Party at the End of the World part 1 - Welcome to the Midterms, Scrub. My best attempt at the macro engine moving forward. The environment seems to be gearing up for a party at the end of the world. It's just dump, pump, dump, pump on repeat. It is what it is. First DJ set in NYSE history, Sept 18. Cash App and Visa presented. All while only 27% of S&P 500 stocks sit above their 50D, weakest breadth this close to a record since 2000. Every green day feeds one of your fave sectors, while your average on the rest keeps getting worse. It's not a healthy market when people bounce money between large caps, or buy short term bonds, to feel safe and sheltered. Round and round. WHY DUMP - the recent timeline: Sep 8: a sitting Treasury Secretary going full ham: "I am the house now... you can bet against me if you want." The bond market took the bet. Sep 12: the now infamous essay by Dario. Altman matched within hours, Musk endorsed, SOX -5.9% on Monday. Then Anthropic signs an $11.6B CPU deal with AKAM, highly contradictory tbh. Sep 16: unanimous 25bp to 3.75-4.00%, first Fed hike in three years. Statement pop, presser fade. Warsh: "this standard has not been satisfied." No path given, doesn't even submit a dot. October hike odds 49% to 75% in a week. The Warsh press conference pattern. Sep 25: 30-year at 5.49%, highest since 2004. 10-year 5.23%, a 19-year high. The hike got absorbed, the long end sold anyway. Xi visit: truce pushed to Jan 10, pandas for Atlanta, very little signed. ORCL credit risk is starting to look nasty. CDS at a fresh record Sep 24, same week as a force majeure notice on Project Jupiter. One notch above junk, -$23.7B free cash flow last fiscal year. Cherry on top, half the backlog sits with a customer that lost 21 billion last year. ORCL is the first domino, as long as they keep it afloat, the party goes on. A stock gets rugged way slower than the credit markets exit. Iran could have ended in the summer, let's be honest, yet the TACO pattern continues. "Right after the election, oil prices are going to be tumbling downward." Brent back above $100, and the administration reportedly PREPARING a 90-day diesel export ban (WH denies). European diesel +7% on the headline. Biden ordered the same study weeks before HIS midterms in 2022 and dropped it. Saudis mildly offline, Russia offline, America potentially offline. First thought: gg Europe. WHY PUMP - proof I'm trying my best not to be a permabear. Same question on repeat: "How will they get more retail in?" $5,000 per adult citizen if Republicans keep the House and Senate. Bigger than all three Covid checks combined. Needs Congress, and the $2,000 tariff dividend never showed up. Literal bribes weren't on my bingo card tbh. NVDA's $500B platforms with six Wall St giants declare GPUs an investable asset class. Still MOUs, waiting on disclosed dollar commitments. The funding needs to be spectacular, because the cash is already drying up. FDIC chair floating discount-window capacity counting toward the LCR, Bessent backing it. JPM already running its book to the unwritten rule, $1.5T SRI into the same sectors. Warsh wants a smaller balance sheet while Treasury buys back long bonds. The Accord tension in official plumbing. Risk rolled forward, at our own peril. Midterm years are the weakest of the cycle, so the Giga AI IPOs keep getting rolled. Anthropic slid to November, Altman pushed OpenAI to 2027. Average midterm drawdown 18%, we've done 9% on closes. S&P higher 12 months after every midterm since 1950. Pick your own adventure: Oct 28 FOMC, hyperscaler capex late Oct, Nov 3, neocloud calls, NVDA EPS ~Nov 18, Dec 8-9 as the 2018 Dec landmine season, Jan 10 China truce cliff. As a nagging thought. I get these moments where I feel like I'm a part of the corruption treadmill and I make money off of it, and the part of me that sees it for what it is, is in agony. To lighten the mood. A vibed illustrative vid about the mkt this year. Enjoy. -Acies

The indexes barely moved today, but why does it feel like a total bloodbath? Because it is one. -Acies

