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Quiver Quantitative
BREAKING: The House Ethics Committee is investigating Representative Mike Collins.

Unclear what the investigation is for.

Worth noting that Collins is the most active crypto trader in Congress. https://t.co/zMevmu46Ij
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WealthyReadings
RT @ruth_capital: one thing that baffles me a lot is how horrible and bifurcating some of these accounts become once you're in a clear down-trend/retracement

no capital protection/bias swap whatsoever once bridge starts collapsing and spamming daily AI-points fails

be selective whom you follow
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EndGame Macro
When Geopolitics Tighten, Even Cutting Edge Chips Become Trade Currency.

You’ve got a White House that treats everything as a transaction. H200s into China aren’t just exports, they’re a bargaining chip. Floating the idea right now signals to Beijing that this is something you want, and we can take it away or give it back depending on what we get on trade, ag, or broader geopolitical concessions. You can’t play that card if it’s never on the table, so the leak itself is part of the negotiation.

On top of that, Nvidia has just printed an absurd quarter…$57B in revenue, $51B from data center, 73%+ margins, and guidance to $65B next quarter. They’re not limping; they’re a core pillar of the stock market. Letting them tap China again under strict export controls gives the administration an easy win with more U.S. corporate profits, higher tax receipts, and a happy equity market, without writing a stimulus check. And because there’s already precedent with the H20 deal where the U.S. Treasury took a 15% skim, you can easily imagine them reviving that model “We’ll let you sell, but we take a cut.” It turns national security policy into a revenue sharing agreement.

There’s also a quiet risk management angle. Nvidia’s balance sheet shows inventories nearly doubling this year to just under $20B. They’re ramping supply hard on the assumption that AI demand stays vertical. If that curve bends, you don’t want a strategic U.S. champion stuck with shelves of high end chips and another multi billion write down tied to export rules. Opening a tightly controlled Chinese outlet for last season’s H200s gives Nvidia an extra release valve for that capacity and lowers the odds that Washington’s own restrictions blow back into a big market scare later.

The Deeper Strategic Logic

Finally, there’s the tech race logic some people inside the administration clearly buy…H200 is powerful, but the real bleeding edge is already shifting to Blackwell and then Rubin. Selling H200s under performance caps and quotas can be framed as keeping Chinese labs dependent on U.S. hardware that’s one step behind, while U.S. and allied players move on to the next node. That’s how they reconcile that they’re tough on China with we’re going to let Nvidia book billions.

So when you put it all together, the timing isn’t random. They’re staring at a hugely profitable but inventory heavy U.S. champion, a slowing global backdrop, a need for bargaining chips with Beijing, and an election narrative built on deals and markets. In that mix, floating controlled H200 sales to China becomes less about softening on national security and more about creating optionality…a card they can trade, tax, or pull back depending on how the rest of the game unfolds.

US officials are having early discussions on whether to let Nvidia sell its H200 artificial intelligence chips to China, a contentious potential move that would mark a major win for the world’s most valuable company https://t.co/j30skXGqT4
- Bloomberg
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EndGame Macro
Want Good Schools? Look at the Town’s Budget, Not Just the Ranking

If you’re planning to buy a home in the next few years, this is one of those moments where you really need to pay attention to the town, not just the house. We’re heading into a period where budgets are tightening, federal support is fading, and costs are rising for schools, infrastructure, and municipal services. That’s when you find out which communities are actually well run and which ones have been papering over problems during the good years. The last thing you want is to move somewhere that suddenly has to cut school programs, lay off teachers, or hike taxes because the math stopped working.

When I look at towns, school quality is obviously a starting point…everyone wants good schools. But the part I focus on the most is the tax base behind those schools. The towns that hold up in rougher cycles usually have a solid mix of commercial revenue, especially from businesses that aren’t the first to disappear in a downturn. Healthcare, medical campuses, logistics, universities, government, long established professional firms, those anchors keep money coming in even when the economy softens. And that stability is what protects school budgets, local services, and long term property values.

So if you’re trying to set up your future, think the way you would about any investment…look past the surface and look at the fundamentals. The next few years will tell you a lot about which towns have their act together. And that’s the environment you want to build a life in.
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AkhenOsiris
Trump trying to give NVDA access to China should absolutely pump $APP, they will gain from this 🤪
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Dimitry Nakhla | Babylon Capital®
Oracle is now down ~40% from its September peak, with the multiple contracting from 46x to a more reasonable 28x

At long last, The Intelligent Investor has re-entered the chat 😂

$ORCL https://t.co/i9aXglG17p
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Quiver Quantitative
BREAKING: Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has resigned from Congress.

