fed's own count there went from about $423 billion to over $1.8 trillion once it recognised it had been counting wrong.
• The Bank of England is now saying the same thing about gilts, with sharper numbers. Hedge fund gilt positions have reached £100 billion, about $125 to $130 billion, and Bailey has warned of potential severe disruption. Funds are a third of gilt transactions, up from 15%, and — the line he tells listeners to read twice — are leveraging gilts to amplify bets sometimes by as much as 100 times on small differences between current and future bond values. A Liberal Democrat MP on the select committee put it more precisely still: a small group of mainly US-based hedge funds domiciled in the Cayman Islands account for 90% of all net borrowing in that market. The proposed remedy is haircuts on repo, where borrowers currently get 99.99 cents on the dollar; the industry's objection is that tighter rules would raise government borrowing costs, which he reframes as a choice between higher borrowing costs and blowing up the banking system. The deputy governor's response is that the status quo is not an option.
• March 2020 is the precedent, and it shows exactly how the failure propagates. Hedge funds sold over $200 billion of Treasuries within days and reduced total exposure by $430 billion — possible only because leverage means selling some is selling much more — which spiked yields while equities crashed and forced the Fed to buy $1 trillion of government debt to restore order. And that was not even a financial crisis. His conclusion is that the same eleven funds run the same crowded relative-value structure in both markets, funded ultra-short in repo against long assets, violating the first rule of never borrowing short to invest long. So the next shock does not need to start in Treasuries: losses anywhere force deleveraging everywhere, the largest holders of US and UK government debt become sellers simultaneously, and yields go up — before anything happens to the carry trade at all.

2026-01-18 · open the original ↗

• Bessent said the US will not outsource its national security, and the rebuttal was immediate and documentary. The response he shows lists the parts sourcing for four US weapons systems, where the semiconductor suppliers are overwhelmingly Chinese — the outsourcing happened, and by this account has been happening since 1971. The practical consequence surfaced the same week: the stated reason for not striking Iran is that the US lacks the munitions and cannot rebuild them fast enough. His reference point is the twelve-day war with Israel, in which eight years of missile production was expended on defence alone.
• He is honest about a claim he can no longer source, and corrects the record around it. He has repeatedly cited a DoD report putting the rare earth buildout at $1.5 to $2 trillion over twenty years; commenters challenged him, he went looking, and he cannot find it. What he can verify is Japan's example: about $1.5 billion invested publicly since 2010, real progress on light rare earths, essentially none on heavy, and still 70% dependent on China after fifteen years. Against that, the US commitment is $2.5 billion for a strategic reserve and a promise of hundreds of billions into mining — which returns him to the distinction he will not let go of: mining is not refining.
• His objection is to the ownership model, not the spending, and MP Materials is the case study. China's method was for the state to declare the buildout necessary and hire companies to execute — the same way it built its grid and its data centres, and the same way it made DeepSeek the national default so every industry's usage fed back into it. The US method is to buy stock and preferred equity: $400 million into MP alongside Apple's $500 million, plus a guaranteed price of $110 for material available from China at $30. Trump has now invoked Section 232 to push for price floors so that US mining is, in the bill's phrase, economically viable. His argument is that if the state is paying anyway, it should contract the work and attach conditions — no dividends, no buybacks — rather than underwrite a margin. Underneath it is the cultural claim he keeps returning to: America treats anything without a profit as having no value, healthcare included, and that premise cannot survive the amount of money this requires. He is careful to note he flagged MP at 11 when it ran to 96 and is now somewhere around 40 or 50, that the guaranteed price was the whole reason for the interest, and that the silver smelter funded at $2 billion takes five to seven years to build. He asks the audience whether the approach is right — as a real question, not a rhetorical one.

