Jonathan Stephens

My latest Chart In Focus article, "Third Low in McClellan Oscillator is Bullish Sign", is posted at my Home page. Direct link to follow in a reply.

Next time someone says they trust the “experts” or the news, show them this video.

It means Iran is coordinating with Oman (which co-controls the Strait of Hormuz) on a traffic management protocol for ships passing through the vital oil route. The key clarification: this won't add new restrictions or tolls that disrupt global shipping. Markets took it as good news—no escalation in the ongoing strait tensions—so oil prices dropped sharply on reduced supply risk fears.

@MenthorQpro BRK had that cash for a very long time.

While everyone chased the rally, Buffett was quietly selling and building a $373B cash pile. The GOAT is on a different level.

@McClellanOsc The Fed has been a captured body since its creation. And they lean one way. Once in a while it gets so obviously bad that a Volker is brought in to cleanup the mess.

The Fed hiked rates into the 1973 Arab Oil Embargo, with disastrous results for the stock market and for the economy. They learned from that and actually cut rates in Nov. 1990 after Iraq invaded Kuwait, even though CPI inflation was above 6% then. That was a good decision. Hopefully the current FOMC has not forgotten the lessons of those two episodes.

@CooperHitAndRun 6475 was the put side of the JPM collar expiring today I think.

@CooperHitAndRun I have not seen this elsewhere.

@spiralcal Nice divergence. Will April 1 make fools of the bears 🐻?

SPX 5-day breadth The stocks nobody owns are doing well.

We are at the stage in the War where the Iranian Parliament Speaker is doling out trading advice. Surreal.

@CraigBrockie @drawandstrike Guide

There's a single gut microbe that influences your mood, your sleep, your skin, and even your muscle mass. 96% of people have lost it. Scientists just discovered it triggers your body to produce the "Love Hormone" oxytocin. Not in your brain, but in your gut. The microbe is called Lactobacillus reuteri (L. reuteri). It used to live in nearly every human gut on Earth. Today - Antibiotics, processed food, and modern living have wiped it out of almost everyone. If you've taken even one round of antibiotics in your life, Yours is probably gone. Researchers at Baylor College of Medicine made a stunning discovery. They found that oxytocin - The hormone linked to mood, bonding, stress relief, and healing - is produced in your small intestine. Not just your brain. Your gut. And L. reuteri is what can trigger its release. How does it work? L. reuteri stimulates special cells in your intestinal lining to release a hormone called secretin. Secretin then signals nearby cells called enterocytes to produce and secrete oxytocin. Your gut is literally manufacturing one of the most powerful hormones in your body. And - It's published science. The Baylor team confirmed it using human intestinal tissue, gene expression data, and lab-grown intestinal cultures. The highest concentration of oxytocin-producing cells? The small intestine. Dr. William Davis - the physician who wrote "Wheat Belly" and "Super Gut" ... figured out how to grow L. reuteri at home using a simple fermentation process. Not a pill Not a supplement A highly concentrated probiotic food you make yourself. Here's what people are reporting after restoring L. reuteri: - Deep, uninterrupted sleep - Reduced anxiety and improved mood - Thicker hair and younger-looking skin - Increased muscle mass (even without heavy exercise) - A 50% rise in testosterone in men over 50 - Faster wound healing - Restored libido MIT researchers tested it in mice. The ones given L. reuteri stayed lean, kept their fur, mated, and aged gracefully. The control group (same diet, no L. reuteri) - Got fat, lost their hair, stopped mating, and died early. Same crappy diet. Completely different outcome. Why? Because L. reuteri does something most probiotics can't. It colonizes your entire small intestine - ALL 24 feet of it. It produces natural antibiotics called bacteriocins that kill harmful bacteria. And it prevents the toxic migration of fecal microbes into your upper gut. When those bad microbes invade the small intestine, they release toxins into your bloodstream. That's called endotoxemia. It drives weight gain, brain fog, type 2 diabetes, cognitive decline - And is now being linked to multiple forms of the Big C. L. reuteri helps stop that at the source. The key? Dr. Davis found that fermenting L. reuteri at 99°F for 36 hours produces roughly 300 billion microbes per serving. More than 30X a typical supplement. A half cup a day is the protocol. I've been saying for 30 years: your mood, your anxiety, your energy - It starts in the gut. When I healed my gut, my crippling anxiety disappeared. Not from medication. From fixing the actual cause. Now science is catching up. And L. reuteri is one of the biggest reasons why. Comment GUIDE and I'll send you a FREE guide on how to make unlimited probiotics at home.

