finance

2026-09-28 · open the original ↗

• Record buyback spending reflects a lack of better options, not folly. Tom argues S&P 500 buybacks pacing near $1 trillion in 2026, including Nvidia's $235 billion authorization (a $150 billion increase), stem from companies having few good acquisition targets and no investor appetite for dividends. He still concedes IBM and General Motors have bought back stock for 80 years and "it doesn't always work."
• The bond market, not stocks, is signaling the real danger. Tom says the 10-year yield's spike to about 5.25%, up from under 4% before an unnamed conflict began, isn't "front-running" a problem but is itself the problem, warning that if stocks catch up to bond-market pricing "it's going to get ugly." He and Scott are positioned short NASDAQ and long bonds/notes on that view.
• Near-par bond yields are framed as a rare contrarian opportunity. Responding to caller Loki, the hosts call yields nearing the "100 handle" — last seen around 2000 — one of the most overbought/oversold setups in years, suggesting investors could rotate some stock-market gains into a roughly 5.5% risk-free return while keeping the rest invested rather than exiting equities entirely.
• Hosts split on managing a caller's forced stock position. Caller Chuck, hit by a large one-day loss in MU options amid three-to-four-dollar-wide markets, ended up long stock near $198 a share. Tom says sell shares (for example, 34 to offset 34 extra deltas) to keep delta flat and hold to expiration, while Scott would look to exit the whole position sooner.

2026-09-28 · open the original ↗

• 2026 has been an unusually choppy, rangebound market, not a clean uptrend. He says stocks now hit new all-time highs only briefly before chopping sideways, unlike 2021–2025 when positions often ran up almost immediately; he won't short into repeated all-time highs, and speculates (unproven) that the chop stems from negative headlines (Iran war, tariffs, oil, rate hikes) plus new day traders — active since June's repeal of the pattern day trading rule — getting picked off by market makers.
• A single -4% Monday drop doesn't make silver's move a "cliff." He contrasts it with the real plunge of more than -30% in one day on January 30, calling the pullback normal consolidation; he'd reconsider the trade only if price breaks below roughly $55.80. He likens the pattern to Bitcoin's sideways consolidation before its breakout above the 200-day moving average, and says he's watching TLT, currently in a confirmed downtrend, speculating silver moves up before TLT turns.
• Patience through the chop, not timing, is what's working this market. He cites no technical breakdown yet — the VIX is downtrending and "nothing is breaking" — and points to his Xometry position, which sat at a loss before turning to over 40% profit, as the reward for holding. He still advises trimming or cutting overexposed positions while letting winners run.

2026-09-28 · open the original ↗

• His single top pick for the next decade is Hong Kong property. He frames it as a play on buying "humiliated" assets — a long-duration real estate bet that would benefit if bond yields have peaked.
• Hong Kong property sits at the intersection of three reversing trends. He points to China's improving position in AI, real estate's neglect relative to commodities and equities, and depressed valuations broadly, calling it a "nice trifecta."
• His investment philosophy is to buy humiliated assets and sell hubristic ones. He argues that when several beaten-down, unloved themes converge in a single asset, as he sees happening in Hong Kong property, the potential upside is larger.

2026-09-28 · open the original ↗

• Mag 7 stocks now depend on bond market discipline to keep spending. He notes hyperscalers will spend $1.2 trillion on AI capex next year, up from about $100 billion three or four years ago, while free cash flow flips from roughly +$300 billion then to about -$200 billion next year — making continued AI investment contingent on yields and credit spreads staying contained.
• Central banks can't run out of ammunition, but they can lose credibility. He points to the Mag 7 peaking on October 29 last year — the day the Fed cut rates and the market read it as not serious about inflation — versus their breakout to new highs a year later after the Fed instead hiked, arguing that restored credibility is what has kept long-end yields from doing more damage.
• AI's 40% weight in the S&P mirrors past bubble peaks. He compares today's "AI 10" concentration to tech in 2000, the Nifty Fifty in 1973-74, and Japan in the late 1980s — all of which peaked near 40% — but notes 1880s railroad stocks reached 60-63% of the index before that boom ended, undone by the social upheaval of the Pullman strikes.
• A Democratic Senate win would be bigger than a typical midterm. He expects roughly a 10% stock dip over the following two to three months if Republicans lose the Senate, and calls the Texas governor's race — where incumbent Greg Abbott polls only narrowly ahead (48% to 45%) of a challenger campaigning solely against AI data-center expansion — the contest to watch as a signal of broader backlash against big tech.

2026-09-27 · open the original ↗

• Europe's security, currency, and travel blocs no longer overlap. The EU (27), Eurozone (20, soon 21 with Bulgaria), Schengen (29), and NATO (32) all have different memberships — Norway is NATO/Schengen but not EU, Austria and Ireland are EU/Euro but not NATO, the UK is NATO-only, and Turkey fits none of the integration frameworks.
• Because no single European country has all five factors (food, energy, demographics, technology, security), states are clustering into mini-lateral groupings instead. Examples cited include the JEF, the Northern League (Norway, Sweden, Denmark), the Nordic-Baltic caucus, the Bucharest Nine, the Franco-German-Polish Weimar group, the Visegrad IV, and the new Carpathian Eight, each organized around shared security, energy, or logistics interests, mostly facing Russia.
• He predicts these clusters will fuse into a two-tier EU as NATO hollows out with the US withdrawal. Forecasting a 2024-2028 "lattice" of mini-clusters consolidating into a 2027-2035 euro-anchored federal core, the Eurozone reaching 22 members, Turkey being permanently sidelined, and Europe effectively replacing NATO's planning role by 2032, though banking and capital-markets union — the step he calls "the real thing" — has not yet moved in three years.

2026-09-26 · open the original ↗

• His top holding just made a fresh all-time high. The position is now up over 40%, and he notes silver mining stocks have been holding their ground through the rally.
• The Midweek Movers screen keeps validating itself. This week's review was the largest yet, with 52 stocks screened and 2 removed (both of which he bought); the average Midweek Mover is up 25.9% this year, with over 75% still significantly positive.
• Negative headlines should be ignored because media is incentivized by clicks, not investor returns. He concedes some fearful headlines contain elements of truth, but argues they aren't designed to help investors, and his read of the trend remains up.

2026-09-25 · open the original ↗

• Lost Dog is launching an "interactive video sandbox." Sosnoff frames it as a direct response to repeated viewer comments asking him to demonstrate strategies rather than just narrate them, tied to his earlier video "11 Boring Trading Strategies Used by the Top 1% of Traders," which he says is nearing half a million views. The sandbox is free inside the platform.
• The eleven strategies reduce to four market views. Sosnoff describes the sandbox as organizing all eleven labs around the belief that a stock is going up, going down, that the market is pricing in a bigger move than will happen, or that something has deviated too far from normal and should revert.
• Sliders are claimed to update risk and profit output in real time. Per Sosnoff, changing an input moves the graph, updated profit-probability estimate, and key results simultaneously, letting a viewer test an assumption instead of only picturing it — a claimed product benefit rather than a demonstrated one.

2026-09-25 · open the original ↗

• UBS may relocate to escape a forced Swiss capital raise. Swiss voters approved a law forcing UBS to add up to $20 billion in capital after its Credit Suisse absorption left an estimated $200–300 billion in bad paper on a $1.7 trillion balance sheet against $146 billion in market value. A merger with Morgan Stanley — said to want UBS's US retail arm and Asia wealth-management business — is floated as the exit route, with Treasury Secretary Bessent reportedly weighing a failure's cost to taxpayers at $500–700 billion.
• This week's five-year Treasury auction, not the seven-year, showed real stress. It tailed 3.1 bps — the second-largest on record for the tenor — with the weakest bid-to-cover since December 2018, leaving dealers to absorb roughly $11 billion (15.8%) that the market wouldn't take at the offer price. The seven-year auction still drew a 33-year-high yield of 5.085%, the highest since April 1993, with indirect bidder demand falling and dealers left holding 12% of the issue.
• Xi's Thucydides-trap remarks read as an offer with a deadline. The framing pairs cooperation language — joint military dialogue, cross-prevention mechanisms, AI cooperation — with an implicit warning that the trap's history always ends in war, with the older power losing. He frames it as pressure aimed at an already overstretched US, tied to the Iran war, and flags January 10th as the date to watch.

2026-09-25 · open the original ↗

• Resume requirements have shifted every few years, with AI fluency the latest gate. One host traces hiring filters moving from cloud-deployment experience, to test-driven development, to now requiring AI-tool fluency (citing tools like Cursor) over roughly the last 18 months.
• Both sides of hiring now use AI, raising the question of who is "gaming" whom. Citing SHRM data, 44% of organizations already use AI to screen resumes while candidates use AI to optimize those same resumes; the host frames it as an open question whether this counts as gaming the system or just playing by new rules.

2026-09-25 · open the original ↗

• Treasury Secretary Bessent's gold push serves two purposes, the speaker infers. Physical gold is the neutral asset the US needs to repay international trade debts and secure new credit until a new monetary system is established, and the 31 tons of Venezuelan gold Washington has obtained could quietly cover any shortfall at Fort Knox.
• Officials' refusal to let auditors see where the money is going is a red flag, he argues. At last week's hearings, senior officials would not provide clear reporting on billions of dollars in assets, which he takes as a sign Washington is preparing for some change in the financial system.
• He predicts the financial "rules of the game" will soon change. Pointing to Venezuela's currency collapse as an example of how fast confidence in paper money can evaporate, he says the timing is uncertain — next month or in five years — but urges viewers to keep saving now, since early beats a minute late.

2026-09-25 · open the original ↗

• Bessent admitted Treasury controls Venezuela's gold and oil revenue. Testifying before the House Financial Services Committee on September 15, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed the department holds roughly $13 billion in Venezuelan oil sales, foreign exchange reserves and mineral assets along with the country's gold, but declined to name the bank or banks collecting transaction fees.
• Venezuela's gold move to New York is framed as loan collateral. The video reports that Venezuela's 31 tons of gold, worth about $4 billion and frozen at the Bank of England since 2019 when the West stopped recognizing Maduro, was agreed to be transferred to the Federal Reserve after Maduro's ouster to back a US loan for rebuilding after June earthquakes — though the metal has not yet left London.
• Lawmakers are pushing back with demands for an independent audit. The video argues the Treasury is already treating the unmoved gold as its own and is withholding bank names and fee details to avoid exposing possible conflicts of interest, kickbacks or slush funds, prompting Congress to demand a full accounting of every account and ounce the Treasury manages.

2026-09-25 · open the original ↗

• Bessent admitted Treasury controls Venezuela's oil revenue and its gold. At a September 15 House Financial Services Committee hearing, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent confirmed the Treasury holds the roughly $13 billion from Venezuelan oil, foreign-exchange and mineral-asset sales, plus 31 tons of Venezuelan gold (about $4 billion) still sitting in a Bank of England vault, agreed to be moved to the New York Fed after Maduro's ouster.
• He refused to name the banks collecting transaction fees. Lawmakers reacted to that refusal by filing formal demands for an independent audit of every ounce of gold and every account the Treasury manages outside public oversight, which the host cites as evidence of a deliberate lack of transparency.
• She frames the gold grab as preparation for a currency reset. This is the host's own inference, not a reported fact: she argues Washington wants physical gold as a neutral settlement asset and to backfill possible shortfalls at Fort Knox, and closes by urging viewers to keep buying metals ahead of a system change she says could come "next month or in 5 years."