Quite the snoozer (unsettling) of an investor day for $CCXI but it's to be expected imo. Makes sense considering they want to save the best stuff for the confirmed ticker change filing cycle. -Acies

The $XE part 4- The lockup hangover. Wrote down one rule and posted nothing for a while. "Unless everyone holds hands and yells hodl, I don't see a world where noone sells the shares they got for cheaper than a loaf of bread so even while I miss a run I'm not engaging until the 15 range." The number passed around during the summer was 69M shares unlocking Sept 1 against a 16M float. I posted it myself. The actual number from the 424B4 was worse. Roughly 350M locked against a 45M float. 5x. And the flush still never came. This part is the why. Going in: sold my remaining size at 18.10 into August strength. Then I did what the casino rarely does. I read who actually holds the 350M. Amazon, 65.8M shares. They are the customer. You don't dump your own reactor supplier the week after lockup. Kam Ghaffarian, the founder, 92.9M. Seventeen years in this company. Founders with control blocks and other fortunes don't hit bids into flushes. Ares, 38.3M. PE funds sell eventually, but in negotiated blocks, not into a thin Tuesday tape. 197M shares, half the company, structurally dead supply. The sh that could actually hit the bid was maybe 40-80M. Short interest ran up 27% into the date. Everyone was short the calendar. The pre-expiry flush hit 17.17 on the Friday before and closed on the lows. Monday Aug 31 it ripped to 19.14 and closed +6.5%. Unlock day itself closed green. Studies put the average lockup hit around 1.5%. The fear so far seems to always be bigger than the event. On Sept 4 a Schedule 13G hit EDGAR. Jane Street, 15.3M shares, 5.2% of the class. Event date on the filing: August 31. The exact day the flush got bought. A third of the float, disclosed by the firm that led the last private round. They knew the cap table better than anyone tweeting the 69M number. Me included. About 4.6M of it sits in their market making arm, so don't read every share as conviction. Since expiry: Zero Form 4s, zero 144s. Every director, officer and 10%+ holder has to report a sale within two business days. Not one has. The only filing in the name since the unlock was someone crossing 5% on the way up. So the fear died. Eight days later the market found a new one. Piper initiated at $9 underweight. Guggenheim sits at $57. The whole spread hangs on one number that has never existed aka the technology fee. No signed fee in any filing, and Amazon holds most favored pricing. The stock's value is a price nobody has ever paid, and the first customer to name it owns about a sixth of the company. TLDR the lockup exp was the tutorial level. Piper day cost 6%. Two more red days and Friday the 15 range printed. Not from supply. OKLO launched another $1B ATM, UBS cut NuScale to a $6 target and $XE got sold 6% with the basket while uranium sat flat. Contagion discount on an unchanged catalyst calendar p much. Back to 2k 14.15 avg shares and laddering. What ends this casino: The NRC final safety evaluation, due November. The Dow construction permit, expected Q1. The 1GW utility announcement management promised by year end. Any signed tech fee. Mid November the 13Fs and quarterly 13G amendments land the same week. Together they name every fund that sold into the expiry quarter, including the sub 10% anchors who never file a Form 4. I'll post the table either way, even if it names sellers. This thing is primed imo. Then again I'm long and biased. -Acies

Sat through NFP mostly in cash and tbh it felt worse than losing money. Same handful of giants carrying everything while bonds and credit (the ones that usually move first) already left the party. I'm wrong if $RSP reclaims 214 and junk credit makes new highs. Until then cash it is. -Acies

Bears think it's all rigged. Bulls think it'll stay rigged forever. -Acies

First thoughts about Claude Opus 5.5. Back in last December I considered the race to be a bit toppy and the scaling laws seemed to kick in. Fiddling around with 5.5... I get it. I truly get it what the frontier labs were so concerned about. This thing is pure alchemy. -Acies