2026-01-17 · open the original ↗

• He was suspended from X, and the timing lines up with one video. The European piece was shadow banned on TikTok immediately — views on his last three videos fell 75%, and the European video specifically became ineligible for promotion. He appealed, TikTok cleared it, and all three videos immediately picked up 200 to 300 views, which is what convinces him the suppression was real rather than algorithmic noise. The X appeal is pending and he does not expect it to succeed. His observation is that the platforms are owned by people who decide what can be discussed, and his puzzlement is genuine: why bother with someone with an audience his size.
• He works out what backwardation in silver actually means and admits he had been reading it backwards. A futures price normally sits above spot, with the premium covering storage, insurance and physical delivery — and, he argues, an embedded expectation of delivery that is never quite 100%, whether it prices at 98.87 or 93. He had been thinking in terms of premium over spot. Here spot is the premium, and the correct reading is a discount applied to the future because delivery is genuinely uncertain. The corroboration is behavioural: COMEX participants going directly to miners offering 10% over spot on forward contracts, because they need metal the exchange cannot supply. The $10 to $15 paper-physical spread is one historic event; the second, which worries him more, is how long it has persisted.
• How it closes tells you whether the market is broken, and his answer is that it cannot close quickly. If a day's worth of silver appeared and every contract could be filled, the gap would shut immediately and futures would reprice to near-certain delivery. That is not available. High prices pull more mining and refining, but nobody currently holding is selling anything, so supply arrives slowly and the gap narrows over months — six or seven, he guesses, without pretending to know. He then asks the audience to look back at the news cycle they just lived through: JP Morgan, COMEX, Goldman, Bank of America and Deutsche Bank were all declared bankrupt, and days later it emerged that the American banks are long silver. His read is that people saw genuine stress, saw repo activity that was ordinary year-end balance sheet dressing, and built a bailout narrative on top of a facility that would never be used for that purpose. Recognising stress is good; understanding why it is there is the part that matters. He closes by saying he is not sure it is feasible to keep doing this in the current environment, and will let people know.

2026-01-16 · open the original ↗

• Paying everyone in a role the same ignores real differences in skill. One host argues that because individuals bring different strengths, uniform pay for a given role "makes absolutely no sense," pushing back on the idea that equal pay for equal roles is inherently fair.
• Pay transparency's wage-gap benefit is real but comes with a feared tradeoff. The hosts call the idea that transparency narrows the gap for women and other underpaid groups "a very valid argument," but one worries it won't lift the bottom up — instead compressing pay at the top, meaning higher earners (described as men) end up making less.

2026-01-16 · open the original ↗

• Gold earns a strategic place in portfolios, not only in crises. Asked by Frost whether gold pauses when growth looks good, Tait argues there is "always a very, very positive reason" for holding it, and says the past six years have started to shift the perception of gold as purely the disaster trade.
• Investors skipped gold because it was complex and capital-heavy. Tait cites ignorance, apathy and capital burden as the reasons; in 35 years of trading "literally everything," he says he never once traded gold because it ate into his capital and reduced his returns, and a whole generation of traders went around it.
• Lower capital costs will make gold a mainstream asset class, he predicts. Tait says his work over the last six years has aimed to cut those capital burdens through improvements such as digitalization, and forecasts that over time events will drive gold less and investors will treat it as they do dollars, bonds or equities.

2026-01-16 · open the original ↗

• Strangles are easier to manage than iron condors. Answering a viewer whose daughter's $30,600 account returned 21% and 28% on the wheel plus condors, the hosts say condors are hard to adjust for delta, while a strangle's single short legs can be rolled up or down. Their advice: stay with what works, and add strangles on low-priced, high-IV-rank names at wide strikes, in one or two lots.
• Buying options is a rare exception for them, never both sides. One host calls options wasting assets and names buying premium as the strategy they would rarely recommend. They would buy directional puts or calls on a hunch or intraday when volatility is expanding, but never a long strangle or straddle. They add that buying carried less risk that day, with the S&P up about 44 and VIX futures down roughly 5%.
• One host traded silver all night, fading rallies and buying gold. The host reports 20 to 25 trades, selling silver from 88 up to 93 and buying gold against it near a gold/silver ratio of 49, plus repeated middle-of-the-night round trips between 87 and 89. Silver was then near $90, down $1.32, after a range of roughly 86 to 93.70.
• An employer would almost never grant a three-day week. Asked by a 20-year engineer, both hosts say they would refuse except for a rare, very valuable person, reading the request as wanting to leave while keeping a safety net. Their advice is to take the leap if affordable, since an engineer could return to the field if the new venture fails.
• Mortgage rules favouring W-2 income are flawed but have no alternative. The hosts argue lenders use income certainty to manage risk, and that the workaround is a bigger down payment, as requirements rose after 2008–09. They claim the US is nearly alone in backing leveraged home ownership, and that banks fail from bad rate, currency and bond bets, not home loans.

2026-01-15 · open the original ↗

• 1099 income is punished by a system built for W-2 certainty. Lenders require three consecutive years of 1099 income before counting it toward a loan, even though a W-2 borrower could lose their job the day after closing; the host calls this a "flawed system" that favors lenders because managing risk is their business.
• The U.S. is called the only country enabling homeownership through leverage. He argues that putting just 5–20% down to buy a home, as is standard in America, is rare elsewhere in the world, where borrowing to buy property is far harder — a system Americans take for granted.