She said:

There is no plan to save the world or insane 4D chess being played by Donald Trump
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EndGame Macro
The GDPNow Spike Looks Great Until You Ask What It’s Actually Measuring

This chart is basically a race between two ways of estimating the same quarter. The green line is the Atlanta Fed’s GDPNow model, a fully mechanical tracker that updates whenever new economic data drops. The blue line is the Blue Chip economist consensus, what human forecasters think GDP will look like once the quarter is over.

Early in the summer, both sides were sitting around 1–2% growth. But as the data came in like retail sales, manufacturing reports, income and outlays, housing…the GDPNow model kept nudging higher, climbing toward a little over 4% by mid November. The consensus moved too, but more slowly and never caught up. So at face value, the chart is saying the data flow for Q3 has looked surprisingly strong, at least as GDP is officially measured. The model just reacts faster than human forecasters.

But Here’s the Important Part And What GDPNow Can’t See

GDPNow only tells you how the BEA’s GDP formula will likely shake out and not how healthy the economy actually feels on the ground. And when you read the underlying methodology, the limitations jump out.

It’s A Mod Of The BEA Spreadsheet , Not A Model Of Real Life

GDPNow’s own slides are explicit…”no judgmental adjustments,” “solely the mathematical results of the model.”
That means it treats every monthly number literally. If inventories rise because goods aren’t selling, GDPNow shows an increase…even though, economically, that’s not strength. If imports collapse because consumers are tightening up, GDPNow shows a positive contribution from net exports…even though that’s a sign of softer domestic demand. The model only knows the arithmetic. It has no intuition.

It Can’t Distinguish Quality Of Growth

Look at the decomposition table in the GDPNow slides…by the time the estimate hits 4.2%, a big chunk of the lift is coming from things like net exports and inventories. Those categories can move GDP without telling you anything good about the underlying economy.

A strong GDP number driven by trade timing and stockpiling is very different from a strong GDP number driven by wage funded consumption. GDPNow doesn’t care, it all counts the same.

It Assumes Old Relationships Still Hold In A New Economy

GDPNow uses “bridge equations” basically historical correlations to map monthly data into quarterly GDP components. That’s fine when the structure of the economy is stable. But right now?
•Pandemic distortions
•Credit card reliance
•Rising delinquencies
•Housing affordability stress
•Fiscal cliffs
•Higher interest rate sensitivity

Those are regime changes, not noise. A model trained on the 2010–2019 world may not capture 2025 accurately. It’s blind to distribution, fragility, and financial stress

GDPNow doesn’t see…
•who is doing the spending,
•how much of it is funded by debt,
•whether households are underwater,
•or whether businesses are quietly pulling back.

You can have 4% real GDP growth with rising bankruptcies, falling real wages for most households, and stress building in CRE, autos, and credit cards. None of that touches the GDPNow estimate until it finally shows up as weaker PCE months later.

And by then, the story has already changed.

The Bottom Line

GDPNow is a fast, transparent way of guessing what the BEA will publish. And on that front, it’s often pretty good. But the model is not a reliable read on the real underlying health of the economy. It’s a mechanical mirror of the official accounting framework and that framework often flatters the headline while hiding the fractures underneath.

So when you see the green line sprinting ahead of the consensus, don’t jump straight into thinking the economy is booming. The model is telling you how the math looks, not how people are living. And right now, that gap between the math and the lived reality is wider than the lines on this chart let on. tweet
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EndGame Macro
Peak Hedging, Peak Fear And The Setup For A Reflexive Rally

This chart is basically showing that the options market just hit one of those moments where fear stops being a vibe and becomes something you can literally measure. SPY put volume didn’t just pick up, it exploded. It’s the second highest reading ever, right alongside the handful of days where traders collectively hit the panic button and loaded up on protection. If you look back at those dates…September 2022, March 2023, the cluster in early April 2025 they all happened during sharp pullbacks where sentiment was washed out and people were hedging aggressively.

The table at the bottom is the punchline…every time put volume crossed 8 million contracts, SPY was higher a month later. Not immediately, not always cleanly, but the one month window has been remarkably consistent. And that’s why these spikes show up near bottoms. It’s positioning. When everyone crowds into puts at the same time, the market often runs out of sellers. Dealers start buying back into strength, hedges decay, shorts get pinned, and that fear flips into a reflexive move the other way.

