Mark Kahn

@EpsilonTheory Serious or parody, it highlights the flawed thinking that not only does every problem has a gov't answer, but every problem needs a gov't answer now. Families & businesses know you can only have so many priorities to be effective, why can't our gov't realize this: do less better.

@dampedspring "If you are always long beta at your risk target as a long term investor you are almost certainly NOT reading this and are out enjoying your life." LOL.

If you are persistently leveraged long assets above your risk target you are doing it wrong and this month is a lesson. Consider moving to your risk target If you are perma bear and always underinvested and in cash you have been a failure and your career as in investor is your lesson If you have been cautiously scaling out of stocks and bonds and are underweight, great job. BUT the only reason to have done that is to get back to target risk. You probably didn't call the top and you won't call the bottom. If you're comfortable deviating from your risk target modestly feel free to leverage a bit into a real decline. Don't miss either side. If you are always long beta at your risk target as a long term investor you are almost certainly NOT reading this and are out enjoying your life. Always own beta

@BamaBonds Serious not snarky question, but are those programs still table stakes for a super power? Iran isn't going to win the war and take over the United States; the question is how much the US is willing to endure, but the win/lose thing is still decided by those old warhorses.

Poor performance of defense names ($RTX $NOC $LMT etc.) so far in the Iran war shows that big changes are coming in the world of defense procurement. Multi-trillion dollar white elephant programs like the F-35 & $15B lemons like the Gerald Ford are out in the era of the drone.

@biancoresearch Honestly, I think he prefers making sh*t up. I don't quite know why, but his mind seems to prefer a long complicated lie that will be called out to a simple truth or a lot of "no comment at this time."

As a follow up, I'm not going to mince words ... If the real reason for the delay is that the military assets needed were not in place, then don't make up shit about 10 tankers going through the Strait (no evidence) or the Iranians asked for the delay (the Pakistanis, who are the intermediaries, said no such request was made). Say you'll keep talking, you're losing patience, and say every day the Iranians don't deal means the Marines are getting closer to the Middle East. The market would understand that, and the crude oil response (fall and stay down) might have been more favorable. This just looks like a TACO mess.

When Trump announced a delay to the bombing on Monday morning, crude oil futures immediately fell 10%. Compare this to the reaction to yesterday afternoon, when he extended the delay another 10 days (red box). It was short-lived, and now, about 12 hours later, prices are meaningfully higher. I believe the market signal is that the Strait must be opened, and the military must do it. The longer we delay starting this process, the higher crude oil prices will go. All Trump did yesterday was add 10 more days to the ongoing supply shock. Any further statements by Trump about a deal are white noise to the markets. Only if the IRANIANS say the talks are going well will it impact markets. Why isn't the crude oil market substantially higher ($150+), like many are asking? I would argue that the market believes the military can open the Strait. But it will be "messy." In other words, there are no good choices, only ones that are less bad.

@jposhaughnessy And many more including: "You just give the best show you can – even if you feel terrible... You do it because you are putting yourself on the line and those people have paid good money to see you." A professional.

Two thoughts from Mick Jagger "You can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you might find, you get what you need." “Polarization affects families and groups of friends. Its a paralyzing situation. A civil war of opinion.”

@karenmotherof2 What I want to know is how the person considering doing this has any money left by now anyway.

Ok we joke about it but if you do this you actually need to call the number I’m not kidding

@dailydirtnap To say nothing of making finding the game you want to watch a stupid version of What-a-Mole, which has turned me off to the sport. Great job MLB. I really think they are hollowing out their viewership if they can turn off someone like me.

Thanks, MLB, for putting baseball games on Netflix, Prime, Apple TV, Peacock, and The Dildo Channel, pretty much everywhere except the MLB network, because I enjoy paying for shit I can't watch. You may think this is a ruse to get me to subscribe to all this stuff, when in reality, it just makes me hate baseball. Well done.

@Road_trippn @JackieBordelon @dailydirtnap I hear you and understand your point of view, but have you considered that those 89 million, if they voted, might not have voted the way you wish?

@MarkKahn2 @JackieBordelon @dailydirtnap Those not voting got us into this mess, so I’m respectfully disagreeing with your opinion. 89 million voters stayed home and now we’re stuck the second time with the worst most catastrophic disaster of a president we’ve ever had.

1/ There's actually a cogent intellectual argument for not voting, but I fear I will get ratioed and booed off the website if I share it. Ah, well. Life is short.

@politicalmath I refer to them as the "gets sh*t done" people and they are the ones that make the world work. I don't know if this is allowed to be said or not anymore: I dated many girls, but would only marry (or partner now for > 2 decades) with a "gets sh*t done" woman.

My entire worldview is that Calvin's dad is not only correct about the definition of "control freak" but that people like Calvin's dad are the key to every good thing that we collectively enjoy

@stepfanie Movie theaters have been proactively giving their customers more reasons not to go at exactly the time home viewing screens and options got infinitely better. That a great business strategy they came up with.

I haven’t been to a movie in 5 years. This is unhinged.

@_ROB_29 God do I feel seen.

If people want to know why Gen X is always mad, it's because we had to replace our record collections with a tape collection and then replace that with a CD collection that we slowly replaced with an MP3 collection and now need a subscription to listen to music.

@AmyPeikoff I'm reasonably math proficient, yet I look like these guys as we all know which of the two – pi or pie – is more fun. I also love that pie used to be thought of as a finger food.

