Wasteland Capital
If everyone was a value investor, noone would ever buy stocks higher.
Someone needs to buy a stock higher for it to go up. Just holding it doesn’t make it go up.
So be glad there are many investor types. From value, GARP & growth to delusion & Ponzi, and everything in between.
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If everyone was a value investor, noone would ever buy stocks higher.
Someone needs to buy a stock higher for it to go up. Just holding it doesn’t make it go up.
So be glad there are many investor types. From value, GARP & growth to delusion & Ponzi, and everything in between.
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Offshore
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WealthyReadings
Finished looking into $PATH: I’m not convinced, mainly due to ARR dollar growth deceleration.
I understand the bull case. But until the data backs it up, I’ll stay out.
That said, $PATH has one of the best chart on the market and reports next week.
Now onto $ZETA. Which one should I check next?
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Finished looking into $PATH: I’m not convinced, mainly due to ARR dollar growth deceleration.
I understand the bull case. But until the data backs it up, I’ll stay out.
That said, $PATH has one of the best chart on the market and reports next week.
Now onto $ZETA. Which one should I check next?
tweet
Offshore
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Fiscal.ai
The Fiscal AI Black Friday Sale is now Live!
Get 30% Off any paid plan this week only! 💥 https://t.co/XmLOLTkRMj
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The Fiscal AI Black Friday Sale is now Live!
Get 30% Off any paid plan this week only! 💥 https://t.co/XmLOLTkRMj
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Offshore
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Fiscal.ai
Uber and Airbnb trade at nearly the exact same forward valuation.
Which would you rather own at current prices?
$UBER 22.4x
$ABNB 21.8x https://t.co/hizgiNJaGe
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Uber and Airbnb trade at nearly the exact same forward valuation.
Which would you rather own at current prices?
$UBER 22.4x
$ABNB 21.8x https://t.co/hizgiNJaGe
tweet
Offshore
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WealthyReadings
$BABA will shock when it posts 15%+ YoY growth in Q1-26.
The market isn’t pricing this in and still believe $BABA's growth is slowing. It isn’t.
$BABA sold Inmut and Sun Art Q4-24, two businesses that generating roughly RMB 20B per quarter. Their removal from revenues makes this year’s growth look softer simply because comps include businesses that no longer exist in the group.
Adjusted for those, $BABA growth has actually been accelerating over the last three quarters: 10% → 10.7% → 15%
It’s not obvious in the numbers, but it will be once Q1-26 is compared against the first fully post-selling quarter.
Just wait for the market’s reaction.
tweet
$BABA will shock when it posts 15%+ YoY growth in Q1-26.
The market isn’t pricing this in and still believe $BABA's growth is slowing. It isn’t.
$BABA sold Inmut and Sun Art Q4-24, two businesses that generating roughly RMB 20B per quarter. Their removal from revenues makes this year’s growth look softer simply because comps include businesses that no longer exist in the group.
Adjusted for those, $BABA growth has actually been accelerating over the last three quarters: 10% → 10.7% → 15%
It’s not obvious in the numbers, but it will be once Q1-26 is compared against the first fully post-selling quarter.
Just wait for the market’s reaction.
tweet
Offshore
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EndGame Macro
The Inflation Nobody Sees but Everybody Feels
Paychecks have gone up, but the stuff people can’t avoid has gone up faster. Wages climbed steadily from 2021 to today, but shelter, food away from home, and even basic services have pulled ahead and they haven’t come back down. That gap is the entire mood of the economy right now.
Wages Are Up But The Essentials Escaped the Gravity of Paychecks
If you look at the lines one by one, wages rise in a clean, controlled slope. But shelter shoots higher. Eating out shoots higher. Groceries edge higher. Even basic services drift above the wage line. The only categories that actually fit inside the wage gains are things people cut first when money’s tight, recreation and alcohol.
That alone tells you the truth: the things that make life enjoyable are still affordable if you sacrifice somewhere else, but the non negotiables are the ones eating the difference. You don’t feel richer when the gains you make at work are swallowed by rent, food, and service prices before you even touch your discretionary budget.
And that’s the thing the headline numbers never capture. The inflation rate cooled, but the price level never came back. The shock stayed in place. You don’t undo a 25–30% jump in shelter by bringing annual inflation back to 3%. Households live in the new level, not the new rate.
Why Sentiment Feels Worse Than the Data Says
Historically, this isn’t normal. Pre 2020, we basically lived in an era of dead flat inflation and low rates. The economy wasn’t perfect, but it was predictable. Then in four years, everything that matters jumped in price at the fastest pace since the early ’80s. Even if wages kept up on average, most people don’t feel it. Renters got hit the hardest. Young buyers got priced out. Anyone who didn’t lock in a mortgage before the spike feels like they’re paying a premium for the same life their parents got at a discount.
