Sean McCarthy 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱

Commenting on financial and energy markets, and value investing. Farm kid from Sask. Chief Data Scientist at IJACK Technologies. Thoughts are my own. CFA, MBA.

[Sean McCarthy 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @McCarthySean]

🧵 1/6 🚨 Donald Trump hates trade deficits but loves budget deficits. There's one big problem: budget deficits mathematically CREATE trade deficits. You can't have it both ways. Here's why this is basic economics...

[Sean McCarthy 🇨🇦🇺🇦🇮🇱 @McCarthySean]

It was a good 3 days

[ClaudeDevs @ClaudeDevs]

As a result of a US government directive, we are suspending access to Claude Fable 5 for all users. You can continue to use all other Claude models.

Here’s what this means for you:

Across Claude products, new sessions will run on your selected default model or Opus 4.8, and existing Fable 5 sessions will end with an error.

On the Claude Platform, requests to Fable 5 will also return an error. Please update your integrations to other Claude models.

We know this is a disruption to your workflows; we appreciate your patience and support.

[Brickell Finance Guy @IronChestCap]

me with the SpaceX cafeteria lady after she becomes a billionaire from the IPO

[Shruti @heyshrutimishra]

Elon just created 4,400 millionaires in a single day.

400 of them are now worth over $100 million.

These aren't VCs. They're SpaceX employees, and the list includes welders, technicians, and cafeteria staff, because for two decades the company paid every level of the workforce in stock instead of higher salaries.

Juan Hernandez immigrated from Mexico and took a $28 an hour contractor welding job in 2015. He says he didn't even know what SpaceX was. The company gave him a $10,000 equity grant and let him buy more shares through payroll deductions. That stake is now worth $880,000.

Trevor Hise's parents wanted him to take a stable job at General Electric. He picked SpaceX instead, stayed 12 years, and accumulated over 100,000 shares. At the $135 listing price that's $13.5 million. He's 37 and semiretired. His words: "The magnitude of this has been ridiculous."

The most telling detail came before the listing. Over 100 employees quietly banded together and negotiated a group wealth management deal covering up to $5 billion, because none of them had ever needed a wealth manager before.

Software IPOs have minted millionaires for 30 years. This is the first one where the money went to the factory floor.

[Heather Exner-Pirot @ExnerPirot]

I had the pleasure of introducing @cenovus CEO Jon McKenzie at the Global Energy Show today, and while the media has focused on his description of Pathways as "unfinanceable", his comments were more nuanced and the whole speech was a banger. My top 🔥 quotes from his speech: /1

[Jeffrey Currie 🆔++ @CommodMkt]

The abundance illusion.

Carter admitted the scarcity. It was honest. It was politically fatal.

Every Administration since drew the obvious lesson: never admit to scarcity. Talk the price down. Release the reserves. Call it abundance and hope the problem resolves itself. It has worked for the past 50 years.

839 institutional investors. Record two-thirds expect oil prices to fall further. Even retail: oil ETF shorts exceed longs for the first time ever.

The template is working.

It has always worked. Until the buffer runs out.

SPR 415→349mb. Global stocks drawing 6mb/d.

That’s not supply responding to price. That’s inventory responding to price. And inventory, unlike production, has a floor.

You cannot destock your way to energy security.

See my latest note https://t.co/ktBpOCEf1U

[Andrej Karpathy @karpathy]

This is a super exciting release - Claude Fable 5 is the same underlying model as Mythos but with added safeguards. The benchmarks are great and it's SOTA on everything by a margin but I'll add that *qualitatively* also, this is a major-version-bump-deserving step change forward (imo of the same order as Claude 4.5 was in November), peaking especially for long problem-solving sessions on very difficult problems. You can give it a lot more ambitious tasks than what you're used to, the model "gets it" and it will just go, and it's never felt this tempting to stop looking at the code at all (but don't do this in prod!). The model still has quirks that people will run into and the safeguards are configured to be a little too trigger happy for launch, which can hopefully be tuned over time.

I feel a lot of things changing as working software increasingly comes out on a tap. The Jevon's paradox kicks in and I feel my own demand for software growing substantially. You can ask for anything - explainers, visualizers, dashboards, bespoke single-use apps (e.g. a full wandb that is hyper-specific just for your project), you can 10X your test suite, auto-optimize code, run giant research projects with custom HTML for the results, anything! "Free your mind" (Matrix ref). Really looking forward to all the things people build!

[The Hormuz Letter @HormuzLetter]

BREAKING: Israeli airstrikes have hit the Karun Petrochemical Complex in Khuzestan Province, causing damage, per Fars.

