"South Korean chipmaker SK Hynix on Wednesday released its third-quarter earnings results, which sharply beats estimates for the July-to-September period.

Here are SK Hynix’s third-quarter results compared with LSEG SmartEstimates, which are weighted toward forecasts from analysts who are more consistently accurate:

• Revenue: 104.62 trillion won ($78.86 billion) vs. 98.34 trillion won expected
• Operating profit: 83.33 trillion won vs. 76.72 trillion won expected

Revenue rose 327.9% from a year earlier, while operating profit climbed 632.1% year on year.

Compared with the previous quarter, revenue climbed 31.9%, while operating profit surged 37.6%.

SK Hynix, a key supplier of high-bandwidth memory, or HBM, chips to Nvidia, has emerged as one of the biggest beneficiaries of the global AI infrastructure buildout, as technology companies ramp up spending on data centers and advanced processors.

In August, SK Hynix had announced plans to repurchase and cancel 40 trillion won worth of its own shares, while raising its shareholder return target to more than 50% of cumulative free cash flow generated between 2025 and 2027.

Last week, SK Hynix announced that its U.S. subsidiary Solidigm would halt its review of potential pre-IPO fundraising and IPO options, citing market volatility and share price trends.

The company said it would continue to assess investment timing, scale and financing options to support Solidigm’s growth and enhance shareholder value."

Anthropic's (ANTH.PVT) long-awaited stock market debut could be just weeks away.

The artificial intelligence startup publicly filed for its initial public offering on Monday, releasing its S-1 - the prospectus a company must file with the Securities and Exchange Commission before selling stock to the public. That started a countdown that could end in one of the largest IPOs in history as soon as mid-November.

Before its stock can begin trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker ANT, Anthropic and its Wall Street bankers have to get through an investor roadshow, set a price, and receive a final green light from regulators.

Under SEC rules, the earliest Anthropic could start trading is Monday, Nov. 16, according to Yahoo Finance calculations. At the pace SpaceX (SPCX) set in June - when it went from public filing to first trade in 23 days - Anthropic would debut on Wednesday, Nov. 18.

This month in international markets saw significant volatility in Brazilian equities. EWZ, which tracks the MSCI Brazil GRTR USD index, surged +12.5% at the beginning of the month, as it priced in the probability of a Flavio Bolsonaro win after a strong showing in round one of the Brazilian elections. However, when the dust had settled, Lula unexpectedly came from behind, and the EWZ gave back all its gains and then some, with a -18.4% drop on Monday.

I wanted to figure out the investors viewed Bolsonaro as so much more market friendly. Curiously, I found that the Brazilian stock market did extremely well during Lula's two prior terms and the third current term and was slightly negative during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, the father of losing candidate Flavio Bolsonaro. In Brazil, the presidential terms are four years long and align neatly with the calendar year. This makes it really easy to track returns using the MSCI Brazil, which would be the gold standard anyway. All returns are gross returns using USD currency:

I certainly would not have expected the less market friendly candidate to outperform his counterpart (presumably with similar policies as his son) by such a drastic margin, even after eating that monster -18.4% single day drop this week. However, to be fair, Lula 1 was an incredible time for emerging markets, one which likely could not be reproduced again. And Bolsonaro's presidency coincided with the pandemic, which could have hampered returns.

To control for this, I compared the MSCI Brazil against several other benchmarks to which the country belongs. ACWI includes all countries, ACWI ex-USA is the international market excluding the USA, and emerging markets are the MSCI emerging markets. Additionally, while Brazil does not belong to the MSCI USA, MSCI World (a misnomer which means developed markets including USA), and MSCI World ex-USA (developed markets excluding USA), these are included for comparison. Brazil has trounced all of these benchmarks under Lula's presidency and badly lagged all of them under Jair Bolsonaro.

Prediction markets have exploded in popularity, and now Wall Street seems to want a piece of the action.

The NYSE is preparing to introduce binary options on 12 major stocks and ETFs, including Nvidia, Tesla, Apple and SPY.

The idea is pretty simple. Instead of buying the stock, you take a position on whether it finishes above or below a certain price. If you're right, you get a fixed payout. If you're wrong, you lose your stake.

And they're not stopping there.

