finance

2026-07-06 · open the original ↗

• Retail beats institutions by judging businesses, not macro. Tenev argues portfolio managers sell on tariffs or Russia-Ukraine for reasons unrelated to the company, citing institutions dumping Palantir over tariffs, while retail asks whether revenue, margins and the rule of 40 are improving. He agrees with Frost that retail bought the dips of October 2022, April 2025 and March 2026.
• Today's retail buying isn't a replay of 2020–21. He ties the January 2021 meme rally to a stimulus round a couple of weeks earlier, with zero rates and checks deployed into the market "within days or weeks", and says customers then bought nostalgia names like GameStop, cinemas, airlines and rental cars. Now they buy SpaceX, Nvidia, Tesla and chipmakers, companies he calls frontier businesses with earnings power whose P/Es are debatable.
• AI differs from past bubbles because revenue already exists. Companies pay for tokens and OpenAI has a scaled subscription business; his stated risk is customers moving from experimentation to ROI scrutiny, while adoption still has a long tail (Claude Code at "low tens of millions" of users). He sees IPO windows cycling faster: shut at end-2021, cracked by ARM and Instacart in 2023, fully reopened last year.
• US equity participation can rise from ~65% into the 90s. He credits 401(k)s with taking participation from 20% to about 50%, and Robinhood with lifting it from the 50s to the 60s; the next leg is the Trump accounts programme, where Robinhood is sole initial broker and trustee with BNY Mellon, giving every newborn a brokerage account. He puts UK participation at one in six and expects UK full-service brokers to be forced to go commission-free.
• Private markets are Robinhood's "next crusade". Tenev warns that value is accruing to insiders as SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic list at trillion-dollar valuations; Robinhood Ventures Fund One, a listed closed-end fund, holds Stripe, OpenAI, SpaceX and Revolut, and he wants retail in seed and Series A rounds. Alongside it, Robinhood Chain (a layer 2 on Ethereum using Arbitrum technology) will carry stock tokens, 2,000 now, in 120+ countries, tradable 24/7 and, he says, backed one-to-one.

2026-07-05 · open the original ↗

• OpenRouter functions as a neutral scoreboard, and the six-month shift on it is stark. Of 400+ listed models, seven account for roughly 75% of routed volume. Over six months Google fell from 24.6% to 10.7%, OpenAI from 12% to 7.4%, Anthropic from 17.5% to 15.3%, while DeepSeek doubled from 9% to 18% and Minimax went from 2.3% to 9.7%. Token volume now splits roughly 46% American to 52% Chinese. He reads OpenAI's announced 50% price cut as the direct consequence.
• The stack has bifurcated along price, and capability leadership has decoupled from usage. A commodity track of open-weight models priced below $1 per million input tokens now carries the majority of routed volume, concentrated in agentic and high-throughput workloads, while US frontier labs hold about 12% of volume but capture roughly 46% of platform revenue. DeepSeek illustrates it exactly: 17.4% of tokens against 6.3% of spend. The highest-scoring models are not the most used — the cheapest are. His analogy is Excel, where nearly everyone uses a fraction of the functions and pays for all of them.
• The same fault line reappears at the supply layer as a two-tier bankruptcy, and he reduces it all to one question. The unprotected periphery of compute-cloud operators clears at market; a government-backstopped core does not. Whether any of it works comes down to whether a business model exists that repays $1.1 trillion of committed compute investment — answer yes and you buy, answer no and there is a problem. He also gives practical picks: DeepSeek for frontier-class agentic coding at lowest cost, GLM where planning quality and long-horizon work matter more than price, Minimax for native image or video input over long context, and Nvidia's Nemotron for a US-built fully open model where the vendor story matters as much as the rank.

2026-07-03 · open the original ↗

• The largest private debt offering in history was engineered primarily to not appear on Meta's balance sheet. Beignet Investor LLC priced $27.294B of 6.581% senior secured notes on 16 October 2025 at T+225bp, rated A+ by S&P on a single-agency basis, 144A-for-life. Blue Owl Capital holds 80% of the SPV and controls the board while Meta holds 20% — the structure that keeps the debt off Meta's books — with Morgan Stanley as exclusive adviser and PIMCO, BlackRock ($3B+) and Apollo as lead buyers. The asset is the 2.1GW, four-million-square-foot Hyperion campus in Richland Parish, Louisiana, targeted for June 2029, serviced by triple-net lease payments from a wholly-owned Meta subsidiary. A Meta residual value guarantee is the primary driver of the A+ uplift.
• The GAAP arbitrage is precise, and its price is quantifiable. Under ASC 842 a lease becomes a balance-sheet liability only if renewal is "reasonably certain" — and Beignet's renewals are one-sided four-year tranches entirely at Meta's discretion, so $27.3B of economic obligation stays off. The premium for that treatment is T+225bp against roughly T+130–150bp on Meta's own AA- paper: about 75–95bp, or an extra ~$200M a year, judged worth paying because the structure was the prerequisite for a $30B conventional raise weeks later. Across five hyperscalers the pattern scales: ~$420B visible on balance sheet, $662B of not-yet-commenced lease commitments living in footnotes, $120B+ in SPV structures, and estimated total economic debt above $1.1 trillion — roughly 2.5x the GAAP figure.
• Impairing the bondholders requires no government decree, because the mechanism is already written into the documents. The chain runs: government takes an equity stake in Meta and stabilises its balance sheet; Meta declines to renew the Hyperion lease at the four-year mark; the SPV has no other income and the bonds default; bondholders move to foreclose; the Defense Production Act and CFIUS block sale to any non-approved entity; and PIMCO, BlackRock and Apollo are left holding defaulted paper on an asset they can neither sell nor operate. Meta would merely exercise a contractual right present from day one, leaving nothing to appeal. Chrysler in 2009 is the cited precedent — secured bondholders taking less than par while the Supreme Court declined to hear it.
• Opacity is a design feature, and the endgame is nationalisation by purchase rather than dramatic default. 144A-for-life means no SEC registration path, no listing, and no dealer obliged to make a market — the CUSIP appears on TradingView with no trades — which conveniently prevents public price discovery on debt that is economically Meta's but legally absent from its balance sheet. Known trajectory: par at issue, roughly 109–110 by November 2025 with Morgan Stanley acknowledging underpricing, and a triangulated ~92–95 by July 2026. The sinker structure — interest only until 2029, then accelerated amortisation to 2049 — prices more like a mortgage security than a corporate bullet, further narrowing the pool able to value it. The most likely resolution is a negotiated government acquisition of the civil and power layer at distressed prices dressed as orderly restructuring, with bondholders recovering 70–80 cents. The closing image: Beignet bondholders are the 1890s railroad bondholders, holding paper on assets the nation needs, at a price the nation will decide. The framework's caution is that a selective default is single-use — repeat it and the market prices a strategic-infrastructure discount into all AI-adjacent debt.

