βIf you go to any other country on planet Earth, what you will notice is that there is significantly more racism than there is in The United States. If you go to Japan, fair bit of racism in Japan. Go to South Korea, fair bit of racism in South Korea. You come to The United States and the poll statistics suggest that, for example, the vast majority of Americans are fine with living next to people of different races. They are fine with intermarrying with people of other races.β
βToday, a few minutes ago, in the Middle District of Alabama, a grand jury returned an 11 count indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. As the indictment describes, the SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.β
Uberβs aggressive testing led to industry-altering fatal accidents
βIn the last moments of Alane Herzburg's life, the robot spent an indefensible five point six seconds trying and failing to guess the shape in the road there was a human body pushing a bike. Over those five point six seconds, the robot kept reclassifying our whishing an unknown object a vehicle a bicycle. During that time, spent wondering the car did not slow down. Soon after Elaine Hertzberg's death, Uber halted its testing program.β
Natural gas shortages threaten critical global manufacturing
βNatural gas, which is a huge part of what the Middle East exports in terms of energy, that is key for global power generation. It's key for air conditioning. It's also a key input for manufacturers around the world. If we're thinking about companies that build everything from chips to companies that create steel and need high heat, to companies that produce fertilizer for farming, all of that requires an immense amount of natural gas.β
βWords have power too. There was an incendiary article about me a few days ago. Someone said to me yesterday, they thought it was coming at a time of great anxiety about AI and that it made things more dangerous for me. I brushed it aside. Now I'm awake in the middle of the night and pissed. So what do you make of the idea, Kevin, that a reason for the negative sentiment against the AI companies and the industry at large is being driven by investigative journalism?β
βSince we hit the bottom from the Iran war, so that was March 30th, that was the market bottom thus far, it's been a very different story. It's actually reversed. Energy has fallen, it's down 9% since the bottom. And the winners have been financials up 11%, communication services up 18%, and tech up 17%.β
Card counting gives players a mathematical edge over casinos
βThere is a way to count cards that definitively gives you an edge over the house. And you don't need to be a a rain man or have a photographic memory to pull this off. A normal person can do it.β
Historical chart durations repeat across different market cycles
βWe have two flags right here. There's the flag pennant, the bear flag pennant. Here's the bear flag. And we can go ahead and measure these. What do you know? A thirteen day formation and a thirteen day formation. And so I don't know if this is chartists that are watching these bear flags and, you know, maybe measuring, like, alright. I I expect a breakout around seventy days because we saw seventy days here.β
Proof of work verifies data authenticity against AI
βThe interesting thing though is with AI, everything can be spoofed, everything can be faked. So everybody's looking at how do you prove that something is AI? And what's interesting is proof of work actually puts a value behind data. So there is a way of using SHA-256 and old miners to put value on content. And therefore, it's just not like one-off cheap. It's the equivalent of if it costs you a million dollars every time to send an email, then you're not going to get any spam.β
βNonprofits exist theoretically to solve problems. You give money to a nonprofit to solve a problem. If the problem goes away, you no longer give to that nonprofit. So what do you do? You create a fake supply of white supremacy so you can go back to your donors and say the problem is worse than ever. That's what you are doing. If your donors are addicted to the fentanyl of the problem, and the fentanyl is in short supply, what you do is you create tranq.β
High-income earners are insensitive to surging gas prices
βIf gas prices go up, yes, it might have some impact on lower-income consumers, and we can get to that because it is very interesting. But ultimately, high earners are completely price insensitive. It doesn't matter to them. They drive consumer spending. Same thing with big companies, same thing with tech companies, they're going to be fine.β
Private markets face risks from higher-for-longer interest rates
βAlternative Asset Managers are very rate-sensitive. Higher for longer rates, they compress private equity deal activity, they slow realizations, they reduce fundraising momentum. There's definitely a lot of downside risk because of how private investments are valued and oftentimes you don't know how bad things are in private markets until they get really bad.β
βThe majority ruled that Bachman couldn't bring her counterclaim because there is no common law duty obliging a casino operator to refrain from attempting to entice or contact gamblers that it knows or should know are compulsive gamblers, unquote.β
βA 20 year old man allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at the gate of Sam's home. No one was hurt, but according to the criminal complaint against the suspect, this was someone who had a document that identified views opposed to artificial intelligence, also had a list of names and addresses of other AI executives, investors, and board members. This is someone who was very clearly concerned about the existential risk that AI posed in his opinion, and so decided to take matters into his own hands and go try to attack Sam Altman.β
