BREAKING: South Korean exchange activates a circuit breaker after the KOSPI falls -6%, temporarily suspending algorithmic trading.
Over ₩438,000,000,000,000 ($300 BILLION) wiped out from South Korean stock market today.
You can reverse years of brain rot from consuming short form video slop by getting back into reading again.
You'll feel so much better if you just read for 30 minutes per day, I promise.
#HFD@Halfords_uk using nefarious tactics to prevent consumers from cancelling their Motoring Club membership.
No doubt of some financial benefit to Halfords short term, but damaging through harmful word of mouth longer term.
Poor form & a taint on their retail brand image.
Somewhat off topic for my usual market focus... but I do lament the decline in entertainment across all genres as we watch with some bemusement the decline of $DIS $EA & all those that embrace the perceived cultural zeitgeist 🙄🤔
One of the coolest details in the Caradhras scene is that Saruman and Gandalf are speaking different Elvish languages.
Saruman chants in Quenya, the ancient tongue of the High Elves. After the rebellion of the Noldor and their return to Middle-earth, Quenya was largely banned by King Thingol in Beleriand and eventually became a language of lore and ceremony rather than everyday speech.
Gandalf answers in Sindarin, the language that survived and became the common speech of Elves throughout Middle-earth.
It’s a subtle piece of worldbuilding that fits both characters perfectly. Saruman reaches for the language of ancient knowledge and lost grandeur, while Gandalf speaks the one still alive in Middle-earth.
(Video by: yanad_durinul on YT)
@rhomboid1MF Conceptual gobbledygook designed to flummox investors... a clever way of telling you to stay in your seat and let the clever people do the thing 😏
BREAKING 🚨: Private Credit
Another one!! Blackstone, which manages $1.3 Trillion in Assets, just restricted withdrawals from its flagship private credit fund 🤯👀
Back above 6% gain on the year, largely thanks to range-trading #SQZ.
4 trades: win 75% cap 1:1.07 (-)
pf: +6.11% @ 5% cash
Rolling over #OXB#SQZ & #HVO along with $BTC $ETH & $SUI.
Have a great weekend all 🍻🍔⛈️
To gauge the extent of the financial crisis the BOE is helping the UK government to cover up, look no further than the liquidity the BOE is pumping in the system via its ST-REPO
This week UK institutions borrowed a record ~123bn GBP and you heard NOTHING about it in the news
NVIDIA IS BUYING ITS OWN CHIPS AND CALLING IT REVENUE
And your retirement account is secretly holding the bag.
This scheme is literally straight out of the Enron playbook...
In January 2026, a special purpose vehicle called Valor Compute Infrastructure was created with one purpose:
Buy Nvidia's chips so Nvidia could book the sale as revenue.
Valor raised $5.4 billion and purchased over 100,000 of Nvidia's GB200 GPUs.
But $1.9 billion of that money came FROM Nvidia itself.
Nvidia invested $1.9 billion into the shell company, then sold that same shell company $5.4 billion worth of its own chips and booked every dollar as revenue.
It's the Girl Scout whose dad bought all the cookies and then she wins the sales contest because Dad was the customer. Except this Girl Scout is a trillion-dollar company and the cookie sale is $5.4 billion.
But it gets MUCH worse:
The remaining $3.5 billion in financing came from Apollo Global Management. Apollo structured the debt, packaged it into securities, and then sold those securities to Athene.
And guess who Athene is? Apollo's OWN insurance subsidiary. The one that sells fixed annuities to American retirees as safe, conservative retirement products.
Follow the chain:
Nvidia funds a shell company with $1.9 billion. The shell company buys $5.4 billion in Nvidia chips. Apollo finances the remaining $3.5 billion. Apollo sells the debt to its own insurance arm. That insurance arm packages it into annuity products and sells them to retirees who think they're buying something safe.
The retirees have no idea that their retirement savings are now backed by 100,000 computer chips sitting in some data center that will be worth pennies on the dollar in three years.
Now look at what's happening inside Athene:
$74.2 billion in US reserves but $217 billion in assets have been shifted to a Bermuda-based captive insurer, outside normal US regulatory oversight.
$103 billion of that portfolio (roughly 35%) is classified as Level 3 assets. That means there is no observable market price.
These assets are valued by internal models, not by actual markets.
And sitting on top of all those unpriced assets? 16.6x leverage.
If you're getting flashbacks to 2008, you should be.
Back then it was mortgages bundled into securities that nobody understood, sold to investors who had no idea what they were holding, rated as safe by agencies that never looked under the hood.
Today it's GPU-backed securities. Computer chips bundled into structured credit instruments, routed through an offshore insurance subsidiary, and sold to you as a retirement product.
The collateral is 100,000 GPUs leased to a single customer through an xAI subsidiary. If xAI stops making lease payments for any reason - financial distress, a pivot in strategy, anything - the entire structure unravels.
And Nvidia releases new architectures every year, so each generation delivers dramatically more compute per watt. A 5 year lease on technology that's obsolete in 2 years creates a mismatch that should terrify every annuity holder in America.
Every single step in this chain is technically legal. The SPV is legal, the lease is legal, Nvidia's equity stake is legal, the securitization is legal, and the Bermuda transfer is legal.
But legality and legitimacy are not the same thing.
I've seen every trick Wall Street has ever pulled in my 45 years of doing this.
And what I'm looking at right now is a pipeline that takes AI infrastructure risk, launders it through 8 layers of financial engineering, and deposits it in the retirement accounts of Americans who never agreed to fund Elon Musk's data centers.
In 2008 it was mortgage-backed securities.
In 2026 it's GPU-backed securities.
Different asset. Same greed. With the same ending.
@Pecunious365 Exactly, news this morning of BP talking to ITH. The real driver to merge would be legacy costs of maintaining / restoring tired infrastructure as SQZ has discovered over the past 18 months.
Prediction for the medium term; #ITH & #SQZ will merge out of necessity under the punitive UK government regime to create a exploration & production business of genuine size. You're welcome 🫡🤓