Brian Schreiner @ALTSadvisor

The Nasdaq fell 78% from 2000 to 2002. But that's not how anyone experienced it. They experienced this: – A 35% rally. Then new lows. – A 12% rally. Then new lows. – A 25% rally. Then new lows. – A 41% rally. Then new lows. – A 45% rally. Then the bottom, 30 months after the top. Five times the market screamed "it's over." Five times it lied. Former colleagues of mine lived through it on a trading floor. They told me what the routine became: by Thursday, you started praying for Friday afternoon. Not for the weekend. For the close. Two days where you couldn't lose money. Then you walked out of the office with your head down. That is what a real bear market does. It doesn't scare you out at the bottom. It exhausts you out, one false dawn at a time. Bear markets don't end when the sellers are done. They end when the buyers are.

To the Americans: I've travelled all over the world. I've familiarized myself with many places, and met many people. And I'm a Canadian, although I’m privileged to reside once again in the States. And here's something I've noticed, and it’s a key element of America's continuing greatness: You bloody Americans value success, and you believe in its existence. This is something that doesn't really happen anywhere else in the world. Even in other free democracies—the United Kingdom; Finland, Sweden, and Norway; Australia, New Zealand and Canada; Germany, France, and the Netherlands (great countries all)—a counterproductive cynicism too often reigns. Success is equated with exploitation. Ambition is looked upon with contempt. This happens sometimes in the United States too—particularly among the miserable progressives, who confuse their resentment, ingratitude and unearned skepticism with wisdom. But in your great country, by and large, striving is admired and success celebrated. This means that more people strive and succeed in the US than anywhere else. And it's increasingly obvious. You remain stunningly more innovative and productive than any people anywhere else on the planet. And so I say, as all should who are fortunate enough to live in the western world, let alone America: Thank God for the United States. Thank God for the wisdom of its founders. Thank God for its faith in the free market and in the natural rights of man. Happy birthday, you damn Yankees and Southerners. Long may your admirable country dominate the world. Long may your freedom and hope provide an example to those suffering everywhere at the hands of their malevolent states. May your two and a half centuries of unparallelled success be just the beginning. Your country is the light of the world, and the city on the hill. Thank God for the USA. Happy 250th. Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

What is fueling the stock mania? The answer is: borrowed money. In May, total margin debt in brokerage accounts registered a record one-month increase of $111 billion, pushing the total amount to $1.42 trillion. That 8.5% increase in margin debt accompanied a 5% increase in the S&P. The latest reading does not include debt used to buy SpaceX, which came public this month.

For Father’s Day, I’ll share this letter to Karl Marx from his dad

Insanity: with a market cap of $2.96 trillion, SpaceX just passed Microsoft to become the 4th largest company in the world. Microsoft Sales: $318 billion Microsoft Net Income: $125 billion SpaceX Sales: $19 billion SpaceX Net Income: -$9 billion

Price to Sales Ratio (TTM Sales) SpaceX: 125 Palantir: 66 Broadcom: 26 AMD: 24 Micron: 21 NVIDIA: 20 Applied Materials: 16 Tesla: 15 Intel: 11 Google: 11 Apple: 10 Microsoft: 9 Oracle: 8 Cisco: 8 Netflix: 7 Meta: 7 Amazon: 3.6 S&P 500: 3.6 youtube.com/watch?v=sMF_Nh…

5 out of the 7 stocks in the Magnificent Seven have actually underperformed the S&P 500 since the start of 2025, a very different picture than 2023-2024. Only Google and Nvidia have outperformed. Video: youtube.com/watch?v=sMF_Nh…

SETH KLARMAN JUST FLAGGED THE AI RISK NOBODY IS PRICING IN. The founder of Baupost Group and author of Margin of Safety almost never makes market commentary in public, which makes his recent remarks on AI, credit cycles, and political risk particularly worth sitting with. Klarman's starting point was the strange backdrop markets have been operating in. There hasn't been significant downside volatility since the GFC. Corporate bankruptcies have been historically low. But the cracks are appearing now, in private credit, in commercial real estate, and across pockets of the corporate market that have absorbed too much leverage for too long. The conditions for a real credit cycle, he believes, are forming. What makes this cycle different from prior ones is the inflationary pressure coming from a place markets have never seen before. Baupost's own real estate book is seeing surging demand for industrial land, warehouses, and cold storage. The AI data center buildout is pushing prices higher across electricians, transformers, copper, electrical equipment, and land at the same time. Onshoring is layered on top. As Klarman put it, the demand for the physical inputs into AI is through the roof. Short term, that's clearly inflationary. Long term, AI is supposed to be deflationary because it makes labor more productive. But Klarman's warning is sharper than that. Once the genie of higher wages and elevated costs is out of the bottle, getting it back in is politically impossible. Workers don't accept compensation rollbacks. Prices don't fall easily. The deflationary thesis sounds great in a spreadsheet and lands very differently in an economy. Here's the part that almost nobody is pricing into AI exposure. Klarman is direct about it. The political crackdown on data centers is coming. It probably won't come from Washington first. It will come from town councils, county boards, and state regulators where citizens are already up in arms about water usage, grid load, and noise. By the 2028 election cycle, AI policy will be a defining political issue, not a technical one. The rules haven't been written. The current administration hasn't really gotten its head around writing them. And local backlash is accelerating. Klarman's broader point is that there are a lot of risks not baked into current prices. Overall AI risk that it runs amok. Political risk that builds out gets blocked at the local level. Credit risk that's already starting to surface. None of these are tail events. They're forming in real time, and the market is still pricing as if none of them exist.

