Master Wayne

Here to save the city

[Master Wayne @GothamWayneEnt]

2026 Outlook
1. Russia v. Ukraine
Trump will push hard for a peace deal to claim a quick victory and lower oil prices ahead of the midterms. However, given the "maximalist demands" from ALL sides, neither side is willing to concede, I see a high probability that Trump washes his hands of the conflict when the deal fails post-midterms. He will likely pivot the narrative to blame European leaders, leaving the EU to shoulder the financial burden of the war and the rebuilding of Ukraine. His voter base will support this move, given that the world is moving away from multilateralism toward unilateralism.
2. Fed Rates
I don’t think rates will fall as much as the market expects. The Fed is already fractured - and while the dot plot signals only one cut in 2026, Trump and his new chair force will force the Fed's hand to more cuts. However, it is a committee decision, and the long end of the curve is already up by 50+ basis points since cuts began, signalling that bond vigilantes are reacting to unchecked deficits and to inflation creeping back in. I expect the Fed to eventually back away from aggressive rate cuts, recognising that inflation is creeping back in and that, with immigration effectively at zero, per Trump’s numbers, we don't need as much job growth, reducing the urgency to cut rates.
3. Venezuela
I think Trump’s aggression here over for Venezuelan oil is because MBS and the Saudis have signaled they can no longer suppress prices; they need Brent higher to fund their wide ranging domestic economic and cultural transformation. While Trump might secure a political win here, I am bearish on the actual supply impact. Venezuela's production capacity is reportedly decimated, and no amount of deal-making can turn the taps back on quickly enough to flood the market in 2026. It will take decades of investment and billions to restore Venezuelan production to what it was before Chavez.
4. AI
Google is the front runner right now with its TPU and upcoming TPU v6 (Trillium). Once Nvidia Blackwell scales in 2026, the Nvidia ecosystem will strike back and regain its position. Grok will be the leading model because Elon is given priority on Blackwell chips since xAI can build clusters faster than anyone else.
5. Tariffs
Tariffs will never end. They'll be closed, re-opened, and re-negotiated. With midterms, I think it's in Trump’s interest to negotiate average tariffs down to keep inflation down. The real story for 2026 isn't the tariffs themselves, but the pivot to Industrial Policy. I expect the administration to move from broad levies to direct intervention - cutting specific deals with companies.
6. Gold, Silver, & Critical Minerals
I am long on hard assets. The shift toward Industrial Policy means governments are now picking winners and securing supply chains, creating a natural floor for strategic minerals. Furthermore, with deficits running unchecked and the bond market revolting, gold remains the primary hedge
7. Affordability & Socialism
Housing is the single most critical variable for the midterms. High costs are moving younger voters toward socialist alternatives because the current system simply isn't working for them. If Trump cannot engineer a correction in housing affordability, the GOP is going to lose big, and left/socialist candidates will have a big year.

Biggest Political Winner: Putin / Newsom
Biggest Political Loser: Trump
Biggest Business Winner: Nvidia
Biggest Business Loser: Open AI
Biggest Business Deal: US-Saudi Nuclear for Oil deal…Signing a "123 Agreement" under the US Atomic Energy Act. would legally allow the US to share sensitive nuclear technology, IP and materials with Saudi Arabia
Best Performing Asset: Hard assets
Worst Performing Asset: Long duration treasuries / US Dollar

[Master Wayne @GothamWayneEnt]

@Jason Whatever happened to retardmaxxing!

[Master Wayne @GothamWayneEnt]

@RyanHanaWWP No words

[Master Wayne @GothamWayneEnt]

@DanielSLoeb1

[Master Wayne @GothamWayneEnt]

@typesfast Naples is up there in the summer, just overflowing with people

[Master Wayne @GothamWayneEnt]

@oleksoleksoleks @blueprintsmb22 Makes sense nobody over 40 knows how to work a computer

[Master Wayne @GothamWayneEnt]

@blueprintsmb22 What do they do after 40? Retire / invest their money / set up a family office / buy a franchise business

[Master Wayne @GothamWayneEnt]

@KarenBassLA Why haven't any homes been rebuilt, Karen? You let the most beloved neighbourhood burn to ashes while you were visiting Africa.

[Master Wayne @GothamWayneEnt]

Hoping for Pratt 🙏 A lot of hard questions STILL need to be asked to LA Council officials and Karen Bass.

@MayorOfLA should be investigated to understand the mitigation plan for the catastrophe in LA. People paid the ultimate price.What mitigation plan was in place? What gave Karen confidence to leave town on a taxpayer trip to Africa knowing LA was in tinderbox-like conditions?

