Cognitive Contortionist

We have been huge silver bulls since 2009, but be very careful here: lots of financial engineering going on. Jane Street not only added a record 20.6MM shares of SLV in Q4, it is now also the biggest holder of SLV

If this is your first foray into the “geopolitical commodity disruption” trade - look at this chart and realize that you need to have one foot out the door at all times. These are not secular moves, do not believe anyone who - once the cycle sets itself up - tells you a smart sounding story about how they are. The moves contain within them the seeds of their own destruction. They are trades.

PPI comes red hot: PPI 0.7% MoM, Exp. 0.3% PPI Core 0.5% MoM, Exp. 0.3% PPI 3.4% YoY, Exp. 3.0% PPI Core 3.9% YoY, Exp. 3.7%

We’ve been posting some variation of this same post for years. The AI boom has made it so that nothing digital can be trusted. Whether it’s real or not doesn’t even matter anymore. The well has been poisoned. This is going to completely change the information landscape permanently as we move forward. Nobody will believe anything they see from digital media. We will have to return to in person events. AI Psychosis is a real thing. If there becomes no such thing as facts, where everything can be dismissed as fake, it’s whoever lies the best and has the most compelling narrative who wins the information war. Not the person who is telling the truth or correct. x.com/autismcapital/…

It’s a really strange time in the world where someone can just say “this is AI generated” then when someone says “no, it’s obviously not,” the other person says “no, they just have advanced models we don’t know about,” and then everyone else says “yeah!” and then people believe whatever they want to believe. This is going to be a real continuing problem moving forward. You thought mis/disinformation was bad before? Now people can just play the AI card and all bets are off.

What an absolutely total coincidence the 10am slams stopped once you know who got busted for market manipulation

99/100 times stay away from: - Dev is a trencher with no credentials outside of CT - Dev is playing naive about the token - Dev launches or has recently launched a second token - Dev posts about the price - Dev hypes announcements / manufactures short-term excitement - Dev DMs and spreads “non-public” info - Dev goes quiet during drawdowns but reappears for pumps - Dev blames the community when things go wrong - Dev’s wallet shows they’re selling into their own hype - Dev has no skin in the game / holds nothing meaningful - Dev pivots the narrative every few weeks

If Iran is blocking and attacking US ships, why is the US allowing sanctioned Iranian tankers to cross the strait with Chinese oil?

*US MONEY-MARKET FUND ASSETS HIT RECORD $7.818 TRILLION AT ICI

one of my favorite interviews on markets

Since people liked the 1st part, there's also some great stuff in Druckenmiller's bonus segment with Morgan Stanley. - The hardest skill in investing isn't pattern recognition or risk sizing - it's knowing when to stop analyzing - Speed matters now. If you need 100% of the information before acting you'll miss the move, then be too scared to buy it because it's already up - Sometimes the opportunity is so big you just have to plunge in. Do the work after. If it doesn't work out, next - Unemployment and payrolls are lagging indicators. By the time they move, whatever was going to happen to the economy is already happening. Using them to predict what comes next is like driving by looking in the rearview mirror. He finds it almost absurd that markets still react to them the way they do - Market internals tell you more than most macro data ever will. Mr. Macro himself doesn't build his macro view from macro data - he builds it from equities. Companies that lead the economy, companies that lag. Put the mosaic together across enough industries and the picture emerges. No models, no forecasting software. Just pattern recognition built over decades of listening to how companies talk about their world - The risk he fears most isn't war, policy error, or a liquidity accident - it's narrative-driven bubbles. He's never seen a truly catastrophic economic outcome - Great Depression, GFC level - that wasn't preceded by one. Every single time - We're not in a bubble. But if markets go materially higher from here, he'd be very concerned. Call it the eighth inning - He's not that "smart", so he goes with his gut instead of competing with the analysts. That's not modesty - that's a real edge