The exchange is also exploring contracts tied directly to earnings results, meaning people could eventually bet on whether a company reports revenue or EPS above a specific number. Those contracts still need regulatory approval.

With prediction markets already attracting huge interest, bringing this kind of trading to some of the world's most popular stocks could be a pretty big deal.

Earnings season is already chaotic enough and now we are adding all-or-nothing bets on the actual results....

Nvidia has said it will invest $3 billion in Meta after the social media and AI giant announced plans to raise $95 billion to support its investments in artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Meta on Monday said it would initially raise $35 billion in underwritten public equity offerings, before raising an additional $60 billion with an at-the-market program.

The announcement said Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices, and Broadcom were interested in purchasing up to $5 billion in shares.

Nvidia announced its investment on Tuesday, adding that Meta would expand Vera Rubin and Vera CPU deployment, and that the two companies would deepen their partnership on Muse, the social media giant’s AI agent that launched last month.

Both companies’ shares were flat in premarket trading on Tuesday.

Nvidia has been rapidly building up stakes in companies powering the AI boom, investing in OpenAI, Anthropic, Intel and XAI. 

The chip giant has participated in 121 investment rounds so far this year, according to Dealroom, up from just 13 in 2022. 

Hock Tan was running out of patience.

The CEO of chip maker Broadcom had spent nearly two months trying to get banks to commit over $40 billion to the largest artificial-intelligence debt deal ever. It was meant to allow Anthropic to lease specialized chips that Broadcom is developing with Google.

Though Anthropic was the main beneficiary of the deal, the startup needed help from its bigger commercial partners to raise the money. Together, Anthropic and Broadcom were trying to close the deal ahead of Anthropic’s filing for its widely anticipated initial public offering.

Broadcom, the supplier of chips to Anthropic, was at the center of the action. Thanks to its sterling credit rating, it had already agreed to provide some financial guarantees to make banks more comfortable with the sizable risk of lending over $40 billion. But over the past few weeks, some of the banks grew increasingly anxious about participating in the deal, known as “Project North Star,” people familiar with the matter said.

Given the rise in interest rates and growing difficulties in the markets for artificial intelligence ventures, some banks felt they weren’t being compensated enough to take the risk and considered pulling out altogether, the people said.
In the end, Broadcom’s CEO held 11th-hour talks with bank executives over the weekend to get them to finalize their commitment to the deal and also agreed to higher interest rates on the loans, the people familiar with the matter said.

Read more

https://www.wsj.com/finance/broadcom-ceo-intervened-to-seal-63-billion-anthropic-debt-deal-c807754f

Fed Chair Kevin Warsh will hold a press conference tomorrow, Oct 28th, at 2:30pm.

Since Kevin Warsh became fed chair, he's made four major policy appearances. The June FOMC, July FOMC, and Jackson Hole in August, and the September FOMC. In all four cases there was a clear market reaction while he was speaking.

Here's my detailed post about this from before the last time he spoke.

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/1wgaetb/the_warsh_effect_and_wednesdays_rate_announcement/

He is 4 for 4 in causing the market to tank during his Q&A. I talked about him making wishy-warshy comments in the session. It scares investors.

If this pattern holds, then there will be a selloff during his press conference. I wrote this before his last appearance and it's exactly what happened. The market might go up before the press conference, and it might go up later. But he's 4 for 4 in causing it to go down during the press conference, especially during the Q&A session.

China's major cloud service providers, including Alibaba, Tencent and ByteDance, have asked South Korea's Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix for long-term server DRAM supply agreements, with some sounding out ultra-long 10-year contracts running through 2035. The requested products are server DDR and low-power LPDDR, driven by a memory shortage as AI data center buildouts accelerate. China has more than 24GW of AI data center capacity, second only to the United States, and its domestic suppliers such as CXMT still lag South Korean vendors in server DRAM competitiveness. U.S. Big Tech's earlier lock-up of supply through long-term contracts has also spurred the Chinese move.

https://finance.biggo.com/news/acfb08d0-180a-4743-8766-69aa08e58088

Before I get into my analysis, let me just say that I use Claude every day and really like Anthropic's products. But I think they are making a pretty large error with their IPO, trying to slide some things by without you noticing.