How did firefighters not know the Santa Ynez reservoir was empty and there would be no water flowing from the hydrants? Who is responsible?

How come we didn't fill the reservoir, given the conditions? The lid has been' under maintenance' for 11 months, but it really never started.

We had a fire in 2018. What did we learn from it and do differently?

Why do we continue to put up with the Coastal Commission, the Sierra Club, CEQA, and other environmental organizations that do more harm than good, blocking common sense wildfire mitigation and putting people's safety and protection at risk as a result?

Why did @GavinNewsom think it was appropriate to go on a podcast on Sunday as the city burns? What are his priorities?

Have we changed the price cap executive order, recognizing the cap reduces the incentive for Home builders to come into the LA market and reduce prices further?

Why haven't homes been rebuilt?

[Master Wayne @GothamWayneEnt]

A lot of hard questions need to be asked to LA Council officials and the Mayor.

@MayorOfLA should be investigated to understand the mitigation plan for the catastrophe in LA. People paid the ultimate price.What mitigation plan was in place? What gave Karen confidence to leave town on a taxpayer trip to Africa knowing LA was in tinderbox-like conditions?

How did firefighters not know the Santa Ynez reservoir was empty and there would be no water flowing from the hydrants? Who is responsible?

How come we didn't fill the reservoir, given the conditions? The lid has been' under maintenance' for 11 months, but it really never started.

We had a fire in 2018. What did we learn from it and do differently?

Why do we continue to put up with the Coastal Commission, the Sierra Club, CEQA, and other environmental organizations that do more harm than good, blocking common sense wildfire mitigation and putting people's safety and protection at risk as a result?

Why did @GavinNewsom think it was appropriate to go on a podcast on Sunday as the city burns? What are his priorities?

Have we changed the price cap executive order, recognizing the cap reduces the incentive for Home builders to come into the LA market and reduce prices further?

Why haven't homes been rebuilt?

[Master Wayne @GothamWayneEnt]

A lot of hard questions need to be asked to LA Council officials and the Mayor.

@MayorOfLA should be investigated to understand the mitigation plan for the catastrophe in LA. People paid the ultimate price.What mitigation plan was in place? What gave Karen confidence to leave town on a taxpayer trip to Africa knowing LA was in tinderbox-like conditions?

How did firefighters not know the Santa Ynez reservoir was empty and there would be no water flowing from the hydrants? Who is responsible?

How come we didn't fill the reservoir, given the conditions? The lid has been' under maintenance' for 11 months, but it really never started.

We had a fire in 2018. What did we learn from it and do differently?

Why do we continue to put up with the Coastal Commission, the Sierra Club, CEQA, and other environmental organizations that do more harm than good, blocking common sense wildfire mitigation and putting people's safety and protection at risk as a result?

Why did @GavinNewsom think it was appropriate to go on a podcast on Sunday as the city burns? What are his priorities?

Why haven't homes been rebuilt? Have we changed the price cap executive order, recognizing the cap reduces the incentive for Home builders to come into the LA market and reduce price prices further?

[Master Wayne @GothamWayneEnt]

@modestproposal1 @InvestLikeBest To be fair, if you’re not sanctioned as a commodity trader, are you really a commodity trader?

[Master Wayne @GothamWayneEnt]

@niccruzpatane Lucky for Ferrari, they only sell less than 1k of these cars. Tesla much more.

[Master Wayne @GothamWayneEnt]

Let’s hope that they write down all electric vehicle manufacturing capabilities after one year of deliveries, and never stray away from internal combustion engine. To be fair, Ferrari could offer 5-10% of their total mix to an overprice electric car because there’s going to be a market for ~1,000 models in California or Europe. Ferrari needs to get lower volumes, higher prices.

[Master Wayne @GothamWayneEnt]

People know aluminium uses a lot of electricity…, but probably don’t know that producing 1 ton of aluminium uses the same amount of electricity as a US household consumes for an ENTIRE YEAR! The key question is how aluminium smelters that are coming back online in the US will compete with the hyperscalers for more power? How much will their cost basis raise with higher electricity prices?

[Master Wayne @GothamWayneEnt]

During WWII, Americans were encouraged to collect aluminium. New York had ‘Aluminum for Defense’ on the radios and children were offered free movie tickets for collecting balls of aluminum foil

[Master Wayne @GothamWayneEnt]

The doomsday $200/bbl oil calls were wrong—but prices still have to go higher from here.