Applied Materials faces significant China export risks
βChina still represents 30% of the revenue. So any additional export controls or Chinese retaliation, restricting tool service access, that could remove revenue to the tune of $2,000,000,000. It is a best in class franchise, but you are paying full price.β
Snapchat cuts workforce as AI writes majority code
βHe said that AI is now generating more than 65% of new code at Snap and the company expects to cut over $500 million in annualized expenses by the back half of this year. So they are cutting in a massive way. The stock jumped almost 8% on the news, and I think that tells you exactly how Wall Street is feeling about this tradeoff.β
βThe attacker actually broke into Context AI, which is an AI tool that Vercel, one of their employees was using. And from there, they got into that employee's Google workspace and from there into Vercel's environment. So there's kind of like this multi-step approach that they took in order to get in.β
Regulated institutions offer the cheapest cost of capital
βOur view at LeDin was always that if we wanted to get the cheapest cost of capital to disperse to clients in Bitcoin-backed loans, we had to go the regulated route. The regulated entities like pension funds, insurance companies, banks, etc., they are the ones that historically have the cheapest cost of capital, which makes the most sense for you to borrow from and lend to other people. So an example of that is our ABS bond, which is the first Bitcoin ABS bond rated by S&P.β
Googleβs Larry 1K project validated real-world autonomous potential
βSebastian, I think you should build a self diving car that can drive anywhere in the world. And my immediate reaction was, no, taking the technology we build for this empty desert and put it in the middle of Market Street in San Francisco is going to kill somebody. And Larry would come back the next day with the same idea, and I would give them the same answer, and both of us got increasingly more frustrated. God damn it, it can't be done, and eventually came and said, look, Sebastian, OK, care, I get it. You can't do it. I want to explain to Erk Schmidt the CEO at the time and Sergey Britt my cofounder, why it can't be done?β
Citadel is exploring binary prediction market trading
βCitadel Securities is reportedly exploring prediction markets as trading scales up, a development that could fundamentally change how financial markets incorporate real-world event probabilities into prices. The price of this contract at any given moment essentially represents the crowd's real-time probability estimate.β
Historical chart durations repeat across different market cycles
βWe have two flags right here. There's the flag pennant, the bear flag pennant. Here's the bear flag. And we can go ahead and measure these. What do you know? A thirteen day formation and a thirteen day formation. And so I don't know if this is chartists that are watching these bear flags and, you know, maybe measuring, like, alright. I I expect a breakout around seventy days because we saw seventy days here.β
βSince 2010, a search of the New York Times pulls up 711 instances where the SPLC is cited as an authority on hate or discrimination statistics. They are like the go to. The New York Times sees a Jussie Smollett story, and they call up somebody from the SPLC to talk about it. There's a Nick Fuentes story. They call the SPLC to talk about it. There's a Charlie Kirk story as it turns out, and they call up the SPLC to talk about it.β
βThere was a survey from the University of Michigan. It was the lowest ever in 74 years of the survey taking place. And so some of that might be an overreaction in vibes because the economy was pretty strong coming into this. But the direction of travel, how fast that plummeted in just one month as people were seeing those price increases in the gas station, that just goes to show that people hate this.β
Markets have disassociated from general public prosperity
βI've said for a long time, I think the NASDAQ and the Dow are two of the worst metrics or most unhealthy metrics ever invented because they give the illusion that people are doing well. And it really is, it's a proxy for earnings and a proxy for the wealth of the top 10%. Mostly what I think this is about is that the markets have disassociated from the majority of people's well-being and their prosperity.β
βWe're gonna continue to monitor this breakout. I am expecting a lot of resistance around 85 k. That's gonna be the bottom of this range right here. But, you know, I I did make the prediction. I think Bitcoin goes to 80 k, and then we do one more flush towards 60 k, maybe even dipping into the fifties.β
βApple CEO Tim Cook is officially stepping down on September 1st, and John Tarnas is gonna become the CEO. This is really interesting. There's a lot of AI things at play for Apple, and they really haven't delivered on their AI promise.β
Self-driving is a software problem, not a hardware problem
βI saw that all the teams treated this like a hardware problem. They looked at this and say, we have to build a bigger wheels and bigger chassis and so on. And I looked at this and said, about wait a minute. The challenge really is to build a self driving car. They can drive for the desert. I can get a rental car. They can do it just fine, provided as a person insight and the challenges we need to take the person out of the driver's seat and replace it by computer. That is not a problem with bigger tires. That's actually be a software problem.β