When you only look at the top 25 pages of the S-1, everything pretty much looks pretty good: Revenues up from $1.16B in H1 2025 to $16.3B in H1 2026. Q2 2026 GAAP operating profit was $1.03B. They have $131.7B in cash and near-cash equivalents. But if you look at the accounting mechanics, the accounting treatments, the working capital loops, and particularly footnote 9, you start to see that the structure of Anthropic is poised to be that of a high margin software company, while the balance sheet looks more like a highly leveraged utility. This is 100% GAAP-compliant, audited accounting and not considered illegal.

Here are some red flags I found:

Training costs are number uno, there is no gross margin line item anywhere in the S-1. If you open virtually any SaaS S-1 you will see the revenue line, and directly below that COGs or Gross Profit line, then operating expenses. Anthropic has chosen to remove the gross margin line. They have taken their cost of goods sold (customer inference & computing power) and model training cost and put them into a single line aggregate expense called "Compute and infrastructure," which came to $8.95B in H1 2026.

They only have two reasons for doing so:

One either the company has absolutely dreadful marginal profitability per unit provided (not too profitable at the service level) or the multi-billion dollar training campaigns that go on nearly all the time (AI Labs are continuously training the next model; model development doesn't stop) are essential recurring capex rather than optional discretionary R&D spend.

Convertible Notes Subsidy:

So take a look at the bottom of the income statement. There's a large amount of losses in Q2 2026 for changes in the fair value of the convertible notes amounting to $72.4B. Most of the wall street crowd will just brush it off as a non-cash accounting item, as the valuation of notes had gone up by a considerable amount in their last private funding rounds. But if you take a deeper look at those tens of billions of dollars of losses in the form of convertible notes issued by the company between 2023 and 2025 were entirely and soley to cover the enormous training compute costs, which were paid for by the company in the form of cheap equity shares to Google and Amazon (the cloud providers). So I hypothesize that Anthropic is subsidizing their training expense, as part of notes to the Cloud providers Google and Amazon, to shift the Billions of dolllars from top line COGs, into liabilities and R&D. This is 100% GAAP-compliant, audited accounting; it is not illegal, or considered fraud. I'll cover the next part in a second.

Off-Balance Sheet Tsunami:

The $587 billion take-or-pay obligation trap (Footnote 9 of S-1): Total off balance sheet liabilites were up to nearly 6x what they were a year earlier, reaching $587B by the end of Q2 2026

Lets break the numbers down a bit to see where we are:

• $265.6B in irrevocable minimum fixed purchase agreements (which includes at least $114.5B to Google Cloud through 2033 and $110B to AWS through 2036); around 80% of that is non-discretionary.
• Uncommeced leases, under ASC 842 the leases can be deferred indefinitely until the date of official occupancy, so this category of leases alone make up about $321.4B of off balance sheet liabilites, even though they represent a real liability to the company.
• Broadcom 9% debt loop, of that, it contains $161.2B of Broadcom TPU leases which are 5 years out (around 2030,2031) that were funded with $42B 9% loan facility

So how does this like affect the S-1:

Whenever the company uses those loans to make lease payments they are treated as financing activities rather than operating expenses which allows the company to present the cash-flow are relatively clean, presenting the image that Anthropic is profitable or has decent margins. Typically, if you are leasing out infrastructure, it would be a variable cost as most companies do that scales as usage scales, but in Anthropics case they have effectively turned a variable cost into a fixed cost floor that is irrevocable. They have locked themselves into an exponential growth plan without room for any hitches. They are now forced to produce a spike in revenue before 2027-2030 to service the uncommenced leases, take-or-pay commitments, and regular operations.

So now we see the company is using liabilities as a way to shift expenses but they are doing something weird with revenue too:

Notice the weirdness of the balance sheet: revenues go up steadily, so do their current liabilities, seemingly in lockstep. After I traced the path of the funds, you realize that they are creating a self-looping cycle involving Google/AWS: 48%. of the revenue came through the AWS marketplaces and Google Vertex AI Platform (up from 11% in 2023). Gross vs Net revenue inflation: when a customer pays Anthropic for service via the AWS or Google cloud marketplaces, they are recognizing the full amount as gross revenue (which inflates their sales multiples). The commission paid to the marketplace owner (around 20-27%) is then essentially shifted into the sales and marketing expense line at 19% of all revenue.

