Ahead of the Curve

Buffett Indicator hit 229.9% on May 5—meaning the U.S. stock market is worth more than double the entire economy. Historically, 100%+ often signals overvaluation. 150%+ has marked extreme excess. Near 230% is unprecedented territory. more here: quoththeraven.substack.com/p/the-markets-…

Semiconductor Stocks are now the most overbought since the peak of the Dot Com Bubble 🚨🚨🚨

This chart shows hard assets vs paper assets. And it has now broken out on lower time frames. Commodities are extremely undervalued vs the stock market. A historical opportunity is underway, in the form of a global paradigm shift away from overvalued paper assets towards undervalued hard assets. It will be the largest global financial paradigm shift the world has ever seen. And therefore, one of the biggest opportunities there has ever been. The pushed narrative is that big inflation is basicly done. No, it surely is not. Not by a mile. Unfortunately. The commodities bull market started 6 years ago, which we caught the start of. The biggest opportunity in our lifetime, and threat. So, do not miss it, whatever you do. #joinus graddhy.com

The US cannot continue to be a major swing producer of oil. All growth in oil production has come from just one oil basin, and that basin has been in decline since 2018 and will soon turn negative. This is just simple geology. Full report: peakprosperity.pulse.ly/zjiddtfo6d

The market just did something it has literally NEVER done before. The S&P 500 traded $2.6 trillion in call options yesterday. The highest single day call volume in market history. When traders buy massive amounts of calls, the market makers selling those calls are forced to hedge by buying the underlying stocks. That buying pushes prices higher. Higher prices force more hedging. More hedging pushes prices higher again. This is called a gamma squeeze. It works incredibly well on the way up. It’s brutal on the way down. The same loop that drove the S&P higher every day reverses with the same force when the calls expire or the trades unwind. We’re no longer watching investors price in earnings or growth. We’re watching options flow drag the largest index in the world. The question is not if it unwinds, the question is when. you want to know which stocks we’re buying next, turn on notifications this is VERY important.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ Many people will wish they followed us sooner.

Most people look at the oil price. The forward curve already told you everything weeks ago A quick primer first. When the contract trades BELOW spot, that's backwardation. The market is saying: the commodity today is worth more than the commodity later. It signals tight supply, low inventories, or acute stress in the physical market. When backwardation appears in crude, it usually means one of 3 things: Inventories are falling fast Supply is disrupted Buyers are paying a premium to secure barrels now All 3 now are currently true. Since the Iran war began, Brent has been in deep backwardation. The Strait of Hormuz disruption removed 20% of global seaborne oil from normal routing overnight. Buyers scrambling for non-Gulf barrels pushed spot prices up sharply while deferred contracts stayed lower, pricing in an eventual resolution. That spread IS the market's fear, quantified. There's also a roll yield implication. In backwardation, rolling a long position earns the roll you sell the more expensive expiring contract and buy the cheaper next one. It's one reason commodity funds have outperformed during the war period beyond just the spot price move. Now watch what happens to the curve if the Iran MoU gets signed. Spot premiums compress. The curve flattens or flips toward contango. That move will show up in the forward curve before it shows up in headlines. The curve has already voted. The question is what it votes next.

The reality is, nobody “needs oil” @acidiclemon2 I don’t know anyone who owns a barrel. What people actually need are products like diesel & jet fuel. And much of U.S. light crude isn’t well suited to produce those at scale. That's what most people don't get #OilMarkets #EnergyIsTheEconomy #Diesel #JetFuel #CrudeQuality #Refining #Macro #Commodities

1/ Oil prices will rise to at least $140 per barrel by June if the Strait of Hormuz is not reopened by July, and will not return to pre-Iran War levels before 2028 even in a best-case scenario, predicts Goldman Sachs. It warns of price surges and major economic impacts. ⬇️