The one metric I actually track on X is original thinkers and let me tell you honestly, there ain't many left. Citrini crew was on that list. Jukan, Zephyr, the whole team tbh. Even Analyst 69. Then SemiAnalysis bought them Sept 11 and within two weeks the feed went tame. SemiAnalysis itself now runs a buzzfeed style teaser farm where every post exists to funnel you into a subscription. Zero hate, this is just how the machine works and I'll pay the sub to stay informed. The real stuff still exists behind the paywall. The founder is reportedly launching a fund. And the second a fund exists every public call is either giving away what your LPs pay for or moving the price before your own fund is in. Suddenly you also have a compliance department and the free feed becomes an ad. You can track the same pattern across a lot of accounts. 1. Enthusiast gains an audience 2. The dollars come in one way or another. Takeover bid, substack grind, fund launch. 3. Original soul gets sucked out. Unreal how fast it happens though. 18 months ish from first banger to first dollar to tame. So props to the accounts still running on nothing but curiosity. You're the only ones I'm still reading. -Acies

Shoutout to Westminster for keeping the 78% North Sea tax on through the whole Iran mess. Reeves was days from scrapping it, then oil spiked and she found her courage. $BP put its entire North Sea business up for sale, so the next windfall goes to whoever's selling you diesel. Trump's export ban is just the cherry on top. Great timing lads. -Acies

Looking at $QQQ from the sidelines is so damn deceptive. "So much drama but the US market remains so strong, wow" It's a pretty stage built to cover the battlefield. 27% of stocks are above their 50 day. The index pushing towards ATHs anyway. I wouldn't call cap weighting as a solid report of how stocks are doing, just how five names are doing. The worse the battlefield gets, the more money crowds into the survivors. The index held up by the same fear that's killing everything under it. Show me a market where all boats are lifted and then I'll know we're finally back. -Acies

I'll admit that World of Warcraft Forever got me scratching my arm again like an addict who got offered the chance to feel their first hit allover again. If I do play, I'll mostly enjoy doing the boring stuff and actually taking my time instead of nonstop minmaxing. -Acies

I have a $TTWO thesis piece in progress where I try to understand how this mysterious gaming industry orphan actually trades. A $40B company where a 500 share sale can move the price for 10 minutes, yet someone prints massive blocks almost daily. And no one managing to actually reach the ask without a hidden order blocking their way. Started with gg ez game vibes only and ended up digging SEC filings for a $2B+ shareholder that no longer files a single US disclosure. 1500sh 209 avg Part 5 before earnings. -Acies

The $XPEV part 1-Pick a card, any card XPeng's IRON humanoid walking off its production line is why I'm here, simple. I haven't successfully held a single Chinese stock since covid. I try, try and try again, but the political tension snaps me out Every. Single. Time. Five small losses on XPEV this year alone. Every "this is the time, trust" met with something subconscious overriding my decision to commit within weeks. Good thing too, because if you zoom out the chart... XPEV hasn't exactly been the picture of health. Then again, neither has the general Chinese tech sector. So why am I long again? Because the risk reward is the best it's ever been and the worst at the same time. Pick a card, any card. That's the whole game. Every great company picked one. XPeng sat down at the table and grabbed four. EVs, robotaxis, humanoid robots, their own AI chips, flying cars on the side, tech consulting for VW. Whatever future you believe in, they're making a play for it. And the unit bank rolling all the others stopped growing. Deliveries are flat versus last year while Beijing pulled the subsidies and the whole Chinese EV market shrank. The cars earn less per unit than a year ago. That record margin everyone celebrated? Mostly from selling tech services to Volkswagen. Yes, that's right folks. The exciting EV company's best business right now is consulting for a German legacy automaker. The robot card is the one true ace up their sleeve. $900M raised at a $6.3B valuation, the biggest private robotics round in China's history, announced 6 minutes after the ugly EPS. All during the robot games in Beijing, the same week Unitree went +629% on debut. Two weeks later came the IRON production line video. Beautiful choreography. And the result? Hong Kong, the session where people can actually spark the resurrection arc, sold this thing down to 52 week lows. The treasure chest funding this whole hand? $6B in cash! But wait a minute... The debt pile next to it is roughly the same size. Net, the chest is close to empty. Lifetime losses sit around $6.4B. Why a Chinese horse for the robotics basket? Because after enough hours of supply chain work you do eventually learn that all roads lead to China. I genuinely hope US, China and Europe sort out their differences for the sake of capitalism itself. (how noble, I know) However, if this company doesn't finally commit to two sectors or better yet one, this is a slow death valley waiting to happen. Wannabe conglomerates that hold every card get priced like they'll never dominate any of the chosen sectors. 1000 shares, 10.40 avg. Riding the Xi visit run up per my earlier post. May taught us the summit premium dies sooner than one would expect, so a godcandle before October cuts me to 200 sh and a tracker. Size only increases on solid execution. Part 2 comes when the October numbers show whether XPeng finally learned to pick their lane. I'm long and biased -Acies

