Patient Speculator

@animalologist My net worth is a few million but far from super wealthy. Although I am happily married, if I found myself single then I would absolutely hire @datingbyblaine in an instant. A good relationship is worth it’s weight in gold and the dating market is crazier than ever before

It really wilds me out how angry some people are at Blaine for simply running a successful business that they deride. Mostly men, angry that other men who have way more money than them value matchmaking. She found PMF and they’re misdirecting rage at the market towards her…

@_10delta_ @TFL1728 Step 1: Start a war with Iran Step 2: ????? Step 3: Gain control of the Strait of Hormuz

3 weeks ago I argued the US goal in Iran is to seize the global oil spigot. Venezuela in January -> Iran in February. Neutralize every supply channel outside the dollar system within 90 days. Achieve a compliant successor government and complete energy dominance. The oil thesis was the obvious layer. However, when you zoom out & view the last four years as a single sequence rather than isolated geopolitical events, the architecture of the grander US plan becomes visible. 1st was Europe, which laid the groundwork. The Ukraine conflict provided the justification for sanctions that collapsed Russian pipeline gas from 150 billion cubic meters to 40. Then Nordstream was destroyed, which rewired the entire European energy system permanently. The US went from supplying 28% of Europe's LNG in 2021 to 58% by 2025, exporting a record 111 million MTs, the 1st country in history to break 100 MT. Europe was transformed from a customer with options into a captive market now purchasing its survival in USD. 2nd was Syria. The fall of Assad severed the critical node connecting China's Belt & Road Initiative to the Mediterranean. The trilateral railway linking Iran, Iraq & Syria, designed to bypass Western maritime chokepoints, was completely destroyed. This isolated Iran geographically & cleared the path for what came next. 3rd was Venezuela. In January the US effectively took control of the world's largest heavy crude reserves. The US Gulf Coast has the most advanced refining complex on earth, specifically built for heavy sour crude. Phillips 66, Valero & the rest are now positioned to process hundreds of thousands of barrels of Venezuelan crude daily. The US captured a massive strategic reserve & solidified its position as the dominant exporter of refined petroleum products, an industry worth $110 billion in 2025 alone. Venezuela & Iran were the two major oil supply channels that existed outside the dollar system. Both produce heavy crude sold primarily to China & evaded US financial supervision. Both now being neutralized within 90 days, which leads us to.. 4th is Iran & the Middle East energy shock. Israel struck Iran's South Pars gas field, the world's largest natural gas reservoir. Iran retaliated against Qatar's Ras Laffan, the single largest LNG facility on earth, responsible for a fifth of global supply. QatarEnergy's own assessment is that 17% of export capacity is gone and recovery will take up to 5 years. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. European gas prices spiked 70%. Asian spot prices doubled. The only remaining scaled supplier? The United States. If Iran falls & a successor government is installed that the US controls or influences (the Delcy model described weeks ago) then roughly 40 to 45 million barrels per day of global production out of 103 million is effectively under US control. OPEC becomes irrelevant because the US coalition is now the marginal producer. Now add the gas dimension & it goes beyond oil. This war is solidifying the petrodollar system as it evolves into a hybrid petro/LNG-dollar. The old system was built on Saudi crude priced in USD. The new system is built on American crude plus American gas from the Gulf Coast, with no alternative supplier of comparable scale. The dependency is deeper because LNG infrastructure requires long term contracts & regasification terminals that lock buyers into supply relationships for decades. Europe & the Pacific allies (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, etc.) cannot pivot away as there is nowhere left to pivot to. They're now locked into the US energy system. The market confirms this. DXY went from 96 to 101. Gold down ~20% from its January all time high. Bitcoin down 20% on the year. Brent above $100. European & Asian institutions are liquidating precious metals and crypto to buy dollars because they need dollars to buy the only remaining scaled energy supply. The world is selling its gold to buy American energy in American currency. The dollar is now being weaponized through energy dependency. The structural repricing is happening regardless of how the conflict resolves. But the US grand strategy goes deeper.. Artificial intelligence is a physical industry. It runs on power and chips. Data centers require massive uninterrupted baseload electricity, primarily provided by natural gas. Semiconductor fabrication requires helium & rare earths. By choking the Strait of Hormuz & crippling Middle Eastern LNG & helium production, the US is systematically degrading China's ability to power its data centers & fabricate semiconductors at scale. The US is energy self sufficient, especially with newly captured Venezuelan reserves & expanding Gulf Coast capacity running on domestic gas. On the other hand, China is import dependent & every joule it imports effectively now transits chokepoints the US Navy controls.. Iran was the Belt & Road's overland energy bypass, the corridor that allowed China to mitigate the Malacca Trap. With Iran neutralized that corridor is severed. China faces a world where its compute infrastructure competes for scraps on a depleted global LNG market, while American data centers run at full capacity on domestic energy. Russia is next in the sequence. A post-war Iran reopening under US influence competes directly with Russia for the same refineries in China & India at lower cost. Iran's production costs are lower. Russia loses its last structural advantage in heavy crude & its economic lifeline. Additionally, under the Iran war cover, Ukraine has been opportunistically destroying Russian energy infrastructure & all signs point towards Russia being at the end of the line. The message from Washington becomes very simple: we dismantled two regimes in three months, your economy is about to get crushed, sign the Ukraine deal. Then Trump sits down with Xi holding every card. Complete energy dominance. The hybrid petro/LNG-dollar fortified, Iran cleared, Russia cornered, & China facing the Malacca Trap fully closed with no remaining energy bypass. Israel & the GCC are absorbing the kinetic cost of a conflict whose primary beneficiary, counter to the mainstream narrative, is actually America (First). Qatar offline for 5 years reprices the entire global gas market in favor of US exporters for the remainder of the decade. The Gulf states face years of rebuilding. Europe faces its 2nd energy crisis in four years. Sure, the average American might face temporary moderate inflation & higher gas prices. But if you are the architect of the US empire & you view the rise of China & Chinese ASI as an existential winner takes all scenario, the collateral damage is acceptable cost. Whoever controls the energy corridors controls the monetary system. Whoever controls the monetary system & the energy supply simultaneously controls the compute infrastructure that determines which civilization builds ASI first. The US is seizing all 3.