Working capital vice effect: 58% of the company's accounts receivable are still in the hands of AWS/Google. The other side of it is that current liabilities and accruals have risen so dramatically that they owe a massive amount to their marketplace owners. They are borrowing picks and shovels to mine for gold at Amazon/Google, sell the gold back to them via the marketplaces, have Amazone/Google hold on to 58% of the receivables from the customers, and book the 255 net margin from the marketplaces as gross revenue.

My Conclusion:

The point I am trying to convey is the fact that Private investors and hyperscalers have reached maximum asset concentrations. They have entered massive commitments with cloud providers in order to fuel hypergrowth necessary for inflating valuations. And now those same agreements are chaining them to a death-trap treadmill without an exit strategy. Even with unstable public markets and enterprise cutbacks looming, this offering seems more like a desperate liquidity release than a fundraising exercise. And if revenue growth breaks the form needed to service Anthropic's or any large AI startup's liabilities, the broader market is in trouble.

Edit: Tightened up my phrasing around the Convertible Notes section; I am in no way saying Anthropic is doing something illegal or breaking GAAP compliance; I am just highlighting the choices around their accounting practices. And to clarify the mechanics, I understand that compute invoices still hit the compute and infrastructure OpEx and the $72.4B charge is an unrealized equity fair-value mark on notes; my point is that the economic round trip of issuing cheap convertible debt to cloud providers to fund the cash needed for the massive compute bills is a massive hidden cost of capital

SOFI's numbers are out, and the stock is soaring in the premarket. Highlights include:

Results:

• Adjusted Net Revenue: Jumped 44% year-over-year to $1.4 billion (analyst consensus was $1.26 billion)
• GAAP Net Income: Surged to $241 million compared to $139.4 million in Q3 2025.
• Diluted EPS: Came in at $0.18 (estimates were $0.17)
• Adjusted EBITDA: Climbed 70% to $469.8 million, matching an impressive 34% margin.

Forward Guidance:

• Adjusted Net Revenue
  • 2026: $5.04 Billion (up from $4.75B–$4.85B)
  • 2027: $6.4 Billion (~27% YoY growth)
• Adjusted EBITDA
  • 2026: $1.66 Billion (up from ~$1.60B)
  • 2027: $2.24 Billion
• GAAP EPS:
  • 2026: $0.61 (up from ~$0.60)
  • 2027: $0.90 (vs. $0.82 Wall Street expectation)

Other Highlights:

• Record Membership Growth: Added 1.2 million new members during the quarter, bringing the total base to 17.1 million (a 35% YoY increase).
• Lending Surge: Total lending adjusted net revenue reached $807.4 million.
  • Student loan originations grew 96% to $2.9 billion
  • Personal loans climbed 69% to $12.6 billion
  • Home loans rose 44% to $1.4 billion

I'm a long-term believer in SOFI, and I think the stock has a very bright future. However, it's recent performance has been disappointing to say the least. I'm viewing this as a buying opportunity rather than an opportunity for current SOFI shareholders a chance to cut losses and move on to other opportunities.

Any other thoughts?

Been looking into SK Hynix lately and their Q3 earnings expectations are kinda insane.

Saw estimates putting revenue at around 99.68 trillion KRW and net income near 60 trillion. That’s some pretty wild YoY growth if those numbers actually hold up.

I get that AI demand is booming and everyone needs more HBM, but I’m starting to wonder how much of that is already priced in. Feels like everyone talks about Nvidia when it comes to AI, while memory companies don’t get nearly as much attention.

With HBM4 ramping up and memory prices climbing, I’m curious if SK Hynix still has more room to run. Then again, expectations are already so high that even good earnings might not be enough.

Are you following this? Are we still early in the AI memory boom or getting a little too excited here?

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, has reportedly filed to go public.

And the numbers being thrown around are pretty ridiculous.

$16.3 billion in revenue in just six months, up from $1.1 billion in the same period last year. Nearly 15x growth.

But then there's the $80.7 billion reported loss, although around $72 billion of that is apparently down to accounting adjustments rather than actual cash spent.