Why It’s Not A Perfect Bottom Signal But Still Matters

You can’t take any of this as gospel. The sample size is tiny, and the options market today looks nothing like it did a decade ago. Zero day options, systematic hedging flows, dealer gamma dynamics, all of that means an 8M+ put spike today is built on an entirely different ecosystem than the original data points. And huge put volume isn’t always raw fear; sometimes it’s a hedge roll, sometimes it’s a big player setting up for an event, and sometimes it’s just structured product desks doing their thing. The chart treats it all the same.

But the bigger message still holds that traders are scared, hedged, and leaning in one direction. When positioning gets this lopsided, you don’t need some miraculous macro catalyst to spark a bounce, you just need the bleeding to slow. In markets, extreme fear tends to create its own reversal.

So What’s the Highest Probability Outcome Now?

This is where everything comes together. A spike in put volume like this almost always marks a point where the market is emotionally exhausted. That doesn’t mean the exact bottom is in but in the short term, the odds tilt toward a reflexive bounce, not a continuation of the slide. When everyone is looking down, markets usually move up simply because the risk has already been priced in.

And that’s my highest probability view here…the next meaningful move is more likely to be upward. Maybe sharp, maybe fast, maybe messy but upward. After that, the market probably runs into the reality of a late cycle economy, stretched consumers, and a Fed that still doesn’t have a clean exit. So the bounce may not become a new trend, but the setup for relief is better than the setup for a fresh collapse.

This isn’t call the bottom energy. It’s recognizing the difference between a market that’s still panicking and one that’s already burned through most of its fear. Right now, we’re firmly in the second camp.

S&P 500 $SPY Put Volume on Thursday was the 2nd largest ever 🚨 Historically this has usually occurred near bottoms 🥳🤑🫂 https://t.co/3543mXn5ii
- Barchart
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EndGame Macro
Riding the Last Wave: Bitcoin’s Momentum in a Cooling Economy

This chart is basically trying to map Bitcoin onto the broader business cycle, the idea that BTC rips when liquidity is improving and stalls or breaks when the macro turns. The white line is Bitcoin in log scale, and the blue line is a kind of macro pulse indicator. Every time that macro line bottoms, the chart labels a transition from bear to pre parabolic. When it rises, Bitcoin tends to follow, and when it peaks, you get the blow off phases we saw in 2017 and 2021.

There’s truth in that. Bitcoin has always been a high beta expression of global liquidity, so it tends to move early when financial conditions ease. But the chart also makes it look far cleaner than reality. We’re working with two full cycles, maybe two and a half. That’s not enough to draw perfect rules around. And it’s drawn with hindsight, the color coded boxes aren’t how anyone experiences this in real time.

Still, the broader point stands that Bitcoin tends to front run shifts in the macro cycle, and right now the chart is signaling we’re somewhere in the stronger half of that cycle.

Why This Is Still a Late Cycle Moment

The problem and what the chart doesn’t tell you is that the underlying economy is deteriorating. Not collapsing, just quietly weakening in all the ways late cycle slowdowns usually look.

Household balance sheets are getting squeezed…credit card delinquencies are climbing, auto loan stress is the highest since the early 2010s, student loan payments are biting again, and personal finance sentiment has dropped to multi year lows. Consumers are running out of cushion.

Businesses are feeling it too. Hours worked have softened, job openings are drifting down, small business optimism is sliding, and hiring freezes are showing up across sectors. All of it is consistent with an economy that’s inching toward the part of the cycle where layoffs start to pick up.

Then you have the Fed. They’re cutting not because growth is roaring but because the data is softening in ways they can’t ignore and QT is ending for the same reason. In every past cycle, when the Fed is cutting into weakness rather than cutting into strength, you’re closer to the end than the beginning. Markets sometimes rally on the first cuts, but they usually discover why the Fed is cutting a bit later.

Bitcoin is holding strong and could still push higher, that part of the chart is real. But the environment underneath looks very much like late cycle behavior…stretched consumers, slowing demand, rising delinquencies, quieter job markets, and a central bank trying to buy time.

That’s why you can’t treat this moment as if it’s the early pre parabolic phase all over again. It’s more complicated. There’s still room for upside especially with easier policy coming but there’s also an expiration date attached. The macro is already shifting underneath the surface, and Bitcoin has never been immune to that.

Top line is where the liquidity fuel has cyclically exhausted. It ends the red zone. All multi-year tops have printed here.

Bottom line is where the liquidity fuel has cyclically ignited. It begins the red zone. All multi-year parabolic moves have started here.

Bitcoin doesn’t care about the calendar. It cares about liquidity.

Where are we?
- TechDev
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