$SPX breadth continues to deteriorate. On Tuesday the index was flat with 249 stocks advancing and 253 declining. Today was flat again, but there were only 176 advancing and 326 declining:

🔴Fars News, citing an informed source: The news coverage by Western media outlets, including Axios, about another round of negotiations is false and is designed more to manage the market and oil prices.

New post, a long one. Deep forensic dive on $MSFT, $GOOG, $ORCL, $META, $AMZN with CU Universe stock rankings and the return of the fat pitches AICT Composite Value Map. michaeljburry.substack.com/p…

Gallup: Record-high 89% of Americans think their government is corrupt

The Heretic’s Guide to AI’s Stars Part IV: The Big 5 Hyperscalers & the Missing $3 Trillion Current GPU pricing is representative of today’s scarcity, but the duration mismatch playing out undermines any guarantee the demand will continue at this level for long enough to justify today’s valuations. I am a fair-weather fan of Nvidia’s names for its GPUs, but the newest line of chips I’ve dubbed LEAPFROG. michaeljburry.substack.com/p… A study of overlooked footnotes to the 10-K and 10-Q filings from Amazon, Meta, Alphabet, Microsoft & Oracle

$GOOG 350p 6/17/2027 filled at the bid

Absolutely GIANT $SPY $10 BILLION+ Worth of Dark Pool Prints @ 762.69

🇺🇸 WHAT TO WATCH TODAY — U.S. MARKETS 6:30 PM ET Thu. — 🇯🇵 Japan CPI ~10:30–11:30 PM ET Thu. — 🇯🇵 BOJ Rate Decision 2:00 AM ET — 🇬🇧 UK Retail Sales 2:30 AM ET — 🎙️ BOJ Governor Ueda 9:15 AM ET — 🇺🇸 Industrial Production 9:30 AM ET — 🏦 Fed Vice Chair Michelle Bowman 10:00 AM ET — 🇺🇸 Leading Economic Index All Day — ⚡ Quarterly Options/Futures Expiration 🔥 BOJ — KEY EVENT The BOJ is expected to raise rates 25bp to 1.25%. With a hike largely anticipated, the bigger catalyst will be Ueda’s guidance on further tightening. Hawkish BOJ → JPY/JGB yields ↑ → carry trades pressured → global yields potentially ↑ 🇺🇸 INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION August industrial production and capacity utilization arrive at 9:15 AM ET. A strong print could reinforce the higher-rate narrative following this week’s Fed decision. 🏦 FED — BOWMAN Michelle Bowman speaks at 9:30 AM ET — the first scheduled Fed policymaker appearance after the FOMC. Markets will listen closely for any clues on the post-FOMC rate path and inflation outlook. ⚡ QUARTERLY EXPIRATION Friday is a major derivatives expiration session. Expect potentially elevated volume and positioning-driven volatility, particularly around the open and closing auction. 🛢️ OIL No EIA inventory report today, but crude remains an important inflation and rates driver.

According to an informed federal official, in the coming months the Trump administration plans to send a total of 40,000 Mark 84 and Blu-117 bombs to the government of Israel. Each bomb weighs 2,000 pounds. This appears to be the largest transfer of conventional explosive ordnance from the United States in modern history. How big is this shipment? It amounts to 40,000 tons of bombs. For perspective, the largest American air raid of World War Two was the Eighth Air Force’s attack on Berlin in March of 1945. Combined, the 2,023 Allied aircraft involved dropped about 3,000 tons of bombs. That’s 7.5 percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. That same month, March of 1945, the US Army Air Forces began the single most destructive bombing raid in human history, Operation Meetinghouse over Tokyo. More than 100,000 Japanese civilians were killed. By the end of that operation, the US had dropped 1,600 tons of bombs. That’s four percent of what Trump is sending to Israel. World War Two ended five months later, when the US dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. The shipment Trump is sending to Israel amounts to more than three times the destructive power of that nuclear explosion. There is no precedent for what the Trump administration is doing. Nor is there a justification. The government of Israel is not fighting World War Two, or even a war. It is engaged in periodic skirmishes with a guerrilla force in Lebanon, and it is working to exterminate an unarmed civilian population in Gaza. Neither front requires modern 2,000-pound bombs. An American-made Mark 84 has a destruction radius of half a mile. It releases a thermal wave the temperature of the surface of the sun. Within 100 feet of the explosion, rock melts and human flesh turns to vapor. The bomb collapses apartment buildings and leaves craters thirty-five feet deep. Until the war with Iran, the US military generally avoided using the Mark 84 in urban areas. It kills too many civilians. For the Netanyahu government, that’s been the upside. In the weeks after October 7, the IDF dropped nearly six hundred 2,000-pound bombs on densely populated areas in Gaza, including on more than 100 officially designated civilian evacuation zones. The slaughter was so grotesque and embarrassing that for a moment the Biden administration paused a shipment of Mark 84s. Those shipments quickly resumed under Trump. Now they’ve accelerated. It’s hard to overstate the scale of the crime the Israeli government is committing in Gaza. Over the last three years, more than a quarter-million Palestinians have been killed or wounded by Israeli forces there. The majority of them have been noncombatants: women, the elderly and tens of thousands of children. Many thousands more remain missing, presumably entombed under the rubble of 200,000 collapsed buildings. So far the Israelis have destroyed 92 percent of all homes in Gaza, and 34 of the 36 hospitals. By comparison, the 1945 Allied bombings of Dresden, now acknowledged as a war crime, destroyed about half of the city’s inhabited buildings. By any definition, what the Netanyahu government has done in Gaza is genocide. The 40,000 new bombs the Trump administration is sending will be used to do the same in Lebanon, and likely in other countries in the region. If you wanted to extend the Iran war into the indefinite future, this is exactly what you’d do. So far none of this has received public scrutiny. At some point, inevitably, it will be described in media accounts as an “arms sale.” It is not an arms sale. It is a gift, funded by American taxpayers through the Foreign Military Financing program, an arrangement designed to disguise welfare as capitalism: Congress appropriates money to the executive branch, which transfers the cash to Israel to “buy” American-made weapons, in this case from General Dynamics. Politicians claim this is a win for America. Most voters have no idea they paid for it. The bill in this case is about $3 billion. Add that to the $352 billion the US Treasury has transferred to Israel since 1951. How did this happen? The request for 40,000 new high-explosive civilian-killing bombs originated at the US Embassy in Jerusalem, which is run by Christian Zionist Ambassador Mike Huckabee and his aide David Milstein, who is the stepson of Fox News host Mark Levin. From there it moved to the State Department, where Marco Rubio enthusiastically approved it. At this point, only four more people need to sign off before the bombs ship to Israel: Senators Jim Risch and Jeanne Shaheen, the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; and Congressmen Brian Mast and Gregory Meeks, the top two members of the equivalent House committee. All four are committed neocons. Collectively they’ve taken millions from the Israel lobby. In 2015, Brian Mast traveled to Israel to volunteer for the Israeli military. In 2023, Mast showed up in the House of Representatives wearing an IDF uniform. It’s hard to imagine any of them hesitating before sending more free bombs to Israel. Only public outrage can stop this.

