The oil ETF $USO currently has 14,923,603 shares outstanding. The short interest is 19,660,351 shares or ~130% - Do you remember what happened to GME years ago in a similar situation? Yes, not only there is government price suppression ongoing, but this is one of the many data points signalling how investors are shorting oil to an obscene degree Don't be surprised if as soon as "tank bottoms" become headlines, the biggest short squeeze ever in the commodity markets triggers, along with a rush to secure crude oil in short supply to replenish critically low commercial and strategic oil reserves across the globe

S&P 500 SENTIMENT Coming into today, inverse ETF volume had hit 42% of spec total. Without a broader negative catalyst, this is where pullbacks historically stop.

Why are Mag 7s suddenly scrambling to sell expensive equity? Because as we reported a month ago, the debt channel has shut (except for occasional SPVs). Good lucking funding $5 trillion in capex

TRUMP: $700 MILLION INVESTMENT IN COAL

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.

Texas AG Ken Paxton opened an investigation into Celsius $CELH and Alani Nutrition over energy drink marketing practices. The probe focuses on whether Alani Nu misled consumers about safety for teens and children. Alani Nu contains 200 mg of caffeine per 12-oz can, and regulators are reviewing whether its packaging, branding, and warnings adequately disclose risks for younger consumers. The investigation follows a lawsuit tied to the death of a 17-year-old in Texas who allegedly consumed Alani Nu.

Remember when shale companies would keep drilling negative ROIC wells and fund them with debt or equity or converts or literally any idiotic funding source. That’s why they’d trade at 3x EBITDA. $GOOG just told you that it’s basically a shale company. They cannot stop spending on negative ROIC datacenters…

How do you erase a massive national debt without raising taxes or defaulting? You quietly tax the savers. It’s a strategy called Financial Repression. The Fed used it 70 years ago, and now they're planning to use it again. Here's how it works: After WWII, US debt had skyrocketed to 106% of GDP. The government couldn't slash spending without crushing the post-war economy, and hiking taxes further was a political death sentence. So, they chose a third option: Shrink the debt with inflation. Here is how the playbook worked: 1. Cap the yields: The Fed pegged long-term government bond yields at a low 2.5%. 2. Let inflation run: When post-war price controls lifted, inflation quickly peaked past 10%. If you were a disciplined citizen holding a government bond, you got your guaranteed 2.5% interest. But because of soaring prices, your real purchasing power was eroding by roughly 6% a year. The government effectively repaid yesterday's debt with today's dollars that were losing their value. Without this strategy, the system might have collapsed. But by 1974, this silent plan dragged the Debt-to-GDP ratio all the way down to 23%. America's post WWII boom is often seen as an example of miraculous economic growth. But more than growth or responsible budgeting, it's the massive wealth transfer from the public that saved the system. Why is this relevant now? For the first time since WWII, Debt-to-GDP ratios are hitting nearly the same levels. Kevin Warsh has been hinting that the new Fed will be a more disciplined one, and financial repression is always a silent but powerful tool. In today's Substack post, I talked about how to see this coming and what you can do to protect your wealth once it kicks in. I'll drop the link in the comments.

Iran will stop negotiating with the U.S. Thanks for playing

Amazon is going cash flow negative. Alphabet and Meta not so far.