That’s why consumer sentiment still reads like a recession even with unemployment low and stocks at highs: people aren’t reacting to the economy, they’re reacting to what it costs to live in it. We’ve seen strong spending numbers, but underneath that is a shift toward trading down, choosing cheaper brands, cutting back on dinners out, and saving less.
And once people feel squeezed on the essentials, that shapes everything else: politics, mood, expectations, and how secure they feel even with a decent job.
The Real Takeaway
This is a snapshot of a deeper tension in the economy: a world where the macro data looks stable, but the lived experience feels harder. A world where the recovery happened on paper, but the affordability didn’t come with it.
That’s why the vibecession won’t magically disappear. People don’t care that inflation is down, they care that rent is still up. They care that groceries never went back to 2019 levels. They care that eating out is now a conscious decision instead of a casual one.
And until the essentials start moving in the same direction as wages or wages finally outrun the essentials the gap you see in this chart is the gap you’ll keep hearing in the public mood.
tweet
The Inflation Nobody Sees but Everybody Feels
Paychecks have gone up, but the stuff people can’t avoid has gone up faster. Wages climbed steadily from 2021 to today, but shelter, food away from home, and even basic services have pulled ahead and they haven’t come back down. That gap is the entire mood of the economy right now.
Wages Are Up But The Essentials Escaped the Gravity of Paychecks
If you look at the lines one by one, wages rise in a clean, controlled slope. But shelter shoots higher. Eating out shoots higher. Groceries edge higher. Even basic services drift above the wage line. The only categories that actually fit inside the wage gains are things people cut first when money’s tight, recreation and alcohol.
That alone tells you the truth: the things that make life enjoyable are still affordable if you sacrifice somewhere else, but the non negotiables are the ones eating the difference. You don’t feel richer when the gains you make at work are swallowed by rent, food, and service prices before you even touch your discretionary budget.
And that’s the thing the headline numbers never capture. The inflation rate cooled, but the price level never came back. The shock stayed in place. You don’t undo a 25–30% jump in shelter by bringing annual inflation back to 3%. Households live in the new level, not the new rate.
Why Sentiment Feels Worse Than the Data Says
Historically, this isn’t normal. Pre 2020, we basically lived in an era of dead flat inflation and low rates. The economy wasn’t perfect, but it was predictable. Then in four years, everything that matters jumped in price at the fastest pace since the early ’80s. Even if wages kept up on average, most people don’t feel it. Renters got hit the hardest. Young buyers got priced out. Anyone who didn’t lock in a mortgage before the spike feels like they’re paying a premium for the same life their parents got at a discount.
That’s why consumer sentiment still reads like a recession even with unemployment low and stocks at highs: people aren’t reacting to the economy, they’re reacting to what it costs to live in it. We’ve seen strong spending numbers, but underneath that is a shift toward trading down, choosing cheaper brands, cutting back on dinners out, and saving less.
And once people feel squeezed on the essentials, that shapes everything else: politics, mood, expectations, and how secure they feel even with a decent job.
The Real Takeaway
This is a snapshot of a deeper tension in the economy: a world where the macro data looks stable, but the lived experience feels harder. A world where the recovery happened on paper, but the affordability didn’t come with it.
That’s why the vibecession won’t magically disappear. People don’t care that inflation is down, they care that rent is still up. They care that groceries never went back to 2019 levels. They care that eating out is now a conscious decision instead of a casual one.
And until the essentials start moving in the same direction as wages or wages finally outrun the essentials the gap you see in this chart is the gap you’ll keep hearing in the public mood.
Why there never was a Vibecession in one chart.
It’s always been about the prices of essentials. https://t.co/lDhA1HqIa2 tweet
EndGame Macro
Stephen Miran’s Quiet Revolt And Why He Says the Fed’s Leverage Fix Doesn’t Go Far Enough
Miran isn’t against giving banks capital relief. The new rule cuts the enhanced leverage buffer and trims TLAC and long term debt, opening up more balance sheet space for Treasuries, reserves, and repo, exactly the mechanical change I laid out before. What he’s saying is that, in normal times, the leverage ratio shouldn’t be the thing that bites, because when it does, it pressures banks to reach for riskier, higher yielding assets just to justify the capital they’re forced to hold.