And now there's talk of a $1.5 trillion valuation.

It's pretty crazy how quickly these AI companies have grown and just how much money is involved.

Would you actually buy Anthropic shares at a $1.5 trillion valuation, or is that getting a bit carried away?

I’ve been minorly invested in Meta for a while (48 shares purchased from 2021-2025) and am just wondering how big of an impact their recent settlements/judgements have on their financials.

The $25B New Mexico judgement is large but seemed manageable for a company of their size, but their recent CapEx expenses from the earnings seem to counter that thought.

Meta’s current qualified legal liabilities are ~$46B including a youth-related settlement of up to $18.6B and the $25B New Mexico judgement. Their recent earnings showed an $82.45B war chest, but also negative free cash-flow of $-2.1B for the quarter.

The legal liabilities aren’t immediate costs and will be spread out over a number of years, but with a negative cash-flow and extensive future obligations they will either need to outgrow or deplete their cash holdings. At up to 55.8% of their current cash holdings this seems like a substantial obligation. This doesn’t include future lawsuits which seem to always follow successful settlements or potential forced changes to their advertising business, their largest sector.

I’m wondering how large of an effect current and future legal obligations will have on their ability to compete in the AI race.

Microsoft said Monday that it’s offering buyouts to a wide swath of employees as it strives to balance a costly AI infrastructure buildout with capital efficiency.

The software maker announced a new voluntary exit offer for certain workers in the U.S., Canada, India and the United Kingdom at its experience level of 70 or below.

Around 60,000 people are eligible, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be named while discussing an internal matter. The effort affects about 27% of Microsoft’s total workforce of 223,000 people.

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/26/microsoft-msft-voluntary-buyouts.html

This is the daily discussion, so anything stocks related is fine, but the theme for today is on technical analysis (TA), but if TA is not your thing then just ignore the theme.

Some helpful day to day links, including news:

• Finviz for charts, fundamentals, and aggregated news on individual stocks
• Bloomberg market news
• StreetInsider news:
  • Market Check - Possibly why the market is doing what it's doing including sudden spikes/dips
  • Reuters aggregated - Global news

Technical analysis (TA) uses historical price movements, real time data, indicators based on math and/or statistics, and charts; all of which help measure the trajectory of a security. TA can also be used to interpret the actions of other market participants and predict their actions.

The main benefit to TA is that everything shows up in the price (commonly known as "priced in"): All news, investor sentiment, and changes to fundamentals are reflected in a security's price.

TA can be useful on any timeframe, both short and long term.

Intro to technical analysis by Stockcharts chartschool and their article on candlesticks

If you have questions, please see the following word cloud and click through for the wiki:

Indicator - Trade Signals - Lagging Indicator - Leading Indicator - Oversold - Overbought - Divergence - Whipsaw - Resistance - Support - Breakout/Breakdown - Alerts - Trend line - Market Participants - Moving average - RSI - VWAP - MACD - ATR - Bollinger Bands - Ichimoku clouds - Methods - Trend Following - Fading - Channels - Patterns - Pivots

See our past daily discussions here. Also links for: Technicals Tuesday, Options Trading Thursday, and Fundamentals Friday.

Reddit -5% at 137 as I am writing this. They will have earnings on Thursday, and have historically beaten guidance each quarter.

Having used Reddit for 10+ years now, this is the app I always come back to, and it's obviously going nowhere.

On the ad front, I can see the ads getting a lot better each each month, the format is more appealing and the ads themselves are more targeted. What is your opinion and where is RDDT headed?

position: 60 shares @161.6

Costco’s FY2026 results show strong business growth:

• Net sales rose 10.1% to $297.2 billion.
• Diluted EPS increased from $18.21 to $20.76, about 14%.
• Operating cash flow was $15.825 billion, against $6.435 billion in capital expenditure.

Source: Costco’s FY2026 earnings release.

My question is how much of that growth a buyer can pay for without relying on a permanently high earnings multiple.

Using reported EPS of $20.76, a hypothetical entry at 50× earnings means paying $1,038 per share. This is a scenario, not a live price quote.

If the stock trades at 35× earnings five years later:

Calculation: future price = $20.76 × (1 + growth rate)⁵ × 35. Returns exclude dividends, taxes, and transaction costs.