Trump is 80. Xi 73. Putin 73. Xi and Putin purged their heirs. Trump won't name one. All three run nuclear states that scale up the ego and the insanity while accountability shrinks every year. People think old rulers go crazy because they're old. No. They go crazy the day the last person who could tell them no gets brutally pushed out. Putin's opposition vanished around 2004, Xi's around 2013. Age is just the count of years since the opposition decided to jump off a balcony. An old man wants to be in the history books at all costs. It's irrelevant whether they are seen as famous or infamous. No need to care about future generations when you're doing everything in your power to prove your candle isn't being snuffed out. I'm sick of their shit but still trying to see optimism in the world. -Acies

So you're trying to tell me after all of the "it's over" headlines leading into Monday. The only sector that got sold off was everything to do with $SMH Can't keep yourself away from the roulette table, can you? -Acies

To those suddenly bullish about $ORCL Good print, not arguing that. 30% growth, 30 bil in new bookings. But we all see the same credit default risk chart, right? Insurance on their debt hit a record in July, rating one notch above junk Five straight quarters of negative free cash flow. The cherry on top being that half the backlog still sits with a customer that lost 21 billion last year. Or am I taking crazy pills here. -Acies

A brief $SOFI analysis -The guild bank. It's trading near the lows again which made me sit down to understand the obsession. You people are more fanatical than IREN holders so naturally I had to know what's the secret sauce. The co is genuinely worth more than a year ago. Tangible book value per share up 56%, $45B of deposits, profit guide up 72%. You're right about that and the market is mostly arguing with you about the multiple. Core holding material for me? No. At $17 it's fairly priced for a bank that earns 9% on tangible equity today and promises 20 to 30% later. My range is $15 to $21 and I don't risk the middle. Seven hours of work did greenlight 500 sh in my brain for future reference, but I'd like them a tad cheaper. The most obvious magic that keeps you coming back is that you bank there. The app has a buy button. Every metric you see only goes up by design. Covered calls pay you to wait. Time feels like income. Then Noto buys the dip and the loop closes. GME potential? Not yet. It's already a congregation. What's missing is a giant injustice done to the members, the kind that makes one lean into mild psychosis. Muddy Waters tried in March and it didn't take. 1.27B shares, 10% short, nobody trapped. No trapped shorts, no squeeze. Two things from the 8-Ks before you go white knight mode. Noto and the CFO took $58M out through prepaid variable forwards. Legal, but "never sold a share" is only true on paper. An S&P 500 inclusion needs a $22.7B market cap, so there's also a world, roughly 15 cents from here, where those passive flows are coming. For the time being I like HOOD more, it's my core play in the sector. Not really an easy sector to pick a horse in mind you. Where I'd jump in it with you: The next potential post earnings dump followed by a Noto Form 4 or the 15 per sh range. Whichever comes first. A profit guide raise next to the revenue guide would also change my mind. In conclusion, idk what you're smoking but I can see the appeal. NFA -Acies

So $TTWO has chosen to be a hedge today during the wider panic. One year into this and I'm still nowhere closer to figuring out how the moves happen. -Acies