Short Seller

What is happening in South Korea increasingly resembles a more extreme version of something already visible in India: foreign capital exits while domestic money keeps the market levitating.

@FirstSquawk Wealth will be not created but transferred. Do you really think they let it happen?!?

GOOGLE CEO SUNDAR PICHAI SAYS THE NEXT 5 YEARS COULD CREATE MASSIVE WEALTH: According to Pichai, AI is driving the biggest technology shift since the internet — and 2026–2030 may be the window where individuals can still build, invest, and scale before the market becomes dominated by a few giants

In July of 2024, $INTU announced a 10% layoff, or almost 2000 employees, citing the need to accelerate investment in AI. Since the July 2024 layoffs, INTU is down around 40%. Today $INTU announced additional layoffs of 17% of the workforce, or around 3K employees, to focus even further on AI and are down 4%. Turns out AI-induced layoffs aren’t always bullish.

8,000 Meta workers got fired by email this morning. Singapore got the notice at 4 AM. The moment the email arrived, their laptops, work email, and accounts went dark. That is how a $1.7 trillion company tells you it is over. Inside Meta, this round has a name. They are calling it "Pralaydin," which is Hindi for "day of catastrophe." Reuters reports this is the third firing round of 2026, and the full year could end with 22,000 people gone. About one in five Meta employees. Analysts at Evercore say firing these 8,000 people will save Meta around $3 billion a year. That sounds like a lot. Zuckerberg has been writing much bigger checks for AI hires. Last summer he paid an ex-Apple engineer named Ruoming Pang $200 million to come work on AI. He paid another AI researcher, Andrew Tulloch, a reported $1.5 billion over six years. He wrote a $14.3 billion check just to get the CEO of an AI startup called Scale to join the team. The same week Meta laid off 8,000 office workers, the company is still planning to spend somewhere between $125 and $145 billion this year on AI data centers and the chips to run them. The firings save about 2% of that. Two days before the layoffs began, Meta picked 7,000 of the survivors and moved them onto brand new AI teams. The people getting hit in this round are mostly engineers and product managers. Another wave is already planned for later this year. Meta is not in trouble. Far from it. The company made $56 billion in revenue in just the first three months of 2026. That was up 33% from a year ago. Pure profit in those same three months was nearly $27 billion. The stock is off its September high but Meta is still worth $1.7 trillion. The severance is good on paper. 16 weeks of base pay, plus two extra weeks for every year you put in, plus a year and a half of health insurance. The average payout works out to about $360,000 per person. The money does arrive. But finding a new job is brutal. Engineers who got cut in earlier Meta rounds say they have sent out hundreds of job applications and heard back from almost nobody, even with Meta on the resume. So a wildly profitable company is firing 8,000 office workers via 4 AM email and instant lockout, while writing checks worth hundreds of millions of dollars to a small group of new AI hires. The Singapore workers reading their termination email at 4 AM were paying for the next $200 million hire.

Korean funeral company "Parents' Love" lost ₩49,800,000,000 of their clients' money on a 2x $BMNR long trade. Insane.

A KOREAN FUNERAL COMPANY HAS JUST LOST 59.5 BILLION WON AFTER INVESTING INTO LEVERAGED CRYPTO ETF’S THEY INVESTED 59.5 BILLION AND ARE DOWN 83% SO FAR TO 10.2 BILLION WORST PART THE MONEY WASN’T THEIRS IT WAS CUSTOMER FUNERAL PREPAYMENTS

After discovering that one of his former colleagues allegedly stole 25x more and received only a 6-year sentence, he apparently realized corruption has economies of scale.

Former Indonesian Deputy Labor Minister Emmanuel Ebenezer Gerungan, facing 5 years in prison for stealing $170K, says his biggest regret is stealing too little.