2026-07-03 · open the original ↗

• His emphasis on the Beignet structure is not the mechanics but who actually absorbs the loss. PIMCO, BlackRock and Apollo bought the $27.3B offering — and what they manage is pension and insurance money. So if Meta exercises its one-sided non-renewal at the four-year mark and the SPV defaults, the impairment lands on pensioners and policyholders rather than on the managers who bought it. His phrasing for the whole arrangement: the structure itself is the weapon, and the bondholders' lawyers have nothing to appeal because Meta would only be exercising a right written in from day one.
• Government equity inverts the priority waterfall, and there is precedent for it working. IEEPA, the Defense Production Act and CFIUS are not bound by bankruptcy priority, so nominally senior secured debt becomes economically subordinate to strategic interest. He points to Chrysler in 2009, where secured bondholders took roughly 60–70 cents. The consequence is a two-tier outcome in which protecting Tier 1 equity — OpenAI, Stargate, potentially Microsoft Azure — funds their acquisition of Tier 2 assets from CoreWeave and the smaller operators at distressed prices. Guaranteeing the equity is what lets the winners buy everyone else.
• His conclusion is about the terms of the rescue, not whether one happens. Opening on the July 1969 ARPANET anniversary and the question of whether the technology was humanity's best or worst turn, he argues the bailout is a done deal and only the how remains. Either it preserves billionaire equity intact, or the public takes the equity in exchange — and he wants at least 50–51%. Supporting details: 144A-for-life is rare enough that he cannot recall the last one, he jokes about an executive order eventually pushing such paper into 401(k)s, and he notes OpenAI announcing a 50% price cut against this debt backdrop.

2026-07-03 · open the original ↗

• Britain's dominance rested on a credit machine, not just its Navy. The Bank of England shifted government borrowing from expensive goldsmith loans (up to 30% interest) to long-term bonds backed by parliamentary taxation, letting Britain finance wars against France for over a century even as its debt hit roughly 180% of GDP after Waterloo.
• What mattered was credibility, not the debt level itself. France, despite being larger and richer than Britain, lost their long rivalry partly because its monarchy defaulted repeatedly and borrowed expensively; financing the American Revolution helped trigger the fiscal collapse that fed the French Revolution.
• Alexander Hamilton copied the British model directly for the new United States. He assumed the states' war debts to bind wealthy bondholders to the federal government's success, then chartered a national bank in 1791 whose stock could be bought largely with U.S. war debt, turning the country's most despised paper into its most valuable asset.
• The bet worked almost immediately. Bonds went from trading around 70 cents to par within seven months, and America went from a defaulting confederation of states to an investment-grade country in three years — evidence the author uses to argue that today's debt-ceiling fights and reserve-currency risk threaten the same credibility mechanism underpinning American power.

2026-07-02 · open the original ↗

• The proposal itself sets the valuation it is meant to justify. Altman reportedly proposed the government take a 5% stake for $50B — which implies a $1 trillion valuation against a recent $852B mark, at a company reporting roughly $51B of losses for the year and postponing its IPO. His read is that this bails out the private-equity firms that manufactured the escalating private marks in the first place: a government cheque is a stamp of approval that legitimizes the trillion-dollar figure, after which the IPO can sell it onward. Absent the $50B, he argues, the assets could be bought for pennies on the dollar instead.
• The sovereign fund he predicted three years ago is now arriving as legislation. His standing forecast was that every country would build a sovereign fund and direct pension and insurance capital into national priorities, because there is not enough money for everyone to do everything. Sanders has since introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act pushing for public ownership closer to half, Japan has committed $2.3T across public and private funds, and England has told its pension funds to put 10% into UK-critical assets. He separates the policy from the politics explicitly, and argues for 51% rather than 50%.
• After two years of asking what the business model is, his verdict is that the sector is uninvestable as currently structured. He notes that top US corporations are now using Chinese models because they are dramatically cheaper, and cites Palantir's CEO calling the business model a scam. His framework's prior is the Build-Bankrupt-Consolidate pattern: four prior infrastructure build-outs exceeding 6% of GDP all went bankrupt before consolidating, and he reads the current cohort as already there but for continued private-equity injections. He raises Starlink needing to build terrestrial towers as another multi-billion capital sink, and argues the condition for public money should be replacing the leadership, not underwriting it.

2026-07-01 · open the original ↗

• Tom Sosnoff pitches a giveaway of $1 million in cryptocurrency across 50,000 free subscriptions to launch tastytrade. The offer seeds new accounts with a starter position in Bitcoin, Ethereum, Stellar and Solana, framed by him as goodwill marketing rather than an investment recommendation.
• The platform claims an AI trained on millions of resumes calculates a user's "precise" career and net worth. Sosnoff says every uploaded resume or portfolio makes the AI "smarter," describing this as a moat competitors can't replicate — a claim about the product, not a demonstrated result.
• A 50,000-spot cap is used to drive urgency to sign up. The "first 50,000 people" framing and "when they're gone, they're gone" language are scarcity marketing mechanics, not information about actual remaining capacity.

2026-07-01 · open the original ↗

• The Supreme Court upheld birthright citizenship 6-3 in Trump v. Barbara, but the same term narrowed protections for everyone one rung below citizen. Five justices grounded the ruling in the Constitution itself rather than a narrower statutory path Justice Kavanaugh urged, making it resistant to anything short of a constitutional amendment.
• Blanche v. Lau flipped the burden of proof for green card holders. Lawful permanent residents returning to the U.S. are now treated as "seeking admission" rather than simply returning, meaning they must prove they should be let in rather than the government proving why they should be kept out — even absent a conviction.
• Mullin v. Doe stripped courts of jurisdiction to review the executive's termination of Temporary Protected Status. The ruling let the administration end TPS for roughly 350,000 Haitians and thousands of Syrians with no judicial review of the Secretary of Homeland Security's determinations, regardless of the process behind them.
• The author frames the term as a building: citizenship secured at the foundation, but permanent residence made conditional and temporary status made unreviewable above it. With the CBO projecting immigration will drive all U.S. population growth after 2030, the piece argues this repricing of America as a destination carries direct economic costs, not just legal ones.

2026-06-29 · open the original ↗

• The contested line runs between two tool models inside one technology layer, which is what makes this dispute unusual. EUV was blocked in 2019 and ASML has never shipped one to China, so this was never an EUV story. What remained open was the older DUV-immersion tier, and the MATCH Act (H.R. 8170, introduced 2 April 2026 by Rep. Baumgartner, cleared committee 22 April) closes it — extending controls to the tools and to servicing, with a 150-day window for the Netherlands and Japan to show equivalent controls, backstopped by the Foreign Direct Product Rule. A parallel Moolenaar letter sharpens it further, asking that the NXT:1965i be treated no more permissively than the more capable NXT:1980i.
• Washington holds a chokepoint over the chokepoint, which is why the decision is not The Hague's to make. ASML is a near-monopoly — sole EUV maker, roughly 90% of the lithography market — but it is also a nested node, because its EUV light source and key components originate under US jurisdiction and therefore inside FDPR reach. The Netherlands sits on a weak energy base and an alliance-dependent security posture, so it cannot rupture from the bloc that underwrites both. The extraterritorial mechanism formalises a constraint that already exists.
• The cascade runs through memory, not lithography — and the leverage is single-use. Servicing is the sharper instrument, since installed tools degrade without calibration, parts and software. Chinese DRAM and NAND output then degrades, tightening global memory on top of the 2026 supercycle, raising AI-buildout costs and accelerating indigenous Chinese tool development — the reflexive trap. ASML absorbs an estimated 14–15% revenue and 16–17% gross-EBIT hit plus the long-run loss of its installed-base service annuity, and once indigenisation clears the contested node the chokepoint flips from durable rent to one-time denial. Note the dossier's own discipline: it corrected two factual errors in its originating source, and logs the June EUV-in-China allegation as an open observation — no public evidence presented, ASML denying categorically and counting all 314 operating EUV systems, none in China. Shares fell only ~2.6% on introduction, so full passage is not priced.