Where he breaks from the rest of the Board is on the structure. The new rule still counts Treasuries and Fed reserves in the leverage denominator; it just lowers the required ratio. Miran thinks that’s fundamentally inconsistent. Regulators require banks to hold these instruments as high quality liquid assets, and risk based capital already treats them as essentially risk free. In his view, it makes no sense to demand those holdings for liquidity, then penalize them again through the leverage test. He wants Treasuries and reserves excluded from the SLR denominator altogether.
He ties this directly to market plumbing. Treasury and repo desks are low margin, high volume businesses that keep the government’s funding machine running. If you make those books capital intensive, banks will naturally shrink them at the margin, especially when volatility is high. That, in his eyes, makes the Treasury market shallower and more fragile just when the fiscal side needs it most.
He also points back to 2020, when regulators temporarily carved Treasuries and reserves out of the SLR to stop the market from seizing. His argument is don’t wait for the next panic and improvise another exemption that looks like a bailout. Set the rule in advance, make it transparent, and avoid having to bend it under pressure.
So the Board majority is saying they will keep the basic leverage design, but dial it down so it stops choking balance sheets. Miran is saying, If you really believe these assets are the safest in the system, they shouldn’t be in this ratio at all.
How I Read the Tradeoff
On logic, he has a strong case. It is hard to defend a framework that forces banks to hold Treasuries and reserves, calls them risk free in one part of the rulebook, and then treats them as if they’re just another asset in the leverage test. That really does discourage the kind of Treasury market intermediation policymakers say they want.
But taking Treasuries and reserves completely out of the denominator isn’t costless. For the largest banks, those positions are enormous. If you ignore them in the leverage ratio, that ratio stops being a real backstop and you slide back toward relying almost entirely on risk weighted models and supervisory judgment, the combination that badly underestimated risk pre 2008. You also invite banks to grow very large books of risk free sovereign exposure, which deepens the link between the banking system and the state. That’s fine until confidence in the sovereign wobbles; then you’re flirting with the kind of bank sovereign doom loops Europe has already lived through.
So I see the majority trying to walk a middle line: keep a meaningful leverage check, but loosen it enough to free up trillions of balance sheet space. Miran is pushing the internal logic all the way to the end that if the real goal is smooth Treasury financing and deep liquidity, then the clean answer is to stop letting the leverage ratio lean on those holdings at all.
The deeper signal is that everyone involved shares the same fear of a huge refinancing wave, a softer economy, and a Treasury market that cannot afford another March 2020 moment. The disagreement is not about whether to use bank balance sheets as shock absorbers, that decision has basically been made. It’s about how much of the old armor they’re willing to strip off to make that strategy work.
My statement on the final rule on levera[...]
Stephen Miran’s Quiet Revolt And Why He Says the Fed’s Leverage Fix Doesn’t Go Far Enough
Miran isn’t against giving banks capital relief. The new rule cuts the enhanced leverage buffer and trims TLAC and long term debt, opening up more balance sheet space for Treasuries, reserves, and repo, exactly the mechanical change I laid out before. What he’s saying is that, in normal times, the leverage ratio shouldn’t be the thing that bites, because when it does, it pressures banks to reach for riskier, higher yielding assets just to justify the capital they’re forced to hold.
Where he breaks from the rest of the Board is on the structure. The new rule still counts Treasuries and Fed reserves in the leverage denominator; it just lowers the required ratio. Miran thinks that’s fundamentally inconsistent. Regulators require banks to hold these instruments as high quality liquid assets, and risk based capital already treats them as essentially risk free. In his view, it makes no sense to demand those holdings for liquidity, then penalize them again through the leverage test. He wants Treasuries and reserves excluded from the SLR denominator altogether.
He ties this directly to market plumbing. Treasury and repo desks are low margin, high volume businesses that keep the government’s funding machine running. If you make those books capital intensive, banks will naturally shrink them at the margin, especially when volatility is high. That, in his eyes, makes the Treasury market shallower and more fragile just when the fiscal side needs it most.
He also points back to 2020, when regulators temporarily carved Treasuries and reserves out of the SLR to stop the market from seizing. His argument is don’t wait for the next panic and improvise another exemption that looks like a bailout. Set the rule in advance, make it transparent, and avoid having to bend it under pressure.
So the Board majority is saying they will keep the basic leverage design, but dial it down so it stops choking balance sheets. Miran is saying, If you really believe these assets are the safest in the system, they shouldn’t be in this ratio at all.
How I Read the Tradeoff
On logic, he has a strong case. It is hard to defend a framework that forces banks to hold Treasuries and reserves, calls them risk free in one part of the rulebook, and then treats them as if they’re just another asset in the leverage test. That really does discourage the kind of Treasury market intermediation policymakers say they want.