2026-01-15 · open the original ↗

• The scale mismatch between the problem and the response is the whole episode. Lawmakers are debating a $2.5 billion agency to boost critical minerals production, against a Defense Department figure of $1.5 to $2 trillion over twenty years — and the article notes it is too early to say whether the bill passes. The one US rare earth refining facility announced in October, with zero reliance on Chinese inputs, equipment or technology, has a capacity of 200 tons a year against a national requirement he puts at 95 million. On production, the US did 67,000 tons to China's 620,000. His conclusion is that anyone claiming this gets solved in six months or a year is contradicted by the administration's own posture.
• Aluminium is the example that shows how deep the dependency runs. The $150 million of preferred equity into the last US aluminium refinery, in Louisiana, looks marginal until you follow the process: bauxite into aluminium leaves red mud, and red mud is where rare earths come from. The US has one small plant, and imports most of its aluminium from Canada because hydropower makes the enormous electricity requirement affordable — while Canada is in Beijing signing deals. Fifteen companies now have US government equity stakes, roughly $20 billion committed, plus $8.5 billion to Australia for mining, which he flags again as the wrong verb. The press calls this a pivot to state capitalism; he thinks state socialism is the more honest word and says the label matters less than the strategic logic, which even the critics concede is compelling — industrial sovereignty by another name.
• The diplomatic sequence has a deadline, and Europe has already refused the format. Bessent chaired a G7 finance huddle on critical minerals vulnerability and thanked participants for their willingness to work together — the same Bessent who argued in late 2025 that the G7 is no longer relevant given the shift toward BRICS, and that America first means dealing with suppliers directly rather than through Brussels or Tokyo. The numbers behind that: the G7 is now about 30% of global GDP, down from 70%, with BRICS around 35%. The asks are a G7 alignment by 4 February and bilateral agreements signed by individual European countries by 22 January — Germany, France, each separately — and Europe's answer is that it is the EU or nobody. On Europe he adds two data points he does not want to sit on: Moldova's president saying he would support and vote for a referendum to join Romania, on the reasoning that a small country can no longer survive as a sovereign democracy alone; and Merz raising eventual convergence with Russia, which he has said all along is a fifteen-year proposition that makes no political sense and complete economic sense, particularly if China takes eastern Russia. His marker for how far NATO has already inverted: Europeans invoking Article 5 and sending troops to Denmark to guard against the United States.

2026-01-15 · open the original ↗

• The threatened criminal indictment of Fed Chair Jerome Powell marks a qualitative escalation beyond past pressure. The DOJ — which the author notes has already targeted figures like NY AG Letitia James and John Bolton — is pursuing allegations the author calls frivolous regarding Fed building renovations, following an earlier attempt to fire Fed Governor Lisa Cook without investigation; the author argues the credibility of Treasuries, the dollar, and U.S. finance rests on the Fed's presumed independence.
• The 1970s Arthur Burns precedent shows how "captured" central banks fail in slow motion. Nixon-tapes evidence confirmed Burns loosened monetary policy to help Nixon's 1972 reelection via "stop-and-go" policy, which eroded market trust that the Fed would actually fight inflation and contributed to CPI peaking above 12% by 1974, ultimately requiring Paul Volcker's 20% rate hikes to break.
• The author lays out concrete portfolio hedges against dollar debasement and unanchored inflation expectations. These include shifting equity exposure toward the Eurozone, Japan, and emerging markets with current-account surpluses; gold and silver (up nearly 70% over the past year); and real estate and commodities, while expressing skepticism toward Bitcoin as an inflation hedge given its volatility.
• Specific indicators are offered as early-warning triggers for acting on the hedge. A 10-year breakeven rate rising toward 3-4% (versus ~2.29% currently), consumer inflation expectations spiking well above 2%, and a gold/oil ratio pushing toward 30 (versus a historical ~15) would each signal markets have concluded the Fed's 2% target credibility is effectively dead.