2026-06-29 · open the original ↗

• Extraterritoriality is not a US monopoly — China is running the same play through rare earths, with a nastier topology. Beijing has cut Japan off while continuing to supply South Korea, and has added another 20 Japanese companies to the restricted list, bringing it to roughly 60. The bind is that Japan makes the inputs South Korea needs to make chips, so supplying Japan risks South Korea being cut off in turn. Rules are now multiplying faster than results, and governments are obstructing rather than governing.
• His actual question is why none of this is in equity prices. ASML fell about 2.6% on a bill Bank of America models at a 14–15% revenue hit — evidence the market has not priced passage. He extends the point to Nvidia and SpaceX valuations he calls built on sand, and recalls a call made three years ago that if Taiwan were ever invaded, Intel would become the most valuable stock in the world the following day. The framework claim is that supply-chain fragility is real, quantifiable, and absent from the multiple.
• The reverse leverage is the part nobody games out. Washington's instrument is Cymer — wholly owned by ASML but located in the United States, so the US can block a company from receiving parts from its own subsidiary. But the Dutch counter is simply to stop selling to the US and supply everyone else, and he asks pointedly what the response to that would be. He cites the 301 action that hit Nexperia and nearly halted the global auto industry as evidence this class of move misfires, and notes the escalation has now descended from banning technology layers to banning individual tool models.

2026-06-29 · open the original ↗

• 0DTE options are increasing liquidity, not instability, one host argues. He dismisses the argument that more options being traded than available shares poses systemic risk, saying market makers willing to quote these products just makes markets better, calling the instability argument "crap."
• Weekly options, now extended into dailies, reportedly originated from Tom's pitch to the CBOE around 2005-06. He proposed the name "quickies" at the time; one host says today's push toward even-shorter, daily-expiration products feels "a little overboard."

2026-06-29 · open the original ↗

• Invest every month regardless of price, and think decades out. Scaramucci has bought stocks monthly since age 17, following George Clason's 1926 The Richest Man in Babylon: "pay yourself first". He says a young producer he coached passed £100,000 after two years. His cautionary tale is ripping up his notes on Amazon in 2000 after Buffett dismissed it; $10,000 then became more than $14 million, despite an 85% fall along the way.
• Today's inflation is a supply shock; deflation is the bigger risk. He blames tariffs and the cost of insuring tankers through the Strait of Hormuz, and expects AI, automation, robotics and immunotherapy to "crush the curve of costs" within four or five years, while conceding the Fed may still raise rates. He cites Truflation's estimate that the dollar has lost 28% of its value since January 2020, calling that inflation a regressive tax that has crushed asset-poor workers.
• Bitcoin could reach half of gold's market cap. That would be roughly 10x over the next decade, by his forecast; he expects 50–70% drawdowns every four years and says the current cycle is about halfway through, with issuance falling from 450 coins a day to 225 in about two years. He claims nine in ten investors who "do the homework" end up owning some, and puts Bitcoiners at about 5% of investors.
• Blockchain's value is removing third-party verification costs. Paying his restaurant's bill in stablecoins would save a 3.5% card fee, which on a 15% margin is, he says, roughly a 28% uplift to gross margin. He puts global third-party verification costs at about $4 trillion, an estimate he took from an AI chatbot, and compares the change to call prices falling from $3.50 a minute in 1985 to nothing.
• He won't sell SpaceX, because betting against Musk is a mistake. He admits the valuation looks stretched against revenue but notes that Ron Baron sees a $4–5 trillion company. The xAI–Twitter merger also gave Scaramucci more SpaceX shares.

2026-06-28 · open the original ↗

• The coercion campaign is measurable, escalating, and unaffected by diplomacy. Panama-flagged detentions in Chinese ports rose from 92 in March to 135 in April to 139 in May; the April–May total of 274 exceeded the 251 recorded across all of 2025. Panama's share of all Chinese detentions climbed from ~74% to 82% and then 85% in the first ten days of May. The step-up began around 8 March 2026, and the China–Panama foreign-minister meeting on 26 May did not slow it — May was the heaviest month on record.
• The registry, not the canal, is the lever that reaches Panama's treasury. Cargo ships above 10,000 dwt leaving the Panama registry rose to more than 80 in April and roughly 150 in May, against a monthly average below 40 in Q1 and 55 across 2025, out of about 5,000 vessels in the segment — a ~3.3% contraction in 2026, with owners reflagging mainly to Liberia and the Marshall Islands to shed political exposure. Registry income is sovereign revenue independent of canal tolls, which is why this channel bites hardest. Panama's response has been defensive rather than retaliatory, issuing guidance to appeal detentions; no symmetric lever exists.
• Tactically effective, strategically self-defeating — and the framing insight is about ambiguity, not geography. The pressure moved Panama toward conciliation but did not change the outcome: APM Terminals and MSC's Terminal Investment Limited now run both terminals under 18-month interim agreements. Meanwhile the bluntness drew condemnation from six governments plus separate statements from Israel, Ukraine, Honduras and Peru, handing Washington a clean coercion narrative across the hemisphere, while the reflagging exodus erodes the very registry leverage being squeezed. The analytical note is the sharpest line in the brief: a chokepoint holder's premium is a function of the credible ambiguity of its alignment, not its geography — Panama retains the geography and has lost the ambiguity. And the diplomatic and pressure channels are running in parallel rather than in sequence, with pressure as standing leverage behind the talks.

2026-06-28 · open the original ↗

• His historical claim is that freedom of the seas is an eighty-year anomaly, not a norm being defended. In the ancient world ships hugged coastlines and paid a toll at every city they put in at overnight; Constantinople's wealth was toll wealth, and in the era of British dominance the ruler of Singapore — sitting on the Strait of Malacca — was the richest man in the world. There has been no period of genuinely free seas except the last eighty years, and that was a US Navy artifact rather than a legal condition. Hormuz is simply where the artifact expired first.
• The toll-versus-fee distinction is the legal fiction everyone is now using. A toll on a strait is illegal under international law; a fee — environmental, paperwork, whatever the label — is not. Iran announced a toll, realized the error within a day, and reissued it as a fee. The same wording lets Washington charge for Panama transit while denouncing tolls elsewhere.
• China's Panama campaign shows coercion that works tactically while failing strategically, and Beijing appears untroubled by that. Detentions of Panama-flagged vessels ran 92 in March, 135 in April and 139 in May, driving over 230 ships off the registry in two months against a 2025 average of 55 for the year. The OAS confrontation on 24 June coincided with the heaviest detention month on record, which he reads as indifference to condemnation. He also notes China is suing Panama for $2B, likely $3–5B if it runs for years, with Panama — not Washington — paying. His standing model prediction closes it: most chokepoints pass into private hands within five to ten years, and a genuinely free Panama Canal is unlikely to be allowed.

2026-06-26 · open the original ↗

• Trump withheld his signature from a bipartisan housing bill (passed 358-32 in the House, 85-5 in the Senate) over unrelated voter-registration demands. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act restricts institutional investors' single-family home purchases, streamlines environmental reviews, and incentivizes local governments to build, but Trump instead wanted federal voter-fraud legislation, despite data — including from the Heritage Foundation — showing voter fraud is negligible.
• The institutional-investor restriction is more symbolic nationally than locally. The ban triggers at 350 homes, and even investors owning 1,000+ homes hold only about 0.34% of national housing stock, though the impact is concentrated in specific metros like Jacksonville, Dallas, and Phoenix where such investors own 20%+ of rentals.
• Trump's leverage is illusory: the bill becomes law regardless of his signature. With veto-proof majorities and Congress in session, it takes effect 10 days after presentment; withholding his signature only forfeits credit for an affordability win — the platform he ran on — while handing Democrats the opening to claim it instead.

