Will Miners

Anthropic has been publicly forced to bend the knee to the US government. The ban on Fable and Mythos reads like censorship, and the market will read it as the TAM of the frontier labs collapsing. Instead, I read this as the opposite, as an acceleration event... The government MUST have first access, because this is The Great Game, the game of nations over the most powerful technology ever discovered, and a technological edge of 30 to 60 days is worth everything. It's the same edge the labs already exploit internally. You build your next model with your unreleased frontier tech, never with the public one. That private head start is what keeps you accelerating ahead of the competition or at least in line with them. The US needs that exact advantage now. Before the public, and before the Chinese open source models can copy it. They have no choice. They cannot allow their own technology to be turned against them. What's being negotiated, in the usual outrageous, hard-ball Trump manner, is the new arrangement: Anthropic and OpenAI are free market operators and state vassals at the same time. Nobody wants to curtail their growth. The Gov just wants to be Customer Number 1 with privileged access. This is the East India Company all over again. A private enterprise left free to grow rich and dominant, granted protection and a clear run by the state, on the unspoken condition that it serves the crown's strategic interests first. That charter was the price of the monopoly. It also sends a message to China and everyone else that US AI is now so advanced the state itself has to control it. They won't, not yet anyway. They just want privileged access, the rest is posturing. And Anthropic will bend the knee, very soon... The hidden outcome is the one that matters. The AI firms are now near-explicitly too big to fail, which means the debt funding the capex buildout comes with an implicit state guarantee. That accelerates the build-out of intelligence. It doesn't curtail it... Open source accelerates too, because going open ensures no state can intervene in the model itself. Though the same Great Game rules apply there, and the Chinese state will take its own privileged access first. So the market may wobble, convinced the TAM of AI just collapsed. The real outcome is an acceleration of intelligence, and a Super Cycle that keeps running.

Golden Boot Lotto Tickets that have steamed over the last few days. Up to 25 backs & 29 lays. Fun market

Big Flo Balogun in from 362 to now 17.5 to lay (Golden Boot) 🇺🇸

Since the start of the war, gold has been negatively correlated to oil. Oil up, gold down. Why? Because the marginal gold buyer is not the West, it is EM Asia and Turkey. India alone is the world’s 2nd-largest gold buyer after China, across both central banks and retail. And the Rupee hates oil spikes, let alone an oil crisis like this. High oil intensity, limited crude storage, weak FX resilience. The mechanism is self-reinforcing: Higher oil → weaker growth -> weaker Rupee → even higher import costs (also for oil) → even weaker growth → weaker Rupee again -> repeat. That is precisely why Modi has moved to curb gold imports. He wants to support the Rupee (industry), not the consumer (gold is a hedge for a weaker Rupee). Well, not sure consumers will like it. So this will not last forever but I doubt it will stop before 2027. Turkey already went further and dumped reserves to support its FX. Other EM Asian countries may follow. Not just Asian, perhaps also ME countries? They are hardest hit by this crisis. Qatar & Kuwait come to mind. They have plenty of SWF reserves but the hit is big and the invoices keep coming. China offsets some of this through higher gold imports, but not enough, at least for now. Until the Strait of Hormuz situation stabilises, or EM Asia adjusts through demand destruction and policy responses, gold likely keeps bleeding, slowly, nothing dramatic, but bleeding. And no, I do not think there is a quick fix for the SoH crisis. The two sides are too far apart. Weak regimes can survive longer than people expect (they had little oil exports under Trump 1.0 and survived for years). Trump has midterms ahead & is unlikely to escalate materially without political support. Without regime change, the structural issue remains. So the oil market will likely solve this itself through painful adjustments into 2028: rerouted flows, new pipelines, permanent demand destruction, more coal, more efficiency. For now, China is doing the heavy lifting. Chinese crude imports in May were down 45% vs February. That single-handedly balances a large part of this mess. But not indefinitely. Once China decides to normalises imports closer to baseline, or Japanese SPR drawdowns fade, Brent likely reprices higher again, ceteris paribus. Korea is another big player in the puzzle to watch. Gold may stabilise before the full oil adjustment plays out. But I do not see much value in taking a rigid long-term view here. Too many moving parts. Mental flexibility remains key here. We have been risk-off since week one of the war, largely because we understand commodity transmission mechanisms. If this turns into a healthy correction in quality miners, I am certainly happy to buy it as the structural gold story remains largely unchanged. I explained it in 2023/24/25 on this channel. That is what I am watching.

Elon Musk is so alpha. To have a net worth chart like that continues to be exponential after Tesla was the best performing of the decade up to 2021 is truly remarkable.

BREAKING - 12:04 - *NASDAQ: IPO OF SPACEX TO BE ELIGIBLE FOR TRADING AT 10AM ET