2026-01-14 · open the original ↗

• The OMFIF report puts a number on the basis trade that the official estimate missed by nearly five times. The Fed conservatively estimated the trade captures 45 basis points annualised, levered at least twenty times through repo or prime brokerage for upwards of a 9% yield, with the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee calling twenty times a good anecdotal approximation. OMFIF asked the funds directly and got 56 times. Then in late 2025 the Fed reconstructed Cayman holdings from multiple data sources rather than single regulatory filings and found another $1.4 trillion, taking the total from roughly $423 billion to $1.85 trillion at end-2024. Morgan Stanley's independent attempt, using CFTC and derivatives inputs, lands at $1.5 trillion. Nobody knows the size of the most leveraged trade in the United States, including the regulator holding the filings.
• The bills-only Treasury portfolio has a second-order effect that gets missed. Warsh's preference for shorter-dated holdings began shifting the portfolio in 2019 and it now sits around 83% bills. OMFIF's point is that starving institutional cash investors of bills forces them to provide short-term financing against long-term Treasuries to leveraged investors instead — a more brittle version of the same structure. So the funding composition of the largest leveraged trade in the market is itself being reshaped by issuance policy, and the organisation's view is that monitoring is not a sufficient response.
• The question he actually wants answered is whether the two big trades take each other down. The yen carry trade and the Cayman basis trade are the two largest leveraged positions in the world and nobody can say which is bigger. The linkage is not mechanical or one-for-one, but both sit on balance sheets sensitive to the same FX moves, rates, volatility and margin calls. The sequence: BOJ hikes raise yen funding costs while US cuts narrow the differential, yen appreciation makes it worse, and holders must sell. If the resulting squeeze tightens dollar-yen funding or raises repo and futures haircuts — and raising margin is exactly what is already happening in silver — it becomes cross-asset deleveraging. Funds earning 18 or 19% at 56 times will not exit voluntarily, but forced sellers of Treasuries push yields up, which puts the basis trade itself into loss, which forces its unwind, which pushes Treasury yields up again. He offers this as the thing to hold on to for 2026, and ends without an answer.

2026-01-14 · open the original ↗

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2026-01-14 · open the original ↗

• Tait argues Howard Marks' discounted-cash-flow critique of gold misjudges how most equity investors actually invest. He says many equity holders buy and sell for nominal gains rather than off DCF value, so judging gold by a stricter standard than stocks is inconsistent.
• Gold's value is cultural and functional across most of the world, not just speculative. He describes it as a long-standing medium of exchange and store of family wealth outside wealthy financial centers like London, plus a small but growing use in high-tech manufacturing.
• He characterizes Marks as a "conventional," DCF-driven investor who underestimates these drivers. Tait likens gold's appeal to Warren Buffett's description of it as an "unexplainable relic" that nonetheless means more to more people worldwide than equities do.

2026-01-13 · open the original ↗

• He states the negotiating problem plainly and cannot solve it: there may be no counterweight to rare earths. October's deal was a one-year truce — China supplies critical minerals for non-military use, the US eases technology export controls — and it took a month of mutual accusation before it worked. Trump wants to go to Beijing in April and needs the arrangement extended beyond October, which means arriving with something to trade. His conclusion is that this cannot be a negative negotiation: the US will have to give, and what it has to give is technology — Blackwell chips, H200s, possibly ASML machines — in exchange for perhaps five years of unfettered access including military use. He invites anyone who sees another counterweight to name it.
• The profile of China's chief trade negotiator suggests Beijing wants the deal too. The headline asks whether Li is unhinged or savvy; American businessmen in the room came away impressed. What he did was read a US delegation the riot act over the port fees and the Nexperia action taken after Washington said it would take no further steps, and convey leadership's demand that behaviour change to get talks back on track. The line he flags: Li's near-term priority is maintaining the truce and creating a positive environment for the April visit, with the team's main challenge being to extract more relaxation of US export controls without triggering an overwhelming backlash in Washington. He also notes the wolf warrior generation of Chinese diplomats was cleaned out last year, and that observers rate China's team as more cohesive and empowered than the American one.
• He reads current US moves as an attempt to manufacture leverage before April, and finds one of them inconsistent. China imports around 15.5 million barrels a day, takes roughly 850,000 from Venezuela and 80% of Iran's exports. Venezuela is effectively removed, with Trump saying the oil can still be sold but through America — which he cannot tell is about keeping it in dollars or about the April agenda. Iran may be next, on the same logic: take it off China's board, then offer to leave the arrangement alone for five years in exchange for minerals. What does not fit is the announcement that day of 25% tariffs on anyone doing business with Iran, when China is the largest such party and Washington had said no new tariffs before the meeting. He says outright he does not know what is going on there, and turns the question back to the audience: what would you build as a counterweight?

2026-01-13 · open the original ↗

• Common Sense succeeded by pairing plain language with a permission structure, not just strong ideas. Thomas Paine's 1776 pamphlet sold 500,000 copies in a colony of 2.5 million by translating abstract political grievances into concrete, emotionally charged analogies (calling William the Conqueror "a French bastard," comparing loyalty to Britain to a child never eating meat after milk) that made a previously unthinkable idea — independence — feel reasonable.
• Paine operated against a still-functional, not collapsing, institution. Britain retained the world's dominant navy and a first-class administrative state when Paine wrote; his argument wasn't that the system had failed outright but that decisions were made by people thousands of miles away with no stake in the colonies' outcomes — a legitimacy critique the author distinguishes from outright institutional collapse.
• Distribution and timing mattered as much as the content itself. Paine kept the pamphlet short (50 pages), priced it to spread rather than profit, and published anonymously as "an Englishman" so the ideas, not his identity, carried authority — arriving six months before the colonies moved from favoring reconciliation to declaring independence.
• The author frames this as a lesson in persuasion mechanics for institutional-legitimacy moments generally, not a call to any specific action today. He argues that when legitimacy fractures, clarity beats cleverness, logic must be paired with emotion, and distribution of a simple idea beats a well-reasoned one poorly spread — explicitly declining to say what people should conclude, only how persuasion works under these conditions.