2026-06-26 · open the original ↗

• The airline analogy holds in the places that matter, which is why it is the best one in circulation. Both businesses are brutally capital-intensive with high fixed and near-zero marginal cost — one more passenger or one more inference token is essentially free once the plane flies or the cluster is racked. Four traits carry straight over: perishable inventory, since a GPU-hour unsold at the moment of capacity is gone forever, which is why the industry already runs airline-style spot/reserved/batch yield management; commoditizing output, with H100 rentals falling from $7–10/hour in early 2024 to $2–4/hour by late 2025, a 50–70% collapse that is simply a fare war; a synchronized capacity cycle, with everyone ordering against the same demand thesis; and supplier capture, with Nvidia as Boeing and Airbus except capturing far more of the chain. The big four guide to roughly $700B of 2026 capex, up ~77%, with power and cooling rather than chips as the binding constraint.
• Where the analogy breaks, it breaks against AI — and the debt market has not noticed. A 737 has a 25–30 year economic life, a deep lease market, and an entire bond market built on it as collateral. A GPU's contested economic life runs two to six years, and that disagreement is the whole story: Amazon shortened server life from six years to five in early 2025 and took a $920M accelerated-depreciation charge, while CoreWeave, Microsoft and Alphabet hold at six, and Burry claims roughly $176B of understated depreciation across 2026–2028. Yet more than $20B of GPU-collateralized debt is outstanding — BlackRock, Blackstone, PIMCO, Carlyle, JPMorgan, Macquarie — all resting on the five-to-six-year assumption. The airline-like layer carries worse-than-airline collateral, and the debt stack is mispricing exactly that.
• Returns are destroyed in the middle of the stack and captured at both ends, which dictates the survivable model. Applications are software economics with durable IP; foundation models are the contested hinge; cloud capacity and raw GPUs are the airline trap; the data-centre shell is REIT economics at 20+ years; power and grid are utility and locational-monopoly economics measured in decades. So the model that earns is a vertically integrated utility-plus-software hybrid — own the power and the shell as the durable moat, own the model and distribution for margin, and treat GPUs as a depreciating consumable financed short rather than termed out as collateral. The cleaner historical rhyme is the 1990s fiber build: Global Crossing, WorldCom and Level 3 were right about demand, built far ahead of it, watched roughly 90% of fiber go dark, and handed the value to the second owner. The counter-case worth tracking is workload cascade — training to high-value inference to batch, extended by prefill/decode disaggregation — which would soften the depreciation-doom thesis if it holds.

2026-06-26 · open the original ↗

• OpenAI postponing its IPO is, on his reading, a direct consequence of the government signalling it wants half of these companies. He had asked in a prior video how an AI company comes public once Washington announces an intent to take roughly 50% of every one of them; three days later the IPO was deferred to next year. His own view, offered explicitly as opinion without inside knowledge, is that OpenAI does not come public at all.
• Depreciation accounting, not revenue, is what is generating the reported profits. Stretching chip useful life to five or six years against a real life closer to two or three understates depreciation by roughly $176B, and that difference is being booked as profit — the trouble arrives when the schedules run out. Meanwhile $20B+ of GPU-collateralized debt sits with BlackRock, Blackstone, PIMCO, Carlyle, JPMorgan and Macquarie, all lending against the longer assumption, using a mechanic borrowed from aircraft and power-plant finance where the underlying technology cycle is far slower. The stack's economics put all the value at the two ends and all the expense in the middle.
• Japan's ¥-scale spending plan is his two-year-old sovereign-fund forecast arriving in legislative form. A $2.3 trillion, 14-year blueprint combining public and private investment across 17 strategic sectors — roughly $600B for AI and semiconductors, plus shipbuilding, solar, quantum computing and next-generation nuclear — explicitly framed as breaking a cycle of excessive austerity. He notes economists faulted it for lacking detail on the public/private split, but treats it as confirmation that every country will direct sovereign and pension capital into designated sectors. On the yen at ~161.6: Japan has already spent $79B defending it, and he warns that another $200–500B of defence would push US rates materially higher.

2026-06-25 · open the original ↗

• This is a coercion architecture with two channels, not a bilateral rare-earth spat. The physical channel is a chokepoint where one cut material paralyses capacity far downstream; the legal channel is extraterritorial re-export liability that pulls non-Japanese firms worldwide into Chinese jurisdiction. The instruments arrived as a deliberate ratchet rather than a single shock — the 2026 Dual-Use Catalogue (31 Dec 2025), the Japan dual-use ban (6 Jan), 20 hard-banned entities plus 20 watch-listed (24 Feb), State Council Order 834 (31 Mar), and implementing Measures on 22 June that switch the enforcement mechanism on.
• Tungsten is the load-bearing case and the shutdown is already dated. China holds 80%+ of global tungsten, Japan has effectively no domestic ore, and tungsten powder is 60–70% of WF6 cost. Kanto Denka Kogyo and Central Glass — jointly ~25% of global WF6 capacity, about 2,200 t/yr — permanently cease production from 1 July, opening a ~2,000 t second-half gap against 8,000–9,000 t/yr of global demand. Downstream sit Samsung and SK Hynix, which sourced roughly 80% of their WF6 from that Japanese pair, plus TSMC. WF6 is the irreplaceable precursor for sub-7nm logic, HBM and 200+ layer 3D NAND — the AI-chip stack. China's tungsten exports to Japan hit zero from February through April 2026.
• The extraterritorial trap is the part most analysts miss, and it is what makes a Japan measure everyone's problem. Article 49 of the Dual-Use Regulation gives Beijing Foreign-Direct-Product-style reach: any entity in any country is liable for transferring China-origin dual-use items to Japan in violation; foreign-made goods are captured at a 0.1% de minimis or if made using Chinese REE processing technology; a 50% affiliates rule radiates the 40 named Japanese entities out to their global subsidiaries; and intermediary liability drags freight forwarders, customs brokers, financiers and platforms into the perimeter. The net effect is not one supply cut but a permanent obligation — China-origin tracking and end-use attestation for every multinational with this content anywhere in its bill of materials.
• Price transmission is severe and the cascade is regressive. WF6 is up roughly 200–233% year-on-year and the APT tungsten benchmark up ~557% since February 2025, landing on a memory market where DRAM has roughly doubled since early 2025, with smartphone shipments projected down ~12.9% and PCs ~11.3% in 2026. Two refinements matter: the memory crunch is mostly HBM reallocation — a wafer routed to an Nvidia stack is one denied to consumer DRAM — so WF6 is a second independent shock on the same node; and hyperscalers lock supply through long-term commitments while mid-market buyers compete for residual capacity, so smaller firms absorb both higher costs and longer lead times. Note the entry's own corrections: the circulated "~1,100 items" figure was dropped as unconfirmable, the entity-ban count was an undercount (40, not 20), and a Bessent attribution was downgraded to partial. China's domestic WF6 capacity has meanwhile ramped to ~2,200 t/yr at 6N purity, breaking into global fabs exactly as Japan exits.