The result that stands out is that even 15% annual EPS growth produces only about 7% annual price appreciation under this multiple contraction.

The limitation is that 35× is an assumption, not an established fair value. Costco could retain a higher multiple, while sustained 15% EPS growth could also prove too optimistic. Reported FY2026 EPS additionally includes a $0.15 fourth-quarter benefit from tariff refunds, net of partial reinvestment.

My tentative conclusion: strong operating performance alone doesn’t settle the valuation question; the eventual multiple materially changes the outcome.

For people who model Costco, which assumption is less defensible over five years: sustained 15% EPS growth or an exit multiple of 35×? What operating evidence supports your view?

https://www.cnbc.com/2026/10/26/meta-stock-offering-ai.html

Meta said Monday it is planning to raise a total of $95 billion to support its investments in AI infrastructure and superintelligence. Nvidia, AMD and Broadcom were interested in purchasing up to $5 billion in shares, Meta said in a statement. The tech giant will initially raise $35 billion in underwritten public equity offerings, before raising an additional $60 billion with an at-the-market program.

The news comes as hyperscalers pour record sums into the AI infrastructure buildout. Goldman Sachs estimates that AI-related capital spending could total about $7.6 trillion from 2026 through 2031, across compute, data centers and power. Meta’s planned investments will support “emerging AI opportunities” including its family of apps, its AI agent Muse and its data center business, the company said Monday. It plans to balance funding for these investments through a mix of operating cash flow, investment-grade debt, partnerships and equity capital.

Quarterly revenue vs. compute & infrastructure expense ($M)

Revenue per compute dollar

Serving margin

Fully loaded cost per revenue dollar, by quarter

^\Includes the $541M donation-matching charge. †Includes the $1.5B Bartz settlement.)

Now I know that gold is a classic rare metal that people should have some exposure to in their accounts anyway, but I think there is potential for a longer run over the coming years, so I am going to make my bull case and bear case. I already have a small position, but I am also planning on purchasing more at the current prices. My ETF of choice is GLD since it tracks the spot price directly and also has an annual expense ratio of 0.4%. If anyone prefers a different method, feel free to say as much in the comments. I have considered buying physical as well.

My Bull Case for buying @ ~$366

• GLD sits about 28% below its 52-week high of $509.70. I realize the run up was a good selling opportunity, but gold is still hovering near $4,000 after a sharp pullback. I feel like investors typically fall into two camps after a big correction: this is either a good opportunity to buy in, or the rally is over. So why'd it drop so much? A combo of interest rate expectations, Treasury yield increases, and the dollar momentarily strengthening. I’ll touch on this more in the bear case.
• Over the last 25 years, gold has outperformed the S&P by about double (938% vs 461%). I know 25 years is pretty arbitrary as far as time horizons go, but I am planning on holding for a long time.
• The US federal debt keeps climbing and climbing. In fiscal year 2026 we hit a record $1.05 trillion in net interest payments. I repeat - over $1T on interest alone! How is the US government planning on reining this in? In my opinion, the likeliest path forward is policies that tolerate inflation and erode the true value of the debt. I foresee a lot of money printing in the near future. In this case, people holding cash lose out.
• Have the structural reasons for buying gold changed in the last few years? Has the US eliminated its fiscal deficit? Has the debt begun shrinking? Has federal interest expense returned to historical norms? Have the central banks stopped diversifying reserves? Has the global monetary system suddenly become more disciplined? I am inclined to say no to all of these questions. The short-term circumstances for gold provide some pretty strong headwinds (see the bear case), but I think the long-term forces still apply.
• Gold still matters from a de-dollarization perspective. No fiat currency has ever survived in the history of mankind, and the US dollar can go the same way. Gold can’t be printed like fiat, and there is continued instability in the Middle East. That cuts both ways, though - the conflict supports gold as a safe haven, but it has also strengthened the dollar and kept energy prices elevated (again see bear case).
• As far as following the “smart” money goes, central banks bought over 1,000 metric tons a year from 2022 through 2024, and still added 863 tons in 2025.
• A minor, but legitimate, player is the AI build out. Gold in electronics accounts for ~7% of annual gold demand, compared to jewelry, central bank buying, and investment demand. Figured I would include it since this is a global movement.