When you boil everything down - Dubai and Trump sum up the Big Delusion The Big Delusion is comprised of two parts The first leg of the Big Delusion is that crypto will thrive with governmental and institutional support - when, in fact, crypto exists almost entirely in response to institutional failure Centralizing forces will either exit scam crypto wealth back into their native currency or temporarily tolerate it without integrating (see : people just leaving Dubai with stables on a plane) The second leg of the Big Delusion is that you can simply make a “fixed supply asset” and expect it to replace fiat or Gold. Fiat is partly violence but it’s violence that is a function of elections, judicial systems, democracy, race, or ideology (communism etc). The function of the State is not easily reduced to authority but rather - a social fabric and set of behaviors democratic or otherwise that precedes said authority War is the starkest demonstration of this origin. China defines citizenship as “being Chinese” so Taiwan must be part of China because it is racially and culturally Chinese. This is at odds with post WW2 definitions the US set and more aligned with what Putin is doing in Ukraine. Iran is a repressive theocracy that innately clashes with Western “degeneracy” or as we put it, freedom. In face of these ancient clashes if you show up to the scene and say “that’s great but code is law, check out my Lichtenstein foundation and autonomous rebalancing smart contracts” - you are met with at best hobbyist adoption or at worst getting thrown in jail because “actually, Law is Law” Protocols like HYPE, TRX, BNB and Tether can to some extent ignore the speculative dance I’m describing because they are essentially tokens of organizations that have future cash flows that get delivered to token holders. Their value proposition is identical to equities even if we don’t classify them as securities. We care what Jeff, Justin, CZ and Paolo do and what they tweet. But Bitcoin and its holders dares to dance the “store of value” dance. The war machine pays for itself by money printing and asset confiscation and BTC argues that it can provide holders solutions to this. But it’s very unclear that it does, because it’s not private enough. Hence the parabolic move in ZEC, and to a lesser extent XMR. But privacy coins and running from the state have a critical liability: you might have shielded Z cash but if you live in Dubai and your entire life is recorded, on chain privacy functionally does not matter. You transact or off ramp with the blessing of the state. Right now - the OTC desks in Dubai are transacting in USDC. So you’re also transacting with the blessing of the US govt So even with privacy you end up with an unsatisfying answer “I’m running from the state and relying on the tragedy of the commons to hope that I can off-ramp this” But all money. Including fiat. is a collective hallucination. The ultimate interesting question is not whether we are delusional. But whether a more fertile fallacy can be discovered You’ve had a mosaic of events that suggest this is the case. AI models are coordinating themselves and humans - and acting autonomously in a way that is relevant to military behavior. The extreme redux is that “fiat” aka violence intercepted with AI for the first time with Anthropic’s very public fight with the department of war. So what will evolve is that you have governmental level intelligences and new economic systems form powered by machine intelligence. That have judicial layers, ethics and people involved. Balaji coined the idea of “network states” - but it goes further than that. Collectives of machinistic desire. Not human folly. Are coming. They are an inevitable progression of the systems we have architected. The alternative to the state is not 21 million bitcoins it is something far stranger indeed. It starts at the edges: the failed states. The on chain casinos. A novelty. Until it isn’t

UNITED STATES TO RELEASE 172 MLN BARRELS OF OIL FROM STRATEGIC PETROLEUM RESERVE - DOE

5 days ago: “damn I guess I have to learn about Iran” Today: “what do you mean it’s basically all the same trades that worked for Ukraine!?”

*DOJ PROBES IRAN'S USE OF BINANCE TO EVADE SANCTIONS: WSJ Can it also probe "sellers" who have never heard of VWAP but intentionally take out the entire bid stack for one sell order to make as much price impact as possible?

Oil down 30% since this last night

Which Asian countries are most exposed to rising oil prices: China least, Singapore the most

WTI now 111. Total panic

gold down to fund oil margin calls

*VERTIV, LUMENTUM, COHERENT AND ECHOSTAR SET TO JOIN S&P 500