Solar is so obviously the future

Bears on AI spending have asked, "how will all this be monetized?" The answer has been commercial enterprises are already doing that by buying compute, burning tokens, maxing out that compute, that token usage." There is good reason for that, but perhaps it does not inform long-term demand. So now bears ask "for how long?" The pyramid below is not a static economic construct. There is strong pressure to migrate upward. Every enterprise that is profit-maximizing will seek to move up in the pyramid, and will in fact do so. That move is compression. And it will betray the ultimate return on invested capital (ROIC) on all this spend.

U.S. Supreme Court refuses Trump administration request to enforce postal service rule limiting mail-in voting

$SPY is between the MVC at $760 & the Dark Pool Zone at $758. MVC is the contract with the greatest absolute gamma exposure (GEX).

China’s central bank officially bought +20 tons of gold in August, This matches its largest monthly purchase since October 2023

US CPI PREVIEW 🇺🇸 Friday’s August US CPI report could be one of the most consequential inflation prints in months, with the outcome potentially tipping the balance on whether the Fed hikes rates at next week’s FOMC meeting. Consensus expectations point to headline CPI rising around 0.4% MoM, a sharp acceleration from 0.1% in July, while core CPI is expected around 0.2% MoM. On a year-over-year basis, headline inflation is expected near 3.4%, with core easing to around 2.4%. The expected acceleration in headline inflation is largely an energy story. Energy prices are seen rebounding roughly 2.5% MoM after falling 1.5% in July, driven in part by a 4%+ seasonally adjusted increase in gasoline prices. Food inflation is expected around 0.2%, although risks are tilted toward a slightly stronger 0.3% reading. Underneath the headline, however, the core picture looks much more mixed. Travel-related components could provide upside pressure, with airfares expected to rise around 3% MoM and lodging prices rebounding after two particularly weak months. On the other side, medical-care inflation is expected to moderate, apparel prices could decline, used-car inflation should slow and shelter inflation continues to show signs of cooling. Technology goods are another area worth watching. July saw a sharp 1.4% MoM increase in IT goods, partly reflecting previously announced computer price increases. That impulse is expected to fade somewhat in August, potentially removing another source of pressure from core goods inflation. THE FED DECISION 👀 This is where the report becomes especially important. The Fed enters the release with policymakers debating whether recent disinflation is sufficient to justify patience or whether inflation remains sticky enough to warrant another increase in rates. With the September FOMC decision just days away, the composition of the CPI report could matter almost as much as the headline number. A simple framework for Friday: 🔥 0.3% core: would represent a meaningful upside surprise and could significantly strengthen the case for a 25bp hike. ⚖️ 0.2% core: keeps the decision finely balanced. In that scenario, markets are likely to focus heavily on the unrounded number, shelter, services and the eventual core PCE read-through. 🕊️ 0.1% core: would provide much stronger evidence that underlying inflation is cooling and strengthen the case for the Fed to remain on hold. Markets are already leaning toward a more hawkish policy path. Fed funds futures have roughly 15.5bp of tightening priced for next week, 23bp cumulatively by October and 37bp by year-end, meaning the CPI print has plenty of potential to force a repricing in either direction. Bottom line: don’t just watch headline CPI. Watch core inflation, shelter, services, energy and the PCE read-through. And with consensus sitting almost exactly at the dividing line, even a few basis points could matter. 0.1% = hold gets stronger. 0.2% = debate stays alive. 0.3% = hike risk rises sharply. With the Fed decision just days away, Friday’s CPI could set the tone for rates, the dollar and risk assets heading into the FOMC.

Bank of Japan to hike key interest rates 0.25 percentage point in September meeting, Kyodo News says

How much more do you need to see before you realise he knew Oct 7th was happening and he had no problem seeing israeli’s lose their lives. Demon!

$TSLA bouncing off blue line. $355.6 key, $362.5 band above

$SPX SELL SIGNAL → TARGETS HIT. Now today’s low is the DECIDER. Hold it → relief bounce into the Daily FVG resistance first. Break it → W3 should start expanding LOWER. Either way, both paths still favor LOWER after the bounce / break resolves.

Much of that negative exposure at $765 has dissipated on $SPY; negative exposure at $760 has increased and is now the MVC. Potential downside scalp under $760 if momentum holds. Might see a slight vol uptick, especially as geopolitical tensions rise.