Failed bear flags historically signal market cycle bottoms
βNow I say this all the time, bear market bottoms for Bitcoin are always ended with a failed bear flag. And you can see the failed bear flag right here. We have the flag pole. We have the flag formation. Kinda started to go low. We're still in the range, and then boom, it just off into the races. And so this was a failed bear flag that ended up marking the bottom.β
βLueck's concern is that when you deploy these black box models at scale managing billions of dollars and you can't explain why the model is taking a position, you've introduced a risk that is very difficult to manage. You still want researchers to be thinking.β
The military uses Bitcoin nodes for national security
βThe Admiral, who went on the floor of Congress and said that Bitcoin is a national security tool, that the United States military is running a Bitcoin node, monitoring the situation, so to speak, and that it's not a matter of holding the asset or investing in the asset, but that they're looking at it for a way to secure networks and use proof of work. I thought that was just an astounding, astounding clip.β
SPLC paid informants to coordinate extremist events
βThe SPLC also had a field source who was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the twenty seventeen Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, Virginia. That field source made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportations to the event for several attendees. This donation money was instead being used in part by the SPLC to pay leaders and others within the same violent extremist groups.β
Economic stability masks deeper fears of AI disruption
βI mean, one thing that I've been thinking about over the past few days is, like, this is happening at a time when unemployment is below 5 percent, and the S and P 500 is near a record high. And so if all of this is starting to happen when things are relatively good, economically speaking, in this country, I think the fear and the expectation among the leaders of these companies is that it will get much worse if and when AI does actually start to cause, like, mass disruptions to the labor market.β
DARPA contests catalyzed the modern autonomous vehicle industry
βTony Tether, who had been a door to door salesman in his use definitely has that flare in that way of thinking, says, let's have a contest. Let's see who can put all of these ingredients that we've developed together into a proper self driving car. His original idea is we'll drive him down the Las Vegas Strip that's almost immediately next because it's insane.β
βAI agents, the fear that these large language model companies could displace both tax prep and small business bookkeeping simultaneously has led to a lot of fear. This is a sell-off driven by convergence of regulatory and AI disruption fears, not really deteriorating fundamentals.β
The Strait of Hormuz closure blocks global oil supply
βAnd while we can make up some of that gap, because countries and companies have stockpiles, we can sort of like massage it a little bit here and there for the moment. The longer this situation goes on, the longer the tankers can't make it out of the Strait of Hormuz, the longer that 10% will continue compounding. And the longer that the supply disruption will end up rippling through the global economy.β
βWe're gonna continue to monitor this breakout. I am expecting a lot of resistance around 85 k. That's gonna be the bottom of this range right here. But, you know, I I did make the prediction. I think Bitcoin goes to 80 k, and then we do one more flush towards 60 k, maybe even dipping into the fifties.β
βIn a way, it is a toll road on America's aging water pipe replacement cycle. But daily average sales growth is down. There is a clear demand cooling trend. Private construction is soft. Tariff driven input costs, uncertainty, another overhang here. It is, in many ways, a high quality infrastructure distributor at a multi-year low valuation.β
Addicted brains process near-misses as actual wins
βIn pathological gamblers, the same regions that are activated for wins are also activated for near misses. And so these include regions such as the amygdala, which is a a region involved in emotional processing, as well as parts of the brain stem, which are involved in reward and and dopamine function, which is part of the reward system.β
βI think these are the most compelling NVIDIA alternative in AI accelerators. They have record data center revenue, they have that 41% server CPU share, and they have a credible roadmap towards GPU growth by these committed hyperscaler orders.β
Failed bear flags historically signal market cycle bottoms
βNow I say this all the time, bear market bottoms for Bitcoin are always ended with a failed bear flag. And you can see the failed bear flag right here. We have the flag pole. We have the flag formation. Kinda started to go low. We're still in the range, and then boom, it just off into the races. And so this was a failed bear flag that ended up marking the bottom.β
Private markets face risks from higher-for-longer interest rates
βAlternative Asset Managers are very rate-sensitive. Higher for longer rates, they compress private equity deal activity, they slow realizations, they reduce fundraising momentum. There's definitely a lot of downside risk because of how private investments are valued and oftentimes you don't know how bad things are in private markets until they get really bad.β