2026-09-25 · open the original ↗

• A pitched feature flags when the hosts trade your holdings. Called Trade Match, it automates what the pitch says thousands of viewers already did manually — checking the platform's live trade feed for a ticker overlap with their own portfolio, trade by trade, in real time.
• The feature is marketed as breaking down agreement or disagreement in detail. It's described as comparing position bias, trading mechanics and market direction between the host's trade and the viewer's own position — a description of what the tool does, not a demonstrated result.
• Signing up requires linking a brokerage account, framed as fast and safe. The pitch says the SnapTrade connection is read-only, takes under 45 seconds, and covers about 40 brokerages; it also claims thousands of traders are already using Trade Match, an adoption figure asserted rather than demonstrated.

2026-09-25 · open the original ↗

• AI now screens resumes before any human sees them. The host cites stats: callback decisions take about six seconds, applications per opening have tripled since 2021 to over 300, 71% of AI rejections go unreviewed by a human, and SHRM says 44% of organizations already use AI screening — while 49% of hiring managers say they'll auto-reject a resume they suspect was written with ChatGPT or Claude.
• A direct message to the recruiter beats a blind application. Alex Zaleski, a Hirewell recruiter, says texting or messaging a recruiter right after applying creates a personal connection that pushes an application to the top of the pile; he advises keeping it to roughly 200-300 characters and highlighting one specific, relevant experience rather than the whole resume.
• Personal recommendations still beat resume optimization, AI or not. Zaleski argues the best hire is always someone personally recommended, since a trusted referral functions as an extra layer of verification against the fake resumes, bots, and no-show candidates now flooding applicant pools — and lets a candidate bypass the screening system entirely.
• The applicant count on job posts is mostly noise. Zaleski says a figure like "300 applied" includes bots and people who clicked without finishing the application, so genuinely qualified competition is far smaller than it appears. He adds that AI likely makes rejection easier without explanation, but argues interview chemistry and problem-solving still land less "technically perfect" candidates the job.

2026-09-25 · open the original ↗

• This post includes paid content that is not available publicly. See the original source.

2026-09-25 · open the original ↗

• Written policy for an agent is not a control. Unlike a trader, an agent has no fear of losing a bonus, job or reputation, so nothing restrains a strategy that merely works; he contrasts writing a $100 million position limit in a handbook with configuring the trading system to reject the next dollar. Adding an LLM judge to read the policy "has added another opinion," not an enforceable constraint.
• Harmful behavior can be composed entirely from permitted actions. We cannot list in advance every bad strategy a capable agent may find, and coding agents can compose permitted capabilities into new programs; interacting agents could discover coordination resembling collusion without intending it. Sandboxing and scoped credentials are basic hygiene but control capabilities, not the behavior built from them over time.
• Agent count is a meaningless KPI; capability and authority matter. He imagines a CEO boasting of going from 500 traders to 100,000, and notes a document-summarizing agent and one that can read customer data, run code and initiate transactions each count as one. The useful figures are how many can execute code, write to production, move money, communicate externally, spawn agents or run without review.
• Autonomy in thinking should not mean authority in acting. He wants broad autonomy for search, ideas and experiments but argues that, because constraints cannot all be specified, governance must engineer the whole environment — observability, delegation, interaction monitoring and escalation when uncertainty rises. His warning is that enterprises may be industrializing agents before industrializing agent engineering.

2026-09-25 · open the original ↗

• Wilfred Frost recorded a rare full-hour interview with Michael Hartnett. He notes it's unusual for Bank of America's chief market strategist to do media at all, let alone a full hour-long conversation.
• Hartnett made several bold, contrarian calls in the episode. One in particular surprised Frost, though he doesn't reveal which one in this preview.
• The full interview releases the following Monday on the Master Investor podcast. Frost calls it well worth listeners' time and asks them to follow or subscribe.

2026-09-24 · open the original ↗

• AI threatens to commoditize fee-based money management, not just automate parts of it. One host argues AI will force fee compression across firms like Schwab and LPL and nearly any asset manager, because it can replicate much of what an advisor does — a development he calls good for consumers.
• A human advisor's remaining value is personal relationship, not trade execution. He frames the point of differentiation as having "somebody you can call" rather than relying on an AI tool, while adding he still wouldn't hand his own money to those firms.

2026-09-24 · open the original ↗

• A two-month truce extension signals US weakness, not strength. Author D. Gallagher argues Washington's rollover to 10 January 2027 — far short of the six-month-to-one-year extension the market expected — reflects an inability to land a durable deal with China, not "toughness" as officials framed it. Japan, by contrast, received no truce at all, because it is a node China has already captured.
• Japan controls the chokepoints beneath the chip supply chain. It holds over 50% share in 14 critical chipmaking materials — wafers, EUV photoresist, mask blanks, ABF substrate — via firms like Shin-Etsu, SUMCO, Tokyo Electron and Lasertec. By June 2026 China's exports of dysprosium, terbium, yttrium and gallium to Japan had fallen effectively to zero, with dysprosium imports down 82% in H1 2026.
• The chokehold's real target is the US, reached via Japan. Every advanced US fab — Intel, Micron, TSMC Arizona, Samsung Texas — depends on Japanese photoresist, wafers and inspection tools, so China's squeeze on Japan throttles American chip and defense output without ever sanctioning a US company. Gallagher frames 10 January as the date Washington learns whether it avoids "the Japan treatment": a cutoff with no truce.

2026-09-24 · open the original ↗

• The compressed two-month truce reads as a sign of US weakness. The host says China reportedly pushed for an extension to the end of Trump's term while the US countered with just two months, versus the six-month consensus the market expected, and offers this — as his own opinion, not certainty — as evidence Washington negotiated from a weakened position.
• China's rare-earth squeeze on Japan is described as "domestication," not embargo. Gallium exports to Japan have fallen to zero and dysprosium imports dropped 82% in the first half of 2026; the host cites a Japanese newspaper photo of a 48-kilogram rare-earth shipment arriving by suitcase as evidence of how constrained the flow has become.
• The US has pre-positioned legal authority to triage critical materials domestically. The host says the show flagged roughly a year and a half ago that Washington would set up a triage system, and points to Defense Production Act Title I as already giving the government priority allocation authority over critical supplies if the China-Japan squeeze reaches US industry.

2026-09-24 · open the original ↗

• Agentic AI handed authority to the LLM first, then bolted on guardrails. He traces how ReAct (Yao et al., 2022), a research pattern tested on question answering and WebShop, became a working definition of "agent" — letting the LLM decide what happens next — before tools gained write permissions and governance became an afterthought. He cites the 2025 AI Agent Index, covering 30 agents, as finding developers disclosed far more about capabilities than safety evaluations.
• Separation of duties means separate authority, not more LLM calls. A bank officer proposing a $500 million credit does not also validate it, waive limits and wire the money; chaining LLMs to propose, critique, judge and approve creates "a committee of autocomplete." LLM judges are fine as soft quality signals but not as the source of authorization.
• ProveAct confines the LLM to proposing, with the system deciding. Outside the generative loop, the system runs Verify → Establish Feasible Set → Optimize → Gate → Act. In his $500 million credit example the LLM suggests structures (e.g., $350 million secured), the system adds its own candidates including declining, approved models verify, limit-violating options are simply infeasible, an optimizer picks among the rest, and a gate checks delegated authority before execution.
• CaMeL applies the same instinct to prompt injection. Debenedetti et al. (2025) separate control and data flows and use capability-based restrictions rather than trusting the LLM to spot malicious instructions, after AgentDojo showed injections could redirect agents in email, banking and travel tasks. Both rest on not making a guarantee depend on the probabilistic model behaving.
• ProveAct only works where claims can be verified. He concedes it suits credit, pricing, portfolio, code deployment and fraud work, not open-ended tasks like ten-year corporate strategy, and that a biased generator can omit good options. His mitigations are treating generation as search and having the system inject baselines, defaults and a no-action option, so that a wrong LLM proposal is just one that fails verification.

2026-09-24 · open the original ↗

• The Xi-Trump summit is theater already priced into markets. Hosts note China's purchase of 14–15 cargoes of soybeans as a presummit goodwill gesture, well below the roughly 350–480 cargoes bought annually pre-tariff, and say they'd be "shocked" if anything announced at the meeting itself moves markets, since the real trading already happened in the run-up.
• Meta's Muse is accelerating disruption of financial advisors, not creating it. They link Muse's autonomous cash-management feature to sharp selloffs in Schwab (near $98, down from a $114 high) and LPL Financial (off more than 7%), arguing AI will compress advisory fees industry-wide while barely affecting self-directed traders like themselves.
• Loan refinancing at higher rates is an inflation story, not a housing one. With roughly $936 billion in loans originated near 3% now refinancing near 5%, and $1.5 trillion more coming due through 2027, they argue the real shift is markets repricing from an expected two rate cuts to two hikes.
• Bitcoin's bounce to 8-month highs is an oversold rally, not a new bull market. Both hosts reject a short-squeeze explanation, with one dismissing reported liquidation totals ($648 million to $750 million) as misleadingly small and inflated by leverage math, and predicting Bitcoin revisits the low $60,000s before challenging $100,000.

2026-09-24 · open the original ↗

• Retail investors should lean on speed, not imitate Buffett. He argues Buffett's scale forces him to hold through losses that a retail trader could cut instantly, so copying billionaire buy-and-hold strategy at retail size throws away the retail investor's real edge: agility to enter and exit fast.
• Chubb (CB) is not a buy despite the Buffett-bandwagon push. Media tied Buffett's name to Chubb back in June/July even as it stayed in a local downtrend; earnings were merely okay, free cash flow is dropping into 2026, and price reactivity around a recent red-volume sell-off stayed bearish. He'd wait for price to clear ~$350 before considering it.
• Major indexes remain in a well-defined bull trend despite a quiet tape. The NASDAQ hit new all-time highs on 22 September (S&P close behind), the VIX keeps making lower highs and lows, and Finance's strength since February is now spreading to Tech — confirmed when his Midweek Movers ranking of 52 stocks produced only 2 winners, both tech names he bought. He warns the current calm typically precedes turbulence.

2026-09-24 · open the original ↗

• Conway warns today's overlapping wars could be seen in hindsight as the start of something larger. He points to the simultaneous conflicts in the Gulf and Ukraine "bleeding into" each other, comparing the moment to the pre-1914 period, while saying he hopes that comparison doesn't hold.
• Global economic integration makes a breakdown in trade far more dangerous now than in 1914. Unlike then, when supply chains didn't span the globe, today's economies are vastly more interdependent, which he argues raises the stakes of any real breakdown — something he hopes leaders like Trump and Xi are conscious of as they meet.

2026-09-24 · open the original ↗

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2026-09-23 · open the original ↗

• Issuance is clearing calmly at the front despite a heavy week. ~$733B of gross Treasury issuance across five days (Sep 21–25) breaks down to $521B in bills (71%), $183B in 2/5/7-year coupon notes and $29B in a 2-year FRN; the 2-year note cleared in line at 4.787% on Sep 22, with a 0.2bp tail and 2.63 bid-to-cover.
• A bill-heavy structure reprices instantly with every Fed move, unlike termed-out debt. Bills are clearing at 3.87–4.02% against the 2-year's 4.787%, pricing in roughly 80bp of expected tightening after last week's hike. If that pricing is right, the piece estimates roughly $5.5 trillion in outstanding bills reprices upward within four months, making today's bill tilt look cheap now and expensive if the cycle runs.
• Banks are shortening duration by letting bonds mature, not by selling them. Selling would crystallize losses into regulatory capital, so Philadelphia Fed research found exposed banks were 8–9x more likely to trade bonds with unrealized gains than losses. That leaves pensions, insurers, foreign accounts and the leveraged basis trade as the main buyers of 10s and 30s — a loop the piece says explains why Treasury doubled long-end buybacks.