2026-01-13 · open the original ↗

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2026-01-12 · open the original ↗

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2026-01-12 · open the original ↗

• His European thesis is that the EU, the euro and NATO are political institutions in a world that has stopped making political decisions. Everything now runs through the five factors — food, energy, technology, demographics, and whether you are easy to attack — with the last one transformed by recent events. The structural problem inside the EU is that it was built on equality: every state one vote, every state holding the presidency for six months. That works politically and cannot survive economically. Slovakia will not outrank Germany, nor Luxembourg France, so the bloc has to rearrange itself along economic lines, and the decisions it has deferred for years are arriving whether it wants them or not.
• The data points he collects all show the same shift from regulation toward actual state powers. Airbus has been commissioned to build a European Starlink equivalent, online by end-2026, because Musk and the US were switching the service off when Europe would not comply. The EU defence commissioner and Spain — Spain, which he stresses is remarkable — are both calling for a 100,000-strong European army. Eighty percent of EU citizens support common defence, against a fragmented industry with over 70 companies producing four fighter jets and twenty tanks, on 5% of US output, because everything gets built domestically. Mercosur was finally signed after 25 years once Meloni was brought round. A 28th legal regime is proposed so a startup faces one pan-European structure instead of 27. And China settled EV tariffs with Brussels at about 35% despite intense US pressure to adopt the American 135%.
• What he thinks Europeans are only now discovering is how little Brussels was ever given. The EU was created with the power to pass regulation and nothing else — no taxation, no military, no capacity to build. Everything in the current debate is an attempt to acquire actual power: to tax, to arm, to defend, to set global standards from Europe rather than receive them. The most striking marker of how far the old arrangement has inverted is the EU declaring an obligation to defend Denmark against an American invasion, with the accompanying observation that this would also end NATO — which he says is already over, given the US skipped the last meeting and told them it will sell arms but not defend them, while they have stopped wanting to buy American arms. His forecast is unchanged and unsentimental: they will come together, they will not do it before it hurts, and it goes down first.

2026-01-12 · open the original ↗

• Geopolitical shocks like Russia-Ukraine sanctions and Venezuela are only an "added wind in the sail," not the main driver of central bank gold buying. Tait says he disagrees that incidents like tariffs or war are the primary cause.
• The real driver, in his view, is fear of a runaway US debt spiral and continued currency debasement. He points to April, when tariffs triggered a US Treasury yield curve shift "in one go" rather than a gradual steepening, which he reads as a loss of trust in the US government.
• Central banks are buying gold as a hedge against what some regard as a potential "financial Armageddon." This is his own characterization of the underlying motivation, not a quote from a named central bank.

2026-01-11 · open the original ↗

• He returns to a video he deleted last August, and the reason is instructive. Two GameStop videos were his biggest ever at 50,000 and 60,000 views, and the personal attacks were sufficient that he took one down — his verdict being that he had walked into a cult whose members did not understand what was happening at their own company. The mechanism he laid out is generic: a company heading for bankruptcy at a dollar and change, with hedge funds shorting it and waiting, picking up pennies in front of a steamroller. At one point short interest reached 170 to 180% of outstanding shares, which is plainly illegal. What he rejected then and rejects now is the belief that a meme stock could bankrupt two of the world's largest banks.
• The problem he set was how both sides get what they want, and the answer was a zero-coupon convertible. The shorts need to cover; the company has no business, no cash and no way to benefit even if the stock ran to $500, because there is nothing underneath it. Issuing 140 million new shares into a 448 million share count by announcement would collapse the price. A convertible does it without the announcement effect: GameStop has now placed about $5.5 billion of zero-coupon convertible securities, convertible into roughly 130 to 140 million shares at an initial rate of 34.58 shares per $1,000, about $28.91 a share. The moment a short buys the bond it is no longer net short — it holds a matched position, its risk-weighted assets and capital requirements fall, it can trade derivatives around it, and it can exit whenever it chooses because the shares are secured. The company receives the money at the conversion price. His summary from last August stands: some banker worked out how both sides get out, and earned a very good bonus.
• The numbers a year on show the squeeze draining rather than exploding. Short interest is around 68 million shares, about 16% of float, down from 24% when he made the original video, having hovered between 66 and 72 million through late 2025. The company carries a $9.5 billion market cap on $3.8 billion of revenue — inverted from the usual relationship — with 448 million shares, 82 cents of EPS and a 7% dividend. He had guessed the CEO would pick AI or crypto as the new business model; AI needed more capital than they had, so it was crypto, and crypto has fallen. The compensation package requires growing GameStop to $100 billion for a $10 billion payout, against a stock down 36% last year and $77 million of third-quarter net income. His conclusion is that the shorts got their exit and the company got its money.