Why did the early models break? We had a massive, temporary cushion keeping the market supplied:
1. Historic global SPR dumps from rich nations and China.
2. The rapid drawdown of 150–180 million barrels of Iranian floating storage (as noted by Morgan Downey).
3. Bypass pipelines stepping up: Saudi Arabia's East-West Petroline (7 million barrels per day capacity) and the UAE’s Fujairah pipeline (running at 1.8 million bpd) successfully rerouted a huge chunk of the 20 million bpd that normally flows through the blocked Strait.

Those buffers are tapped out. The closure has already hemorrhaged roughly 1.4 billion barrels of oil from the global system.

Even if a peace deal hits the tape today, prices will stay elevated. Restarting 13M bpd of completely shut-in wells requires months of complex repressurization.

Furthermore, you cannot resume exports until empty VLCCs physically transit back into the Gulf—a 30-day minimum flywheel just to normalize global delivery schedules.

I’d expect a sharp price spike into the heavy June travel season as demand hits a depleted market, followed by a sustained $100/bbl baseline for the rest of the year.

[Javier Blas @JavierBlas]

COLUMN: Wall Street is full of hope, leaning on a tweaked version of Stein’s Law:

“The Strait of Hormuz cannot be closed forever because it will cause too much economic damage. Therefore, it will reopen.”

But what if it didn’t reopen?

@Opinion
https://t.co/mcN6b7Bc0n

[The Spectator Index @spectatorindex]

Price increase since 1st of January, 2026.

Sulfur: +106%
Lithium: +50%
Bitumen: +46%
Urea: +40%
Rice: +35%
Canola: +28%
Wheat: +27%
Rubber: +22%
Wool: +22%
Cotton: +21%
Aluminium: +21%
Tea: +20%
Milk: +11%
Palm oil: +11%

[Master Wayne @GothamWayneEnt]

@anasalhajji I need tickers 🙏!

[Master Wayne @GothamWayneEnt]

If you want the ultimate non-consensus expression of the 2026 reagent crisis, you go Long Grupo México (GMEXIC MM), which holds a dominant 89% controlling equity stake in Southern Copper (SCCO). 

Global copper is pricing in severe physical tightness, but the real structural story is the unhedged chemical bottleneck Craig Tindale highlights. The combination of the Hormuz chokepoint shutdown and China’s May 2026 sulphuric acid export ban has pushed spot sulfur past $1,200 a metric ton. To put that in perspective: a massive portion of global copper mines rely on buying that expensive acid to literally dissolve copper out of crushed rock—and right now, their margins are collapsing and they are being forced to choke back production.

Grupo México completely bypasses this bottleneck because they don't buy acid—they make it. Their La Caridad and Ilo smelters capture SO2 gas off-take, effectively turning a global supply shock into a captive profit engine. Being structurally net-long the tightest reagent on Earth pays off: management confirmed that soaring sulfuric acid byproduct credits dragged their net copper cash costs down to a negative $0.11 per pound. They aren't just surviving the $1,200/tonne squeeze; they are capturing the arbitrage as the regional supplier of last resort.

The financial leverage of this setup is massive. While their physical copper volume actually dipped 2.8% to 258,138 tonnes, net profits jumped 57% to $1.71 billion. That dramatic divergence highlights their unique position: because their cost base stayed flat while spot copper hit record highs, a minor production headwind translated directly into a record cash windfall.

Best of all, because of its Mexican listing, the parent stock trades at a massive 30% to 40% conglomerate discount to its 89% underlying equity stake in Southern Copper (SCCO). You are buying a premier tier-one copper portfolio at a deep cyclical discount, while getting the entire smelting infrastructure, the chemical networks, and Latin America's premier freight rail business (GMXT) completely for free. It’s at 5.8x 2027E EV/EBITDA and an 8% FCF yield

[Master Wayne @GothamWayneEnt]

Gold is typically a geopolitical hedge — bombs drop, gold up. But on March 2nd that flipped: bombs down, gold down. What gives? Three forces are at work: (1) speculative investors — precious metals attract heavy speculative money, so when markets panic, investors unwind their exposure to tolerable levels; (2) oil-driven inflation — if inflation is back, rates could rise, making bonds more attractive than gold; and (3) inelastic central bank demand is on pause — the marginal buyer has stepped away, busy defending its currency against oil imports by selling gold and raising tariffs on it. I’d be short gold until the marginal buyer is back. That said, the US has lost some trust through all this, so longer term the conflict is positive for gold as a monetary and fiscal hedge.