2026-09-23 · open the original ↗

• Long-dated yields inverted today, which the host flags as unhealthy. The 20-year yield (5.45%) closed above the 30-year (5.39%) while the 10-year reportedly hit a 19-year high, part of a broad move up across the curve that the host ties to the same front-end-versus-duration dynamic covered in the accompanying note.
• This week's Treasury issuance is clearing without stress so far. Walking through the Sep 21–25 calendar (~$733B total: $521B in bills, $183B in 2/5/7-year coupons), the host reports the 2-year auction cleared in line — a roughly 2.60 cover and a small tail — which he calls "no stress yet," and notes bills are pricing in about 80bp of expected Fed tightening.
• Banks are shortening duration without selling, and a Fed fix may follow. Citing Fed and Philadelphia Fed research, the host says banks reclassify risky holdings as held-to-maturity rather than sell them to avoid crystallizing losses. He predicts the Fed will roll out a facility, which he calls "SDOF," to clean up bank balance sheets, calling that priority the thing "everything else pales beside."

2026-09-23 · open the original ↗

• Lossdog is marketing a new AI portfolio-exploration tool it calls "Dog-It AI." The host describes it as a revamped in-platform feature pairing the company's existing quantitative software with AI to surface new investment ideas from a user's holdings, which he calls the most exciting thing the company is currently building.
• The tool reportedly generates and explains stock picks quickly. As an example, the host recounts asking it to build a portfolio of underperforming tech stocks and getting results in roughly 30 seconds to a minute, each pick accompanied by an explanation of why it was selected.

2026-09-23 · open the original ↗

• Record gold inflows reflect diversification demand, not fiscal-collapse fear. Global gold ETFs pulled in $18 billion in August, the second-largest monthly inflow on record, into a market one host sizes at $8–9 trillion; he argues gold belongs in a portfolio as a non-correlated diversifier rather than a "dollar debasement" hedge, and discloses being long gold and silver by selling puts in GC and SLV.
• Meta's Muse buzz doesn't yet prove its AI spending pays off. The stock jumped 11% after Muse hit #1 in Apple's app store, drawing a price-target raise to $796 from $640, but Wall Street's average target of $763 implies just 3% more upside, and the hosts warn a rival's free AI model could undercut Meta's guided $135–145 billion 2026 spending plan.
• Both hosts treat Bitcoin's rally as a trading vehicle, not a currency. They call the roughly 32% Q3 gain (about $58,000 to $85,000) an alternative-asset trade rather than a dollar substitute, dismiss $648 million in liquidated short positions as "a rounding error" against the move, and flag $85,000 as the pivot toward $100,000 or back down to $60,000.
• Falling IRS enforcement doesn't change wealthy investors' stock incentives, one host argues. IRS investigations into abusive tax schemes dropped 63% (92 cases to 34) even as the top 1% owns 54% of the US stock market; he says using a legal loophole isn't "abuse," and both hosts back a simplified, single-page tax code over the current system.

2026-09-23 · open the original ↗

• Named experts' allocation advice spans an enormous range. Steve Forbes and Judy Shelton favor just 10-15% as portfolio insurance, keeping the rest in income-producing assets; Peter Schiff, Rick Rule, Dave Morgan, Jim Rickards and Lyn Alden suggest 20-30% as an inflation/currency-devaluation hedge; Ron Paul recommends 50-65%; and Mike Maloney goes as far as 100%, on his own prediction that the fiat system, weighed down by uncontrolled national debt, is headed for collapse.
• The host reaches her own target by averaging every expert's recommendation. Doing so puts the consensus around 20-25% of one's cash net worth (savings, CDs, non-retirement investment accounts), a figure she presents as her own conclusion rather than any single expert's number.
• Newcomers are told to start well below that target. She advises beginners to put only 5-10% of cash capital into physical gold or silver, then scale gradually toward the 20-25% target as confidence and experience with the metals grow.

2026-09-23 · open the original ↗

• Most agent architectures rest on prompting and hoping, not mechanisms. The author coins "Prompt and Pray" for designs, like a hypothetical bank agent handling a $10,000 credit-line increase, where LLM interpreter, planner, orchestrator, policy reader, eligibility reasoner and judge all depend on the model getting it right. The author's objection is not to prompting itself but to using a prompt where a mechanism could have been built.
• Use an LLM judge only after lookup, computation and prediction fail. Many judged questions have correct answers: whether a document reports a capital ratio can be looked up, whether 17 transactions sum to $4.8 million can be added, a limit breach is a numeric comparison, and default risk is what a credit model estimates. The author applies the same order (lookup, compute, predict or simulate, then LLM) to every component, arguing that moving toward LLM discretion raises the LLM's latitude, not the system's intelligence, and is justified only by real ambiguity, such as "I need some additional room on my card" or open-ended research.
• A prompted step is an instruction; a state machine is a control. For a credit workflow (retrieve account, verify identity, retrieve policy, calculate exposure, score risk, check limits, authorize, execute), an LLM orchestrator told "you must always perform these steps" usually complies but cannot be forced, whereas a state machine makes reaching execution impossible until prior states complete. Likewise, two LLMs agreeing an action meets an approval threshold is not knowing it does; a settled rule should be encoded and enforced, with LLM interpretation kept for policy language that is genuinely ambiguous.
• Grant LLM freedom early, tighten the architecture toward consequential action. The author proposes a propose → verify → optimize → gate → act sequence, in which the LLM does most of the proposing, verification looks up facts, computes and uses validated models, optimization runs against explicit constraints, and the gate checks policy, permissions, limits and approvals, so uncertainty shrinks at each stage rather than piling up. The author calls the target "Propose and Prove", and concedes that much cannot be proven and belongs to judgment, LLM judgment included, so long as verification is not skipped merely because it is harder to build.
• Prompt and Pray persists through vendor incentives and engineering convenience. The author argues providers favour LLM-heavy designs because each planner, critic and judge multiplies inference calls they sell, and that real verifiers need schemas, data contracts, SQL, calibration, rules, permissions, provenance and tests, against thirty seconds to type a judge prompt. The author's review test for every component is "why is an LLM doing this?": ambiguity, an unenumerable search space, synthesis or option generation are good answers, while "it was easy to prompt" is not.

2026-09-23 · open the original ↗

• This post includes paid content that is not available publicly. See the original source.

2026-09-23 · open the original ↗

• Wool was medieval Europe's most strategically important manufactured good, akin to semiconductors today. Conway notes that in 13th–14th century England, wool and food were the largest shares of GDP, much as semiconductor fabrication obsesses observers now, with Nvidia and TSMC as the modern equivalent.
• England once wielded wool dominance as a trade weapon, the way China uses rare earths today. He says England banned wool exports to pressure other countries, drawing a direct parallel to China's current use of rare earths in trade negotiations as Xi meets with the US.

2026-09-22 · open the original ↗

• "Government" money market funds hold less Treasury buying power than reported. Of the $8.3T total, only $3.43T (41.7%) is direct Treasuries; $2.91T sits in overnight repo plus $1.06T lent through the FICC clearinghouse. SEC rules let Treasury-collateralized repo count as "government" holdings even though it is legally a loan to a dealer or institution, not a Treasury purchase.

• A repo counterparty default could force a cascade of Treasury sales. If an institution on the other side of a repo fails — he cites UWM's collapse as the kind of event — the fund must sell the pledged Treasury collateral to recover its cash, since no counterparty remains to unwind the trade normally.

• One of three T-bill buyer pools is shrinking. Citing Morgan Stanley, he says the leveraged Treasury basis trade has fallen to $900B in notional size from $1.26T at the start of the year, alongside money market funds and roughly $300B in stablecoin demand; he doesn't know why. Meanwhile Treasury is issuing about 86% short-term paper against a 30-year yield running five basis points under the 20-year, which he calls abnormal.

2026-09-22 · open the original ↗

• One host predicts the Aura IPO "ends badly," likening it to Peloton. He points to the company burning $924 million to generate $1.2 billion in revenue as the kind of growth-over-profitability story that typically ends in disaster, questioning whether IPO investors are still right to reward growth at any cost.
• Burning cash alone isn't disqualifying, the other host argues. He cites Amazon and Groupon as companies that burned cash for years before turning profitable, saying a company can spend heavily as long as it has a "switch to flip" into profitability — though he admits he doesn't know whether Aura has one.
• The company nets almost nothing from its own share sale. Of the $632 million Aura raises by selling 15 million shares, $626 million goes to pay taxes on RSUs vesting at the IPO, leaving the company just $6 million; insiders are separately selling 35 of the 50 million total shares offered, about 70%.

2026-09-22 · open the original ↗

• Global trade depends on a handful of physical chokepoints, which is underappreciated. Nearly 90% of traded goods must pass through straits like Malacca, the Bab el-Mandeb into the Suez Canal, or the Panama Canal, and a greater number of these are "in play" at once than ever before.
• Shipping has proven more resilient to disruption than expected. Despite Red Sea attacks forcing vessels around Africa, the added cost is "microscopic" because the cost of moving goods globally has already fallen so low that even a longer route barely registers.
• Oil prices rose less than feared from the Strait of Hormuz tensions because of covert supply routes. He points to tankers making nighttime "ship-to-ship transfers" near the Iranian coast with US military support, meaning more oil has kept flowing than official figures suggest.

2026-09-22 · open the original ↗

• Oura's IPO is being pitched as growth-at-any-price that will end badly. One host compares it to Peloton: Oura is seeking a $14 billion valuation on $1.2 billion in revenue (up 73%) against a $924 million net loss, up from $183 million a year earlier. Insiders are also selling 35 of the 50 million shares offered, and the company nets only about $6 million after RSU taxes eat most of its own $632 million raise.
• AMD's price increase, not fundamentals, drove its stock to new highs. AMD raised prices on AI accelerators and GPUs by roughly 10% starting next quarter, and the stock rallied to a new high near $619, up from about $500 a week earlier — beyond Piper Sandler's reaffirmed $600 price target. The hosts call the market's reward for a small price hike, like its reward for layoffs, unsettling but consistent with how it has always worked.
• Tokenized stock trading is still riding speculative momentum, not proving infrastructure use. One host calls Uniswap's $2.6 billion in cumulative tokenized-stock volume on the Robinhood chain a drop in the bucket next to the $7 trillion in notional options volume the exchange cleared in one Friday expiration. He argues tokenized stock is "dead money" since it can't be levered, but expects tokenized derivatives to be the bigger opportunity; the other host is more bullish but agrees the case is unproven.
• Becoming a better trader is about decisiveness or engagement, the hosts split. One argues the key skill is simply making decisions without agonizing over the "perfect" strike, comparing it to ordering a pizza; the other counters that staying engaged — watching markets and futures daily even when not trading them — is what separates good traders from great ones.

2026-09-22 · open the original ↗

• He called bitcoin's July bottom, and the broader tape confirms it. Bitcoin has trended up since, silver is climbing, and the S&P 500 is pushing toward all-time highs, which he expects to pull other sectors higher with it.
• He calls Microstrategy a toxic bet despite being tactically bullish on it. He criticizes CEO Michael Saylor, noting Saylor reportedly lost nearly 99% of his wealth in the 2000 dot-com bubble, and argues Microstrategy's heavy leverage makes a blowup a matter of "when," not "if."
• Short-term momentum still favors Microstrategy, with no fixed price target. The stock is back above its 200-day moving average alongside bitcoin's uptrend, and he says he "wouldn't bet against it," while dismissing specific targets like $300 or $500 as unknowable.
• He frames the trade as bullish but time-bombed, urging active risk management. His advice for anyone in profit is to keep raising the stop-loss/cut price rather than hold a fixed target, since leverage-driven blowups are unpredictable in timing.