Those forks and those faces 🥰

@biancoresearch Jim, thank you. This is why I follow you and look forward to your posts: all the great information. No yelling or posturing, just thoughtful and detailed support of your argument. If only X had more of this and less of all the other garbage and endless snark we see.

The cryptic announcement that Iran will allow tankers to pass through the Strait of Hormuz if their cargo is paid in Yuan has many problems. Unless there are more details offered, view it as propaganda and not a workable idea. --- If you're interested in why, some thoughts... No operational mechanics were explained How exactly does Iran verify what currency a cargo was paid in before granting passage? Oil trades involve a chain of counterparties — producers, traders, refiners, end buyers — often with multiple legs of financing and settlement. There's no manifest line that says "paid in yuan." Is Iran proposing to inspect banking records at the Strait? Demand SWIFT confirmations from Chinese banks? This isn't a tariff booth, it's one of the world's most complex commodity markets. There is no operational framework described because there likely isn't one. The Saudis tried exactly this in 2022, and quietly killed it When Saudi Arabia floated yuan-denominated oil sales to China, it generated huge headlines in 2022. It went nowhere. Once you collect yuan, what do you do with it? China's bond market is partially closed to foreigners, capital controls limit repatriation, and yuan-denominated assets globally are a tiny fraction of what dollar assets offer. Oil exporters need somewhere safe, liquid, and deep to park revenues. That somewhere is US Treasuries, not Chinese Yuan-denominated bonds. Chinese capital markets are not deep enough The US Treasury market trades $800B+ daily. That depth is why the dollar is the oil settlement currency, not politics, not the petrodollar agreement, but pure market structure. If every barrel transiting Hormuz (roughly 15-20 million barrels/day pre-war) suddenly needed yuan to purchase, the demand shock on a managed, partially-closed currency would be enormous. China's capital markets cannot absorb that recycling flow. A surging yuan could actually hurt China Massive forced yuan buying would likely send the currency soaring, and that's the last thing Beijing wants. China is already battling deflation. Its export sector is under tariff pressure from the US. A sharply stronger yuan erodes export competitiveness. China has spent years carefully managing a gradual appreciation of the Yuan for strategic reasons. A shock appreciation forced by an Iranian is not in Beijing's interest. There's no indication Beijing has endorsed or agreed to this plan. Further, China has carefully avoided being drawn into the military conflict. Suddenly becoming the financial clearinghouse for the Hormuz passage, with all the secondary sanctions that come with it, is exactly what Chinese banks want to avoid. China buys Iranian oil through shadow-fleet intermediaries specifically to avoid formal yuan-settlement mechanisms that would expose Chinese banks to US sanctions. ---- This reads like a trial balloon from Tehran, not a workable financial architecture. It suffers from the same structural reasons that killed the Saudi yuan-oil experiment in 2022, with the added complications of US sanctions and the absence of Chinese buy-in. The dollar's dominance in oil markets is a function of capital market depth and convertibility, not something a Strait closure can unilaterally rewrite.

@BobEUnlimited @AahanPrometheus The thing I respect about both of you is that you put your trades/investment/themes out there ahead of time & admit when you're wrong. So many MOTU memory hole their bad trades. I'm still waiting for one of them to note that he called for gold to 1/2 it price when it was at $3500

@AahanPrometheus Everyone gets things right and wrong... not the point... The difference is you aint charging 7 & 30 and acting like you are a master of the universe.

While all those handsomely paid Masters of the Universe with fine tuned models eat shit, Global Macro managers are up ~2% so far this month and high single digits for the year. x.com/nishantkumar07…

@stepfanie Agree with everything, but I'd change "at least" to "way more than."

Your lack of ethics and blatant disregard for the truth is part of the reason I’m no longer a Democrat. Garbage “reporting” for at least the last decade.

@AmyPeikoff One good thing (the only good thing) about DST, it got you to post a lot more on X. I've missed your Tweets.

Daylight Saving Time: People who want different daylight patterns get government to force the rest of us to change our clocks away from solar noon to suit their personal preference, regardless of what that does to our circadian rhythms and health. #DitchDST

@AmyPeikoff I agree with you, Amy, but I'll tell you, trying to catch up with some work I had set aside for Sunday morning, all I really want right now is my damn hour back. Grrr.

You’re forgetting the long hours of darkness in the mornings you’ll have with permanent DST. That’s why there was a huge public outcry when it was tried in the 1970s. Can’t anyone learn from history? #DitchDST

@stepfanie I love that they had changed the name from penmanship to writing, but hadn't ordered new forms yet.

@MarkKahn2 1996

My mom is cleaning out her garage and just sent me this pic of my 2nd grade report card Ever since I was a little girl I knew I wanted to grow up and weaponize a B in phonics

@stepfanie Quiet impressive. What year was this that they were still measuring some of this stuff?

You'll also note that my work was EXCEPTIONALLY NEAT tyvm

@dailydirtnap Happy birthday and many happy and healthy returns.

Today is my birthday. A good birthday present would be to follow me on Insta. Helps me get DJ gigs. I'm (at) djstochastic. Many thanks in advance!

@BamaBonds I agree, but I'd add, the mkt looks at these things differently than it did for most of my career. Now it's more concerned that the higher prices will destroy growth and demand. Also, if the price hike is temporary, it's not willing to price the stocks as if ⇧ price will last.

The inability of energy stocks to hold a bid with Brent crossing $90 is, if not equally concerning, just as amazing.