a5184098

event-driven hedge fund in china

[a5184098 @a5184098]

China’s market crashed, Korea’s market crashed, and US stocks are hanging by a thread... these past few days have felt like an absolute eternity. Everyone’s AI fantasy is just getting crushed.

[a5184098 @a5184098]

@archeohistories World War II was already underway, right on the eve of the Great Depression coming to an end.

[a5184098 @a5184098]

......make money

[NEXTA @nexta_tv]

A Russian woman breaks down in tears at the grave of her husband, whom she had sent off to make money in the “SMO” — but he came back in a coffin

Now there's no man left in the house — she even has to move the refrigerator by herself.

“I keep begging: please, come back to me in another form. I'm so tired of being alone,” the widow says as she nervously smokes, searching for a new companion.

[Ali Vaez @AliVaez]

The timing of these leaks is no accident. They appear designed to prompt more escalation to foreclose any pathway back to diplomacy and lock both sides into a conflict that becomes not a means to an end, but a forever war.

[Brett Erickson @BrettErickson28]

Many people see an obvious reality that this is an existential war for Iran. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that this is also an existential war for Donald Trump himself.

By all logic, President Trump should end this war. A majority of Americans supported the MOU. Iran is in a significantly stronger STRATEGIC position. The risks vastly outweigh the probability of success.

But now President Trump’s legacy is going to be increasingly defined by the outcome of this war. 17 Americans (at least) have been killed. We’ve severely depleted our advanced munitions. The has clearly been a catastrophic failure in strategy from the White House.

Failure may simply not be an option in the mind of President Trump at this point. We’re not dealing with “the best interests of the United States” anymore. We’re dealing with what is best for TRUMP.

That’s dangerous.

Everybody can clearly see that the most “logical” option here is to tuck tail and run. Get out. Sign the dang deal.

But what happens when a President views this as just as much of an existential war as Iran does?

How far may he be willing to take this?

[a5184098 @a5184098]

said that for AI stock market?
What if AI turns out to be nothing special under the hood?
If there’s real tech behind it, there’s no way it’d be this cheap.

[Edward Lawrence @EdwardLawrence]

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent says the administration found US watermarks in some of the Chinese AI model releases. He says the IP theft will be delt with in the coming weeks. The White House discussion what to do about cheaper Chinese AI models that threaten the US marketplace. #AI #China #POTUS

[kodumit @kodumit]

@__alpoge__ fable is 180 iq, confirmed by my trusted advisor

[JustDario @DarioCpx]

I stopped following him and other since they started pushing that nonsense sir

I live in HK, I go to Shandong multiple times a year (where a big chunk of the oil business is) and I have direct info from China. The reason why imports went down a lot is because Chinese firms, similar to others in the world, were not allowed to rise retail prices enough selling oil they bought at lower prices. In China but in other countries like India retail prices are set by the government, China and India raised prices (and they haven’t lowered yet) but crude oil in the market was too expensive for many refineries in Shandong to be profitable. Some slowed refinery as low as 20%, the average of the TeaPots that don’t have much direct access to local Chinese production like Sinopec or Petrochina, fell to 50%. Another reason is China curtailed export quotas significantly forcing them to sell into the local market, the reason why they couldn’t import oil from abroad and make a profit. Now margins are back to positive and they resumed buying cargos of oil, but still not too much since the extra can only be resold for a profit outside China and exports are still very limited.

China hasn’t used a drop of its SPR, commercial inventories are as low there as elsewhere and at some point they will have to come back to the market and rise retail prices further to make sure refineries can have some margin. That’s what people should watch about China. However what people forget is that in US, Europe and Japan inventories are running at dangerously low levels and likely these regions will be forced to step into the spot market for prompt delivery sooner to refill them especially when US won’t be able to afford supporting Europe and Japan with its exports anymore.

[Laman @LVision_Trading]

$OIL | What will it take for Chinese teapots to start buying oil again?

Shandong utilization: 50.5% last week of June. Lowest since 2017. Below COVID lows.