2026-09-22 · open the original ↗

• Rising bond yields reflect several compounding doubts at once, not one single cause. Conway cites fading confidence in fiscal sustainability, assumptions about AI capital spending, and "geography reasserting itself" after decades of disinflationary globalization — compounded by a structural shift in which hedge funds, not traditional long-term gilt buyers, are now the marginal buyer and seller in UK bond markets.
• Britain's historical dominance in wool, then cotton, mirrors China's position in rare earths today. England once banned wool exports as leverage the way China does with rare earths now; cotton then transformed the UK economy, with cotton's share of UK GDP rising from 2.6% in 1770 to 23% in 1830, while US cotton production rose from 1.5 million to 167 million pounds between 1790 and 1820 after the cotton gin's invention.
• Offshoring began in textiles after World War II, not in tech, and explains today's disaffected politics. US department-store buyers started outsourcing clothing production to Japan and Hong Kong in the 1940s–50s, a template later copied by tech and car firms — a shift Conway says helps explain the hollowed-out rust belt and Midlands, and in turn the rise of Trump and the Brexit vote.
• Russia, left unsanctioned, has become the world's dominant wheat exporter. Conway says this reverses a Cold War dynamic in which American agricultural superiority helped beat the Soviets; if Ukraine's grain exports were added to Russia's, the combined dominance in global wheat would exceed anything seen historically.
• A genuine breakdown in global trade would be far more dangerous today than in 1914, given how deeply integrated economies now are. He compares it to a run on a fractional-reserve banking system — panic-buying of staples could trigger a real supply-chain crisis — and argues China is especially exposed, since its export containers must pass through the same vulnerable chokepoints as everyone else's.

2026-09-21 · open the original ↗

• Trade Match flags when a followed trader owns something you do. The feature compares a connected portfolio against trades made by Tom Sosnoff and Tony Batista and surfaces context on how their position is structured relative to the user's, though the video stresses the decision to act stays with the user.
• Portfolio Explorer lets users browse other members' full portfolios. Framed as a library of community-built "mini ETFs," it shows each portfolio's thesis and holdings, with a companion leaderboard tracking how those portfolios perform as the market moves.
• A sidebar icon system flags new actions and new features. A circle marks something the user can act on; a star marks something new or recently improved, both meant to help users keep up as the platform adds features "constantly."

2026-09-21 · open the original ↗

• One host dismisses the press-freedom-volatility link as already priced in. Reacting to research tying declining press freedom across 12 countries to higher volatility, after the White House revoked three networks' press credentials, he notes volatility sat at all-time lows even when past administrations revoked roughly 400 individual press passes. The other host is more cautious, calling one trading day too soon to judge.
• The Fed "doesn't matter" except as crisis insurance, one host insists. After the Fed's unanimous vote to raise rates 25 basis points to a 3.75%-4% range was shrugged off by markets, he argues the Fed only counts in catastrophic moments like 2008-09; the other host counters that an independent Fed still matters so no single administration can control interest rates itself.
• Handing Berkshire's chairmanship to a son proves little about succession, hosts argue. After 96-year-old Warren Buffett stepped down in favor of son Howard, one host says he'd never have stepped down since running the company was his reason for living; both agree the move is largely symbolic, since Greg — not Howard — actually runs Berkshire day to day.
• Iron butterflies trade lower win-odds for smaller risk. The hosts describe selling a straddle and buying wings for a net credit — a butterfly flipped to collect money upfront — and say they rarely trade it themselves despite an all-women SPX group using $100-wide flies successfully; that day's SPX straddle priced at just $14, underscoring how narrow the market's expected range had become.

2026-09-21 · open the original ↗

• Rollover dependency, not this week's dump, is the real danger. He models $457B in Monday auctions as part of roughly $720-730B raised this week, but net new cash raised is typically only $30-60B against that gross figure — the correct metric, he argues, is net duration supply, not headline auction size.
• Structural buyers, not traditional demand, absorb the T-bill wave. Stablecoin issuers, money-market funds, and the Cayman Islands basis trade are now the biggest buyers of T-bills, a shift that has left the Treasury rolling roughly $9-9.5 trillion over the next four months (about $27 trillion a year) with over a third of outstanding debt now in bills, suppressing 20- and 30-year yields in the process.
• Banks' hidden bond losses are choking their ability to buy new debt. He estimates roughly $400-420B of unrealized losses sit in banks' held-to-maturity portfolios, unrecognized because they aren't marked to market, which he says prevents those bonds from being leveraged to absorb new Treasury issuance — he predicts a new "Sovereign Debt Facility" swapping banks' underwater long bonds for short-term par bonds, freeing balance sheets, by November 4, 2026.

2026-09-21 · open the original ↗

• He argues buying stocks at 52-week lows is the wrong move. Lowe's (ticker LOW) has been trending down for 238 days and is hitting fresh 52-week lows, which he says is exactly when investors mistakenly buy rather than avoid it.
• Rising home-remodeling activity is a leading recession signal, in his view. He says when households can't afford big vacations they remodel instead, noting this pattern showed up ahead of the 2008 crash and again in 2022, making home-improvement retailers worth watching as an economic gauge.
• He contrasts chronic laggards with steady 52-week-high compounders. Nike has trended down for 1,748 days and just posted its eighth 52-week low, while Pepsi is down 33% from its highs on its fourth low; by contrast, Berkshire hasn't hit a 52-week low in roughly 1,440 days and is up 108%, and Shell has trended up over 1,340 days and is up 175% on its third 52-week high.
• He built a free 52-period-high indicator to spot these breakouts. The tool, an orange line included in his trend indicator and "pump machine," is available on his page; he says he's watching LOW for an eventual reversal but wants confirmation from new highs, not just a bounce off lows, before buying.

2026-09-20 · open the original ↗

• The American order functioned as an operating system, not a patron. It supplied one settlement currency, one insurance and trade-finance stack, one navy, one treaty lattice — a role no successor (China, Europe) can simply inherit. As it withdraws, constructs don't find a new protector; they compete for admission into smaller regional clusters, which bid only for states offering a factor endowment — energy, a chokepoint, a fabrication base, arable land — the cluster actually needs.

• Washington's retreat transfers the world's maintenance bills rather than erasing them. He cites the Strait of Hormuz closure and the US defense secretary telling Europe to "get on a boat," arguing America's fifty years of Hormuz escort bought a "tollkeeper position" — dollar oil invoicing, Gulf surplus recycling into Treasuries, sanction leverage — not oil itself, so abandoning the toll booth invites non-dollar settlement for the routes it once policed.

• The transition should be forecast on slow "factor" variables, not fast politics. Demographics, energy infrastructure, and geography for 2040 are largely fixed already, given ten-to-fifteen-year build times; dating T-zero to February 2022 (the freezing of a major central bank's reserves), he places the period of maximum disorder — old system functions dying faster than new clusters can replace them — around 2036 to 2041.

• Factors set the destination, but politics prices the path there. He contrasts Czechoslovakia's peaceful post-Cold War split with Yugoslavia's decade of war: identical factor-driven dissolution logic, a hundredfold difference in human cost. That gap, he argues, is exactly what purely structural (factors-only) forecasting misses and where the real trading risk sits.

2026-09-20 · open the original ↗

• Turkey has built a large, durable military footprint in Somalia, while Israel's push into Somaliland looks unlikely to hold. He cites Turkish naval assets, armored divisions, an officer's school, and roughly 15,000 trained Somali soldiers, against Djibouti's shared US–Chinese base and a contested Somaliland where Israel is reportedly trying to gain a foothold.

• Colonial-era border-drawing produced the "construct" states now facing dissolution. He traces this through the 1934 British/French treaty stripping three provinces from Yemen's Zaidi Kingdom and the splitting of a once-larger Oman into today's Gulf states, framing it as the same process his book's chapter five applies to Korea, Jordan, and Kaliningrad.

• Removing the American security subsidy will hit mono-crop agricultural economies hardest. He predicts (his own forecast, not reported fact) that countries exporting a single cash crop — his example is avocados — to fund cheap food imports will be "torn down badly" within the next year, once that arrangement, sustained by the old US-backed order, stops functioning.

2026-09-19 · open the original ↗

• A mechanical dealer-hedging flip drove the September rebound, not news. Tom says rising volatility during the sell-off forced market makers into buying futures instead of selling once the index fell near 7500, flipping the spiral into a rally — a pattern he says he's seen "10 or 20 times" in his career and now trades around.
• Beating a benchmark is irrelevant; target a multiple of risk-free rates. Tom argues that if risk-free rates are 5%, committing time to trading only makes sense if you clear that rate by 3x to 5x — 15% to 25% returns — since outsourcing money decisions to a "conflicted" financial industry means you've already lost.
• Trading edge comes from frequency, not conviction. Tom says he makes 15,000 to 17,000 trades a year via the law of large numbers, and that "genius fails" only when position size gets too large — citing Long-Term Capital Management's collapse — so keeping trade size in check, not being consistently right, is what prevents blowups.
• He dismisses AI-extinction warnings from AI CEOs as self-interested. Tom notes the Anthropic CEO who cautioned about AI's dangers is "about to go public at $2 trillion" and argues such warnings are attempts to "temper expectations"; he predicts AI won't replace trader judgment but will serve as agentic tools monitoring tail risk beyond two standard deviations.

2026-09-19 · open the original ↗

• The rate hike was foreseeable and shouldn't have surprised anyone. He says he flagged the risk back in February and, on September 7th, showed the odds of a hike had become increasingly likely.
• He remains bullish despite the initial selloff. Stocks dropped and the VIX spiked on the news, but the market reclaimed the lost ground the same and following day while the VIX fell back below its moving average.
• The bullish thesis held since June 9, 2025 stays intact for now. He says he hasn't seen enough deterioration in his signal to change course, though he'll exit on a major company failure, "delusional euphoria" on social media, or a break in price structure.
• The week's calls remain relevant: a recession-resistant buy, three IPO picks, and Nvidia caution. He bought a recession-resistant stock as rate risk raised recession risk, screened roughly 389 IPOs down to three he likens to his 2024 Palantir call, and flagged Nvidia as a name he's cautious on versus better opportunities elsewhere.

2026-09-18 · open the original ↗

• Saudi Arabia's oil/gas halt to Europe is driving an energy-sovereignty pivot. Saudi Arabia told Europe it won't renew oil/gas exports until around 2027; Ursula von der Leyen responded by calling for a technology-neutral, EU-controlled energy system built on renewables or nuclear, explicitly excluding oil and gas, projected to save €260 billion a year in fossil-fuel imports. The host reads this as confirming his "five factors" thesis that chokepoint disruption pushes countries to secure their own energy.
• Chokepoints are shifting to private, national control, not just Hormuz. The host points to Peru's Chancay port, built and largely owned by China with its land reportedly ceded to Chinese control, plus a nearly finished connector road and a planned north-south railway on China's side — a project he says the US opposes. He cites Turkey's unilateral Bosphorus toll hikes, from about 80 cents for decades to $4.60, now $5.20 and headed toward $6, as the same pattern: no permission asked.
• He agrees Hormuz matters but rejects the "dollar is ending" timeline. Responding to ex-Goldman commodities head Jeff Currie's claim that ceding the Strait of Hormuz to Iran ends US hegemony and dollar reserve status, the host says the Navy has lacked power to police global chokepoints for 5-10 years, citing a February 2025 pull-back paper by a US Navy power-projection strategist, and that NATO and the Japan/Korea/Taiwan treaties were already hollow before Trump. Since Iran still converts 60-80% of its sanctioned oil sales into dollars, he puts real dollar displacement 10-15 years out.

2026-09-18 · open the original ↗

• Lossdog pitches a feed that filters portfolio-moving news down to what matters. Its "portfolio news" feature claims to scan a user's held stocks and surface the handful of headlines — dividends, earnings, splits, economic releases — said to actually explain a day's move, populating once a portfolio is uploaded.

