The CoreQuant (TCQ)

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[Jensen Huang @JensenHuang]

For my first post, I’m sharing a letter @NVIDIA signed on why open models matter.

AI will transform every industry, power every company, and be built by every country.

Open models strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.

The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models.

https://t.co/AUKzoQ5Ikb

[The CoreQuant (TCQ) @thecorequant]

#BREAKING: The US technology sector has surged +42% in just 2 months — the biggest 2-month rally in 24 YEARS.

Even the Dot-Com Bubble peaked at +40%.

Meanwhile:

$SOXX +66%
$SPX +16%
$Dow +10%
Since the March 30 low, the S&P 500 has gained +20%, with just 10 stocks driving ~65% of the advance.
Half of those top contributors were semiconductor stocks.

The AI trade isn't slowing down.

$NVDA $AMD $AVGO $TSM $MU $SMCI $ARM $PLTR $MSFT $META

AI infrastructure is becoming the market.
https://t.co/GnUOuXhobw

[The CoreQuant (TCQ) @thecorequant]

Ten refineries. Six countries. Three weeks. Global oil inventories already falling at historic rates. Spare refining capacity: effectively zero.
Whether these fires are connected is the wrong question. A system with no buffer has no tolerance for coincidence.
The margin for error in global energy supply is gone. Markets have not noticed.

[Aravind @aravind]

I think anyone could have predicted if they had followed the news on refinery fires in a pattern around the world.

There were refinery fires in Mexico, Canada, US (two sites), Russia (two sites), Australia, Ecuador etc one after the other in just the last 20 days or so.

Some DS hand with its local elements seems to be behind many is my strong hunch. I could still be wrong, but I think such a series of fires world over in oil refineries is no coincidence.

One side wants to cause an oil crunch having prepared for the war with all sorts of buffers, and another wants oil to flow in plenty to arm twist the other more.

A simple piece which can be fit into the pattern to see the incentives in such refinery fires.

Plus I know for sure adversaries and their DS doesn't want India to benefit from refining Arab and Iran oil in plenty once the war settles.

As I had said before, India is to benefit a lot by next year if everything goes as I had forecasted.

They also want to hit India economically and destabilize it politically. We all know this, no matter what's your ideology, this has always been the conspiracy against India.

Hit jobs on industries and refineries can serve many purposes in one. Geopolitical, economical, and political. A clear pattern I just noticed is a plethora of accounts trying to blame Modi and Govt for the fire.

How come so fast, so well organized they are in this propaganda? Is GoI responsible for the fires in Texas refineries, Russian refineries, Australia refinery too? Ridiculous. Or are they all also losers as these comment psyops imply?

The 0.5 front of the DS is being used to attack India by all means. Online and offline. By psyops on people and sabotage ops on the country.

India still needs to be careful. Should adopt what I call a "conspiratorial preemptive defense posture."

We should believe there's a conspiracy against us and the enemy uses all sorts of dirty tricks to attack us, so think in those lines and try to preempt.

I know it is easy to say but very difficult to do. Yet starting with vetting the workforce in all strategic sectors may be a good beginning.

[The CoreQuant (TCQ) @thecorequant]

#BREAKING: Netanyahu warns Iran ceasefire “could end quickly” — just hours before Trump’s Strait of Hormuz blockade takes effect.

A fragile truce now collides with a hard power move at the world’s most critical energy chokepoint.

Markets, oil flows, and diplomacy all hang in the balance.

[The CoreQuant (TCQ) @thecorequant]

#Breaking: Israel says it has struck more than 200 Hizbullah-linked targets in Lebanon, as Beirut reports at least 10 fatalities. The escalation risks complicating peace talks in Islamabad, where Iran has pushed for any US ceasefire to extend to Israeli operations. Lebanese and Israeli ambassadors in Washington are set to meet Tuesday.

[The CoreQuant (TCQ) @thecorequant]

#BREAKING: J.D. Vance says 21 hours of US–Iran peace talks in Pakistan ended without a deal, with the American delegation departing on Air Force Two.

Washington had been “very clear” on its red lines, Vance said, adding Tehran “chose not to accept our terms”. Iran’s nuclear programme remained a key sticking point, with the US seeking firm assurances it would not pursue a weapon.

Iran’s state news agency, however, blamed the collapse on what it called America’s “unreasonable demands”.

[The CoreQuant (TCQ) @thecorequant]

$CRCL ▼22% — Circle Internet suffers its worst single-day drop on record as draft U.S. stablecoin legislation threatens to ban yield on passive balances. A stock that had tripled since February is learning that regulatory risk never sleeps.