This isn’t a supply story. It’s margins.

3 structural reasons teapots stopped buying:

1️⃣ Discount compression: the whole teapot business model is arbitrage on sanctioned crude discount. Iranian light was ~$11 under Brent pre-war, now ~$2
2️⃣ Beijing’s export curbs: product can’t leave the country, so weak domestic demand has nowhere to drain.
3️⃣ Compliance fear: Hengli got sanctioned in April, tried to buy “clean” barrels to get delisted, got refused/cancelled on 6M bbls anyway. Other refiners watching and staying conservative.

▶️ Net: teapots were losing ¥500-600/mt ($74-88) as of May. Math still doesn’t work at $70 Brent because it’s the spread that’s broken, not the flat price.

▶️ Timeline (hypothesis, low confidence):
Trigger isn’t Brent falling, it’s sanctioned discounts re-widening OR Beijing loosening export quotas. Contango building in Dubai/Murban hints that prompt scarcity is easing faster than teapot appetite returning.

▶️ My base case: no meaningful teapot re-entry before September, absent a policy nudge from Beijing.

https://t.co/5X5hyHh6oM

[Gregory Brew @gbrew24]

Brent at $88

Oil market needs to see Saudi tankers on fire in the Red Sea or a Yanbu pier exploding. Otherwise, just another day at the office.

[a5184098 @a5184098]

just 19?
Iran war is a funny war,not a real war.
But if you're terrified of losing soldiers in a real war, you're gonna lose your dominance—simple as that.
You can’t just sit there hoping your enemy shows mercy and doesn’t attack.

[Daniel Davis Deep Dive @DanielLDavis1]

This is the granular level of the personal cost of President Trump’s foolish war of choice in Iran. This genuinely patriotic American was sacrificed on the altar of the President’s ego.

She did not die to “protect America” as the Pentagon will try to claim.

She died bc of the arrogance of our rotting elite class in America. Her blood is more on their hands than even the Iranian missiles and drones that affected her physical death.

I weep that she likely won’t b the last to be pointlessly sacrificed.

[Jeffrey Emanuel @doodlestein]

@guohao_li There’s also something to be said about training “lehrlings” deeply through immersion at a very young age so they can develop deep intuition while their brains are still extremely plastic. This was the approach used for generations in the commodity trading houses:

[a5184098 @a5184098]

That article is just a massive shield for President Trump, basically crying about why former presidents didn't make America great enough.

[a5184098 @a5184098]

So just gonna write off the Middle East now?
Can even handle 10-dollar gas? If dump the Middle East, is Europe next?
At this rate, America’s literally gonna turn into Mexico.
Honestly though, maybe that’s not even a bad thing.

[a5184098 @a5184098]

If Billy Mitchell were still alive today, he’d be writing columns in foreign policy, arguing that we don't need boots on the ground in the Middle East—just keep the air and naval bases.

[a5184098 @a5184098]

So just gonna write off the Middle East now?
Can even handle 10-dollar gas? If dump the Middle East, is Europe next?
At this rate, America’s literally gonna turn into Mexico.
Honestly though, maybe that’s not even a bad thing.

[a5184098 @a5184098]

So just gonna write off the Middle East now?
Can even handle 10-dollar gas? If dump the Middle East, is Europe next?
At this rate, America’s literally gonna turn into Mexico.
Honestly though, maybe that’s not even a bad thing.

[Jon Hoffman @Hoffman8Jon]

Our military bases in the Middle East are a liability, not an asset.

There is no greater disrespect to American servicemembers than asking them to make the ultimate sacrifice for Washington elites and special interests.

Bring them home.

[a5184098 @a5184098]

makes me look so tall

[a5184098 @a5184098]

Ziegfeld Girl

[Archaeo - Histories @archeohistories]

Barbara Stanwyck spent a lifetime playing women nobody could push around. Audiences believed she was born fearless. The truth was almost unimaginably different.