2026-09-18 · open the original ↗

• Bank of America's 2021 bond bet has turned into a large drag. BAC built up a big securities position in 2021 wagering that rates near zero to one percent would persist; with rates having since risen, headlines are now circulating citing roughly $90 billion in estimated losses tied to that portfolio.
• He reads BAC's public $150 target-pushing as a sign it wants out. Per its 13F filing, BAC holds a large stake in a stock (the name is unclear in the audio) that it's reportedly pushing toward a $150 target; he calls price targets "often futile" and speculates the push signals BAC wants liquidity to exit, expecting the stock to oscillate rather than cleanly get there.
• He calls Bank of America a flat "no" amid a stacked downtrend. Between the bond losses, only replacing 75% of departing staff while doubling its AI budget, and pushing individual stock targets, combined with a strong downtrend, he's avoiding BAC; he separately flags TLT as a possible future bond-related entry but says that setup "is not there yet."
• Regional banks, not BAC, are where he sees the opportunity. He's favored regional banks since roughly February 2026 as part of his "stock talk" positioning, which he says has delivered two-to-three times the S&P 500's returns; a review of 389 recent IPOs flagged names like NB Bancorp rising to the top on strong cash flow, rising EPS, and bullish chart setups, even as he continues avoiding the large banks.

2026-09-18 · open the original ↗

• Peterffy argues AI's economic impact will come from broad adoption, not frontier-model breakthroughs alone. He says that even if leading AI labs' models stopped improving entirely, the spread of existing open-source models through ordinary companies would still drive large productivity and earnings gains.
• He opposes slowing AI development, framing it as a race the US must win. He dismisses fears of a catastrophic AI-related hack as no different from the hacking risks that have existed for decades, and argues China will not slow down regardless of what the US does.

2026-09-17 · open the original ↗

• Avoid trading an options chain with wide bid-ask spreads unless forced to. One host says a wide market on a weekly chain (using SPX as the example) is reason enough to pick a different expiration, unless the stock has earnings that week, which tends to tighten markets.
• Cap how much of the bid-ask spread you'll give up, regardless of how wide it is. Asked about a wide spread in Palo Alto Networks (PANW), he says he sets a fixed give-up limit on entry, whether buying or selling, and treats the acceptable give-up on exit as proportional to what was given up getting in.

2026-09-17 · open the original ↗

• Peterffy is buying land as a hedge against what he puts at a 20% chance of the US eventually "eradicating" capitalism, at least temporarily. He draws on his family's experience in communist Hungary, where land was the one confiscated asset the state eventually returned after 45 years, unlike businesses or other real estate.
• He dismisses gold as an alternative hedge. In his view, a government moving against private property would simply declare gold ownership illegal and force it to be surrendered, whereas land cannot be seized and redistributed the same way.

2026-09-17 · open the original ↗

• Tight credit spreads reflect rate math, not risk complacency. High-yield spreads sit near 271 basis points versus a roughly 450-point historical median, but the hosts call this efficient market theory: with short-term rates already elevated, lenders don't need as wide a spread to hit an acceptable yield, so it's neither confidence in corporate America nor evidence investors have stopped charging for risk.
• Crypto's 2026 failures reflect dead demand, not missing regulation. The hosts trace institutional caution to a Gensler-era SEC rule, SAB 121, that forced brokerages to hold crypto exposure dollar-for-dollar against their own capital until it was repealed on the new administration's first day; they argue the 99 crypto projects that shut down this year failed because trading demand collapsed, not because the Senate's Clarity Act stalled.
• The Fed should admit it's guessing instead of calling inflation "transitory." One host argues the word is misleading since forecasters can't know whether a shock will fade, citing Arthur Burns's 1970s transitory call, which required Paul Volcker's 22% rates to fix, and a Chicago Fed finding that the 2021 transitory call produced forecast errors three times larger than pre-pandemic norms.
• One host is betting on a market decline over the next two years. Citing that midterm years have averaged a 17.5% intrayear correction since 1950, sixth-year two-term presidencies gained roughly 21% on average, and the year after a midterm low has rallied more than 30%, the other host expects the historical bullish pattern to hold instead.

2026-09-17 · open the original ↗

• Goldbacks are physical gold, not paper, manufactured with layered verification. Created in 2019, they're made by depositing a thin layer of gold atom by atom, checking it with an X-ray for purity and thickness, then fire-assaying sample notes — melting and weighing the gold — plus independent lab testing, to guarantee the content of denominations from 1 to 50 (each a thousandth of a troy ounce).
• A roughly 100% markup over spot price makes goldbacks costly gold exposure. The host says gold backs carry about a 100% premium over spot, so roughly half of what a buyer pays covers the note's art and manufacturing rather than metal, and the note's exchange value still floats with the spot price between purchase and use.
• Goldbacks work for barter, not for building an efficient gold stack. They aren't legal tender but are accepted by hundreds of merchants via an app that converts a purchase total into goldback value; standard bullion coins and low-premium bars deliver far more gold per dollar, so the host frames goldbacks as a small addition to a stack rather than a replacement for it.

2026-09-17 · open the original ↗

• A goldback's price runs roughly double the spot value of its gold. The host attributes this to the specialized equipment needed to manufacture durable gold notes, meaning about half of what a buyer pays covers the note's art and production rather than metal.
• Goldbacks aren't legal tender, but hundreds of merchants still accept them. Their exchange value floats with the spot gold price, so a note bought at one price and spent later can gain or lose purchasing power, and participating merchants use an app to convert a purchase's dollar total into the current goldback value.
• Goldbacks suit barter and emergencies more than gold accumulation. The host argues standard bullion coins and low-premium bars deliver far more gold per dollar, so goldbacks shouldn't replace a core stack but can be a practical, wallet-friendly addition for private transactions or bartering with neighbors.

2026-09-17 · open the original ↗

• Goldbacks were created to make small gold amounts usable as everyday currency. Introduced in 2019, they come in denominations of 1, 5, 10, 25 and 50 — each that many thousandths of a troy ounce — and are tear-resistant, waterproof and sized to fit a standard wallet, unlike a loose 1-gram piece of gold (about $175 at today's price).
• Each goldback's gold content is built up and checked atom by atom. The manufacturer deposits a thin gold layer in multiple passes while continuously monitoring thickness, then X-rays the finished note through its full depth to verify both purity and thickness before it ships.
• Production runs are verified by melting and independently testing samples. A fire assay recovers and weighs the gold from sample notes to confirm the guaranteed content, and the maker says it checks its own test methods against ISO-certified processes and independent laboratory testing.

2026-09-17 · open the original ↗

• The Fed's hike was a bond rescue, not a currency defense. Invoking J.P. Morgan's century-old dilemma, he argues the Fed raised a quarter point in a unanimous vote (including previously dovish Warsh and Moran) to keep the yen from crashing, since a yen collapse would have crashed Treasuries; the dots show no cuts through 2027, holding rates near 4–4.25%.

• Fed, ECB, and BOJ are now tightening simultaneously, for the first time since 2006 — a coincidence he flags because that prior episode preceded the global financial crisis by about 18 months. He puts BOJ odds at 89% for a quarter-point hike to 1.25% on Friday (a three-decade high), with the yen already at a seven-month high near 152.89, and floats a smaller chance of a 50bp move.

• Japanese insurers can now out-yield the yen carry trade at home. He calculates that after the BOJ hike, currency-hedged Treasuries net Japanese insurers only about 2.5%, versus 3% and 3.9% on unhedged 30- and 40-year JGBs, making repatriation more profitable than holding Treasuries. He's watching the Treasury buyback through November 4 for signs the long end isn't being controlled, which he believes would trigger an HTM portfolio swap (SDOF).

2026-09-17 · open the original ↗

• Fed rate hikes work like a thermostat, with a built-in lag. He says most newer investors expect an immediate market reaction, but just as turning down a thermostat doesn't instantly cool a house, it takes time for higher rates to work through the economy and cool inflation.
• The standard mechanism: higher rates raise borrowing costs and pressure valuations. He notes the rate hike that just happened makes borrowing more expensive and strengthens the dollar, which puts pressure on the British pound and can make stocks "bumpy" for longer-term investors, though he stresses this doesn't play out immediately.
• History shows rates and stocks don't always move in opposite directions. He points to the first half of 2022, when rates and stocks rose together; 2008, when rates fell alongside a crashing market; and the early 2000s, when rates and stocks both climbed — evidence against a simple "rates up, stocks down" rule.
• His current move: hold recession-resistant assets while waiting out the lag. He expects hikes to eventually pressure the stock market lower, similar to the delayed cooling on inflation, but since that effect takes time, most of the stocks he's currently finding attractive are recession-resistant names.

2026-09-17 · open the original ↗

• Warsh's hike defied his own appointers. Despite the President, Vice President, and Treasury Secretary all pushing to hold or cut, Kevin Warsh raised rates anyway, joined unanimously by fellow Trump appointees Michelle Bowman and Christopher Waller; the author reads this against the Arthur Burns precedent of caving to political pressure.
• Trump's framing of the decision is factually wrong. He argues the President conflates U.S. creditworthiness with the policy rate (which targets inflation and employment, not credit reward) and conflates a trade deficit with a loss — while noting Moody's stripped the U.S. of its AAA rating in May 2025.
• The Fed only sets the short end, not the long end. He argues rising yields stem from Iran-war energy inflation (crude near $100/barrel, diesel pricing as if near $200), swelling deficits and debt-to-GDP, plus hyperscalers like Google, Meta, and Amazon issuing long-dated debt that competes with Treasuries for capital.
• Yields hit multi-decade highs despite the hike. The 10-year Treasury breached 5.041%, its highest since July 2007, and the 30-year peaked at 5.401%, highest since June 2007; the author credits Warsh's Jackson Hole-signaled consistency with preventing an even worse sell-off.

2026-09-16 · open the original ↗

• Lossdog pitches its community forum as a source of career and investing leads. The segment walks through using the sidebar to read community guidelines and announcements and to join career- and portfolio-focused group discussions, or to message other members directly.

2026-09-16 · open the original ↗

• Record household stock exposure reads as risk, not confidence. The hosts agree that US households now holding 48% of financial assets in equities — up from 45% and roughly double the 24.5% average since 1945 — leaves most people badly exposed heading into any real correction. They cite data showing the top 1% of individual stockholders own roughly 60-61% of the market versus about 1% for the bottom 50%.
• The bond market, not stocks, is signaling real economic stress. One host argues the S&P now reflects only ten to twenty "too big to fail" mega-caps rather than the broader economy, while bonds near record lows show the fear the stock market hides. He bets his co-host lunch that bonds retest 115 before ever falling to 100, expecting post-midterm political gridlock to be the catalyst.
• War damage to data centers is a new investable risk. AWS's Bahrain region and a UAE data zone remain down from Iran-war damage, with Bahrain not expected back until early 2027. Vessel transits through the Strait of Hormuz fell to four on Monday from ten the day before, far below the roughly fifty seen before the war; one host argues Hormuz won't normalize for years and calls $100 oil a possible "new norm."
• The wheel strategy isn't actually lower-risk stock ownership. Batista says he never wants assignment and instead rolls naked puts indefinitely at 21 days to expiration, since it uses far less margin for the same P&L as owning shares and selling calls. Sheridan counters that stock ownership carries a "sticky" psychological pull covered calls avoid, and both concede the strategy has only worked because of the current 20-year bull market.

