Niko

Rugged Individualist. Financial markets, politic, licorice and cheap cigars addict. I say what I think under Rorschach mask. Rejected by any club I applied to.

[Niko @nikodemuskell]

Anyone who believes that the long liquidation of Friday has legs... is in for a Monday surprise. This administration cannot afford low equities, nor Jensen Huang can afford the AI bubble to pop or be questioned, so $aapl will be drawn into the data centers boondoggle.

[Niko @nikodemuskell]

@jtraderco Same.

[Niko @nikodemuskell]

https://t.co/yJbxZTI9sH

Wonder if this stuff on Hyperliquid holds by 8 pm on Sunday

[Niko @nikodemuskell]

@optionsbbq @Tony_BATtista @tastytrade @tastyliveshow The fact that @Tony_BATtista reposted this is even more concerning.

[Niko @nikodemuskell]

@AgustinLebron3 In a way, the elites behavior (infinite wealth accumulation, dogged pursuit of immortality, no accountability for their actions) paints an even worse picture of humans who are trying to become gods.

[Niko @nikodemuskell]

@Bogachan_1971 One thing is to correctly point out at the lurid US institutions and corporations. Another is to acknowledge China's criminal government and business practices and its foolish communist autocrat Xi Jinping. The two do not contradict each other.

[Niko @nikodemuskell]

@NinaSerafina 'Shut up and be grateful you are working as a wage slave on a successful movie, while Blumhouse (the shareholders) reap insane benefits from its success'. When X randos are more kingly than the king.

[Niko @nikodemuskell]

@jedimarkus77 Difficult to imagine we continue drilling down, but at the same time if Korea opens in a panic (they seem to be buying the dip on Hyperliquid though)...

[Niko @nikodemuskell]

@SandyofCthulhu @memeslich I gotta disagree on alignment. As irrealistic and contradictory as it is, it sets the cosmological concepts that are part of the fantasy setting

[Niko @nikodemuskell]

Amazing to hear Santoli on @CNBC actually stating the truth regarding SpaceX IPO

[Niko @nikodemuskell]

With the $INTC precedent, the government is going to take shares in the failing business models of OpenAi and Anthropic, probably also SpaceX, to bail them out as they continue destroying capital.

https://t.co/hINIwFemU3

[George Noble @gnoble79]

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.

[Niko @nikodemuskell]

$EWY (Kospi) in freefall, dragging everything down.

[Niko @nikodemuskell]

@DarioCpx @edzitron Instant follow for @edzitron

[JustDario @DarioCpx]

To go out publicly and say what he is saying, @edzitron has balls the size of the Las Vegas sphere

[Niko @nikodemuskell]

@huskies20001 @JohnFMauldin Nah - just saying what I see. Everyone I have spoken with about AI is skeptical about it.

[Niko @nikodemuskell]

@ClayTravis Dude. The answer is cost of living and creeping inflation - not social media, which is responsible for other problems. Your time has never been cheaper compared to capital. This is destroying people day by day.

[Niko @nikodemuskell]

@BruceKnuteson @rdd147 I read your papers... Sickening stuff that at this point is plainly done in the open.

[Niko @nikodemuskell]

Just found out in painstaking detail how the fraud in financial markets has been in plain sight under our eyes. Thanks @BruceKnuteson

[Bruce Knuteson @BruceKnuteson]

"Nothing to See Here" — my seventh article describing strikingly suspicious return patterns in your investments — is now available at https://t.co/2agcGkUPYl.