Iran has previously warned the response to any strike on its energy infrastructure would be waves of ballistic missiles toward Gulf state energy infrastructure.

[John Arnold @johnarnold]

I'm not surprised the oil market could handle 100 days of the Strait being closed without significant disruption.

I am very surprised the oil market would remain so complacent after 100 days and with zero visibility on reopening.

[Rory Johnston @Rory_Johnston]

If you’re not going to be broadly bullish oil when the Strait of Hormuz has been shut for 3 months and faces an arduous unwinding process in even the best case scenario, then when would you be bullish?

[Heather Exner-Pirot @ExnerPirot]

Worst energy shock in history transpiring; inventories about to bottom; Germany buying BC LNG; South Korea, India and China all come to Canada in the same two week period asking for oil and gas; TSX O&G index up 35% YTD.

The Canadian Left:
🤡

[Volodymyr Zelenskyy / Володимир Зеленський @ZelenskyyUa]

Open Letter
To the President of the Russian Federation
From the President of Ukraine

When you came to power in Russia more than 26 years ago, many people in Ukraine viewed you positively. That is how it was. But that is now in the past.
Now, the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians view it positively that our long-range drones paid a visit to the opening of your forum in St. Petersburg, covering a distance of more than 1,000 kilometers. As you know very well, that distance is not the limit of our capabilities.

[Javier Blas @JavierBlas]

USDA has now confirmed the detection of a New World screwworm in a bovine in Zavala County, Texas. The detection of the parasite, which is deadly to cattle, comes at a dire time for the US beef industry, with a smaller herd having already sent prices to record highs.

[NewLimit @newlimit]

Following breakthrough results, we’re bringing longevity medicine to human trials.

We’ve raised a $435M Series C led by @foundersfund to make it happen.

Reprogramming cell age has the potential to create more healthy years for everyone. We're closer than ever to realizing it.

[The White House @WhiteHouse]

"Iran must agree that they will never have a Nuclear Weapon or Bomb... I will be meeting now, in the Situation Room, to make a final determination." - President Donald J. Trump 🇺🇸

[Afshine Emrani MD FACC @afshineemrani]

1/5
I'm a cardiologist. I have spent twenty years watching cholesterol destroy arteries, trigger heart attacks, and kill people I care about.
Today, Eli Lilly presented data that may begin to end that era.
VERVE-102. A single infusion. One dose. It uses base editing to permanently turn off the PCSK9 gene in your liver.
Presented today at the European Atherosclerosis Society Congress:
88% reduction in PCSK9.
62% reduction in LDL cholesterol.
Sustained up to 18 months.
No treatment-related serious adverse events.
One infusion. Not daily pills you forget to take. Not monthly injections. One dose — and your cholesterol may stay low for the rest of your life.

[Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63]

A reminder that Russia is waging a terrorist war on Ukraine, and a reminder that standing by and watching are the richest nations on Earth, controlling the most powerful military alliance in history, an alliance created specifically to stop Russia in Europe. Sickening.

[Max Marchione @maxmarchione]

Retatrutide phase 3 obesity trial just came out and the results are genuinely insane:

- 28.3% bodyweight lost on 12mg over 80 weeks
- 70.3 pounds on avg. or 31.9 kg
- 45.3% of patients hit 30%+ weight loss (this is bariatric surgery territory)
- 30.3% weight loss (85 lbs) at 104 weeks in higher-BMI patients
- 65.3% of 12mg patients dropped below the obesity BMI threshold
- 19% loss on 4mg over 80 weeks (47.2 lbs) with fewer dropouts than placebo (4.1% vs 4.9%)
- significant drops in blood pressure, triglycerides, non-HDL cholesterol, waist circumference, and hsCRP
- no cardiac or liver signals

Retatrutide is going to completely overshadow tirzepatide and semaglutide, and take the throne as the best-selling drug of all time.

[Eric Nuttall @ericnuttall]

The UAE is building a ~1.4MM Bbl/d, 370km pipeline costing ~$4BN USD, started in 2025 and onstream in 2027. Canada aims to potentially build a 1MM Bbl/d pipeline, to cost ~$40BN, take 8+years, and is tying it to an obsolete/costly $30BN Pathways project. See the difference???

[Heather Exner-Pirot @ExnerPirot]

Phenomenal from Carney. Bravo.
“Carney said recent global shocks have threatened the availability of some forms of energy, putting other countries in a bind. He said Ottawa wants to move quickly to supply those resources, and if B.C. stands opposed to more development, his government will "be spending more time elsewhere in the country."
https://t.co/I7FqkLcjSE