2026-01-10 · open the original ↗

• The index rebalance is a mechanical, pre-announced seller of exactly what performed, and it lands this week. Everyone can see the algorithms and everyone can see how the weights drifted, so the flows are calculable in advance: about $6.1 billion of silver and $5.6 billion of gold to be sold. A JP Morgan estimate puts silver's net selling at 10% of the value of all open derivative contracts, and the biggest of any commodity. COMEX silver notional is put at $23 to $25 billion in the source, computed off $50 to $55 prices — at current levels he reckons closer to $65 or $70 billion. Portfolio managers who know this is coming start early, which is why gold is down 0.6% and silver about 4% into it. His framing is that this is a genuine test: whether the metals can absorb a forced seller of that size and keep going.
• He spends most of the episode dismantling the viral bank-collapse claims, using filing rules rather than opinion. JP Morgan going under has quietly been replaced by Goldman Sachs, allegedly $376 billion in the hole on short silver — while trading at an all-time high. His disproof is procedural: anything material to the balance sheet requires an 8-K filed within four business days, filed electronically, hitting public screens the moment it reaches the SEC, downloadable by anyone. There is no such filing. The story also requires a board room of fifty people to have learned of an existential loss between 9:03 and 10:17 on a specified morning without the street finding out, which he does not believe for a moment. And the claimed short entry around $41 or $42 would date to September, meaning a firm that trades this every day sat still for months.
• His broader instruction is to learn the plumbing so the clickbait cannot land. The repo facility that supposedly proved a silver bailout was year-end balance sheet dressing, and it disappeared the moment the books were closed — which is precisely what the timing showed. He restates his own position without hedging: positive on the metals for three years, still positive, and yes they can correct. He passes along TDS reiterating a short call targeting $40 within three months, and says without irony that differing opinions are what make a market. The distinction he wants is between recognising stress, which is correct, and inventing a mechanism for it, which is not.

2026-01-09 · open the original ↗

• Raising capital is called an ask, not a pitch that sells itself. One host says the hardest part of fundraising is simply asking directly for a number, illustrating with two firms that lowballed early buyout offers for Thinkorswim and were later shut out — TD Ameritrade returned years later and paid nearly $1 billion for what it once dismissed.
• Hosts split on matching a competing job offer to retain staff. One says he'd do whatever it takes to keep a valued employee who brings an unsolicited outside offer; the other says he's never fought to retain anyone, arguing that once someone is actively interviewing elsewhere they've already checked out — congratulating them and letting them go instead.
• Short-premium capital allocation should scale with the VIX, not stay fixed. With opportunity and volatility highly correlated, one host says he runs roughly 40-60% allocation when the VIX is elevated but drops to the mid-20s when it's under 15, as it was this week — and says a caller's 40% allocation is fine for a smaller account but too high for a larger one.
• In-person meetings are called irreplaceable for closing deals. Hosts say every significant deal they've made in decades of business was closed in person, never remotely, describing their office as a deliberate "home court advantage" meant to control the environment and make it harder for a counterparty to say no.

2026-01-09 · open the original ↗

• Mellon expects the yen, which he calls severely undervalued, to rise as much as 20% this year. He acknowledges he has made this call before without it yet playing out.
• Japan's new fiscal stimulus push is driving inflation and pushing long bond yields above 3%. He likens the prime minister's "pump priming" to "blowing air into a dead horse," but notes it has still lifted long-dated JGB yields well above levels of five years ago.
• He isn't worried about a Japanese debt crisis because the Bank of Japan is tightening and most bonds are held domestically. He adds that the BOJ is already running quantitative tightening to offset the stimulus, with little foreign ownership of JGBs.
• A yen turn would trigger fast appreciation given the scale of Japanese savings invested overseas, especially in the US. He notes that if Japan's yield curve flattens and short-term yen deposits start paying 1–3%, holding yen becomes more attractive than holding pounds, euros or dollars.