[The CoreQuant (TCQ) @thecorequant]

#BREAKING: $WTI crude collapses ~$4 in minutes as Trump signals diplomatic pause with Iran — erasing weeks of war premium in a single session. Peace rumours are the most powerful oil trader of all. $WTI

[The CoreQuant (TCQ) @thecorequant]

#BREAKING: The United States is seeking a one-month ceasefire with Iran to create space for formal negotiations, according to Israeli media reports. The proposed pause would mark the first structured diplomatic window since hostilities escalated, as regional powers and global energy markets watch closely for confirmation from Washington and Tehran. #IranCeasefire #MiddleEastPeace #BreakingNews #USIran

[The CoreQuant (TCQ) @thecorequant]

#BREAKING: President Trump declares victory in Iran, stating the conflict has been won and attributing continued war coverage solely to hostile media narratives. Markets and regional allies await formal confirmation. #IranWar #Trump #MiddleEast #BreakingNews

[The CoreQuant (TCQ) @thecorequant]

Iran’s oil and gas present signals that economic survival, not ideology, now drives Tehran’s negotiating hand. #IranNuclearDeal #MiddleEastPeace #USIranTalks

[The CoreQuant (TCQ) @thecorequant]

Saudi Arabia’s calculated gamble on Iran reveals the deeper truth about this conflict. This is not simply a war driven by Washington or Jerusalem. It is, at its core, a decades-long Sunni-Shia reckoning that the United States has now been conscripted to resolve.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s reported lobbying of President Trump is not opportunism. It is rational strategy shaped by existential fear. Iran has spent forty years funding Houthi rebels in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, militia networks in Iraq, and destabilisation campaigns throughout the Gulf. Riyadh did not start this confrontation. It absorbed it, quietly and expensively, for a generation.

The Crown Prince’s calculation is cold but coherent. A degraded Iran that retains its government is, in Riyadh’s view, more dangerous than no settlement at all. A wounded adversary with surviving capacity for retaliation, stripped of deterrence but not of grievance, is the worst possible outcome for Saudi oil infrastructure and Gulf stability. MBS is not pushing for war. He is pushing for finality, because he understands that a half-finished campaign leaves Saudi Arabia facing Iranian fury without American cover.

The divergence with Israel is instructive. Jerusalem can tolerate a failed Iranian state consumed by internal collapse. Riyadh cannot. A chaotic Iran on the Gulf’s doorstep, with no functioning government to negotiate with, is a regional catastrophe for Saudi economic ambition and Vision 2030.

What this moment demands is honest acknowledgment. The region’s Sunni powers have concluded, rightly or wrongly, that the status quo with Iran was no longer sustainable. The world must now decide whether Washington is prosecuting a principled campaign with a defined endpoint, or whether it has become an instrument of regional score-settling with no clear exit. The people of Iran, who are neither their government nor its proxies, will bear the heaviest cost of that distinction. Peace remains the only legitimate objective. Everything else is geopolitics dressed as strategy.

[The CoreQuant (TCQ) @thecorequant]

AI will not kill fundamental investing. More information has never been the constraint on alpha generation, and history is unambiguous on this point.

Excel democratised modelling. Bloomberg democratised data. Alternative data democratised signal. Alpha survived all of it.

The structural case is, if anything, stronger today. Factor volatility data shows equities are less efficient now than a decade ago. The rise of multi-manager platforms, duration-constrained quants, and passive indexers has not arbitraged away alpha. It has relocated it. Long-duration fundamental investing now competes against players structurally prohibited from doing what it does. That is a durable competitive advantage, however painful the near term.

The deeper point is about the nature of alpha itself. It follows a power-law distribution. The ineffable judgment that separates great investors from competent ones cannot be reduced to a reinforcement learning framework. Markets are regime-shifting, N-of-1 environments. AI has no sense of materiality. It cannot replicate the contextual discernment that defines investment genius.

What AI can do is compress the mechanical. Junior analysts once spent careers updating Nielsen files and building same-store sales trackers. That grunt work is now automatable. The result is not the elimination of the investor. It is the acceleration of the investor toward the only part of the job that actually matters.

The question is not whether AI will generate alpha. Of course it will, in the right hands. The question is whether the artisanal core of fundamental investing is replaceable. It is not. The future of this craft is bright.

[The CoreQuant (TCQ) @thecorequant]

The IEA has warned the disruption to Gulf oil flows now surpasses the combined impact of the 1973 and 1979 oil crises. Much depends on whether this five-day window holds

[The CoreQuant (TCQ) @thecorequant]

United States and Iran enter a fragile five-day diplomatic window as President Trump suspends threatened strikes on Iranian energy infrastructure, citing what he describes as productive back-channel conversations. Tehran denies direct talks have taken place.

[The CoreQuant (TCQ) @thecorequant]

The diplomatic opening carries significant uncertainty. Iran’s military capabilities have been severely degraded but its political resolve remains firm. The US has tabled a 15-point list of demands, several of which regional sources describe as nearly impossible for Tehran to accept. A potential in-person meeting between US envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner and Iranian officials is being explored.
Global energy markets remain on edge.

[The CoreQuant (TCQ) @thecorequant]

#Breaking: Copper is slipping. But the story is bigger than price.

War in the Middle East is pushing oil higher and strengthening the dollar, weighing on copper. Yet beneath the volatility, a structural demand wave is building.

Electrification. Power grids. And now AI data centres.

The metal of the energy transition is quietly becoming the metal of the AI age.

Full analysis: https://t.co/cNJ70dLaD2

#Copper #Commodities #AI #EnergyTransition #Markets

[The CoreQuant (TCQ) @thecorequant]

#Breaking: Oil markets are again hostage to geopolitics.

A narrow waterway now holds the global economy in suspense.

Nearly 20% of the world’s oil supply flows through the Strait of Hormuz. With disruption escalating, Brent briefly surged toward $120 and inflation risks are rising.

Our deep dive into the numbers behind the shock.

Read more: https://t.co/DX06eVhbct

#Oil #EnergyMarkets #BrentCrude #Geopolitics #Inflation #GlobalEconomy