CTA flows are momentum signals, not fundamental endorsements
βCTA flows are a short-term momentum signal. They are not, not, not, not, a fundamental endorsement. The algorithms are buying because prices are rising. They don't know and they don't care whether the war ends, whether earnings hold, or whether the consumer cracks. The smart money is in. But the smart money isn't always right. It's just faster.β
βThere's a new report out from Stanford this week, the 2026 version of their AI index, which sort of catalogs various trends in the AI industry. And, basically, their takeaway was that, in The US, people have very low trust in not only AI, but on the question of whether their own government can regulate AI in a responsible way. The global average on that question was 54 percent of, like, do you trust your own government to responsibly regulate AI? In The US, that is only 31 percent.β
βBitcoin's bear flag is telling us everything, including an important clue into where Bitcoin is heading. These bear flags have very predictable patterns. And don't take my word for it. We can verify this in the charts. So let me go ahead and show you what I'm talking about. We're gonna be talking about this bear flag and its potential breakout and how this bear flag is giving us an important clue into where we're gonna be heading.β
Financial markets and the real economy often diverge drastically
βThere is a fundamental difference between financial markets and the real economy. They are not the same thing. Markets can be at all time highs while the economy is struggling. Now, where we are right now is not a struggling economy. It is a labor market that is a bit more weak, a bit weaker than it was last year. It's a consumer that is a bit more strained by inflationary pressures.β
Diversification requires assets with low equity correlation
βThe idea here is mixing these different asset classes that have different correlations to each other, and it lowers your overall risk profile of your portfolio. Because nobody knows what the future is gonna look like, and you can never be certain.β
Communities are blocking new data center construction
βThe state of Maine recently passed a temporary moratorium that would ban data centers larger than 20 megawatts until November 2027. There's a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Port Washington, which is gonna be the home of one of these big OpenAI Oracle Stargate data centers. That town recently voted overwhelmingly in favor of restricting the building of future data centers. Basically, you have to get voter approval before you do any of these things. Then there's also similar efforts going on in places like Ohio, Missouri, Indiana, Georgia, North Carolina.β
Stablecoins provide property rights in hyperinflationary economies
βFor the average person in Guatemala, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, they're not really thinking about who's going to freeze my tether, right? They're thinking about, I don't want my government to have access to my bank account, and I don't understand these other assets that are not dollars. They're way too volatile. And other people have gotten scammed. So this USDT thing seems pretty safe. Everybody uses it. And I think the excitement in the Western world is because they are seeing stable coins as a way of basically vampire attacking the Euro dollar market.β
High-income earners are insensitive to surging gas prices
βIf gas prices go up, yes, it might have some impact on lower-income consumers, and we can get to that because it is very interesting. But ultimately, high earners are completely price insensitive. It doesn't matter to them. They drive consumer spending. Same thing with big companies, same thing with tech companies, they're going to be fine.β
βSince 2010, a search of the New York Times pulls up 711 instances where the SPLC is cited as an authority on hate or discrimination statistics. They are like the go to. The New York Times sees a Jussie Smollett story, and they call up somebody from the SPLC to talk about it. There's a Nick Fuentes story. They call the SPLC to talk about it. There's a Charlie Kirk story as it turns out, and they call up the SPLC to talk about it.β
Markets have disassociated from general public prosperity
βI've said for a long time, I think the NASDAQ and the Dow are two of the worst metrics or most unhealthy metrics ever invented because they give the illusion that people are doing well. And it really is, it's a proxy for earnings and a proxy for the wealth of the top 10%. Mostly what I think this is about is that the markets have disassociated from the majority of people's well-being and their prosperity.β
βToday, a few minutes ago, in the Middle District of Alabama, a grand jury returned an 11 count indictment charging the Southern Poverty Law Center with six counts of wire fraud, four counts of bank fraud, and one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering. As the indictment describes, the SPLC was not dismantling these groups. It was instead manufacturing the extremism it purports to oppose by paying sources to stoke racial hatred.β
SPLC paid informants to coordinate extremist events
βThe SPLC also had a field source who was a member of the online leadership chat group that planned the twenty seventeen Unite the Right event in Charlottesville, Virginia. That field source made racist postings under the supervision of the SPLC and helped coordinate transportations to the event for several attendees. This donation money was instead being used in part by the SPLC to pay leaders and others within the same violent extremist groups.β