2026-06-25 · open the original ↗

• China has moved from agency discretion to codified law, with explicit extraterritorial reach. What MOFCOM ran administratively is now a 15-point export-control law, with 10 US entities added in direct retaliation for Washington naming 10 Chinese firms — Alibaba among them — as defence companies. The clause that matters: compliance now applies not only to direct China sales but to transfers of China-origin dual-use goods anywhere in the world. His analogy is the US using SWIFT — Beijing has built the same category of reach from the materials end of the stack.
• Triage is the real consequence, and it reaches consumers. Japan losing a quarter of global WF6 capacity forces an allocation choice downstream: hyperscalers or consumer devices. He points at Apple's announced 20% price increases as the first visible landing, and connects it to a call he made three years ago — that there would come a day Americans could not buy an iPhone or iPad, and that the consumer market would bifurcate with the US holding lesser technology than China and the countries in good standing with it. His earlier triage framing for rare earths, with the government acting as judge over who gets supply, now applies to memory.
• The damage runs well past chips, and the affected firms are behaving as though it lasts. Sumitomo Electric reports tungsten procurement "completely stopped," is raising prices up to 60% and building a ¥15.9bn recovery plant — capital that only makes sense if the cut persists. Mitsubishi Materials tripled cemented-carbide prices on June-onward orders. The hard-ban list cut Mitsubishi Heavy, Kawasaki Heavy, IHI, Fujitsu Defense, NEC, JMU Defense and JAXA off from the controlled minerals, with share prices falling on the announcement. He also flags his own verification discipline mid-stream: the widely circulated "20 Japanese companies banned" figure was an undercount, since another 20 were watch-listed the same day, making the real number 40.

2026-06-24 · open the original ↗

• With information now available to everyone, the real edge is the strategy applied to it, one host argues. He says picking a strategy that fits your own market assumption matters more than the data itself, since any given setup is roughly 50/50 to go up or down.
• Two hosts can read identical market action and reach opposite conclusions, both validly. One calls recent price action bullish, the other bearish, looking at the same data — illustrated as a "glass half full/half empty" situation where both views are defensible.

2026-06-24 · open the original ↗

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

2026-06-24 · open the original ↗

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2026-06-23 · open the original ↗

• The hinge is that an untested private mark can be converted into spendable cash without a sale. The IPO historically did two things — raise capital and create liquidity — through continuous arm's-length price discovery. Private capital replicated both functions while discarding the third: the JOBS Act raised the §12(g) holder-of-record trigger from 500 to 2,000 with employees and certain accredited holders counted separately; growth equity, sovereign funds and insurers deepened the private pools; and secondaries, tenders and GP-led continuation vehicles manufactured liquidity at a negotiated rather than discovered price. Price discovery is the one function never reproduced.
• "Borrowing against the valuation" is a five-layer stack, and the load-bearing layer is measurable. L1 LBO leverage, L2 dividend recap, L3 NAV financing against the marked NAV of the whole portfolio, L4 continuation vehicles as pseudo-realization, L5 founder margin loans under buy-borrow-die where basis steps up at death and the gain may never be taxed. Every layer collateralizes the same object — a Level 3 fair value that is model-derived, judgment-heavy and documented to carry upward bias. L3 sits near $100bn today with ~$70bn deployed in 2025 and a TAM approaching $700bn by 2030; LTVs run 5–25%, covenants often absorb 40%+ NAV declines, buyout funds are ~63% of borrowing, and GP-led secondaries hit a record ~$115bn in 2025. Wide headroom, but finite, and measured against a mark never sale-tested.
• The design fork decides whether the tax is systemically dangerous or a strawman. Annual mark-to-market on illiquid holdings triggers a forced-realization spiral — tax due on an unsold mark, holder sells into an illiquid market, the clearing price prints below the mark, NAV-loan covenants tighten, cross-collateralized stress propagates — making the tax itself the price-discovery event the structure was built to avoid, plus it gives GPs a reason to suppress marks. Deferral with a look-back interest charge avoids annual private-company valuation. Deemed-Realization-on-Pledge treats pledging an appreciated asset as collateral as the realization event, closing the buy-borrow-die loop without ever marking the asset. The paper's clean read: the systemic objection is legitimate only against the annual-mark design; against the calibrated and DROP paths it is largely a strawman — and DROP taxes precisely the monetization that makes the wealth real.

2026-06-23 · open the original ↗

• He reduces the argument to a sentence that is hard to answer. If a mark is real enough to collateralize a NAV loan, a dividend recap or a margin line, the holder has already converted it into spendable cash without a realization event. His illustration: they say your company is worth a billion, you borrow $800M against it, and the defence is that nothing was sold. The asset is illiquid for the tax authority and perfectly liquid for the lender — and it is the borrowing architecture that generates the tax debate, not the other way round.
• His structural read on private equity is that the 2012 shift changed what marks are for. Before, the business was buying a company at $10M and selling at $20M; after, the economics moved to earning 2% on assets under management — so the mark itself became the revenue base independent of any outcome. He is harshest on NAV financing, where a fund borrows roughly 25% against ten portfolio companies to prop up the one that is failing, and on continuation vehicles, which roll a struggling position into a new vehicle at a price set by negotiation rather than the open market.
• He adds a reflexive incentive the paper treats only abstractly. Once the mark is a tax base, the founder wants it lower to reduce the bill while the sponsor wants it higher to preserve the 2% fee — mark down a founder from $1B to $400M and the manager gives up the fee on $600M. Six jurisdictions now have proposals or legislation, and he walks each: the US federal bifurcation, the Netherlands' Box 3 Act with carve-outs for real estate and qualifying startup shares, Norway's tightened exit tax at 37.8% above NOK 3M with founder flight already observed, Colombia's net-wealth tax, and one-time billionaire levies proposed in California and Illinois.

2026-06-23 · open the original ↗

• Today's AI buildout differs from the dot-com bubble because the companies involved are real, not frauds. One host argues large spending on chips, data centers and AI infrastructure parallels the dot-com buildup, but says dot-com-era companies were often outright scams (citing Bernie Ebbers), while today's companies are not.
• Even so, one host calls the current period "the 2026 version of 2000" in terms of market cycle. He expects history's pattern of overextension to repeat, similar to 1987, 1989 and 2008, though he predicts fewer companies will go out of business this time than during the dot-com bust.

2026-06-22 · open the original ↗

• A trader known as "Captain Condor" reportedly lost an estimated $50 million after a Wall Street Journal profile. Known for selling iron condors at scale, he is described as having started at tastytrade before leaving; after the article, when the trade moved against him he doubled down rather than cutting, and was out of business about two months later.

2026-06-22 · open the original ↗

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2026-06-22 · open the original ↗

• SpaceX's post-IPO rally is driven by scarcity, not fundamentals. Only about 4.2% of shares were free to trade at listing, so a small float absorbed heavy retail demand — against a roughly 120x price-to-revenue ratio, a 2025 net loss of nearly $4.9 billion, and an S&P Global forecast of negative free cash flow through 2029.
• Mandated index buying is providing a second artificial tailwind. Rule changes at Nasdaq, FTSE Russell, and Morningstar's CRSP indexes are estimated to force $22-27 billion of price-insensitive passive buying into the thinly floated stock, regardless of valuation.
• The real test arrives when insider lockups expire starting after Q2 earnings. Roughly 20% of eligible locked shares release by late August, roughly doubling the float, with further tranches through October and December — while Elon Musk's own 366-day lockup doesn't expire until June 2027, leaving retail investors as likely exit liquidity for early holders.