Before she became one of Hollywood's toughest stars, she was Ruby Stevens—a little girl whose life unraveled before she was old enough to understand it. Her mother was killed after being thrown from a moving streetcar. Soon afterward, her father disappeared, leaving his children behind. Ruby drifted through relatives' homes and foster arrangements, learning one lesson early: if she wanted to survive, she would have to rely on herself.

That hard edge would become her greatest asset. She left school young, worked whatever jobs she could find, danced in chorus lines, and fought her way onto the stage. Hollywood wasn't immediately convinced. Executives struggled to figure out what to do with a woman who wasn't delicate enough to be the ingénue or glamorous enough to fit their usual mold. Director Frank Capra saw something they missed—an honesty that couldn't be manufactured.

What followed was one of the most astonishing careers in movie history.

Stanwyck could charm audiences into laughter in The Lady Eve, then leave them unsettled in Double Indemnity, where her icy Phyllis Dietrichson became one of cinema's greatest femme fatales. Rumors swirled that no actress could switch so effortlessly between warmth and menace. She could. Then she'd turn around and break hearts in Stella Dallas, playing a mother willing to sacrifice everything for her daughter's future.

Perhaps that was why her performances felt so real. Stanwyck understood that strength isn't the absence of pain, it is what survives after it.

Despite earning four Academy Award nominations, she never won a competitive Oscar, one of Hollywood's most enduring oversights. The industry eventually honored her with a lifetime achievement award, long after she'd already proved herself again on television in The Big Valley.

Barbara Stanwyck didn't become Hollywood's toughest woman because she played one on screen. She became unforgettable because she had already lived through the kind of story most people would never have survived.

#archaeohistories

[Ancient History Hub @AncientHistorry]

108 years ago tonight, this is what actually happened in that basement in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

The Romanovs had been prisoners for over a year at that point. They'd been shuffled from palace arrest to Siberia to a merchant's house in Yekaterinburg that the Jewish Bolsheviks renamed the House of Special Purpose. The windows were painted over so they couldn't see out or signal anyone. A tall fence went up around it. They weren't a royal family anymore, they were seven people, a doctor, and three servants waiting to find out what a revolution does to the people it hates most.

Around 1:30 in the morning they were woken up and told to get dressed. The story was that the White Army and the Czech Legion were closing in on the city and the family needed to be moved to the cellar for their own safety until a car arrived. They believed it. Nicholas carried Alexei down the stairs himself because the boy's hemophilia was so bad he couldn't walk. Alexei was 13. The girls carried pillows and a few small things. Alexandra, who was in constant pain, asked if they could have chairs to sit on while they waited. The guards brought two. One for the mother, one for the dying boy.

Then the Jewish Yakov Yurovsky came in with a squad of men, most of them armed with revolvers, some of them already drunk to get through it. He told the family to stand as if for a photograph. Once they were arranged against the back wall, he read them a sentence: because their relatives kept fighting Soviet Russia, the Ural Committee had decided they were to be shot. Nicholas turned back toward his family and barely got the word "What?" out of his mouth before Yurovsky shot him dead in front of his wife and children.

Then everyone fired at once. It was a tiny room with no ventilation and eleven victims packed into it. The noise was deafening and the gunsmoke and plaster dust got so thick that the killers literally could not see what they were shooting at. Bullets ricocheted off the stone walls and hit some of the executioners. They had to stop, open the door, and let the smoke clear before going back in to finish the job.

That is when they realized the daughters were still alive. Olga, Tatiana, Maria, and Anastasia had spent their captivity secretly sewing the family's diamonds and jewels into the linings of their corsets and undergarments, kilos of gemstones, partly to hide the wealth and partly hoping to buy their freedom later. That packed layer of diamonds worked like body armor. The bullets hit them and bounced off. So when the men came back into the room, the girls were sitting up, wounded, crying and moaning against the wall.