βIf you go to any other country on planet Earth, what you will notice is that there is significantly more racism than there is in The United States. If you go to Japan, fair bit of racism in Japan. Go to South Korea, fair bit of racism in South Korea. You come to The United States and the poll statistics suggest that, for example, the vast majority of Americans are fine with living next to people of different races. They are fine with intermarrying with people of other races.β
Energy shocks are driving US inflation above targets
βSo year-over-year inflation through the CPI index, which is a broad measurement of inflation, is up 3.3% from a year ago. And the Federal Reserve uses 2% as a target for where it wants inflation to be. Even before the war with Iran started, inflation was above that target level. And what we have now is an energy shock that is sending gasoline and diesel prices on one of their steepest climbs in decades, if not ever.β
Global markets dictate domestic US gasoline prices
βWe are a net exporter of energy. We are the largest oil producer the world has ever seen. So why the heck am I paying higher gasoline prices when all of this is happening 7,000 miles away? The reason why is oil is the most global market. So we are a huge exporter of crude oil, of gasoline, of jet fuel, mainly from the US Gulf Coast. So that tethers us to the global market in a really big way.β
βBitcoin's bear flag is telling us everything, including an important clue into where Bitcoin is heading. These bear flags have very predictable patterns. And don't take my word for it. We can verify this in the charts. So let me go ahead and show you what I'm talking about. We're gonna be talking about this bear flag and its potential breakout and how this bear flag is giving us an important clue into where we're gonna be heading.β
Cycle times between geopolitical fear and buying are compressing
βIf you look at the last three exogenous events in America, basically there was a dip, and then the markets ripped back the following year. I think what's happening is the cycle time between fear and uncertainty around a war and the opportunity to buy is compressing, and now people are like, let's move to the part of the program where we make money.β
Financial markets and the real economy often diverge drastically
βThere is a fundamental difference between financial markets and the real economy. They are not the same thing. Markets can be at all time highs while the economy is struggling. Now, where we are right now is not a struggling economy. It is a labor market that is a bit more weak, a bit weaker than it was last year. It's a consumer that is a bit more strained by inflationary pressures.β
CTA flows are momentum signals, not fundamental endorsements
βCTA flows are a short-term momentum signal. They are not, not, not, not, a fundamental endorsement. The algorithms are buying because prices are rising. They don't know and they don't care whether the war ends, whether earnings hold, or whether the consumer cracks. The smart money is in. But the smart money isn't always right. It's just faster.β
Immigration crackdowns haven't spiked wages as predicted
βThe industries where they said we'd see the most wage gains from reduced labor supply are actually seeing slower growth in the broader economy. Employment in those 41 immigrant dependent industries fell by 90,400 in February from the previous February, while overall employment grew 298,000. The fundamental economic concept at work here is a lump of labor fallacy.β
The dollar is weakening as safe-haven demand fades
βTraders have abandoned their bets on a stronger dollar, and the greenback is on course for its worst month since August. Dollar index is down 2.3% from its late March peak. The euro has recovered almost all the losses it made in the conflict's first week. The dollar's loss ground against every major currency except the yen so far in April.β
Systematic hedge funds poured $86 billion into stocks recently
βGoldman Sachs published a note late last Thursday, revealing that systematic hedge funds, the algorithm driven funds known as CTAs or Commodity Trading Advisors, bought 86 billion of stock exposure over the last five trading sessions. That ranks as one of the largest buying surges in the history of these funds. They further estimated another 90 billion could follow over the next five sessions if the signal stays aligned.β
Potential price flush to 60k remains a possibility
βRight now, the thesis is playing out, just we haven't seen it start falling yet. But when I see the similarities of these bear flags and these bear flags, makes me think that maybe that was the bottom. And, you know, if you wanna talk about similarities, look at the similarities of the market right here, 2020 and 2021. You just kinda move this over. I mean, there there's already a lot of similarities in this market.β
Regulators are modernizing frameworks for event contracts
βThe CFTC, which was once a legal adversary of these markets, has done a complete about-face under the Trump administration. In January, the CFTC and SEC held a joint summit on modernizing the regulatory framework for these types of contracts.β
Christian card counters see gambling as pure mathematics
βAs a card counter, you go in there thinking there's no such thing as luck. There's only math. We're gonna sit down and and work for eight hours and and make money. And that's the exact opposite of what 99.9 percent of all people do in a casino.β
