Nikos K

Trader/PM

[Spencer Jakab @Spencerjakab]

When a smart journalist is called a "stenographer" by one of the most powerful people in the world then he or she is usually on to something. Don't miss the analysis from the great @NickTimiraos on the odd yen intervention (link in comment).

[Nikos K @Nik_FX]

@AndreasSteno they probably did it already the first day when news were out and those names were +20/30%..

[Nikos K @Nik_FX]

@AndreasSteno priced in though..

[Bob Elliott @BobEUnlimited]

Can we all accept that allocators got duped into believing the "factor neutral" and "idio" myths, when in reality most of these multistrats are just high-fee momo traders with some accounting tricks. h/t @nishantkumar07

[zerohedge @zerohedge]

Yellen's Activist Treasury Issuance legacy in two charts... and yes, Bessent vowed to end this.

He won't, and can't

[Han Shawnity 🇺🇸 @HanShawnity]

Are we just gonna sit here and let Iran embarrass us and call our bluff? What's the endgame here?

They're attacking us, our bases, our allies, and global shipping. They're calling all the shots. And then they make some vague promise behind closed doors to potentially possibly sit down for negotiations and Trump is falling for it again and again.

It's exhausting and humiliating.

[Jim Bianco @biancoresearch]

Opening line.
-
Memo to Wall Street: Quit whining about the Federal Reserve. Your clients are paying you (a lot) to make judgments about risks and returns in real time, and it’s embarrassing when you complain now that Daddy Fed isn’t telling you how to do it.

[Robert A. Pape @ProfessorPape]

5 times Trump threatened to obliterate Iran in days, only to TACO:
• March: 48hr deadline extended
• April: "Stone Age" threat ➔ ceasefire
• June: Called off strike hrs before
• July: Held off on "probable" deal
• Today (Aug 2): "Locked & loaded" ➔ halts attacks day later

[Milk Road Stocks @MilkRoadStocks]

Ken Griffin revealed the only thing he actually looks for when hiring at Citadel.

Not your GPA, not your pedigree nor your internship list.

He wants one type of person: the athlete who excelled academically.

Here's why that combination matters to him.

The athlete knows what it takes to win. They've also felt what it's like to lose. That experience of pushing through both, and still showing up, is something you can't learn in a classroom.

The academic side tells him something different. It tells him the person knows how to manage their time. That they have the discipline to apply their mind under pressure. That when things get hard, they'll find a way through.

Griffin calls it perseverance and grit paired with high aspirations.

That's the profile he's building Citadel's AI team around.

Think about what that means for where the talent wars in finance and AI are headed.

The people running the biggest pots of money in the world aren't just looking for quants anymore.

[THE SHORT BEAR @TheShortBear]

Great quote from 'When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management'

This explains well what happened to situational awareness and how citadel handled the situation.

[Fireside Alpha @firesidealpha]

Ken Griffin on the ethos of Citadel:

"Things may come to those who wait, but only those things left by those who hustle."

[Deirdre Bosa @dee_bosa]

Anthropic researcher being sarcastic here, but it misses the bigger point: what the market wants... the market usually gets.

If it eventually wants more choice in chips, Nvidia will have to respond. Right now it wants open models and this feels like a deflection

[CapexAndChill @CapexAndChill]

Jamie Dimon on valuing a stock: "Look at the history, read the annual report, study the industry if you want. What would you pay for the stock? It's hard. It is brutally hard. And then you learn also the why... the accounting is bad, or the people are bad, or there are other reasons people will not pay. You think, 'Oh, it's worth 13 times earnings,' and the market has it at 7 or 25. It's humbling."

[Xiaoyin Qu @quxiaoyin]

Many people still confuse Chinese model with Chinese inference:
- A model is like a recipe for a dish—e.g. orange chicken
- Claude keeps its recipe secret, charges the dish $50. You must eat in front of Dario and he will watch you the entire time. You can’t change the ingredients or cook it privately.
- Now China releases a free recipe that tastes just as good. You can use American chicken and cook it in your own kitchen (self-hosting), or have a U.S. cloud like AWS or Nebius cook it and pay $2-5.
- Chinese inference is DoorDashing the finished dish from Beijing. Your order and data go there, and you must eat Beijing chicken. It’s fair to worry about the safety of their ingredients.
- Regulate the kitchen, ingredients, and data. Don’t ban the recipe.

[Nick G. @nickgiva1]

Equities sell off? Tiny risk off bid in bonds, quickly reversed.
Low CPI? Tiny rally, quickly reversed.
Bullish Fed speak? Zero effect.

Meanwhile, real long term rates: ever higher.

Been trading bonds for 42 years: this won't end until there is an accident...
Bonds always end a trend with a spike: remember Oct 1987. You might hear all kind of reasons why Black Monday happened, but the main one was bonds.

[Nikos K @Nik_FX]

100%..post tebalancong they lost the AI momo angle and are the classic small caps

[Danny Dayan @DannyDayan5]

I don't see how small caps escape this unscathed.

Feels like a correl move coming.

[Xiaoyin Qu @quxiaoyin]

What Kimi K3 means for USA AI:
1. FYI Kimi K3 is open weight and will be released on July 27, 2026.
2. When the best open weight model exceeds the best closed-source model, how does @AnthropicAI justify its Fable pricing? Why would anyone pay for that? Not to mention the Mythos drama and dumbing down for "safety reason". Kimi doesn't care about "safety",
3. Kimi's most recent funding round values the company at $20 Billion as of 2 months ago. Anthropic is worth almost 1 Trillion, 50x. Why?
4. If enterprises get to use best frontier model while keeping their data in house, why would they EVER use Anthropic and give away their data?
5. If China can build better models in-house with chip blockage, why the fuck did we ban @nvidia from selling their best chips. What's scarier is if Huawei became the status quo for chips. Nightmare.
6. China has way more frontier labs than USA: Kimi, GLM, Deepseek, Alibaba, Bytedance, Kling etc. Not to mention for multimodal models like video gen, China has dominated the rank for a while. Meanwhile, we only see OpenAI & Anthropic performing even close. What does it mean for USA to keep its tech advantage?

[Rihard Jarc @RihardJarc]

The Kimi K3 release shakes the dynamics of the AI value chain once again and is a dream scenario for the cloud providers ( $AMZN, $GOOGL $MSFT )

Companies will want hyperscalers to serve as the orchestration layer for multiple models & model providers while also squeezing more tokens out of existing infrastructure, as cost per intelligence declines rapidly.