2026-09-16 · open the original ↗

• De facto duration control is already US policy, unannounced. The author argues Treasury's doubled 10–30y buybacks (raised to at least $4B per operation effective 9 September, first operation sized to $6B) reproduce the 1942–51 peg mechanism and cross the line TBAC drew in July 2025 against buybacks that alter the debt profile — a reaction function the market is described as having already recognized.
• This machinery lacks the original peg's infinite backstop, leaving it untested. Where the Fed's 1940s balance sheet was unlimited, Treasury's current buyback capacity is bill-issuance-bounded and visible in advance; the 10 September operation was met with 30-year yields hitting fresh 2026 highs near 5.26%, which the author reads as the line being probed and not holding — the gilt-2022/BOJ-2023 lesson.
• Open exit rails cap how much debt this mechanism can erode. With gold, bitcoin, and tokenized MMFs available on the same phone as the trap — unlike the captive 1946 bearer — the author argues Treasury faces a fork within roughly one refunding cycle: close the exits (repression made legible, self-defeating) or accept inflation without acknowledgment as in 1946–48, a path already being priced via gold.

2026-09-16 · open the original ↗

• A globally synchronized retreat from long-duration issuance is underway. The author notes the Bank of England has joined the US and Japan in halting sales of 20- and 30-year gilts, reading this as corroborating evidence that the 1942–51 duration-control playbook is being reenacted internationally, not just domestically.
• Duration control is already de facto policy, left unannounced on purpose. The author argues Treasury's buyback doubling — to at least $4B per operation effective 9 September, upsized to $6B on the first operation — reproduces the 1942–51 peg's mechanism without formal acknowledgment, because, in his framing, "legibility kills repression"; he expects escalation to continue through the 4 November refunding rather than a named policy.
• Stablecoin absorption of T-bills is the modern replacement for war-bond drives. The author states T-bill share has already crossed 30% of issuance and is rising, funneled into GENIUS Act stablecoins as manufactured demand, and asks — without answering — what happens once concentration reaches 50–60%.

2026-09-16 · open the original ↗

• Interactive Brokers' rate structure insulates it from where Fed policy goes. Peterffy says the firm lends and pays interest at a fixed spread around Fed funds, so it doesn't matter whether rates sit at 1% or 20%; he expects the Fed to hike 25 basis points mainly to "demonstrate independence," while arguing war-driven oil prices, not Fed policy, are the real inflation driver right now.
• He is optimistic AI gains will spread economy-wide rather than stay concentrated in a few leaders. Even if frontier models stopped improving, he says adoption of existing open-source models across ordinary companies would still drive large productivity and earnings gains, and he views Nvidia's roughly 27x earnings multiple as low given its stated 70% earnings growth expectations.
• He expects most hyperscalers' compute spending to be written down as the AI race narrows to one or two winners. Because none will concede the race, he says they'll keep buying "all the compute they can," which will eventually crash compute prices and benefit the rest of the economy even as the losing hyperscalers take writedowns.
• Peterffy predicts prediction markets will eventually become the majority of Interactive Brokers' earnings. He says political prediction markets are already deep enough to be more accurate than polls, currently pointing to the House flipping Democratic while the Senate stays Republican, and expects liquidity to grow sharply as institutions use them to hedge economic and political risk.
• He is buying land as a hedge against a self-estimated 20% chance of the US temporarily "eradicating" capitalism. Drawing on his family losing everything but land under communism in Hungary, he argues land would be the only asset eventually returned, and rejects gold as an alternative since a hostile government could simply declare its ownership illegal.

2026-09-16 · open the original ↗

• This post includes paid content that is not available publicly. See the original source.

2026-09-16 · open the original ↗

• Diversifying across dollar-denominated accounts isn't real diversification. The featured clip argues that bank accounts, IRAs, 401(k)s, stocks, bonds, and money markets are all funded with dollars, so holding many of them still leaves an investor exposed to a single currency.
• A "monetary reset" would reset all dollar-denominated assets together. This is presented as the clip's warning: because those asset types are derived from and denominated in dollars, they would fall together in such an event, though no timing is given.
• True diversification requires physical gold and silver alongside cash-based assets. The host frames stacking metals as the answer and calls gold and silver's ability to hold purchasing power "guaranteed" — his own advocacy position, not a proven fact.

2026-09-15 · open the original ↗

• A 25bp hike is priced at 92% ahead of September 16. That's up from roughly 70% before an above-expectations August CPI (3.4% y/y, core 0.3% monthly) and a hot PPI reading [CME FedWatch via press reports, Sept 11–15]. Sell-side calls diverge on the path beyond the hike: Deutsche Bank sees one more 2026 dot, JPMorgan pencils December, and Bank of America is the hawkish outlier at three further hikes.
• The likeliest scenario frames the hike as insurance, not a hawkish turn. At ~60% probability and with the hike itself already priced in, the note expects the market to trade the dot count instead: one further 2026 dot, on an energy-driven inflation narrative, would leave the dollar mildly firm and the front end flat while compressing term premium enough for the 30-year to rally — framed as the outcome most compatible with an orderly dollar-devaluation program, not a forecast.
• A hawkish dot path is framed as the plan's biggest threat. Two or more additional hike dots (~18%, Bank of America's call) would be dollar-bullish, reverse the yen and won's administered gains, and bear-flatten the curve, with the 2-year jumping 15–25bp; because AI infrastructure buildout is framed as substantially debt-financed, the note treats this as a possible catalyst for ending the four-year equity bull run, testing the Nasdaq's 14% year-to-date cushion. A surprise hold (~15%) is separately flagged as producing a bear steepener called the single worst configuration for the funding desk.

2026-09-15 · open the original ↗

• The host claims vindication for an old export-ban prediction. He reiterates a roughly two-and-a-half-year-old call, made in connection with the Ukraine and Iran conflicts, that the US would eventually ban exports of oil, gas, diesel, and urea, and states officials are now "open to considering it" — presented as his own self-reported vindication, not confirmed against an outside source.
• He walks through the same four FOMC scenarios as the companion note. A 25bp hike framed as insurance (base case) is described as best for the dollar-devaluation plan; a hawkish dot path and a surprise hold are each described as fighting that plan, with the hold's resulting bear-steepener called the worst configuration for the funding desk and likely to force emergency buybacks.
• He personally expects a hold with hawkish rhetoric, not a hike. Against the 92%-priced consensus, he argues Fed Chair Warsh was installed to lower short-term rates, not raise them, so he leans toward no hike paired with tough talk on future inflation. He frames this — plus a guess that the dollar ultimately falls before a "Louvre Accord"-style intervention is needed — explicitly as his own opinion, not fact.

2026-09-15 · open the original ↗

• Record money market cash isn't a coiled spring waiting to hit stocks. One host reads the $7.75 trillion pile — roughly $3 trillion of it retail money earning over 4% — as the start of cracks in the market's foundation; the other calls it the normal flow of cash seeking real yield, not investors timing a dip-buy. Neither can point to what would actually push stocks lower right now.
• Even an aggressive trader should cap risk per trade. Responding to a 30-year-old with $50,000 wanting to go all-in, the hosts suggest a per-trade ceiling near 10% of the account — about $5,000 would already qualify as aggressive. Firing two $25,000 trades and having one go badly, they warn, could cut the account to $30,000–$35,000, a hole they call nearly impossible to climb back from.
• Adjusting a losing strangle divides the hosts: roll or recenter. One still rolls only the untested side unless within 21 days of expiration, when he'd recenter the whole trade; the other says he's shifted over the past couple of years to recentering more than half the time. Both adjust by skew, selling a slightly bigger delta into whichever side — calls on equities, puts on index products — carries the richer premium.
• Tomorrow's rate move is already priced into bonds, hosts say. With the CME's FedWatch odds near 85–90% on a quarter-point hike, the hosts argue new Fed chair Kevin Warsh is in a "no-lose" position: raising the expected quarter point both matches what the market has already priced in and lets him demonstrate independence from a White House that wants rates lower.

2026-09-15 · open the original ↗

• Record stock prices despite bad news reflect mega-caps outgrowing the economy, not confidence. One host argues that oil near $80, rising rates and war-driven anxiety would once have spiked volatility, but today's largest companies are bigger than most countries' GDP and, combined, bigger than the bond market — making the market "almost too big to fail," a label he says he hates using.

2026-09-15 · open the original ↗

• A new AI feature claims to screen thousands of stocks by thesis. The video says the tool, called Dogged AI, can search and analyze up to 5,000 stocks across dimensions including fundamentals, technicals, valuation, sector and risk once a user types an investment idea in plain English — a marketed capability, not a demonstrated result.
• The pitch is finding hidden stocks beyond the obvious names. Using the example of AI and cloud growth with minimal China exposure, the video claims the tool looks past obvious mega-cap names into adjacent areas like power, cooling, networking, components and data centers — again a claim about what the product does, not a verified outcome.
• Reports rank candidates and reward users who refer friends. The tool is described as producing a ranked candidate list with thesis and technical ratings for each stock, explicitly stopping short of telling users what to buy; sharing a report to recruit new users earns the referrer "treats," a promotional mechanic rather than investment information.

2026-09-15 · open the original ↗

• The Fed decision is already priced in, explaining the market's chop. He argues the stock market is a forward-looking discounting mechanism, so a near-certain rate hike that he and readers already know about has likely already been absorbed by price action.
• A pause or cut, not a hike, would be the bullish surprise. He treats a hike as the priced-in base case; CME FedWatch puts a pause at just 7.3% odds and a cut near 0%, but either would surprise markets — a pause partly from reluctance to tighten during the "war," a cut because inflation (per BLS data) is still rising.
• No bear-market warning sign has appeared yet. He points to the absence of any large-cap, reputable company "snapping" or crashing in a single day — a signal he treats as a key early bear-market tell — as evidence the market remains a well-defined bull market, making shorting a bad idea in his view.
• Rising M2 money supply growth should keep lifting stock prices. He frames faster M2 growth, a byproduct of the "war," as typically devaluing the dollar and pushing asset values higher, though he hedges with "normally," not treating it as guaranteed.
• Recession-resistant stocks keep outperforming amid AI-sector turbulence. He says the AI sector is undergoing turbulence while "recession resistant" stocks continue performing well, noting he added a breakout healthcare stock to his buys the day before.

2026-09-14 · open the original ↗

• A rotation out of AI chip stocks and into mega-cap software and ad names was underway at the open. AMD opened down $68 and Nvidia down about $8.50, while Google, Meta and Microsoft each traded up $2-$9; the broader tape showed the Nasdaq down almost 500, gold down $93, oil up $3.60, and the 10-year yield just under 5%, raising the question of whether AI's danger to markets is real.

2026-09-14 · open the original ↗

• The 10-year Treasury yield hit 5% today, arriving sooner than forecast. Kim Brackett had predicted this threshold for this coming winter three months ago; he ties the move to the government's roughly $2 trillion annual deficit, funded through Treasury auctions, at a time when foreign nations are selling off their holdings rather than buying.
• A 5% yield still loses to inflation over a decade. In his example, a $10,000 bond with a 5% yield and 10-year maturity produces a negative 2% real return if inflation averages 7%, leaving the principal's purchasing power at around $8,200 in today's dollars despite the interest payments.
• Today's dip in metals reflects a rotation into Treasuries, not a trend. Spot silver and gold fell just over 1% as fund managers chase the higher yield; he also expects average 30-year mortgage rates to climb from about 6.75% toward 7.5%. He predicts that by February or March next year investors will conclude the 5% yield can't offset the dollar's falling value and rotate back into metals, triggering what he calls the real bull run — his own forecast, not a reported fact.