Systematic hedge funds poured $86 billion into stocks recently
βGoldman Sachs published a note late last Thursday, revealing that systematic hedge funds, the algorithm driven funds known as CTAs or Commodity Trading Advisors, bought 86 billion of stock exposure over the last five trading sessions. That ranks as one of the largest buying surges in the history of these funds. They further estimated another 90 billion could follow over the next five sessions if the signal stays aligned.β
Booking Holdings is shifting to merchant payment models
βThey have been slowly transitioning away from this agency model to more of a higher margin merchant payments model via its connected trip strategy. The growth strategy is certainly bearing itself out with merchant model revenue growing about 27.4% year over year.β
βNonprofits exist theoretically to solve problems. You give money to a nonprofit to solve a problem. If the problem goes away, you no longer give to that nonprofit. So what do you do? You create a fake supply of white supremacy so you can go back to your donors and say the problem is worse than ever. That's what you are doing. If your donors are addicted to the fentanyl of the problem, and the fentanyl is in short supply, what you do is you create tranq.β
Morgan Stanley launches stablecoin reserve management services
βMorgan Stanley is effectively creating something called the stablecoin reserves portfolio, where they're offering to custody, manage treasury, redemptions and issuance of stablecoins for companies. So think of it as if USDC or USDT gives up all of the back end of doing it, or more specifically, probably if someone wants to launch a new stablecoin, you now have Morgan Stanley behind you handling everything.β
Investors are experiencing fatigue from geopolitical conflict timelines
βI wonder if there's also been a little bit of what I would call the timeline fatigue, where we thought we understood what the story of this war was. And there were all of these different plot points. We strike Iran, we kill the supreme leader, but then the son is appointed. Then Trump says that we've had productive talks and we think that it's going to be resolved.β
Casinos track player data to optimize predatory marketing
βHarrah's knew how to track each gambler's habits through total rewards cards that each gambler, including Bachman, would use throughout the casino. And that told the company exactly how much money each player spent, on which games, and at what frequency.β
Investors are experiencing fatigue from geopolitical conflict timelines
βI wonder if there's also been a little bit of what I would call the timeline fatigue, where we thought we understood what the story of this war was. And there were all of these different plot points. We strike Iran, we kill the supreme leader, but then the son is appointed. Then Trump says that we've had productive talks and we think that it's going to be resolved.β
Robots are significantly safer than average human drivers
βI had experiences of losing people in my life to traffic accidents, and I felt we lost over the million people in the world to traffic accidents. Wouldn't it be amazing if Dabok invented something that would save a million lives a year.β
The dollar is weakening as safe-haven demand fades
βTraders have abandoned their bets on a stronger dollar, and the greenback is on course for its worst month since August. Dollar index is down 2.3% from its late March peak. The euro has recovered almost all the losses it made in the conflict's first week. The dollar's loss ground against every major currency except the yen so far in April.β
βSince we hit the bottom from the Iran war, so that was March 30th, that was the market bottom thus far, it's been a very different story. It's actually reversed. Energy has fallen, it's down 9% since the bottom. And the winners have been financials up 11%, communication services up 18%, and tech up 17%.β
βIn a way, it is a toll road on America's aging water pipe replacement cycle. But daily average sales growth is down. There is a clear demand cooling trend. Private construction is soft. Tariff driven input costs, uncertainty, another overhang here. It is, in many ways, a high quality infrastructure distributor at a multi-year low valuation.β
Internal cultural clashes slowed Googleβs early development cycle
βThe main difference in their approach is how quickly they want to move. Anthony is very okay with risk. He gets one of these cars and he's driving it back, and he lives in Berkeley, works in Palauto. He's just using this car like the Bay Bridge every day, probably outside the bounds of what the team actually wanted, and he's not necessarily logging data. He's just enjoying his self driving car and taking it all over the place.β
Consumer sentiment hit record lows over job security
β64% of respondents think unemployment will be higher a year from now, up from 61% in March. Never before has that share been this high without the economy experiencing recession. People aren't just complaining about prices anymore; they are scared about their jobs.β
DeFi lacks bankruptcy protections and legal recovery rails
βThe challenge, and I think what investors realized during this exploit, is that DeFi has no bankruptcy rails. There's no court. There's no recovery. Everybody that got out of Aave first took the full money out. Everybody that's still at Aave is waiting to see how much of the losses are going to get pinned to them. And so if you're an institutional investor and you can estimate the potential of a loss, but you cannot estimate how those losses are going to be attributed, you cannot determine your exposure.β