But taking Treasuries and reserves completely out of the denominator isn’t costless. For the largest banks, those positions are enormous. If you ignore them in the leverage ratio, that ratio stops being a real backstop and you slide back toward relying almost entirely on risk weighted models and supervisory judgment, the combination that badly underestimated risk pre 2008. You also invite banks to grow very large books of risk free sovereign exposure, which deepens the link between the banking system and the state. That’s fine until confidence in the sovereign wobbles; then you’re flirting with the kind of bank sovereign doom loops Europe has already lived through.
So I see the majority trying to walk a middle line: keep a meaningful leverage check, but loosen it enough to free up trillions of balance sheet space. Miran is pushing the internal logic all the way to the end that if the real goal is smooth Treasury financing and deep liquidity, then the clean answer is to stop letting the leverage ratio lean on those holdings at all.
The deeper signal is that everyone involved shares the same fear of a huge refinancing wave, a softer economy, and a Treasury market that cannot afford another March 2020 moment. The disagreement is not about whether to use bank balance sheets as shock absorbers, that decision has basically been made. It’s about how much of the old armor they’re willing to strip off to make that strategy work.
My statement on the final rule on levera[...]
Offshore
EndGame Macro Stephen Miran’s Quiet Revolt And Why He Says the Fed’s Leverage Fix Doesn’t Go Far Enough Miran isn’t against giving banks capital relief. The new rule cuts the enhanced leverage buffer and trims TLAC and long term debt, opening up more balance…
ge ratio capital relief. I think we should give further attention to removal of Treasury securities and reserves from leverage ratio calcluations, since we force banks to hold these through liquidity requirements. https://t.co/umglzUrFzw - Stephen Miran tweet
www.federalreserve.gov
Statement on Enhanced Supplementary Leverage Ratio Final Rule by Governor Stephen I. Miran
The Federal Reserve Board of Governors in Washington DC.
Offshore
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WealthyReadings
$BABA will shock the market when it posts 15%+ YoY growth in Q1-26.
The market isn’t pricing this in and still believe $BABA's growth is slowing. It isn’t.
$BABA sold Inmut and Sun Art Q4-24, two businesses that generating roughly RMB 20B per quarter. Their removal from revenues makes this year’s growth look softer simply because comps include businesses that no longer exist in the group.
Adjusted for those, $BABA growth has actually been accelerating over the last three quarters: 10% → 10.7% → 15%
It’s not obvious in the numbers, but it will be once Q1-26 is compared against the first fully post-selling quarter.
Just wait for the market’s reaction.
tweet
$BABA will shock the market when it posts 15%+ YoY growth in Q1-26.
The market isn’t pricing this in and still believe $BABA's growth is slowing. It isn’t.
$BABA sold Inmut and Sun Art Q4-24, two businesses that generating roughly RMB 20B per quarter. Their removal from revenues makes this year’s growth look softer simply because comps include businesses that no longer exist in the group.
Adjusted for those, $BABA growth has actually been accelerating over the last three quarters: 10% → 10.7% → 15%
It’s not obvious in the numbers, but it will be once Q1-26 is compared against the first fully post-selling quarter.
Just wait for the market’s reaction.
tweet
Offshore
Photo
EndGame Macro
When a Stablecoin Outbuys Central Banks And Why Tether’s Gold Grab Actually Makes Sense
The red bar is Tether. The blue bars are countries.
This isn’t total reserves, it’s net gold buying in one quarter. Tether added about 26 tonnes of gold. The next biggest buyers were Kazakhstan and Brazil, then a string of emerging market central banks picking up much smaller amounts. In other words, for that quarter, a stablecoin issuer out bought every single central bank on the planet.
That’s wild at first glance, but if you think about the world Tether operates in, it’s not random at all.
Why a stablecoin central bank is stocking up on metal
Tether now sits in a strange place: it’s not a country, but it functions like a shadow central bank for the crypto world. It collects huge yields on its reserve portfolio, mostly short term Treasuries and cash. That pile is growing fast, and they can’t afford to keep all of it in one bucket.
Look at the macro backdrop they’re seeing…
Rates were hiked at record speed, public debt is at record levels, and there’s open talk about financial repression as the long term way out. At the same time, geopolitics has turned money into a weapon; Russia’s FX reserves getting frozen was a billboard to the rest of the world. You can see the response in official data: emerging market central banks have been quietly shifting away from Treasuries at the margin and buying gold instead. It’s the oldest hedge in the book against both inflation and sanctions risk.