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Having spoken to a senior Saudi official about the NBC article regarding Project Freedom, I honestly think the article completely misunderstood what actually happened because it was written almost entirely from a US perspective rather than from a GCC perspective. First of all, contrary to the impression being created, the GCC were NOT blindsided by Project Freedom. They knew about it beforehand. Roughly half a day before. The airspace was opened. The facilities were available. Nobody objected. There was broad support for the idea because, at least publicly, Project Freedom was supposed to be a limited humanitarian-security operation aimed at relieving the 22,000 sailors trapped around Hormuz and allowing shipping lanes to breathe again. Nobody in the GCC had a problem with that. But here is the issue .. and this is the part the NBC article completely misses. If you are asking GCC countries to participate in such an operation, then you need to be upfront about the rules of engagement from day one! You cannot say:
“Please open your skies and bases, expose your energy infrastructure” …only for everyone to discover afterwards that the actual American policy was apparently: “Oh by the way, if Iran attacks you with ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and drones in several waves, we still won’t retaliate because Donald Trump is busy chasing The Deal.” And this is exactly what shocked the Saudis. Not the Iranian attack itself. The UAE/GCC expected retaliation.. This is Iran. Nobody in the Gulf is naïve about that anymore. The shock came from the American reaction afterwards. You had attacks against Emirati infrastructure. Fujairah was targeted. Multiple waves involving drones, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles. And Washington’s response was basically:
“Meh. Minor incident. Let’s not escalate.” Minor incident?! For the GCC that was madness. Because what Riyadh, Kuwait and Abu Dhabi suddenly realized was that Trump’s obsession with preserving “The Deal” had apparently reached the point where Gulf energy infrastructure was now considered acceptable collateral damage in the pursuit of his precious negotiations. Everything became:
The deal.
The deal.
The beautiful deal.
The greatest deal.
The mother of all deals. The ultimate “Art of the deal” Or perhaps, more accurately:
The ultimate fart of the deal. Because from the Gulf perspective, this stopped looking like strategy and started looking like desperate political vanity mixed with deadly wishful thinking. Had the GCC been told beforehand:
“Listen, whatever Iran does to you during Project Freedom, America will not retaliate because we do not want to endanger negotiations…” …they would have almost certainly refused participation from the start. The problem was not Project Freedom itself. The problem was discovering midway through the operation that the GCC countries were apparently expected to sit there quietly as punching bags while Washington played negotiation theatrics with Tehran. So the Saudis and Kuwaitis pulled plug! Because the GCC know something US usually forgets: Iran plays the long game. You can freeze enrichment.
Pause enrichment.
Delay enrichment.
Sign ten agreements.
Twenty agreements.
Forty agreements. But if the infrastructure remains…
If the centrifuges remain…
If the IRGC remains…
If the proxy network remains… then eventually the game resumes. There will be another distraction.
Another pandemic.
Another financial crisis.
Another war somewhere else.
Another paralysis in Washington. And while the world is distracted, enrichment quietly resumes again. Ironically, much of Iran’s highly enriched uranium stockpile expanded during the pandemic years precisely because global attention was elsewhere. Judging by the reaction to the UAE attacks, the Saudis and Kuwaitis concluded that Trump’s version of deterrence had become: “Please absorb the missiles quietly because I’m trying to write the sequel to “The Fart of the Deal.”

There is no energy transition We simply use more and more of everything — fossil fuels, nuclear, renewables, solar and wind "Rather than replacing fossil fuels, renewables are adding to the overall energy mix" Energy Institute Statistical Review 2025 energyinst.org/exploring-ener… iea.org/data-and-stati…

Seriously... Look, Argentina is set to add 150kb/d from Vaca Muerta shale over the next 18 months. Brazil, Guyana, and Norway rely on massive offshore projects, so their production paths for the next 1-2 years are basically locked in. The most they can do is slightly pull forward startups, like Brazil did this month with the P-79 FPSO at the Buzios field. Given that Canada is hitting pipeline capacity constraints, the vast majority of that 1.7mb/d incremental growth has to come from US shale. So i have to ask: after looking at US production trends, Q1 earnings from shale companies, rig counts/frac spreads, do you honestly think it’ll be easy for the US to ramp up 1.5mb/d within a year, even with WTI at $90-100? #oott #iran