2026-09-14 · open the original ↗

• A Louvre-style statement, not a Plaza-style one, is the only accord this Treasury could sign. Announcing depreciation in advance would let underhedged Asian institutions front-run it and detonate the long end; a Louvre-style statement instead ratifies levels already reached via unannounced reference ranges and coordinated intervention — the framework's own explicit caveat is that the 1987 Louvre failed within months once the Bundesbank defected, and a BOJ, Korean, or Taiwanese defection is flagged as the modern analogue risk.
• The revaluation sequence runs Japan, then Korea, then Taiwan. Japan's installment is described as already done (July 31 coordinated intervention, FIMA push, BOJ rate-path nudging); Korea is next because the won sits at a 17-year low and Seoul was already denied an unconditional Fed swap line in March; Taiwan goes last because its ask — unilateral currency policy surrender with no joint-operation sweetener — is the most fragile and, per Beijing's likely reading, the most politically radioactive.
• Eroding US credibility is framed as the coercive lever itself, not a liability. Every recent failure — Hormuz effectively closed over six months, the Houthi capture of Yemen's Red Sea coast, and troop withdrawals from Germany and Korea — makes the threat of abandonment more believable and thus more coercive, but the note explicitly flags this as a framework projection with a cliff: once the security umbrella is perceived as worthless, allies are projected to shift to "concede nothing, hedge everything" (Korean nuclear latency, Japanese rearmament, Taiwanese fatalism).

2026-09-14 · open the original ↗

• The host reads Bessent's actions since July 31 as a dollar devaluation already underway, disguised as bilateral currency revaluations. He walks through the Louvre-not-Plaza logic — an announced devaluation would crash the long end overnight — and the same Japan-then-Korea-then-Taiwan sequencing, using FIMA lend-don't-sell, escalating buybacks, and TGA drawdowns as the sterilization tools.
• He treats US credibility as the coercive lever and openly questions whether it still holds. Citing troop withdrawals from Germany, missile removals from Korea and Japan, and recent failures at Hormuz and in Yemen, he asks rhetorically whether Japan, Korea, Taiwan, or China would still believe the US could or would defend them — framed as his own open question, not a resolved claim.
• An unnamed outside commentator (a billionaire the host names only as "Malone or McMahon") is cited predicting the yen appreciates to roughly 110–120, a forecast the host says matches his own view. He separately flags, as a bare data point rather than an analyzed claim, that Turkey has trained 15,000 soldiers and opened an officer candidate school in Somalia through its "TurkSom" camp.

2026-09-14 · open the original ↗

• Lossdog adds futures to its "Trade Feed" and auto-labels the strategy behind each trade. The update is pitched as letting users watch traders Tom Sosnoff and Tony Battista's real-time futures and options trades, with the platform's AI identifying and explaining the intent behind each one in plain English.
• A companion "portfolio news" feature is pitched as scanning a user's own holdings. It's described as ranking relevant news and flagging upcoming earnings, dividends, splits, Fed decisions and other events tied specifically to stocks a user owns, rather than a generic news feed.

2026-09-14 · open the original ↗

• This post includes paid content that is not available publicly. See the original source.

2026-09-14 · open the original ↗

• Scott calls Dario Amodei's AI-slowdown plea pure litigation cover. He and Tom argue over the Anthropic CEO's call to "pace the frontier," publicly backed by Elon Musk and Sam Altman; Scott says no lab will actually slow down and frames it as self-protection ahead of Anthropic's expected roughly $2 trillion IPO, while Tom counters that a model recently solving a previously unsolved, million-dollar-prize math problem is real cause for concern.
• Altman's 2026 IPO pause is read as competitive spin, not safety. Sam Altman confirmed OpenAI won't go public this year, citing AI-safety concerns; hosts and guest Dr. Jim Schultz agree it isn't genuine, calling it a move to temper IPO-price expectations and keep AI's advantage concentrated among early insiders rather than public investors.
• Hosts say there's no threshold for quitting options trading. Fielding a new trader's question about a $12,000 account, Scott says give yourself a year to judge success while Tom argues today's tools can cut the "prove it to yourself" stage to three days to three weeks; both agree that being able to trade any one liquid product — stocks, sneakers, options — means you can trade any other.
• Tom argues bonds are cheap relative to stocks ahead of the Fed. With a quarter-point hike treated as fully priced in (Fed Watch near 65–80%) and a half-point dismissed as a long shot, Tom says he's long bonds betting yields fall further even as the 10-year sits near 4.96% and the 30-year near 106-20; Tony calls $1.25 trillion in credit-card debt, 13% of it 90-day delinquent, irrelevant to any trade.

2026-09-14 · open the original ↗

• A real bubble exists, but price action hasn't confirmed a break yet. He says he believes markets are in a "massive" bubble and expects a real crash eventually ("a sea of red"), but until price action shows a break, he treats the market as still in a well-defined bull market and advises against panic.
• Monday's AI-stock drop was normal volatility, not the bubble bursting. NVIDIA and Taiwan Semiconductor (-3.5% pre-market) fell on news of NVIDIA's possible $10B investment in Anthropic, which he says spooks investors short-term, but Microsoft and Google shares were still up, which he reads as evidence this isn't a broad bloodbath.
• He's screening 2023–2024 IPOs for the next Palantir. Citing how he identified Palantir in 2024 and his rule that "if it's a good stock, it'll be around in 2–3 years" (also applied to SpaceX), he's reviewing over 300 stocks that IPO'd in 2023–2024 instead of this week's Midweek Movers, with no guarantee of finding another winner.
• His bearish oil call stands despite renewed $200-a-barrel talk. He attributes rising oil prices to speculation but argues price elasticity of demand — using rising beef prices curbing beef consumption as an analogy — will cap further upside, calling $200 oil targets unrealistic and comparing oil trading to "playing with dynamite."

2026-09-14 · open the original ↗

• Bond yields function as an unelected verdict on national credibility. With no stock price for a country, he treats long-dated sovereign debt as the closest available signal: the UK sold a 30-year at 5.8168%, its highest since the Debt Management Office's 1998 founding; Japan's 10-year hit 3% for the first time since 1996, matching the rate its budget assumes for servicing debt near 230% of GDP; and the US 30-year sits at post-2007 levels.
• The "great repricing" argues the cheap-money era since 2007/08 is over. He frames rising yields worldwide as a check on governments regardless of ideology, citing former UK PM Liz Truss's resignation within a month of her 2022 mini-budget, and previews a case that the bond market has shaped President Trump's decisions on tariffs, Greenland, and Iran.
• The market's discipline can't be voted out, only fought. He argues it cares about credibility and financing needs rather than political values and simply "communicates a price," while governments respond with buybacks, central bank intervention, or yield curve control — leaving open his closing question of whether this amounts to a healthy check on a country or an undemocratic one.

2026-09-13 · open the original ↗

• Iran's real decision is the form of Hormuz reopening, not whether to reopen at all. The realistic range runs from a narrow, revocable weekly transit regime to a broad near-normal-traffic arrangement with a residual "Strait Authority"; the most probable course is judged to be the narrow option at the Sept 14 Oman talks, with Houthi maritime restraint included but their ground campaign and the Iraqi militia's launch capability explicitly left out, constrained above all by Iran's need to present any deal domestically as tribute paid to it.
• Saudi Arabia is expected to pursue all three of its options at once rather than choose. It is projected to deepen US dependency (the MBS request that Washington run the anti-Houthi campaign), deepen accommodation with Iran (the Oman deal), and keep the Mecca pact alive but unfired — a hedge sustainable only while the Houthis stay out of Aden; the UAE, by contrast, is described as profiting from either outcome and expected to sign nothing enthusiastically while building a rival Horn of Africa position.
• The Houthis are assessed as having the most freedom of action on the board, most likely to "encircle-and-monetize" rather than storm Aden. Momentum on three axes (Bab al-Mandeb, Aden's western approaches, the maritime blockade) is projected to be converted into recognition, revenue, and salaries paid from Yemeni hydrocarbon income rather than an assault on the 2-million-person city, in part because the UAE ground force that ejected them from Aden in 2015 was destroyed by Saudi Arabia in January.
• Turkey's Somalia presence is argued to make it the only credible verification power for a Red Sea transit regime, acceptable to both Riyadh and Tehran. Its TurkSom-trained Somali army, F-16s in-country, and a three-warship task group position it to sell escort and inspection services (echoing the existing SOMTURK revenue-share model), while a rival Emirati-Israeli-backed position at Berbera in Somaliland is described as designed to deny Turkey a monopoly on that southern shore.

2026-09-13 · open the original ↗

• The Houthis seized three Yemeni port cities in roughly a day and a half, unwinding a decade of Saudi-backed buildup. The host reports Saudi Arabia's Red Sea pipeline throughput fell from about 5.5 million barrels a day to roughly 1.5 million after a strike shut it down, and describes the equipment losses as effectively irreversible.
• He expects the Sept 14 Oman meeting between the GCC, Oman, and Iran to produce a narrow, revocable transit arrangement rather than a full reopening. Per an unconfirmed rumor he flags explicitly as such, inbound ships would be inspected and tolled by Iran on the northern route while outbound traffic exits along the southern, Oman-aligned route, in exchange for Iranian-brokered Houthi restraint at sea only — leaving the Houthi ground campaign and Iraqi militia strikes outside the deal.
• He judges the Houthis unlikely to storm Aden, expecting them to encircle it as a bargaining chip instead. He notes the city's 2 million population and stretched Houthi supply lines, and points out that the UAE ground force that ejected them from Aden in 2015 no longer exists because Saudi Arabia dismantled it in January — separately offering his own opinion, not sourced further, that Turkey (already positioned in Somaliland) will move into Saudi Arabia "sooner or later."

2026-09-13 · open the original ↗

• NVIDIA is an automatic "no" for his own portfolio. He cites diminishing returns, an "excessively large" market cap, and circular financing as reasons he won't buy NVIDIA on new money today (he exempts longtime holders), calling it "the bloated hog of the stock market."
• A possible $10B Anthropic investment could pressure NVIDIA's stock short-term. Though unconfirmed, he says the deal could be good long-term but that large acquisitions typically hurt or stagnate the acquirer's stock short-term because investors are unsure the new spending will be profitable.
• History shows big acquisitions often drag down the acquirer's stock. He cites Oracle's $2B TikTok stake (stock down -44% in a bull market), Meta's 2014 $19B WhatsApp purchase (-21%), and Microsoft's 2016 LinkedIn deal (shares flat for nearly a year) as precedent, though all eventually recovered.
• He favors three targeted entries and recession-resistant stocks over NVIDIA. He points to three stocks he's targeting for buys and two recession-resistant names from Midweek Movers, which he expects to "vastly outperform" NVIDIA.
• Disney is about the closest thing he has to a long-term hold. Asked for his favorite long-term holds, he says he never commits to holding anything indefinitely, but if pressed he'd pick Disney for its scale and pricing power, riding trends "for however long it'll let me."

2026-09-12 · open the original ↗

• Lossdog pitches its community forum as a source of career and investing leads. The segment walks through using the sidebar to read community guidelines and announcements and to join career- and portfolio-focused group discussions, or to message other members directly.

2026-09-12 · open the original ↗

• The pitch opens with a claim that professionals may be underpaid by $20,000 or more. This is presented as the problem motivating the segment's resume-analysis feature, not as data about any specific user base.
• Lossdog pitches an AI tool, "Law Scout," claiming to quantify a user's "true" market pay. It's described as comparing a user's resume or manually entered background against more than 2 million professional resumes to generate a downloadable "professional equity report" meant for negotiating a raise or promotion.

