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S&P futures opened -16 handles Sunday night at 6 PM and immediately rallied. At one point the E-minis were +65 handles and now have “settled in” at +37 handles.
The markets looked like we would have a dramatic Monday drop following Friday’s schmeissing (futures were trading lower throughout the weekend).
I remain bearish. However, as I mentioned on Friday, given the uncertainty of the markets and the news, the dominance of passive products and strategies (with machines and algos) that exaggerate short-term moves (they know everything about price and nothing about volume) coupled with what appears to be frequent leaks of policy I am limiting my index trading. When I do trade (on the short side) it is for very quick trades.
My comments of Friday remain very much intact:
I See Tail Risk to the Left and to the Right
* But more to the left!
The volatility of certain sectors demonstrated yesterday — particularly semiconductors and memory — is growing extreme and (to be honest) I am not sure what it portends for the near or intermediate term.
I do know when Micron (MU) trades down to $858 and closes at $931 (+$17 on the day) and Sandisk (SNDK) trades down to $1,276 and closes at $1,391 (-$12) such wide intraday swings render trading difficult to impossible.
This extreme intraday volatility has become routine in a market that now more resembles a casino than a capital market.
As would be said on “American Bandstand” — I give it a 78 I am not sure of the beat but it’s hard to dance to.
This sort of extreme volatility likely indicates a lot of uncertainty and depending on your risk appetite and profile, most should pass on trading these stocks. And if you are trading the QQQs one might reconsider VAR (“value at risk’) and reducing the size of your trading (and investing) positions.
$MSOS As of 11:51 AM EDT, a staggering 74.41% of today’s consolidated MSOS volume is clearing off-exchange and via private Dark Pools. Out of the roughly 2.51 million shares that have changed hands, 1,865,679 shares bypassed the public lit markets entirely. Large block desks are…
* Per my previous “Tales” in which I made the point regarding the low-quality revenue in this space due to a lot of it coming from venture-backed firms that have no future like Character AI, here is some data. Tweet and subtweet. The first tweet claims 80% of Anthropic’s and Open AI’s revenue comes from startups. I have no idea if this is true or not, but it seems plausible, when you see what these startups are actually doing both on the revenue and expense side. The subtweet from Chamath Palihapitiya of all people verifies these numbers. Then the bar graph he includes also indicates 80% of all venture funding is now going into the AI space. In dollar terms, that is a massive number, and dwarfs the $ invested in the dot-com cycle per the data below, and is also much more concentrated. The scale at which they and private capital now invest in these startups is now at another level.
A giant hunk of OpenAI and Anthropic revenue is coming from garbage that has no economics, does not need to exist, and only exists due to greater fool theory investing, and will eventually not exist, just like Character AI, which went from $2.7 billion to almost $0 in an instant. Same thing that happened in the dot-com era and sent Exodus and a lot of other things to $0. On top of that, another giant hunk of the revenue that remains for Anthropic and OpenAI comes from distillation, which will have to slow because everything for the most part has already been stolen. Even Meta ($META) apparently did it to build their new model, and has now cut it off, which is funny and ironic.
Silicon Valley really did create its own circular self-fulfilling money-recycling machine. That is one more reason they are all so promotional about this stuff. There is no underlying economics, the only thing they have to rely on is the next greater fool.
* Nvidia’s ($NVDA) Jensen Huang saves the day yesterday by claiming he doesn’t need to backstop CoreWeave ($CRWV), “because their cost of capital is decreasing.” There was a time when you would lose all credibility for saying something obviously that stupid, wrong, and untrue. Because of that, nobody even would even say that sort of thing. Now, it is the exact opposite world. The more crazy and outlandish a statement, the more one is rewarded for it. These guys, and their circle, have become worse than politicians.
He then went on to extol the virtues of CRWV. If CRWV is so great, why doesn’t NVDA just buy them, capture the value, and solve the whole problem? Because none of it is true and if NVDA were to buy CRWV, they inherit all of the losses, and the balance sheet, and lose the ability to sell into them and recognize all the revenue without the offsetting expense. For all intents and purposes, CRWV is really just an SPV that was created to consume NVDA parts. It is an accounting vehicle built to inflate NVDA revenue and profits, in my view. NVDA invested $100 million into CRWV privately in 2023, and anchored the actual IPO with $250 million, and without their participation, the deal might not have even gotten done.
It is amazing to me GAAP allows for all of this shenanigans. If it didn’t, the internet bubble implosion, where the same stuff was done to lesser of a degree, may not have happened as well. When it is all over, the history books will reference this stuff, but nothing will probably change, and then it will happen all over again with something else in another 10-20 years.
CoreWeave’s CEO claimed his stock was going down due to the market selling his stock irrationally. If it is irrational for the market to sell his stock, why do he and all the insiders there sell it like nobody’s business? The amount of insider selling there is staggering.
“Before CoreWeave imploded, itsthree co-founders had been busy dumping stock, a lot of it, totaling $3.3 billion since the company’s March 2025 IPO. Michael Intrator, Brian Venturo and Brannin McBee sold $2.4 billion this year alone, according to Bloomberg’s new report on corporate filings. Intrator has sold more than $907 million in shares this year. McBee’s sales since the IPO total $1.06 billion, equivalent to 40.4% of his undiluted stake at the listing. Venturo has sold more than $1.2 billion, representing over 35% of his original holding.”
If it is so irrational to sell the stock, where is the press release from them indicating ALL insider selling will now stop, and the 10b5’s are cancelled? Diversification is no longer an excuse. They have taken enough money out. I will cut these guys a break. The stock peaked at $184. I will give them a break and allow them to include the term that no selling is allowed until the stock gets back to $150, which is still well below the all time high.