2026-06-22 · open the original ↗

• The amendment adds a fourth consolidation buyer that the original framework explicitly excluded: the federal government. The prior buyer pool was surviving hyperscalers, allied sovereign wealth and US private credit. Between February 2025 and June 2026 Washington assembled both the vehicle — the sovereign-wealth-fund executive order — and the operating precedent: a 10% stake in Intel (~$8.9B), 15% of MP Materials making DoD its largest shareholder, a 15% China-chip-revenue share from Nvidia and AMD, and a golden share in US Steel. The structural point is that CFIUS-as-unpriced-moat does not break when the state becomes the buyer; it completes, because the government that writes the CFIUS rules is the most-qualified acquirer of all.
• The consolidation outcome is no longer uniform — it is politically conditioned. Equity discussions target designated national champions, OpenAI explicitly with xAI in the conversation, while Anthropic is notably not in talks and sits in an adversarial export-control posture after the Pentagon tagged it a supply-chain risk in mid-June. No stake talk attaches to Tier 3 at all — CoreWeave, Crusoe, Stargate — so the full Build-Bankrupt-Consolidate cascade still runs there while a federal ownership floor may form under the champions. Qualification for protection becomes its own unpriced moat.
• Equity and backstop point in opposite directions, and only one of them breaks the thesis. Equity or sovereign-fund participation is an upside-sharing claim that does not prevent the Bankrupt phase — it merely gives the public a claim on the survivors. A backstop or guarantee is downside protection that truncates that phase for protected firms. As of June 2026 the downside door is verbally fenced — Sacks on "no federal bailout," Altman disavowing guarantees — but ownership raises bailout incentives, a point Warren has pressed. The single variable to monitor is whether equity talk migrates into backstop territory under stress. The entry also corrects itself: its Tier 2 down-round marker is stale, since Anthropic closed a $65B round at a $965B post-money valuation in late May, topping OpenAI's ~$852B, with run-rate revenue near $47B, then filed confidentially for an IPO on 1 June — so the down-round signal is re-scoped to second-tier labs rather than the two leaders.

2026-06-22 · open the original ↗

• A live status board rather than an argument, and as of 21 June 2026 nothing has actually been signed. Equity stakes are in active discussion with OpenAI, xAI in conversation, no deal concluded. The previewed meeting of the top 12–15 AI executives has been announced but not convened. Sanders introduced the American AI Sovereign Wealth Fund Act on 18 June — a one-time 50% stock tax seeding a roughly $7 trillion public fund. The backstop question remains verbally fenced, with the migration not yet crossed.
• The chronology is tagged in both directions, which is what makes it usable. Entries carry SUPPORT, COUNTER or CONTEXT labels, and the COUNTER rows are kept rather than quietly dropped — Sacks' "no federal bailout for AI" and the Pentagon tagging Anthropic a supply-chain risk while it sits outside the equity talks both cut against the thesis. It also records that the cabinet is split on structure, with Bessent favouring equity routed to Trump Accounts and Lutnick a sovereign "national and economic security" fund, and no decision taken.
• One red line is singled out above all the Q3 watch items. Any federal loan guarantee, insurance, or purchase commitment for an AI lab's compute or data-centre obligations would mark the equity-to-backstop migration and trip the parent entry's thesis-break condition. The other things to watch are softer: whether the AI-CEO meeting convenes with equity discussed on record, any announced federal stake or donated-equity transfer, and what an OpenAI or Anthropic IPO prospectus says about government equity.

2026-06-22 · open the original ↗

• This episode is mostly a demonstration of his method, and he says so explicitly. He opened a narrative on 6 April when Altman suggested the government would invest in AI companies — a claim then roundly condemned — and spent two months collecting data points tagged as supporting, countering, or merely providing context, rather than only the ones that fit. His stated principle: "we don't care if we're right or wrong, we care if the narrative is right, because that's how you make money."
• He lands on the government as the buyer by eliminating the other three. Allied sovereign wealth is out because Washington will not let foreign funds take American AI; US private credit lacks both the wherewithal and the trust; and the surviving hyperscalers are themselves capital-hungry — his example is Meta earning roughly $26B in a quarter while raising $60B plus another $20B in bonds, which he reads as a tell that something is not adding up.
• His structural conclusion is that the risk has been pushed down to Tier 3, and his objection is about who owns the upside. With federal support forming under the champions, no stake talk attaches to CoreWeave, Crusoe or Stargate — so they carry the cascade. On design he is emphatic: if the public is funding this it must be a genuine sovereign wealth fund the public owns, not equity routed into Trump Accounts, and he sees no case for seeding a ~$7T fund whose returns do not flow back to the people paying for it.

2026-06-21 · open the original ↗

• Reaching its historical average, the ratio is framed as bullish for silver. Today's gold-to-silver ratio is 64:1; history shows that when the market matches this long-term average, silver tends to outperform gold — a pattern-based forecast, not a guarantee.

2026-06-21 · open the original ↗

• The Cushing warning came from industry to the White House, not the other way round. ExxonMobil's CEO and other oil executives met the administration ostensibly about Venezuela, and Cushing came up — with the president told there were roughly two weeks before the situation could break, against inventory near 20 million barrels. He ties this to Trump's public warning in Europe that energy supply could dry up within weeks and produce a depression worse than 1929. His own limb: an agreement with Iran gets done, reluctantly, because the alternative is unaffordable.
• He proposes that a security event, not economics, is what turned Washington toward owning AI outright. J.D. Vance said the plan is to take a position in every American AI company. His hypothesis, formed before he had evidence, was that something during the war frightened the government into wanting control. Then it surfaced — via the Senate Intelligence Committee vice chair citing NSA and Cyber Command leadership — that a model penetrated nearly every classified system within hours, the same day a separate jailbreak was reportedly found, after which foreign access to two models was ordered cut.
• He presents the competing explanation rather than only the alarming one. Anthropic is privately pushing back, calling the jailbreak minor and the shutdown an overreaction to something other models can also be tricked into doing, and the NSA was already using the model with company engineers embedded. He also relays a technical read he finds credible: the model likely did not break AES-256 encryption but instead chained unpatched legacy bugs, misconfigurations and weak internal credentials at machine speed to map the network — which is a legacy-code problem, not a cryptography one. Underneath it he returns to the recurring question of the business model, noting that a proposed ban on Chinese models failed because the top 100 US corporations run them.

2026-06-21 · open the original ↗

• The current steadiness masks a fragile supply picture ahead. Deliverable silver at the COMEX holds steady at 86 million ounces, but the video predicts two more heavy delivery months this summer or fall could "wipe out what's left" — the host's own forecast, not a reported shortfall.

2026-06-20 · open the original ↗

• Owning your situation without waiting to be rescued is the starting point. He argues the real world is brutal until you accept responsibility for yourself, and that the faster this realization hits, the more energy and drive follow — with failure treated as part of learning, not a verdict.
• He'd choose a small startup with equity over a bigger paycheck. Sosnoff says he gave his own children this advice at the start of their careers: prioritize upside, learning and practical experience over the number on the first offer.
• Building a professional network is the single most important post-grad task. He credits his own network, built over decades, with generating every business and investment opportunity he has monetized, calling it a professional ecosystem rather than a safety net.
• Wealth built over a lifetime, not overnight, is what actually lasts. He didn't launch thinkorswim until his 40s, tastytrade until his 50s, or his current venture until his mid-60s, and notes his grandmother earned her PhD around age 67.