@TommyThornton The bigger the blowup the more money the street throws at them. I never understood why and still don’t.

This lovely lady speaks very confidently but if you go back and examine her previous predictions you discover she’s a fucking moron

@TommyThornton Sticking to your method works! Congratulations!

Hedge Fund Telemetry current portfolio exposure: +8.5% vs $SPY -7% YTD. 45% net short, 15% cash. 63/50 closed trades with 79% win rate, which will moderate through the year

@CooperHitAndRun It's Nacho cheese says the second mouse.

Woke up to a sea of Red on Wall St.

Larry Fink: “If I allowed more people to redeem, I’m not a fiduciary to those who are staying in”. It’s an admission that the reported NAV is bogus.

Bloomberg: “Jim Zelter (President of Apollo) and Doug Ostrover (Co-CEO of Blue Owl) said the private credit industry failed to clearly explain liquidity restrictions to investors.” So shouldn’t you give them their money back?

@TommyThornton GetLoNG? 😁

$GLNG *GOLAR LNG LIMITED REPORTS REVIEW TO MAXIMIZE STAKEHOLDER VALUE, *GOLAR NAMES GOLDMAN SACHS AS FINANCIAL ADVISER

@PeterLBrandt There are governments that have the capability to enter any network be it traffic signals in Tehran or listening into cell phones used as listening devices when idle. They can read keystrokes while someone is composing a tweet/post. I think that is more likely the case.

I've traded futures markets for five decades. There is ZERO doubt in my mind that Trump money was behind this buying. There is NOOOOO law that prevents the Trump machine from manipulating futures markets. Inside trading is legal Trump family fortune grew today. Trump is playing markets like a fiddle

Private credit returns 11.5% on loans that yield 9.5%. Nobody asks how. I'll tell you how: Leverage. They take a portfolio of loans yielding 9.5%, lever it 2x, and the gross return doubles to 19%. Subtract financing costs and fees, hand the client 11.5%, and show them a chart with a line so smooth it would make Madoff jealous. That's the product Wall Street has been selling to pensions, endowments, insurance companies, and now your 401(k). They even gave it a nice name. "Private credit." There's a better name for it: volatility laundering. The returns aren't smooth because the risk is low. They're smooth because nobody is marking anything to market. The same people making the loans are the ones deciding what they're worth. When everything's going up, that's a feature. When it turns? It's a trapdoor. And we're watching the trapdoor open right now. Funds are gating redemptions across the industry. Loans are going from 100 cents on the dollar to zero in a single quarter. The biggest asset managers on earth are telling investors: "Sorry, you can't have your money back." And none of this should surprise anyone who's been paying attention. Every cycle produces the SAME SCHEME wearing a different outfit. Junk bonds in the 80s. Mortgage-backed securities in 2007. Both sold the identical promise - equity-like returns with bond-like stability. Both ended the same way. Private credit is the 2020s version. Bigger numbers. Fancier packaging. Same math. The leverage is the tell. Any time someone shows you returns that look too good for the underlying asset, there's leverage hiding somewhere in the structure. And leverage doesn't create returns... It amplifies outcomes - in both directions. What pisses me off is that the people running this know exactly what they're doing. The risk disclosures are 400 pages long. The gates are buried in footnotes. It's not technically illegal. But doing something because you can get away with it - not because it's right - is a special kind of rotten. After 2008, NOBODY went to jail. Banks paid fines that amounted to rounding errors on their balance sheets. The message was clear: heads you win, tails the taxpayer covers it. So of course they did it again. Why wouldn't they? And here's where the realist in me takes over from the idealist: They're not going to let this blow up cleanly. They NEVER do... The playbook is extend, pretend, and print. Special vehicles. Special accommodations. More liquidity injected into a system that's already drowning in it. Every time they paper over a crisis, they confirm the only trade that matters. Gold pulled back hard this week - from $5,000 to around $4,575. Every shakeout over the past two years has been a buying opportunity. The structural case (debasement, central bank accumulation, collapsing confidence in sovereign debt) hasn't weakened. It's accelerated. The worse private credit gets, the more they'll have to print. And the more they print, the HIGHER gold goes. It's not complicated. It's just math that most people don't want to accept.

Very expensive capital …screams of desperation. Nothing screams bubble trouble more than this.