Autonomous technology threatens nearly five million American jobs
βFour point eight million Americans drive for a living. It's one of the most common jobs we have, and these workers do not plan to surrender to the California tech companies. They're doing this because they stand to make an unfathomable amount of money if they eliminate driving jobs for working class of people. These drivers are represented by unions backed by politicians and in cities across America blue cities. They're organizing. So far they're winning.β
βWeimos says, and I think this is correct, that it's roughly eighty brass safer in terms of crashes are severe enough to turn down an airbag. Crashes severe enough to cause an injury, and also crashes involving vulnerable road users like pedestrians or bicyclists. So far it's been better than human drivers, and so far, I think the case for allowing them they continue. The experiment is very strong.β
Immigration crackdowns haven't spiked wages as predicted
βThe industries where they said we'd see the most wage gains from reduced labor supply are actually seeing slower growth in the broader economy. Employment in those 41 immigrant dependent industries fell by 90,400 in February from the previous February, while overall employment grew 298,000. The fundamental economic concept at work here is a lump of labor fallacy.β
The Kelp DAO hack exposed DeFi rehypothecation risks
βEven to get to the point where the Kelp DAO was even used, that was used largely by recursive looping and yield strategies. These weren't necessarily people taking out loans to do real things in the world. They were just trying to juice their yield. And that is another problem in DeFi. There's so much on-chain rehypothecation, you don't really know what's real. And I expect as the Aave liquidations and losses get attributed and more capital is allowed to exit, you're going to continue to see knock-on effects.β
Cycle times between geopolitical fear and buying are compressing
βIf you look at the last three exogenous events in America, basically there was a dip, and then the markets ripped back the following year. I think what's happening is the cycle time between fear and uncertainty around a war and the opportunity to buy is compressing, and now people are like, let's move to the part of the program where we make money.β
βI think the level that a lot of people are looking at from a technical perspective and especially some of the smartest technical investors I follow, they are looking for a weekly close over 75, which we have not yet had in, I believe since the February 6th down or drop. It does look like we're going to get that this weekend, at least as of right now. So I think that is the breakout signal that he was looking for in particular.β
Prediction markets offer real-time geopolitical probability data
βDuring the Iran crisis, poly market ceasefire probability contracts moved before and alongside traditional markets. These markets aggregate real-time information with participants who have skin in the game which often produces more accurate forecast than polls or even option implied probabilities.β
OpenAI Image 2.0 features reasoning and multilingual text
βPreviously, they had Image 1.5. Basically, it's really good at doing something that the last model, 1.5, was pretty bad at, which is rendering text. If you ask it for a poster, you know, it would always get this kind of like elfish looking, I don't know, the letters weren't that great. Anyways, 2 in their words is a step change.β
Potential price flush to 60k remains a possibility
βRight now, the thesis is playing out, just we haven't seen it start falling yet. But when I see the similarities of these bear flags and these bear flags, makes me think that maybe that was the bottom. And, you know, if you wanna talk about similarities, look at the similarities of the market right here, 2020 and 2021. You just kinda move this over. I mean, there there's already a lot of similarities in this market.β
βOnce I got known as a part of the MIT blackjack team, it became hard to play, and I would get kicked out of just about anywhere I try to play. And sometimes I would take friends there. They just wanna see me get kicked out of some place. Play for a little bit. After, you know, fifteen minutes, an hour, they'd come over and ask me to leave.β
Current price action mirrors the seventy-day 2022 range
βAnd if we measure this in daily candles, this candle, all the way until we finally put a lower low in, was seventy one days. Seventy one days we were in this bear flag formation, not including the pole. Well, let me go back to the old bear market. This was seventy one days... So essentially, the same amount of time.β
Current price action mirrors the seventy-day 2022 range
βAnd if we measure this in daily candles, this candle, all the way until we finally put a lower low in, was seventy one days. Seventy one days we were in this bear flag formation, not including the pole. Well, let me go back to the old bear market. This was seventy one days... So essentially, the same amount of time.β
FTC mandates deleting models trained without consent
βAs part of the settlement, Clarify has to delete the 3 million photos and any models trained on them. I think that this is something that is absolutely insane. For years, AI companies have been operating kind of in this gray area that, you know, they're like, well, if it was on the internet, we can use it. And the FTC just said, no, you actually can't.β