2026-06-19 · open the original ↗

• "80% within 60 days" is 80% of a permanently impaired ceiling, and the arithmetic is the whole trade. Pre-conflict nameplate was 77 mtpa across 14 trains at Ras Laffan; roughly 13 mtpa of damaged capacity needs three to five years to restore. So effective output at the announced 80% is about 61.6 mtpa — roughly 64% of what Qatar actually supplied in 2024–25, not 80% of it. Because 55–65% of global LNG contracts remain oil-indexed, a market that reads the headline as 80% of prior supply overshoots to the downside on spot, and the North Field expansion programme is disrupted on top.
• What the three largest trading houses did while markets celebrated is the real signal. Vitol took an equity stake plus 1.4 mtpa offtake in Delfin FLNG and a five-year 1.7 mtpa Venture Global agreement; Trafigura added a five-year 0.5 mtpa Venture Global deal and is expanding owned VLCCs from four to more than ten; Gunvor signed a 20-year SPA with Delfin, became the first independent trading house to take equity in LNG carrier newbuildings, and bought North American upstream and storage. This is not crisis arbitrage — it is a multi-year structural thesis executed at peak peace-dividend pricing by houses that spent 72+ days finding replacement supply for buyers who could not wait.
• The Cushing risk is physical mechanics, and it requires no geopolitical failure at all. Inventory near 20 million barrels is the operational floor, drawing at ~800,000 barrels a week, with the SPR at its lowest since 1983. Below the floor, tank-bottom sediment fails WTI delivery specification and deliverable volume shrinks toward zero — the mirror image of April 2020, except a squeeze on shorts who must source compliant barrels. Gulf crude needs four to six weeks to transit Hormuz, sail, discharge and pipeline north to Cushing, against one to two weeks of remaining headroom. That leaves a three-to-four week window no diplomatic action can close, and the $88–105 scenario it implies is not in a $77 price.
• Oil and LNG amplify each other through the policy system rather than through price contagion — with one counterintuitive offset. A central bank facing simultaneous oil and gas inflation gets two separate cost-push vectors arriving together against models built for single-fuel shocks, and rate hikes produce neither barrels at Cushing nor repaired Qatari trains. Food takes it from both sides, since roughly 33% of global fertilizer trade transited Hormuz alongside the diesel cost of distribution. The offset is the associated-gas paradox: higher crude drives Permian drilling, which produces more associated gas, which keeps Henry Hub contained near $3.34 even as Asian buyers pay $10–12/MMBtu on oil-indexed contracts — a $7–8 spread that US HH-indexed supply captures, and precisely the asymmetry the three houses have positioned for.

2026-06-19 · open the original ↗

• His opening analogy is the argument: complex physical systems do not snap back when the politics resolve. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, domestic energy demand collapsed with it, oil backed up through the pipelines to the wellheads, and fields had to be shut in. Even with Western expertise and technology, most reopened only by 1999–2001 — and the last of them not until 2014. Roughly fifteen years to restore what a demand shock closed. The war ending does not restore the plumbing on the market's timetable.
• The Qatar arithmetic and the trading houses' response are what prompted the piece. Qatar returning to "80%" is 80% of an impaired ceiling — effectively 64% of prior supply, with two damaged trains needing three to five years. What caught his attention was that three of the five largest commodity trading houses moved the following day to lock US Gulf supply, storage and shipping on five-, fifteen- and twenty-year terms. He walks the spread they are capturing: Henry Hub at $3.34 against Asian legacy oil-indexed contracts at $10–12/MMBtu, a $7–8 gap per million BTU that US cargoes routed to Asia collect.
• Cushing is the mirror image of April 2020, and the market is pricing the friendliest scenario. Inventory sits at the ~20 million barrel operational floor, below which sediment makes the crude undeliverable to specification, drawing 800,000 barrels a week with roughly one to two weeks of headroom — against a four-to-six week resupply lag even if the Strait opened today. His four scenarios run $70–78 if everything holds, $88–105 if the transit lag bites, $120–145 if the MOU collapses, and $150–180+ if collapse coincides with a tank-bottom breach, where $175 becomes the floor rather than the ceiling. In 2020 an overfull Cushing took WTI to roughly minus $37 in a day; this is the same mechanism running the other way.

2026-06-19 · open the original ↗

• The author's final major argument with his father, over the 2020 election, nearly ended their relationship shortly before his father's terminal cancer diagnosis roughly two years later. They never discussed politics again after that fight, and his father died in 2023, an experience the author says reshaped how he now approaches people he disagrees with.
• The author initially concluded people cannot be separated from their politics, then revised that view after his father's death. He argues that dismissing someone as ignorant, brainwashed, or evil is a "selfish" interpretation that ignores the life experience and information environment that produced their honestly-held beliefs.
• He invokes Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" to explain his father, not as cartoon villainy but as an ordinary person shaped by an unexamined environment. He cites his father's conservative economics education (Chicago School influence, Milton Friedman) and decades of Fox News as the inputs behind political views the author still believes were honestly held.
• The essay's operating test for engagement is honesty of belief, not agreement. The author now asks whether someone genuinely believes their politics will make the world better before deciding to engage, arguing this approach — extended with more grace — could bridge both family and societal divisions.

2026-06-18 · open the original ↗

• Silver's paper-over-physical problem is more acute than any other major metal, and it tightens structurally rather than cyclically. Notional paper claims have at times exceeded deliverable metal by a ratio reported as high as 356-to-1 — a structure that holds only while no one asks for delivery at once. What makes silver distinctive is that its real-economy demand permanently removes metal from the deliverable pool: more than half of demand is industrial and consumed, with solar alone running 200–250 million ounces a year, roughly a fifth of supply, dispersed in quantities never economically recovered. Supply cannot respond, because roughly 70% of silver is a by-product of zinc, lead, copper or gold mining, so the silver price alone brings little new tonnage online.
• The stress is a present condition readable in four converging signals, not a forecast. Backwardation, with spot above near-dated futures — the market paying up for metal now rather than a promise later. London lease rates spiking toward 39% in October 2025 against a sub-1% norm, meaning holders would not lend metal even briefly. Geographic inversion, with London spot running more than a dollar above New York for far longer than arbitrage should allow, because the metal could not physically move. And deliverable-float drawdown, with COMEX registered silver near 80 million ounces by mid-2026, down over 75% from 2020, and about a quarter of registered stock withdrawn in a single January week.
• The market has fragmented into three islands, and purity is the wedge that creates a new benchmark claim. Shanghai physical has traded roughly 12–13% above Western benchmarks while China reclassified silver as a strategic material, tightened export licensing and imported record volumes. Abaxx's Silver Singapore contract launched 22 May 2026 — USD-denominated, 1,000 troy ounces, four-nines fineness, deliverable into approved Singapore vaults — built specifically for industrial consumers who actually need the metal. The framework's six-layer basis stack routes the risk accordingly: COMEX owns flat price and little below it, Abaxx owns location, format and purity with Asian delivery, and the Shanghai–Hong Kong axis is the only venue touching the RMB layer. For an industrial hedger, a paper hedge that cannot convert into deliverable four-nines metal is unsecured exposure plus basis risk.
• The document argues against its own thesis in a dedicated caution box, which is the most useful thing in it. It carries the contrarian case deliberately — CPM's Jeffrey Christian and JP Morgan desks arguing the structural shortage is overstated, since investment silver is above-ground stock that re-enters as prices rise and billions of ounces sit in refinable jewelry and electronics — and states that the framework does not depend on resolving the dispute. It flags the ~820 Moz cumulative deficit as contested; notes source price levels ranging from the $50s to $90+ with outliers above $120 that must be re-checked live; marks the 39% lease-rate peak and the ~26% weekly drawdown as point-in-time figures needing primary verification; and warns that some squeeze narratives originate with parties holding a commercial interest in higher prices. It also names the demand-side ceiling monetary metals lack: at high enough prices manufacturers thrift and redesign, which caps the squeeze over multi-year tenors.