2026-01-08 · open the original ↗

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2026-01-08 · open the original ↗

• Once a year the commodity indices reset their weights, and this is the week it happens. The BCOM launched in 1998, holds 23 to 24 commodities weighted two-thirds by liquidity and one-third by world production, capped at 15% for any single name. The S&P GSCI, launched in 1991 and bought by S&P in 2007, weights purely by five-year average world production, which makes it 55 to 60% energy. Both reset targets in January and phase the roll over four to five business days beginning 8 January, with most trading on the 9th and 10th because everyone knows it is coming. His practical framing: if you believe in oil, the biggest trade in the world, you buy the GSCI; if you want balance, the BCOM.
• The arithmetic of rebalancing makes last year's winners this week's sellers, and silver is the extreme case. Silver rose about 170% and gold about 65% in 2025, so their realised weights have drifted far above target. In the BCOM, silver's realised weight of about 9% resets to just under 4% — implying over $5 billion of futures selling across five days. Corn, soybeans and soymeal fall about 21%, and crude is cut to 6.6%, its lowest ever BCOM weight, alongside trimmed natural gas. The GSCI, weighting by production, goes the other way on gold — miners produced more because the price rose, so gold gets one of the largest increases in the index — while buying copper, aluminium, corn, cattle, hogs and natural gas, and cutting oil, gas, Chicago wheat, soybeans and cocoa. The two indices disagree outright on cocoa and Brent, one buying what the other sells.
• What he takes from the buy list is a signal about next year's inflation. The commodities being bought are the ones that fell — grains, livestock, energy, cocoa — and he notes why several of them fell: American farmers are ploughing crops back in because China stopped buying and the prices no longer cover the cost of selling. Mechanical index buying now arrives underneath depressed food and energy prices, which he reads as unhelpful for 2026 inflation. He also flags the structural point running underneath the whole exercise: these funds do not own commodities, they own futures contracts, and their returns include roll yield as well as price. Given the paper-versus-physical divergence he has been documenting, the question he leaves open is whether the indices themselves eventually have to change.

2026-01-08 · open the original ↗

• Data-center buildout for AI will require roughly 20% more US electricity supply, yet energy stocks remain unloved. Mellon says this demand case has been overlooked despite talk of oversupply and the broader shift toward electrification.
• He is "loading up" on oil and gas as the next unloved sector, following his earlier bets on gold and silver. He cites dividend yields and the sector's low weighting in the S&P and other major indices as reasons it's underowned.
• He reads the market's reaction to the Venezuela situation as confirming oil and gas stocks are positioned to benefit from geopolitical instability. He notes any resulting increase in Venezuelan production would take years, but the episode highlights an unstable environment that could support the sector through the year.

2026-01-07 · open the original ↗

• The delivery rate is the number he thinks people should be watching, and it has moved. COMEX historically settles 1 to 2% of gold contracts physically; silver runs slightly higher at around 2.5% in demand spikes and rarely exceeds 8% even in tight markets. In December, 12,800 contracts settled physically out of roughly 150,000 — 8.1% — and it has stayed near that level since. He also puts the exchange in historical context: COMEX only became important after 1971, launching gold futures in 1974 once Nixon ended convertibility, replacing a system where gold was fixed by statute and silver followed the 15-to-1 bimetallic ratio set in the 1792 Coinage Act. Its settlement prices are watched worldwide, but spot has always been shaped elsewhere — London, Shanghai, ETF flows.
• His analogy for what a divergence actually means is retail gasoline, and it reframes the question. Physical prices differ by location for perfectly ordinary reasons — minting, transport, margins, local scarcity — the way upstate New York differs from California. But you do not trade twenty-five gasoline prices; you trade one paper price with physical prices attached to places. What he wants to know is whether silver is now developing a permanent disconnect, with the physical market rather than the paper market setting the direction. The pressure is all one way: hedge funds buying, corporations buying, defence contracts, governments buying, governments banning export — the US among them. He explicitly declines the suppression theory while doing it: people try things, but nobody is that good, and it does not work that way.
• The gold reserve accounting contains a distortion most people never see. Foreign central banks hold roughly 24% of reserves in gold and 23% in Treasuries, and they carry the metal at historical cost. US law prices its 8,133 tons at $42.22 an ounce — about $11 billion on the books rather than the trillions it would fetch. The comparison he draws is China at $150 billion against Germany at $42 billion despite far smaller holdings, which tells you about purchase timing rather than tonnage. The open question is whether central banks return toward the gold share they held in the 1970s, and what the price looks like if they do. His larger frame is a hybrid world: nobody is happy holding dollars and there is nowhere else to go, so instead of a single successor you get zones — the hemisphere on dollars, China on renminbi, Europe on a euro perhaps backed by gold — with far more bilateral, single-commodity trade than people realise underneath.