@datingbyblaine Yes, 100% yes

PSA for the single ladies: overdoing the facial fillers gives you this age-unknown look that makes men assume you’re 40. Great if you’re over 40, not so great if you’re in your 20s 😬

@it_unprofession 3 consultants for 2 months would charge a lot more than $250K. My individual day rate when i left consulting in 2018 was $7,000. With inflation, this study would probably cost over $1M, especially when you add in some partner overhead

We hired a consulting firm to tell us why our profits are down. They sent three 24-year-olds wearing vests. They spent two months interviewing us about our own jobs. Then they put our answers into a PowerPoint presentation. They charged us $250K for this privilege. During the final readout, one of them used the phrase synergy optimization without blinking. I looked around the conference room. Our CEO was nodding like he just received the Ten Commandments. The grand conclusion was that we need to increase revenue and decrease costs. I could've told them that for a gift card to Panera. But nobody listens to the guy who works here. You only listen to the guy who flies in on a Tuesday. I'm updating my resume to include synergy optimization. It feels like the right move.

@JavierBlas Although I am heavily invested in energy, I have to admit that Trump’s oil jawboning is impressive. Let’s see how this plays out. In the short run I am holding onto all my oil/gas stocks and aggressively buy coal. Nobody gives a shit about coal prices

The White House is (truly) winning the oil jawboning battle against Tehran — still to be seen if Trump would win the physical oil market war. But to see Brent trading at sub-$100 a barrel (and WTI below $90) after 25 days of Hormuz almost full closure is almost surreal.

I think there’s a big misconception when it comes to large market moves. Many people take a theoretical view that “the market prices everything in.” But if you look at history, you’ll see that some of the largest market declines have come well after the catalyst was already widely known. 1.COVID-19: It’s called COVID-19 because it was identified in 2019. Yet markets didn’t fully digest the ramifications until mid-March, when economies were already shutting down. 2.GFC: Before the major collapse in Q3 and Q4 of 2008, it was already known in 2007 that cracks were forming. There were multiple warnings pointing to a potential mortgage crisis. Credit began to slowly reprice, and then it all unraveled at once. 3.Volmageddon: Prior to the February 2018 blowout, it was widely known among derivatives traders that these ETPs could fail. Portfolio managers were openly arguing with issuers at major derivatives conferences. 4.“Liberation Day”: Weeks before Trump announced tariffs, the market was aware he had a plan in place. In fact, markets initially rallied a few percent within seconds of the announcement, then went on to decline 20%. My point is that there’s a cognitive bias that leads people to believe the market is all-knowing, smarter than everyone, and always prices everything in. But during major volatility events, it’s often only at the very end that the market fully accepts the fear. This is likely because humans naturally are optimistic creatures. It’s embedded into our DNA.