What happened next is the part people don't like to say out loud. The guards went at the girls with bayonets, and even the bayonets couldn't punch through the jeweled bodices at first, so they stabbed them over and over and then shot them in the head at point blank range to make them stop moving. Maria tried to crawl to a set of locked doors to escape and was shot down. Anastasia and one of her sisters had only fainted and came to screaming when they were touched, and were bayoneted and shot where they lay. Alexei, the little boy, was still alive in his chair through all of it. Yurovsky walked over and killed him personally with two bullets to the head while his sisters' bodies were still warm on the floor around him.

They also killed the family doctor Botkin, the cook, the footman, and Alexandra's maid Demidova, who survived the first volley by hiding behind a pillow stuffed with jewels and was chased down and stabbed more than thirty times. They even crushed the skull of one of the girls' little dogs so it couldn't be heard crying. The whole thing took about twenty minutes.

Then came the cover up, which was almost as grim. The bodies were wrapped in bedsheets, loaded onto a truck, and driven out to a forest called the Four Brothers. The truck got stuck in the mud. They stripped the corpses, and that is when they finally discovered all the diamonds sewn into the clothing, so they burned the clothes on the spot. The bodies were thrown down an abandoned mine shaft and grenades were tossed in to collapse it, but that didn't work either. So the killers came back the next day, hauled the bodies back out, and started over. They burned two of the children's bodies separately and buried them apart from the rest. The remaining nine they soaked in sulfuric acid to destroy the faces and make them unidentifiable, then dumped them in a shallow pit and covered it with railway ties and dirt.

And it worked, for decades. The grave stayed secret through the entire Soviet era. It wasn't found until 1979, and the finders were too scared to tell anyone until 1991. The last two children, Alexei and one of his sisters, weren't even located until 2007, and it took DNA testing to finally prove to the world that yes, they had murdered every single one of the children, right down to the sick 13 year old boy.

That basement in Yekaterinburg is where the Russian century really started. A hundred years of gulags, famines, purges, and secret police, all kicked off by a room full of armed men executing unarmed children over a corset full of diamonds. Remember what it actually looked like tonight.

[a5184098 @a5184098]

Vance would die laughing if he saw what you wrote.
He’s nothing but a political opportunist.
Anyone blocking his path to power gets tossed aside.
If Trump doesn't handle the Iran issue right, he'll learn the hard way what betrayal really means.

[Alon Mizrahi @alon_mizrahi]

Vance throwing dirt at Israel and promoting the fantasy of a schism between Israel and the US is obvious psyop. In fact, it is the most telltale sign that the US is about to embark on a major escalation - together with Israel. Most likely, the decision to start a bigger war and potentially a ground operation has already been taken. This is going to be a very fateful summer

[Voices of WW2 @VoicesofWW2]

Eva Braun's brother in law was one of the most notorious opportunists in Hitler's inner circle. His name was Hermann Fegelein, an SS general and Himmler's personal liaison at Hitler's headquarters. In June 1944 he married Eva's younger sister Gretl, which made him family to Hitler himself in all but name. People who knew him described him as charming, ruthless, a heavy drinker and womanizer who had climbed to the top through connections rather than merit.

In the last days of the war his loyalty evaporated. As the Red Army closed in on Berlin, Fegelein quietly slipped out of the Führerbunker. He was found at his private apartment in the city, out of uniform in civilian clothes, reportedly with cash, jewelry and a woman who was not his wife, apparently getting ready to disappear. Around the same time it emerged that his boss Himmler was secretly trying to negotiate surrender to the Western Allies behind Hitler's back.

Hitler was already spiraling with paranoia, and Fegelein's desertion combined with Himmler's betrayal pushed him over the edge. Fegelein was dragged back to the bunker, stripped of his rank, court martialed, and on April 28, 1945, taken up into the Chancellery garden and shot. Eva Braun reportedly refused to intervene to save her own brother in law, even though her sister Gretl was heavily pregnant with his child at the time.

Two days later Eva and Hitler killed themselves. Gretl gave birth to their daughter weeks after the man was executed, and named her Eva after the aunt who had just died in the bunker.