🤵 The Macro Butler Weekly Digest 🤵

🌐 How to recognise, trust, and trade a genuine bull market — with gold as lens? 🌐

Read more here: https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-real-bull

Dear Investors,

Please find below the performance of The Macro Butler Long/Short Portfolio as of end of July 2026.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-macro-butler-longshort-portfolio-3c8

Dear Investors,

Please find below the performance of The Macro Butler Strategic Portfolio as of end of July 2026.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-macro-butler-strategic-portfolio-8d2

Dear Investors,

Please find below the performance of The Macro Butler IG Portfolio as of end of July 2026.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-macro-butler-ig-portfolio-july-320

Listen to a summary of The Macro Butler weekly newsletter via podcast on Substack; YouTube; Rumble; Spotify & TikTok.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-real-bull-podcast

🤵 The Macro Butler’s Monthly Meditation 🤵

🌐 The quiet race to build a quantum computer may be the most consequential contest of our age: the day it's won, every encrypted secret is up for grabs. 🌐

Read more here: https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/the-macro-butlers-monthly-meditation-fba

The Ministry of Free Markets has unveiled its most candid policy document yet: a handwritten notepad, photographed at a Camp David cabinet meeting and helpfully published by Reuters, reading under a "To Do" heading — "Buy Japanese Yen (JPY) $5-10 bil" — in the confident penmanship of a US Treasury Secretary who apparently believes currency intervention should be conducted with the same discretion as a grocery list. Scrooge Bessent, drawing on his hedge fund career and his newly discovered conviction that the yen is "too weak," has joined Tokyo in engineering the yen's rebound from 162 — its weakest since 1986 — to 157.40, in what officials are describing as the tightest US-Japan currency coordination in decades and everyone else recognises as two governments intervening in a free market to fix a price they don't like.

https://x.com/Polymarket/status/2083390480088236247

Japan spent a record ¥8.45 trillion ($52.8 billion) in a single day, the New York Fed sold euros to buy yen on the Treasury's behalf, and the same administration that lectures the world about market forces is now buying currencies by the billion while the BOJ holds rates at 1% against the US's 3.75% — the actual cause of the weakness that no amount of coordinated intervention can paper over.

When the Treasury Secretary's currency strategy is a handwritten to-do list photographed at Camp David, the free market hasn't been managed — it's been doodled.

An economy that spent June celebrating its factory PMI crawling above 50 has now watched it slither back below in July, proving once again that in China's data, the difference between expansion and contraction is roughly the width of a statistician's optimism. The official manufacturing PMI slipped to 49.2 — below the 50 threshold, missing every single estimate in the Bloomberg survey — while the non-manufacturing measure retreated to 49, its lowest since December 2022, and the construction PMI plummeted to a genuinely alarming 47, confirming that the property sector remains in the condition of a patient whose doctors have stopped using the word "recovery" and started using the word "comfortable."

As China’s factory activity contracts once again, construction PMI hits 47, the speed bump is doing considerably more damage than the road.

The Macro Butler is back on Asharq Bloomberg TV to deliver the call that separates the strong hands from the FOMO crowd: the Eternal Bullion bottomed at the end of June, and the next move is UP — not down.🥇🔥
Here’s the full thesis:

⚔️ The war cycle is escalating, not de-escalating. From Ukraine striking deep into Russia, to the Middle East ceasefire that requires weekly airstrikes to survive, to North Asia where Taiwan is the next chokepoint the consensus hasn’t priced — every geopolitical vector points toward higher gold.

🛢 Energy shortages and more wars are on the horizon — which means Trump Stagflation is not an if but a when, and it’s arriving sooner rather than later.

📈 $4,100 is the line in the sand. Break above it, and the same hot money that panic-sold the June low comes stampeding back in — chasing the Eternal Bullion higher at exactly the prices they should have been buying.

While the mass media obsesses over the pullback, the smart money is quietly accumulating.