2026-06-18 · open the original ↗

• He reframes the silver debate away from manipulation narratives toward who actually uses the market. The vast majority of participants are hedgers — industrial companies — and silver differs from gold in that roughly 50% of demand is industrial and destroyed each year. That is why Abaxx's new Silver Singapore contract matters: 1,000 ounces at 99.99% four-nines purity against COMEX's 99.5%, because solar, EVs and electronics need the higher grade. For the first time industrial users can hedge the grade they actually consume, though he is clear the venue is young with no real liquidity or depth yet.
• The structural split is paper in the West, physical in the East — and backwardation is the symptom. Notional paper claims have at times run as high as 356 to 1 against deliverable metal, and the market has been backwardated since late 2025, with cash above futures. He explains why that is abnormal — gold sits in contango — and what it means: a growing doubt that a COMEX contract can actually be delivered against. London lease rates hit 39% against a historical norm near half a percent and still sit at 13–15%, a level he notes would have shocked anyone three years ago. Shanghai physical trades 12–13% above Western benchmarks, so a New York paper hedge leaves an Asian physical buyer badly mismatched — and badly mismatched is not hedged.
• His warning to holders is specific, and he flags his own disagreement with the contrarians honestly. In an extreme squeeze, ETF shares can keep trading while the underlying metal effectively disappears, leaving holders with a paper claim carrying rising counterparty risk. On scale: Hecla, the largest US silver miner, produces 12–14 million ounces a year against a cumulative shortfall near 820 million. He relays the CPM and JP Morgan view that the shortage is overstated and above-ground stock will return, says plainly he does not believe it, and offers his own bet — that recovery and recycling of dispersed silver begins. The open question he leaves: what does COMEX do when it needs physical metal nobody is willing to sell?

2026-06-17 · open the original ↗

• The initial post-FOMC spike can be played as a fade or ridden as a trend. One approach is fading it immediately regardless of direction (buying a drop, selling a spike); in-house research found waiting a day before fading worked better, since the move looks "basically random" within the first couple of days; a trend-following alternative is offered for traders uncomfortable taking the contrarian side.
• The CME FedWatch tool can be traded directly off its rate-probability shifts. One host says following its implied probability — currently skewed over 65% — "has never been wrong," framing it as trading the probability itself rather than guessing a direction.
• FOMC day produces two separate moves, and waiting for the second is the safer entry. The rate number itself drives an initial move, and the press conference roughly a half hour later drives a second; the hosts suggest holding off until after that second move.
• Position and contract size should come down on FOMC day. They recommend ZN futures instead of ZB (half the size) or TLT instead of ZB (a tenth the size), on top of simply trading smaller overall.

2026-06-17 · open the original ↗

• When the maritime commons stops being a guaranteed public good, geography returns as the binding constraint on power. Political strategy can open doors and accumulate goodwill, but it cannot manufacture reach or compel a guarantee another nation has chosen to stop providing. The Iran conflict is the demonstration: it presented as political — regime, enrichment, civilisational stakes — and was decided as geographic, ending at a twenty-one-mile aperture where the only question was who could keep crude moving and who could survive it stopping. The sanctions architecture had already reached the end of its travel; it could still inflict pain but no longer dictate terms. Ideology was the costume; the factors were the actual terms.
• The eighty-year era was rent, and most tenants mistook the subsidy for a law of nature. One navy underwriting every sea lane flattened the map, so distance stopped billing anyone and alliances could be drawn anywhere regardless of terrain. Land empires never received that subsidy and never forgot the older arithmetic — a continental power holds what it can physically reach. But the paper is careful not to overclaim: contiguity is a multiplier, not a winning side, since fourteen borders is also fourteen potential fronts, and a hollow core hemorrhages through its frontiers rather than projecting through them.
• The retrenchment is real, staged deliberately, and Canada is the cleanest refutation of political strategy. June 2026 cuts to European commitments reduced committed fighters by roughly a third and thinned maritime reconnaissance — but the disclosure was withdrawing every aerial-refuelling tanker, because refuelling is reach, the connective tissue letting power travel past the horizon and stay there. Canada has a genuinely strong factor base yet touches exactly one neighbour, earns roughly seven of every ten export dollars selling south, and would have to double combined sales to China, Germany, France, Mexico, Italy and India at once merely to move a tenth of its exports — every one of them across water no longer guaranteed. So it is not diversifying; it is swapping a continental dependency it can drive a truck across for a maritime one requiring the exact commons being withdrawn. The paper coins a typology for it — the Vault Node, high on four factors and hollow on Security — and stages the reversion in three regimes: repricing by ~2031, regionalisation with in-region providers by ~2036, and a multipolar continental order supplanting the treaty map by ~2051.

2026-06-17 · open the original ↗

• His organising claim is a dating: before 2019 decisions were political, after it they are economic. He recorded a video the day before the Iran war began saying it was the wrong war on Five Factor grounds. His account of how it resolved is the argument in miniature — it began political, turned economic the moment Hormuz closed, and then the only live question was whether an undefined political win exceeded a very defined economic loss. It did not, and that is what forced the end.
• The European drawdown numbers are specific, and he singles out the least-covered one as the real signal. Fighters cut from 150 to 100, P-8A maritime reconnaissance from 26 to 15 — a 42% reduction — all eight KC-46 aerial refuelling tankers withdrawn entirely alongside carrier and warship reassignment, plus 5,000 troops out of Poland. Everyone covered the troops; he argues the tankers matter more because they are attached to a task force that is leaving. His blunt summary of the alliance position: NATO exists in name only.
• He translates the framework into an instruction for reading decisions. Over five years to 2031 the guarantee frays but persists, so geography becomes a repriced risk factor — every commitment now carries the question of whether the guarantor can actually arrive. By 2036 sea-lane security is partly privatised with in-region providers emerging by necessity, Turkey for the Sunni near abroad being his example. By around 2051 a multipolar continental order organised around geographic clusters supplants the treaty map. The practical takeaway he leaves: any country or company still making decisions on political rather than geographic and economic grounds is making a mistake.

2026-06-17 · open the original ↗

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

2026-06-16 · open the original ↗

• Shrinking attention spans are pushing retail toward moonshot bets. The question posed is whether hypergrowth "moonshot" investing, aimed at quick exponential wealth, has replaced Warren Buffett's moat style of capital preservation and steady growth. One host blames social media for cutting attention from 5–15 minutes to 20–30 seconds, and calls Gen Z more of a gambling, quick-fix crowd. That host credits the GameStop, Koss and AMC meme-stock episode with showing that retail can move markets.
• SpaceX is trading on price, not value, and will break. The same host says retail piles into a stock or two each day, and SpaceX buyers keep calling it cheap at 135, 150, 200 and 220 regardless of company quality. The forecast: moonshot investing is the norm "for the foreseeable future", until the market breaks and something like moat-style investing returns.
• The hosts split on whether moonshot investing is permanent. A second host calls the question silly, says moonshot investing "will always be the norm", and reminds the first of past advice to young traders: risk all of a $5,000 or $10,000 account instead of setting money aside in bonds. The clip ends with someone insisting moat style "is not going away". The captions do not show who said it.