My Bear Case for avoiding @ ~$366

• Gold pays no yield, and higher interest rates or other strong performing assets apply pressure or are at least tempting/more exciting.
• A stronger dollar can pressure it, as we’ve seen recently, even if its momentary.
• Reuters reported on Oct 12 that the dollar was near its strongest level in a year and a half, helped by safe-haven demand amid the war in Iran. Higher energy prices are likely to keep inflation elevated, and the SPR is at historic lows. Pressure on other routes to get oil out of the Middle East is exacerbating this.
• All of this points to Warsh keeping interest rates high or pushing them higher. Keep in mind that we are expecting another Fed rate decision on Oct 28, and a hike is definitely on the table.
• The 30 year Treasury bonds are at ~5.3%.
• Some critics think the growth of the US economy could outpace the debt (I don’t personally agree with this).

Possible PT?

Just using this part to say that historical performance is not a guarantee of future price action. Gold can always stop climbing for a number of reasons, and just because gold’s historical rebounds from large corrections have seen it climb higher doesn’t mean that will happen again. Not financial advice, lol.

Quick math on a possible 5-year price target using gold’s 25-year return (938%):

• The multiple of a 938% return = 938/100 + 1 = 10.38x
• Annualized return over 25 years = 10.38^(1/25) - 1 = 1.098 - 1 = 0.098, or 9.8% a year
• Applying that rate for 5 years = 1.098^5 = ~1.6x
• Apply that multiple to the current price: $366 * 1.6 = ~$586. Shave off about 2% for fees and call it ~$575.

That’s about $65 above the 52-week high of $509.70, or roughly 57% above today’s price. That doesn't seem like much in this crazy bull market, but since it is the world reserve asset, I think it is a good play in this environment. I plan to DCA my position over the next few months. Can it can go lower? Yup, I just know I am not buying at the top! Thoughts?

This is just an FYI

A lot of trading people have seen this in the market but I've never seen it said outload overtly (as if obviously true and unavoidable):

This is from a very recent reuters post about Chinese government and AI stocks, the key point is in the quiet admission that Chinese (and likely our own) governments do control stock using a kind of sock puppetting where 'investors' actively choose to accept bad deals.

This allows market manipulation, stops real valuation, and explains why during crazy periods we often see an 'unexplainable support' which does not move even as the trend clearly approaches (I never understood that phenomenon but it always looked like state or whale manipulation).

Here's the full article:

https://www.reuters.com/world/china/china-ai-bubble-has-already-burst-2026-10-26/?taid=6adf45821579270001ce08d5

I personally believe that stocks (like politics) is largely entertainment for the masses, it's not an honest reflection of the levers of control.

I like to imagine what the price of a truly borderless near zero fee system would be if governments truly could not be manipulate markets, just a reminder that even if your successful your playing someone else's game in these farms that we call countries ;)

Enjoy

Following Elon Musk's recent warnings regarding specialist AI cloud providers (neoclouds), the market is seeing immediate pre-market pressure on stocks like Nebius (NBIS), CoreWeave (CRWV), and Iren (IREN). Musk argues that over 200 startups are facing "guppy-level death and consolidation" because lenders are tightening credit lines. Basically, capital markets are shutting off the tap for any cloud provider that lacks a diversified, independent revenue stream to cover their massive GPU debt obligations (SpaceX successfully raised $40B because of Starlink's stable cash flow, whereas pure-play neoclouds are exposed). This lines up heavily with Gartner’s recent warning that up to 80% of these niche AI cloud providers could fold by 2030.

Are any of these neoclouds actually viable long-term value plays at a massive discount, or is this the definitive beginning of the AI infrastructure rationalization phase?

Source: CNBC

Elon Musk has reportedly confirmed that SpaceX secured $40 billion in financing for GPUs expected to arrive in 2027.

Not rockets. Not satellites. AI chips.

And this comes after the company reportedly spent $16.4 billion on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.

The scale of this AI race is getting pretty hard to wrap your head around.

Just think about how much money NVIDIA and the rest of the chip industry stand to make if this level of spending continues.

Are we witnessing the biggest technology buildout in history, or are these companies getting completely carried away?