Koreans are surrendering life insurance policies to buy SK hynix, Insurance surrenders at the top 3 life insurers jumped 16% last quarter. Savings bank deposits fell below 100 trillion won for the first time in 4 years. Commercial bank time deposits dropped 12 trillion won since February. The entire financial system is being rerouted into 2 semiconductor stocks. When new money into a rally comes not from income but from liquidating safety nets, that is how the end of every cycle looks man, this is crazy ..... Investors over 50 now hold 62% of margin loans at Korea top 10 brokerages. Among those in their 60s, margin debt doubled from 3.9 to 8 trillion won in one year. These are people who spent decades in fixed deposits and real estate, now entering a semiconductor rally on borrowed money at record highs. When the KOSPI dropped 19% in March, leveraged investors in their 60s lost 20% on average. The rally recovered. same thing in smaller model happening in India - MTF, i feel this so stupid

Risk appetite in South Korea is exploding: Margin loans outstanding on Korean stocks are up to a record $24.3 billion. Since the start of 2025, margin debt has surged +140% and is up +32% since the beginning of this year alone. To put this into perspective, the value of leveraged bets on Korean stocks was ~$5.0 billion in 2020. This also likely understates the real scale, given that many loans taken out to buy stocks are labeled under other categories. Meanwhile, domestic investors have poured ~$25.3 billion into South Korean shares year-to-date. Retail investors in South Korea are aggressively rushing into stocks.

Koreans have now maxed out margin on KOSPI and are directly going to banks for loans. People that are 60 have never owned trading accounts and now it’s the fastest growing age group entering to buy leveraged semiconductors. Just one article of many describing the madness. $soxx $dram koreatimes.co.kr/amp/economy/20…

“Korean investors over 50 now hold 62% of margin loans at Korea top 10 brokerages. Among those in their 60s, margin debt doubled from 3.9 to 8 trillion won in one year” Maybe it is different this time and it doesn’t end in tears for these people 🙏

Leveraged Bets on Korean Stocks have soared to an all-time high 🚨🚨 Traders are all in 🤑

@ThorstenPolleit Schadenfreude.

Deutschland im freien Fall, wird zum Armenhaus Europas. Mark my words. Im ersten Quartal 2026 waren in Deutschland nur noch rund 45,6 Millionen Menschen erwerbstätig. Das teilte das Statistische Bundesamt mit. Besonders bitter: Von Januar bis März gingen 486.000 Jobs verloren. bild.de/politik/deutsc…

@minenergybiz Gold miners = Dumb money. That’s why: open.substack.com/pub/meanmatch/…

Top 4 Gold Miners - Newmont, Barrick Mining, Agnico Eagle Mines and AngloGold: Highest Free Cash Flow Generation Ever 💰🪙 In the first quarter of 2026, Newmont, Barrick, AngloGold, and Agnico collectively generated an impressive $6.72 billion in free cash flow, which is by far the highest in history. Newmont is clearly the cash flow king. $NEM $AEM $B $AU $GDX

@Naironius Glückwunsch, du bist jetzt in diesem Film, wie hieß er noch mal?

Happy anniversary zu der lustigsten sache die mir jemals passiert ist

How expensive is the S&P 500 right now? Four ways to count. - Price/Sales: 3.5x (all-time high, higher than 2000) - Price/Book: 5.5x (all-time high) - Forward P/E: 26x (at the 2000 dotcom peak) - Dividend Yield: 1% (near a record low) Three of these are at levels last seen at the dotcom peak. The fourth one is the price you're paying for the privilege.

War ANNO 2026 'FPV drones now account for somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of frontline casualties in Ukraine. Not artillery. Not missiles'

NEW: @Bitwise CIO @Matt_Hougan SAYS "HYPERLIQUID IS NOT A CRYPTO APP. IT'S A SUPER APP" - "IT'S NOT TARGETING THE $3 TRILLION CRYPTO ECONOMY. IT'S TARGETING THE $600 TRILLION GLOBAL ASSET MARKET" hyperliquid:native

*UK TREASURY PUSHES SUPERMARKETS TO CAP FOOD PRICES PER FT WHAT IS THIS NORTH KOREA ???