🚨The DOJ is investigating $2.6 billion in oil trades placed minutes before major Iran war announcements. 4 trades. 4 times someone appears to have known what was coming The pattern, per ABC News: March 23: $500 M bet on falling oil prices placed 15 minutes before Trump announced a delay to strikes on Iran's power grid April 7: $960 M bet placed hours before a ceasefire was announced April 17: $760 M bet placed 20 minutes before Iran's Foreign Minister posted that the Strait of Hormuz was open April 21: $430 M bet placed 15 minutes before Trump announced a ceasefire extension Each trade was positioned to profit from a price decline. Each announcement moved oil prices down. Each trade was placed before the announcement became public. The DOJ is now investigating whether the trades were placed with advance knowledge of the announcements which would constitute insider trading on material non-public information tied to geopolitical events. $2.6 billion in total exposure across 4 separate incidents is not a coincidence thesis. It is a pattern thesis. No charges have been filed. The investigation is ongoing. Source: ABC News / @MarioNawfal

Global onshore inventories have been falling by >40MM barrels per week for the past 2 weeks as the in-transit safety buffer has been exhausted. Ignoring 5 "imminent peace deal to open up the Strait" leaks for 19 days, this appears to be the ~ likely path forward. Will it matter?

Read the fine print.. Iran claims the Strait is "open" for ships complying with their "terms" (i.e. paying tolls) Do you think Team Trump will capitulate and surrender control over 20% of global energy flows to Iran? It would be the biggest geopolitical L of all time

Concluding that shippers won't be willing to pay a toll to the Iran--and, thus, won't return to the strait--is reasonable, and it's a key reason why I don't think the US will agree to anything with Iran that maintains a tolling system. Hard to see a deal coming together if the Iranians cling to tolls.

Here’s Kpler’s take on the Strait of Hormuz reopening scenario. They predict that as long as Iran maintains control, any increase in transit volume will be strictly limited. They’ve pointed out several key constraints: 1) Delays and uncertainty caused by the new transit permit process. 2) Rising insurance and compliance issues due to the mandate to pass through Iranian territorial waters. 3) The potential need to pay transit fees to the IRGC, which is a sanctioned entity by the US. 4) Complex routing compared to the standard IMO traffic separation schemes. Kpler expects these factors to set a hard ceiling on traffic. While volume might recover gradually, capacity utilization will be structurally capped. Under this Iranian control scenario, they see transit volume peaking at only about 40-50% of the Gulf’s total export capacity. #oott #iran

Top British attorney Natasha Hausdorff stunned the audience by completely destroying the Palestinian narrative about the conflict. The truth the world refuses to accept: Palestine never existed as a sovereign Arab state. The British Mandate of Palestine was a British territory taken from the defeated Ottoman Empire after 1917. Jews lived continuously in the Holy Land for centuries — long before modern Zionism. They were the majority in Jerusalem under Ottoman rule. Jews legally bought desert land (including the area that became Tel Aviv) and turned it into thriving cities and kibbutzim. Not a single Arab was displaced by these purchases. The Arabs rejected the 1947 UN partition plan and launched war to destroy the newborn Jewish state. They lost. During that war, Arab armies ordered local Arabs to flee so they could “push the Jews into the sea.” Many did exactly that. Israel has never committed genocide. It has fought for survival against repeated attempts to commit genocide against the Jewish people. Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran’s regime are the real obstacles to peace in the Middle East. The historical facts are clear. The propaganda is not. Share this. The truth needs to be heard.

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Jerusalem Cross: A Christian symbol dating back to the 11th century and painted on the floor of the National Cathedral. Totenkopf: The official symbol of the Nazi SS units who ran the death camps. Guess which tattoo Democrats think should disqualify you for public service.