Lmaoooooo I’m crying

@TaviCosta @TFMetals I sold most of my $EQX 2027 calls when gold was between $5200 and $5600. I’m thinking of starting to reload with 2028 calls now that gold is in the low $4000s

This meme never gets old. You never know the exact bottom — and it’s not worth having the hubris to think you do. I’ll keep scaling in at what I see as cheap, historically oversold levels. No need to follow my approach — I know many prefer to buy at $5,500 instead.

And why was the market green today?

@ttmygh @fleckcap Excited to listen to this.

Dammit! I left out the main man's Twitter handle: @fleckcap Sorry, my friend!

@nocapalpha Aren’t party balloons for kids’ birthdays last in line for helium? I think the MRIs are slightly more important than birthday balloons

Purposely taking credit for what might become the largest humanitarian crisis in the history of mankind will go down as one of the biggest unforced errors made by a politician. Things are about to get really dark in the near future if this war doesn’t de-escalate soon. @tedcruz youtu.be/ug07xac2gKM?si…

I think the most dangerous thing that I see in markets currently is this assumption that, as soon as the war ends, commodity production will just switch back on again. It won’t. It can’t. Commodity production is not like a manufacturing plant where you just line up your raw materials, flick a switch and production restarts again. Restarting oil and gas production, for instance, can take several months, depending on the assets. Some simple wells may only take a few days or a few weeks, but offshore fields or LNG facilities can take weeks or months. Delays are caused by the need to repressurise systems, inspect equipment and ensure the safety integrity. Reservoir behaviour can also change during shut-ins, requiring careful ramp-up to avoid damage or flow issues. So, this assumption that fields will just restart production immediately is not realistic. For LNG plants it takes weeks to cool down the cryogenic systems. It's a similar situation in aluminium, as I discussed in previous posts. When you idle an aluminium smelter, the molten aluminium in the pots freezes. It can then take 6 months+ to restart a plant. While not as bad as oil&gas and aluminium, turning a urea plant back on can take 2-3 weeks. It takes 1-2 weeks to restart ammonia plants and then another 7-14 days to restart the urea plant around it. Likely it will take 1-4 weeks to restart the petrochemicals and plastics plants, and the oil refineries will also take a similar amount of time to restart. And those factors don’t even consider that the world’s shipping fleets are now mispositioned and it will take weeks in many cases for those ships to reposition themselves to the right places. So this assumption the market’s making that, as soon as peace breaks out, everything will go back to normal is very dangerous. Supply disruption is into its third week now. Even if the war stopped tomorrow, it would be several months before supply of many of these commodities will be re-established. And that’s simply not being priced into commodity prices or economic expectations, in my view.

@dollarsanddata The purpose is to socialize a 98th percentile student out of "I'm smarter than everyone so I can coast" into "I will have to hustle to compete with these people, and hustle even harder to outcompete the people who start with more money and better connections than me"

@calvinfroedge @johnkonrad But they are still paying the day rates… right?

Guys they've basically abandoned all the jackup rigs in the gulf The crews were evacuated A jackup rig is basically a shallow water oil driller That production isn't coming back quickly even with naval escorts or insurance or trump press conferences You don't get it yet

It takes Two to TACO! Probability of a Crash just shot up from 30% to 44.44% 🤭🌳🙏open.substack.com/pub/shrubbery/…

We are now 8.16 million b/d offline. Iraq -3.3 million b/d Kuwait -1.3 million b/d UAE -1.56 million b/d Saudi -2 million b/d

After much reflection, I have decided to resign from my position as Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, effective today. I cannot in good conscience support the ongoing war in Iran. Iran posed no imminent threat to our nation, and it is clear that we started this war due to pressure from Israel and its powerful American lobby. It has been an honor serving under @POTUS and @DNIGabbard and leading the professionals at NCTC. May God bless America.

@dailydirtnap I’m glad you and @TgMacro started a podcast. When I see a new video drop it is an instant watch for me.

Ten years ago, if I went on a podcast, I could expect 5-15 new subscriptions. Now, when I go on a podcast, I get LinkedIn requests from bots.