@thestreetpro The Iran Deal Is a Tragic Failure * While the price of oil is retreating, the stock futures’ Pavlovian reaction to the deal makes little sense to me * It is a deal to do a deal... It is pretending to have a deal The Iranian deal, as announced, is a tragic failure and shows how badly out-negotiated the U.S was. The major U.S. asset in the negotiations was the blockade yet amazingly it was the first concession the U.S. made. This destroys our negotiating position as Tehran knows that once the blockade ends and the ships routed away, it is highly unlikely that it will ever be reconstituted. In contrast, Iran can reinstate a blockade of Hormuz at any time it wishes and the issue of control and fees was not even conceded by Iran. At a time when the U.S. initially said benefits to Iran would be based on performance, the reverse has occurred. It is the U.S. which must act first. The Iranians demanded the end of the blockade before allowing free passage. With all the focus on Iran’s nuclear program, it is totally absent in this agreement, no commitments regarding removing the enriched material, no dismantling the enriching infrastructure, no inspections—all to rediscussed later. There is nothing regarding curtailing extensive missile production. There are no commitments for Iran to stop supporting resistance groups like Hezbollah and the Houthis. Indeed, Lebanon was included in the plans for cessation of military activity which, in essence, confirms Iran’s commitment to Hezbollah. This restricts Israel’s ability to defend itself and creates enormous pressures for Netanyahu. This agreement hands the Revolutionary Guards a great victory and cements their governance in Iran. The Iranian people, who we claimed to stand by, have been abandoned. Regime change is gone. The 60-day negotiating period is meaningless as it can be extended and likely will be. Iran knows that President Trump’s desperate to stop the war despite his bluster and knows he will not take any military action before the midterms. Thus, the big issues, which were the basis of the original strike, will likely go unresolved for a very long time and many never be resolved as Iran loves to play the long game. The coexistence of this terrible agreement with the spectacle of a cage fight on the White House lawn is hard to take — but the markets apparently feel different and are rejoicing. BY Doug Kass · Jun 15, 2026, 7:00 AM EDT @SquawkCNBC @andrewrsorkin @beckyquick @joesquawk @saraeisen @TheJudgeCNBC @carlquintanilla @SullyCNBC @cnbcfastmoney @halftime @tomkeene @business @lisaabramowicz1 @annmarie @ferrotv @Convertbond @peterboockvar @guyadami @WhitneyTilson @gnoble79

Nobody is trading stocks any more: it's all just options and levered ETFs

zerohedge @zerohedge

4 weeks ago

SOXS (-3x Semis) traded more than 1.3 billion shares today, the third largest volume day in terms of shares for a US-listed ETF in data observed over the past two decades: GS

19 49 309 451K 75

@DougKass @KeithMcCullough @kellyevans @SullyCNBC @HedgeyeDJ @SamofAmerica @RPKent This is what the 2017 fork was all about. Bitcoin is slow and expensive. Bitcoin Cash is instant and nearly free.

Over on @cnbc @halftime Frank Holland asked his panelists to explain the volatility. @FrankCNBC I don't believe his question was thoroughly answered. Here is my answer (@thestreetpro): BY DOUG KASS · Jun 10, 2026, 9:45 AM EDT Structural Instability Anyone who has observed the market’s spectacular intraday volatility over the last four trading sessions should realize that something is amiss. The market is not behaving normally — it seems destabilized. * Is it simply an overvalued market that is in the process of correcting? * Is it an overvalued and concentrated market led by large-cap technology that is rotating into new leadership? * Is it a signal that the AI revolution might face growing fundamental headwinds? * Is the proliferation of leveraged ETFs and the growing acceptance of the market as a casino (with the ubiquitous presence of 0DTE options) undermining market stability, acting like an infant splashing around in a bathtub (violently moving from side to side)? * Is it the consequences of the evolution of market structure (the tail wagging the dog), in which passive products and strategies dominate the investment landscape? * Or, have the machines and algos “gone wild” (in dealing with a potential inflection point or price momentum change)? To me, its all of the above — some of each. We are likely entering a slippery slope — great for opportunistic traders, lousy for the buy-and-hold crowd. @GuyAdami @squawkbox @andrewrsorkin @BeckyQuick @TheJudgeCNBC @halftimeReport @cnbcFastMoney @SullyCNBC @tomkeene @ferrotv @lisaabramowicz1 @annmarie @gnoble79 @KeithMcCullough @peterboockvar @whitneytilson @HedgeyeDJ @business

An unprecedented supply-and-demand shock is about to hit Wall Street. Between a historic $75 billion SpaceX offering and a massive wave of mega-capital raises from tech giants, institutional funds are being forced to liquidate existing positions just to get a seat at the table. youtu.be/lcV2Fv2YOB0

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.

I spoke with @Rory_Johnston last week about tightness in the oil markets. Rory explains why oil prices may be underreacting despite 13–15 million barrels per day of Gulf oil production being offline and record market deficits. It contrasts the pre-war period—when the market was in a protracted surplus due to OPEC reintroducing previously withheld crude, non-OPEC supply growth outpacing demand, and stocks building by over 2 million barrels per day—with the post-Hormuz shift that rapidly erased that surplus. Full interview here: youtu.be/Ut1z5cDw8l8

In Part 1 of AI Snake Oil: The Skeptics, I pulled back the curtain on the massive wave of AI hype. In Part 2: Where Are All the Data Centers?, I explained how the largest industrial over-build in American history is hitting a wall. Today, in Part 3: The Rise of Open-Source Models, I want to explain why I believe that smaller, more efficient AI models will play a major role in the future of AI. youtu.be/5h3vA0B-Clo

youtu.be/6PL_uDyYNTU?si…

The first in my series on the AI bubble: youtu.be/Pf8zY4H4IPI

Market Forces on YouTube > youtu.be/5ihKEaH6Cds?si…