Tether is just following that playbook, but with crypto flavor. If your whole business is issuing dollar IOUs outside the regulated banking system, you care a lot about two things…
1.Assets that can’t easily be frozen or haircut by a single government.
2.Assets that your users intuitively trust.
Gold fits both. A bar in a Swiss vault is harder to seize than a bank deposit at a U.S. institution. And in a community that already loves hard money narratives, our reserves include physical gold is a powerful marketing line, whether you fully believe it or not.
There’s also a straightforward product angle. Tether issues a gold backed token (XAUt), so it needs physical inventory anyway. Buying more metal doesn’t just diversify the USDT reserve; it also deepens their ability to run that whole tokenized gold business.
Why it actually makes sense in this cycle
Seen from the outside, “Tether bought more gold than every central bank” sounds like peak absurdity. Seen from their balance sheet, it’s consistent.
They’re swimming in cash from reserve income. Sovereign debt dynamics look shaky. The dollar’s hegemony is still intact but being chipped at the edges. Central banks are buying gold at the fastest pace in decades. And Tether itself lives in a legal gray zone where banking relationships can change on a headline.
In that environment, swapping a slice of T‑bills for bullion is rational. It reduces their dependence on any one jurisdiction, helps them ride the same derisk from fiat wave their users believe in, and gives them an asset that, in a worst case scenario, still has value outside the traditional system.
You can absolutely worry about transparency, concentration risk, and what it means for a private, opaque firm to be this big in the gold market. Those are real concerns.
But purely on incentives and macro, this isn’t some crazy stunt. It’s a logical move from an entity that has quietly started acting like a mid sized central bank, one that doesn’t trust the existing system enough to leave all of its chips on the table.
tweet
When a Stablecoin Outbuys Central Banks And Why Tether’s Gold Grab Actually Makes Sense
The red bar is Tether. The blue bars are countries.
This isn’t total reserves, it’s net gold buying in one quarter. Tether added about 26 tonnes of gold. The next biggest buyers were Kazakhstan and Brazil, then a string of emerging market central banks picking up much smaller amounts. In other words, for that quarter, a stablecoin issuer out bought every single central bank on the planet.
That’s wild at first glance, but if you think about the world Tether operates in, it’s not random at all.
Why a stablecoin central bank is stocking up on metal
Tether now sits in a strange place: it’s not a country, but it functions like a shadow central bank for the crypto world. It collects huge yields on its reserve portfolio, mostly short term Treasuries and cash. That pile is growing fast, and they can’t afford to keep all of it in one bucket.
Look at the macro backdrop they’re seeing…
Rates were hiked at record speed, public debt is at record levels, and there’s open talk about financial repression as the long term way out. At the same time, geopolitics has turned money into a weapon; Russia’s FX reserves getting frozen was a billboard to the rest of the world. You can see the response in official data: emerging market central banks have been quietly shifting away from Treasuries at the margin and buying gold instead. It’s the oldest hedge in the book against both inflation and sanctions risk.
Tether is just following that playbook, but with crypto flavor. If your whole business is issuing dollar IOUs outside the regulated banking system, you care a lot about two things…
1.Assets that can’t easily be frozen or haircut by a single government.
2.Assets that your users intuitively trust.
Gold fits both. A bar in a Swiss vault is harder to seize than a bank deposit at a U.S. institution. And in a community that already loves hard money narratives, our reserves include physical gold is a powerful marketing line, whether you fully believe it or not.
There’s also a straightforward product angle. Tether issues a gold backed token (XAUt), so it needs physical inventory anyway. Buying more metal doesn’t just diversify the USDT reserve; it also deepens their ability to run that whole tokenized gold business.
Why it actually makes sense in this cycle
Seen from the outside, “Tether bought more gold than every central bank” sounds like peak absurdity. Seen from their balance sheet, it’s consistent.
They’re swimming in cash from reserve income. Sovereign debt dynamics look shaky. The dollar’s hegemony is still intact but being chipped at the edges. Central banks are buying gold at the fastest pace in decades. And Tether itself lives in a legal gray zone where banking relationships can change on a headline.
In that environment, swapping a slice of T‑bills for bullion is rational. It reduces their dependence on any one jurisdiction, helps them ride the same derisk from fiat wave their users believe in, and gives them an asset that, in a worst case scenario, still has value outside the traditional system.
You can absolutely worry about transparency, concentration risk, and what it means for a private, opaque firm to be this big in the gold market. Those are real concerns.
But purely on incentives and macro, this isn’t some crazy stunt. It’s a logical move from an entity that has quietly started acting like a mid sized central bank, one that doesn’t trust the existing system enough to leave all of its chips on the table.
tweet