2026-09-12 · open the original ↗

• Central banks are buying gold at a record pace. China's PBOC has added to its reserves for nearly two years, recently buying 20 tons via the LBMA to push official holdings near 2,400 tons (with analysts suspecting more); Poland's central bank is near 648 tons on its way to a 700-ton target, while India and South Korea have also stepped up purchases.
• Nations are also pulling gold back from Western vaults. Germany's Bundesbank launched the largest modern repatriation, moving 300 tons from the New York Fed and 374 tons from the Bank of France between 2013 and 2017; France pulled 129 tons from the New York Fed late last year, and the Netherlands moved 86 tons out of US custody a few weeks ago.
• He ties repatriation to fear of the dollar being weaponized. The freezing of hundreds of billions in Russian sovereign reserves after the Ukraine invasion showed central banks that dollars, Treasuries, and even gold held in Western vaults could be frozen over policy disputes — his inference for why nations are securing their own gold, offered as a reason for stackers to consider holding physical metal directly.

2026-09-12 · open the original ↗

• Doggit AI is pitched as finding stock candidates beyond the obvious names. Lossdog describes the feature as searching up to 5,000 stocks across thesis relevance, fundamentals, technicals, valuation, sector and risk, surfacing "subsurface" companies — infrastructure, power, cooling, networking, data-center suppliers — tied to a stated thesis like AI/cloud growth with minimal China exposure. This is a described capability, not a demonstrated result.
• The tool is framed as organizing research, not issuing recommendations. A report is said to show the discovered "thesis paths," a plain-English summary of how the AI interpreted the idea, and a ranked candidate list scored on thesis fit, fundamentals and technicals, with Lossdog stating the AI won't tell users what to buy.
• A referral mechanic rewards sharing Doggit AI reports with friends. Users who share a report and bring in new signups are told they "earn treats" while the referred user gets rewards — a promotional incentive, not a product finding.

2026-09-12 · open the original ↗

• Lossdog's new "volatility analysis" feature is pitched as reading options pricing for every holding. Connected via a read-only SnapTrade link, it's described as analyzing implied volatility on each ticker a user owns and comparing the options market's historical expected move, over the past two years, against actual price movement and a theoretical standard-deviation benchmark, then projecting a forward expected range.
• The feature is said to score whether an option's premium looks rich or cheap. It reports IV rank (current implied volatility's place in a ticker's 52-week range) alongside a comparison of implied versus realized volatility, framed as context for judging whether premium is relatively expensive or inexpensive.
• A ticker's volatility is compared against the broader market and fed into a trade builder. Lossdog tracks a ticker's implied volatility against SPX implied volatility over time, and its "explore a trade" tool is described as turning a stated bullish, bearish or neutral view plus the current volatility read into a specific, leg-level options structure.

2026-09-12 · open the original ↗

• A bullish Friday reversal followed a choppy Monday-through-Thursday week. He frames Friday's reversal signals as typically — "often, not always" — predictive of a bullish Monday and Tuesday to follow.
• Two of three targeted stocks are nearing his buy range. He updated entry targets following Friday's reversal, with two of the three stocks he's watching getting particularly close to the prices he'd buy at.
• Two recession-resistant stocks broke out and remain in buy range. Both the first- and second-place stocks from this week's rankings broke out and are still within his buy range, per his Midweek Movers process.
• A screener pick from February keeps paying off. FRO (Frontline) is up 63% since the screener flagged it in February; the original entry setup has passed, but he says a new trigger just fired that looks more actionable now.
• This week's community-picked stock still has runway, despite a sharp rally. CVR Energy, the community's chosen stock, rose 23% this week on a fresh weekly/monthly breakout; he expects some consolidation but thinks it has room to run longer-term.

2026-09-11 · open the original ↗

• This post includes paid content that is not available publicly. See the original source.

2026-09-11 · open the original ↗

• Lossdog instructs users to add the web app to their phone's home screen as a stand-in app. It is not yet a standalone native app; the segment walks through the Safari and Android browser steps to install it as a shortcut, saying a true standalone app is still to come.

2026-09-10 · open the original ↗

• Bessent's expanded buyback failed to push yields down as intended. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent raised the daily buyback from the usual $2 billion to $6 billion of long-term debt to lower borrowing costs ahead of elections, but by day's end the 10-year yield rose to about 4.8% and the 30-year to about 5.3%.
• He blames the failure on foreign buyers stepping away from Treasuries. Countries that once bought US debt are turning inward to shore up their own economies or cutting dollar exposure after Washington used the banking system as a geopolitical weapon — his explanation for why demand no longer responds to the buyback as it used to.
• Rising yields threaten the mechanics of servicing $40 trillion in debt. Beyond pushing up mortgage, auto and credit-card rates, 5-6% Treasury yields make the debt harder to service; he likens the situation to a wind-up clock with a damaged cog that can keep ticking while pressure builds, predicting the mainspring will eventually snap — his own forecast, not a reported event.

2026-09-10 · open the original ↗

• Hosts say a quarter-point Fed hike is essentially fully priced in. One cites the Fed Watch tool at roughly 65–70%, rising toward what another guesses is closer to 80% after that morning's ECB move, and argues that historically any probability the tool has shown above 65% has gone on to happen 100% of the time.
• A half-point hike is dismissed as a long shot priced near zero. Discussion turns to "rate controls" — a scenario where the Fed sets an arbitrary trigger point to auto-buy bonds until markets calm — with one host noting it "wouldn't be the first time" the Fed has intervened that way, tied to bond prices holding above the 107 level.
• Hosts frame the Fed as boxed into raising rates with no real alternative. Given current bond prices, they argue hiking is the only tool left to stem inflation and attract capital, treating any bond-buying "rate control" mechanism as a fallback rather than a substitute for raising rates.

2026-09-10 · open the original ↗

• Hosts dismiss dark-pool volume growth as a nonissue for retail traders. With dark pools now handling roughly 40% of U.S. equity volume, up from 37% a year earlier, they argue retail orders never route there directly — every order goes through high-frequency market makers like Citadel first, so the price on screen is a fair reflection of where a stock is actually trading regardless of where the print later shows up.
• Copper's record rally is called a near-meme trade, not a real signal. Hosts argue the futures contract is effectively untradeable for retail — about $25,000 per point per contract, with an options market too illiquid to use — and that the tariff story behind copper's rise of more than 50% since spring has nothing to do with the demand data cited alongside it; they'd rather trade gold or silver for metals exposure.
• One host argues the blocked Paramount–Warner merger isn't really about antitrust. Federal antitrust regulators already approved the deal, but a dozen state attorneys general are suing; he argues the real driver is concern over writers'-guild jobs rather than consumer choice, noting consumers already juggle eight to ten streaming subscriptions. Both hosts pass on trading it, with the stock at roughly a 10% discount to deal value.
• Hosts call the shutdown fight pure political theater with no market impact. Congress passed a funding extension pushing the deadline to December 11, 2026 on a 370–48 House vote; the hosts argue nothing changes structurally and expect the same brinkmanship to repeat, with one floating term limits as a fix for incumbents who pander instead of legislate.

2026-09-10 · open the original ↗

• Trading is deliberately cheap tuition for financial literacy and bias correction. He argues the only choice is how much you lose and when, and ties financial literacy to roughly a third to 40% of wealth inequality near retirement; he points to loss aversion — losses feeling about twice as painful as equivalent gains feel good — as a bias that real money forces you to confront in ways reading about it cannot.
• Options are risk-management tools, not the casino retail treats them as. He frames derivatives as insurance dating back to farmers' forward contracts, then cites a Stanford/MIT study in the Review of Finance finding retail traders who buy options ahead of earnings announcements, chasing an expected volatility spike, average losses of 5-9%, rising to 10-14% on the highest-volatility events — a knowledge gap, in his telling, not a rigged tool.
• Post-2021 retail traders proved the "dumb money will get wrecked" predictions wrong. He cites Schwab's self-directed brokerage data showing average balances climbing through 2025 up double digits year-over-year, JPMorgan research finding 2025 retail equity inflows rose more than 50% year-over-year above the 2021 meme-stock peak, and JPMorgan's finding that retail single-stock portfolios posted stronger profit-to-loss ratios than its own AI and software model portfolios.
• Self-directed trading's real payoff is skill, not index-beating returns. He concedes most active investors underperform the index, but argues the value is learning to correct hindsight bias — mistaking outcome for decision quality — under real stakes, calling it rehearsal for the capital-allocation judgment a business owner needs; he traces his own fundraising, from $100,000 at 23 to $500 million at 36, to that same fluency in talking markets.

2026-09-10 · open the original ↗

• Today's choppy action isn't what a real bear-market start looks like. He contrasts today's "fear and worry" with the mass euphoria and delusional price targets he says precede real crashes, and recalls the "sea of red" he personally saw in 2008, 2020, and 2022 as the actual bear-market signal — absent today.
• Shrinking drawdowns point to a late-stage bull market, not a bear one. Even the brief technical bear market in early 2025 showed progressively smaller, more compressed drawdowns, which he reads as evidence the market is late-cycle bullish rather than rolling into a bear market.
• He only buys on green days, never on red ones. He's still watching three stocks he wants to buy but is waiting for local price action to reverse from its small downtrend first, reasoning that buying on red days usually means missing the bottom and eating short-term pain.
• Recession-resistant stocks keep leading Midweek Movers rankings. He notes recession-resistant names again took the top spots in this week's Midweek Movers episode and says they've performed particularly well throughout 2026.

2026-09-10 · open the original ↗

• The note verifies Bessent's actions but flags one assumed premise as false: September is a rate-hike debate, not a cut. Confirmed facts include the July 31 coordinated US-Japan yen intervention (Bessent's notepad reportedly read "Buy Japanese Yen $5-10 bil"), the long-end buyback ceiling tripling from $2B to $6B by Sept 9, and his "I am the house now" line at SMU — but the July FOMC vote was 9-3 in favor of a hike with roughly 56% odds priced for a 25bp hike on Sept 15–16, which the note says "materially changes the strategic picture."
• Plan A, called the highest-confidence read, holds that Treasury is building undeclared yield-curve-control capability while the Fed sheds long-end duration to it. The $2B-to-$4B-to-$6B buyback escalation is read as deliberate signaling, with the November 4 refunding flagged as the likely point to formalize the practice into a standing facility (M. Green's proposed Sovereign Debt Optimization Facility, sized potentially near $422B against a current ~$38B quarterly pace).
• Plan B holds that dollar devaluation against Asia is being run bilaterally, installment by installment, because no single Plaza-style accord is achievable. Following Miran's "User's Guide to Restructuring the Global Trading System," the yen leg uses the FIMA repo facility so Japan can defend its currency by lending rather than selling Treasuries; Korea and Taiwan are named as the next installments to watch.
• Plan C, labeled the most speculative, proposes the Fed is hiking now specifically to bank inflation credibility before delivering later cuts. Under this "Credibility-Bank Sequence," a hawkish front end lets a managed dollar depreciation run later without becoming a disorderly rout, with Miran's proposed 150bp of cuts framed as the eventual destination rather than a near-term move; confirmation would be a Sept or Dec hike paired with continued buyback expansion.

2026-09-10 · open the original ↗

• The host says he prompted an AI model, cast as a senior central bank strategist, to test whether Bessent's, Miran's, and Warsh's scattered statements form one coherent plan. He reports the model's conclusion that three candidate strategies, rather than improvisation, explain the record — but notes the model rated the claim that Bessent is acting as "guarantor of the yen" only partially true, since Bessent never used that exact word.
• He frames the Fed and Treasury as dividing labor rather than working at cross-purposes — Warsh holding short rates while Bessent suppresses the long end via escalating buybacks. He adds his own figure that Treasury bills now make up roughly 33–34% of outstanding debt and could exceed 50% by early 2027, calling this a deliberate strategy to starve long-end supply and keep yields down.
• As his own opinion rather than the model's output, he predicts Taiwan — not Korea — will be the next currency addressed, and expects a formal Sovereign Debt Optimization Facility within about two months. He ties this to Treasury's buyback authority running only through the November 4 quarterly refunding, at which point he expects hold-to-maturity bank portfolios to be brought into a named facility.