2026-01-07 · open the original ↗

• The author describes spending the 2010s on "cultural cruise control" while focused entirely on a conventional legal and Wall Street career. He attended law school (2010–2013), worked Wall Street trading floors, and was promoted repeatedly, but says he consumed only surface-level culture (Breaking Bad, Kendrick Lamar) without engaging deeply with literature, film, or the rise of social platforms like YouTube and TikTok.
• Quitting his job in 2021 to care for his newborn son during the pandemic prompted the reassessment. The slower pace of caregiving — pushing a stroller through Manhattan while others worked in offices — created space to ask whether life had to remain defined by career advancement alone, a question he says he'd never made time to ask.
• He describes deliberately rebuilding cultural literacy as a discipline, not passive catch-up. This included watching roughly 800 Casey Neistat vlogs to study filmmaking craft, buying a dedicated camera, and reading more widely (The New Yorker, Werner Herzog), framing the effort as necessary groundwork for his later pursuits in writing and video.
• Looking into 2026, he commits to long-form, slower work over viral short-form content, despite proof the latter works. A New Year's Eve thread of his went viral (1.3 million views) after he shared an authentic moment rather than commentary on a news cycle; he argues short-form video rarely produces anything memorable years later, and states his intent to keep chasing depth over virality.

2026-01-06 · open the original ↗

• Chasing a stock that already tripled to $70 isn't worth it. Asked whether he'd buy a chip stock whose price jumped from $20 to $70 in two days, he says he "wouldn't buy it in a hundred years" and would instead look to get short, since such moves typically reverse.
• He's more worried about short sellers than chasers, citing GameStop's $5-to-$500 run. Because a stock that jumps from 20 to 70 could keep going to 100, 200, or 300, he says the real danger sits with anyone short it without a plan, not with longs chasing the move.
• His concrete advice: use real or mental stop-loss levels. Without one, he warns, these stocks "can break really really quickly" and traders get caught not knowing what happened, whether trading the move long or short.

2026-01-06 · open the original ↗

• He says up front that he is unsurprised by Venezuela and that this is not approval. The claim that runs through everything is that the old world is dead and the new one is being built differently — the old order was political, allowing everyone to trade with everyone under Pax Americana, and the new one is economic, defined by two words: secure and control. Countries will make decisions on their ability to secure and control energy, food, technology, demographics, and whether they are easy to attack. The last factor drew years of pushback, and his answer now is to ask Venezuela, then Colombia, then Guyana.
• Trump is an accelerator rather than a cause, and the distinction carries the argument. His original framing was fifteen to twenty years, and he does not know who will be president or what any country will be doing at the end of it — only that existing powers will co-opt the resources they need. Trump is not waiting: Venezuela taken, Greenland drafted (a document offering money and local self-government while the US runs everything, delivered to Greenland directly rather than through Copenhagen), Panama likely next by taking the canal back from its Chinese owner, with Mexico and Canada already threatened. The underlying admission is in the published military strategy: out of Europe, out of Africa, leaving Asia. Since the US cannot control the world and is pulling back, the question becomes where to pull back to, and the answer is the hemisphere.
• The symmetrical case is eastern Russia, and it is the one people miss. Greenland offers the Arctic, rare earths, farmland, oil and gas; eastern Russia offers farmland, rare earths, water, oil and gas. Chinese maps still show the territory taken in 1858, 1900 and after the Second World War as Chinese, with the old Chinese city names. And the demographics have already turned — there are reportedly more Chinese living in eastern Russia than Russians, with nobody there to stop the crossings. He treats it as a matter of time. He also cautions against reading any single week's news as direction: South Korea, Japan and Australia just formed a defence pact while South Korea's president is in Beijing seeking fully normalised relations with Xi. His closing judgement is not triumphal — America cannot go it alone and will need allies, but the eighty-year arrangement with rights and obligations is over and everything is transactional now: be with us or we will not defend you, will not help you, and will hurt you if we can.

2026-01-05 · open the original ↗

• Venezuela's small economic footprint explains the market's shrug. Outside of oil, one host says Venezuela is a minor player in global GDP, with no risk of other countries being drawn in, so a change at the top — its president is called "a crook and a criminal" — barely registers for markets.
• The real worry is precedent: this could greenlight China moving on Taiwan. Hosts argue that intervention against Venezuela's leadership sets a dangerous precedent that erodes prior boundaries on global intervention, and that a comparable move toward Taiwan would be "significantly different and much worse" for markets than anything happening in Venezuela.