📺 Watch the full interview on Asharq Bloomberg TV.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-asharq-bloomberg-tv-fa7

The Macro Butler kicked off the week at dawn on BFM 89.9 Malaysia — and the sovereign debt crisis just fired its opening shot. 🎙🔥
He joined Malaysia’s premier business radio to decode the week’s most consequential macro story that the consensus is treating as a footnote:

💴 Friday’s yen intervention was not a rescue — it was a warning. The Macro Butler breaks down what was really behind the coordinated US-Japan move to keep the JPY alive, why Washington is suddenly propping up the BOJ, and why none of it changes the long-term trend.
Japan is ready to lead the Western world into the inevitable sovereign debt crisis — the canary in the developed-market coal mine, and the first domino nobody wants to watch fall.

A weaker yen and a stronger yuan reshape the Chinese economy — and The Macro Butler explains why Panda bonds will only attract China’s major trade partners once the Chinese consumer replaces the US consumer as the world’s demand engine, a transition still years away.

Just the macro playbook history keeps validating.

🎧 Listen to the full interview on BFM 89.9 Malaysia.

https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/interview-with-bfm-899-radio-03082026

The Ministry of Strategic Diplomacy keeps following its official four-phase negotiation methodology, rendered as a circular flowchart for the benefit of allies, adversaries, and confused bond traders alike: Phase One, "We're going to bomb their power plants"; Phase Two, "They called us begging for a deal"; Phase Three, "They're giving us everything we want"; and Phase Four, "They're scum, you can't negotiate with these people" — after which the cycle returns seamlessly to bombing power plants, having resolved precisely nothing while consuming a strategic petroleum reserve, closing two shipping chokepoints, and whatever credibility remained.

The genius of the diagram is its honesty: there is no exit node, no "peace achieved," no "conflict resolved" — merely an eternal loop in which each phase is announced with total conviction via Truth Social, believed by markets for approximately 48 hours, and then contradicted by the next phase with equal conviction.

https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/117023461141824050

The "You are here" arrow, pointing at Phase Two, is the only fixed coordinate in an otherwise infinite rotation — a reminder that whichever soothing headline is currently calming the oil market, the return to Phase One is never more than one social media post away. The Iran ceasefire completed this cycle four times in five weeks.

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-canceled-iran-attack-war-b3026149.html

The negotiation cycle has no destination because the process is the destination — bomb, deal, betrayal, repeat, and bill the taxpayer for each rotation.

🚨 WANT TO UNDERSTAND WHERE WE ARE IN THE CYCLE? 🚨

Most investors react to the news.
The best investors understand the cycle.
📈 Every boom...
📉 Every bust...
💰 Every opportunity...
...follows a pattern.
The question isn't what happens next—it's where we are today and why it has always been all about cycles...

🎯 Learn how to understand the economic cycle by joining The Macro Butler's Financial Academy.

https://themacrobutler.com/financial-academy/

July's US manufacturing data offered investors the customary choose-your-own-adventure: the ISM survey surged to 55.6 — its strongest since May 2022 — with inflation lower, orders higher, and employment beating expectations, while S&P Global's competing PMI flatlined at 53.9 near three-month lows, meaning the same economy is simultaneously booming and stalling depending entirely on which analyst you prefer to believe. Beneath the survey there are some warning signs about the future growth trajectory — namely production growth slowing for a third month, supply chain delays intensifying to their sharpest deterioration in four years, exports falling, customers pushing back on high prices, and the Q2 precautionary stockpiling binge fading exactly as predicted. Input costs remained elevated thanks to high energy prices, producers kept raising factory gate prices to protect margins, and business optimism about growth slipped to its lowest since last October — a constellation of stagflationary signals.

In a nutshell, strip away the rosy ISM headline and the truth is unmistakable: America's factories aren't booming — they're screaming stagflation in broad daylight.

What actually makes a bull market real — and why almost everything the financial media calls one isn’t. 🐂

The Macro Butler is featured again in Hubbis with a piece that dismantles one of the market’s most abused words.

A genuine bull market, The Macro Butler argues, is not a reflexive 20%-off-the-lows bounce dressed up as a trend — it is a sustained, structural advance of higher highs and higher lows that must pass two unforgiving tests: it has to rise against every major currency simultaneously, and it has to outperform every rival asset class on the ratio charts. Strength in a single depreciating currency isn’t a bull market — it’s a currency collapse in disguise.

Read the full piece on Hubbis — and learn to tell a real bull from a dead-cat bounce before the crowd does. 👇
https://themacrobutler.substack.com/p/hubbis-the-real-bull-what-defines