FADE RETAIL

“The policy is pump stock market. That's what it is. I feel like there's room here for them to do something. Obviously, the cost that we just talked about is inflation. But who cares about inflation if the stock market is going up, right?”

“Inflation is going to continue. The Fed's not going to get in front of it. So who's left holding the bag here? And it's regular people. And then he looked at the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index, all time lows in consumer sentiment. Where does that track? Tracks into the midterms.”

“This is a really good one from the Fed a Fed research paper that came out last week, which answers the question that we've all been wondering, which is how much of tariffs is causing inflation, namely in core goods because that's mostly where you would see it. And so they came out with this one that just shows, like, before the Iran war, we were seeing core goods inflation accelerate pretty significantly. If we didn't have the tariffs, we would have had deflation in core goods. Instead, we have two and a half percent core PC core goods inflation.”

“Negative negative real we're living in a negative real yield world now, which is, like, global flows talks about this too. But, like, this is the most important thing to realize is, like, if inflation's really at, you know, 5% and yields are at 3%, you should lever up and buy whatever is growing faster than that. And that's that's pretty much how they're gonna grow their way out of this.”

“The dollar seems to be structurally flawed in the sense that even a bigger oil moved this year than 2022, but a much smaller dollar move. And so that when you look at correlations over the last week or two, it's very clear a lot of this has come on the back of the dollar getting pushed lower.”

“Allbirds, which basically went bankrupt, just decided to execute a $50,000,000 convertible financing facility to pivot from direct to consumer freaking shoes to becoming an I AI compute infrastructure company. Look. I've been I've been hitting the whole we need more compute thing and talking about, like, bidding the stuff that that is a tailwind to that. But, oh my god. Like, when I saw this this morning, I was like, this is, I mean, you know, the the the crypto crew knows all about this because back in 2019 or whatever it was, we started to see, like, you know, Kodak was gonna be a a crypto company.”

“This is the put to call ratio. A lot of people have been calling calling this out. So, like, now everyone went balls along, puts previously at the Lowe's. This is what giving retail these products, it's really it's good in some ways, but it exacerbates things because they always you know, they push things in both directions. But now they went balls long puts, and now they unwind it. And now they're going long calls.”

“Probably one of the worst things the Trump admin has done is just, you know, kinda disintegrated the integrity of capital markets in in The US and basically allowed white collar crime to be legal insider trading everything to to just an extreme extent. I mean, it's just not good for because short people shorting the markets and people long in the markets both do a do a deed by, you know, steering efficient allocation of capital.”

“Obviously, the cost that we just talked about is inflation, but, like, who who cares about inflation if the stock market's going up? Right? The policy is pump stock market. That's what it is. And, like, every time they try to actually, like, target another pocket of the social, like, strata, that derails the stock market.”

“The market's just a giant derivatives trade. It's what happens when everything gets so centralized and everyone everyone's asset management looks the same. If you have, you know, this beta neutral book, that's generally a lot of hedge funds. That's that's the guys moving the books around. And it's it's a lot of, like, you know, they they they do things in unison as much as they think they're original thinkers.”

“They have you can either make housing and mortgages more affordable by getting bond yields lower and therefore mortgage rates lower, but you can't do that at the same time as having stock markets higher because you need disinflation. You need to get a handle on inflation, which means some sort of hawkish reaction function, which means lower stock prices to get those lower mortgage rates. So you have to decide. And he you know, we don't wanna see housing prices go lower. So that doesn't matter as much. So they decide to pump the stock market instead.”

“The market is just a giant derivatives trade. It's what happens when everything gets so centralized and everyone's asset management looks the same. If you have this beta neutral book, that's generally a lot of hedge funds, that's the guys moving the books around. And it's a lot of like, they do things in unison as much as they think they're original thinkers.”

“Retail's chasing the strength hard, buying on their platform is unusually aggressive for an up day. They're in the 90th percentile in call buying now. So now, retail is chasing to the upside calls, which is like, that's where you just got to step back and be like, okay, this got really wild.”