sleep walk
market vibes
January 28
“The river never moves.” Sidhartha
In the news today
Nvidia Calls DeepSeek an “Excellent” AI Advance, dismissing concerns. “DeepSeek’s work illustrates how new models can be created “using the Test Time Scaling technique,” the company said in an emailed statement, “leveraging widely available models and compute that is fully export-control compliant.” However, Nassim Taleb warned this is just the beginning of a larger correction at “hedge fund week” in Miami. Imo…“$589 billion is a record, and records do tend to have weight.
China has added nearly 2 trillion yuan to their financial system through a new repo facility. Thirty-year yields chart below. CNY is back to 7.25. QE by any other name, especially at scale in the second-largest economy in the world, is a global thing, imo. The drop in yields at year-end and the gentle uptrend in gold may be related.
In national news
LA is still burning. It’s been afire for so long there is a point when tragedy becomes ordinary, and the only news worth mentioning will be when it stops. And what it cost to rebuild. I asked Grok to compare the area of devastation in LA to Hiroshima, which, except for the loss of life, seems to be an apples-to-apples measure from the perspective of reconstruction only. “LA wildfires are much larger than the area of total destruction in Hiroshima caused by the atomic bomb, by a factor of about 19 when comparing the direct, total destruction zones.”
In the markets
Starting with S&Ps, this is not a good-looking chart. For all the hype about big AUM flows as January ends, money is leaving the futures market, which is indicative of the entire equity universe, notwithstanding the majority of its execution having moved offshore to dark pools (BBG yesterday).
Not only is 99% of it done at light speed that no human can grasp by any means of sensory perception, the mind cannot conceive one’s trades are entering a pool where, in a single second of linear time, more orders are entered and canceled than were cleared by the big board in an entire day prior to electronic trading… Based on the number of players operating with response times in microseconds today, that number is probably higher.
It is my guess that if the exchanges and platforms within the US (all 17 of them) were to combine and disseminate that specific datum, it would literally freak people out. I know it would me, but I’d still want to see it. Imagine 50 or 100 Nvidias yesterday going bananas at once. Imagine 1,000.
Gold up next and various thoughts + bitcoin and where not to be, maybe.
