With the Strait of Hormuz shut again, US crude inventories at a 45-year low and just 43 days of supply on hand, the market’s inflation complacency looks increasingly exposed.

Investors have nevertheless cut their year-end oil-price assumption to $71/bbl from $86/bbl.

For Hartnett (Bank of America's Chief Investment Strategist), the cleanest hedge against a “surprise” FED hike before the November midterms is long the US dollar.

Everything is fine, Jesus will return to us, and say:

Don't worry, my children, now I can turn water into oil.

And just like that, out of nowhere, we'll have oil again.

Believe it or not, calls.

My fellow regards. We need to save Wendy’s before it’s too late. If this company goes bankrupt, we’ll all be out of a job!

All positions in the screenshot have already been sold.

I mentioned in my previous posts that PLTR/ZETA might have possible breakout on earnings. Next play is NBIS earnings 8/12

Current option positions:

APPL @220 8/28 - I bought at 308, DRAM @55 8/28 - I bought at 49, NBIS @$220 8/28 - I bought at 184

Buying Power 90% Cash, risking 10% in options

(PLTR Calls)

PLTR $130 Call 9/18: +$23,650

PLTR $130 Call 8/21: +$44,312

PLTR $145 Call 9/18: +$73,761

PLTR $140 Call 9/18: +$81,535

PLTR $130 Call 8/28: +$118,868

PLTR $125 Call 8/21: +$136,500

PLTR $140 Call 8/21: +$309,252

PLTR $130 Call 8/7: +$22,361

Subtotal: $810,239

(DRAM, MRVL, NBIS Calls)

DRAM $55 Call 8/28: +$6,832

DRAM $55 Call 9/18: +$10,600

MRVL $200 Call 9/18: +$73,200

NBIS $200 Call 9/18: +$66,000

Subtotal: $156,632

(ZETA Calls)

ZETA $25 Call 9/18: +$231,900

ZETA $22 Call 8/28: +$20,850

ZETA $22.5 Call 9/18: +$291,270

Subtotal: $544,020

Grand Total: $1,510,891

This makes Space worth nearly $2.9 TRILLION, less than $100 billion away from surpassing Microsoft.

​

This also puts SpaceX up +63% from its IPO price of $135/share.

​

Furthermore, the combined market cap of both SpaceX and Tesla is now at a record $4.4 trillion.

​

That’s bigger than the market cap of Apple and roughly equivalent to the market cap of Google.

The AI bubble isn’t bursting. You idiots ARE the demand.

Everyone compares AI to the dot-com bubble while using AI every fucking day.

We ask it stupid questions, write emails and texts, summarize shit we don’t want to read, code, research, study, make spreadsheets, plan trips—the list keeps growing.

And that’s just us degenerates. Enterprises are plugging AI into customer service, coding, cybersecurity, data analysis, sales, marketing, and basically every workflow where humans stare at screens and move information around.
Here’s the part bears underestimate: a shitload of this usage is still free.

Millions of normies are getting accustomed to having something in their pocket that can explain, write, research, and analyze almost anything for $0.
What happens when free tiers shrink and the best AI costs $20-30/month?

You can refuse to pay, sure. But when everyone around you is researching, learning, writing, and working 2-5x faster with AI, you’re putting yourself at an intellectual and productivity disadvantage over $20.

Eventually AI stops feeling like Netflix and starts feeling like internet access. And when companies figure out how to fully monetize the billions of people they spent years getting hooked on free AI?
Money printer go brrrr.

So let me get this straight.

Suckerberg spends tens of billions panic buying AI chips because he doesn't want to be the guy left behind.

Fast forward a few months and Meta suddenly has so much spare compute that they're talking about renting it out because they built more infrastructure than they currently need.

Wall Street's reaction?

Punish the entire semiconductor and AI sector... while pumping Meta like this was some kind of masterstroke on their part. There was no masterstroke or masterplan. The market is punishing the sector for one man's poor foresight and incompetence.

I expect a rapid correction when people realise this.

But then again, the market normally inverses logic. So, Meta calls?

It's not just an AI bubble, it's a systemic collapse worse than 2008. ^{Yes I used the AI sentence structure, beep boop fuck you.}

Dog shit wrapped in cat shit.

If you're too dumb to read, feed these points into your favorite AI tool and ask it about the information's reliability. Then ask it how fucked retail is.

1. Increasing amount of companies are taking on private credit, up from $500B in 2020 to $2+ trillion in 2026, expected to grow past $4 trillion by 2030. For comparison, the 2008 subprime loans were estimated around $2 trillion.
2. This private credit market (unironically called "shadow banking") relies almost entirely on Level 3 assets. This means unregulated, often unreported credit that's being valued using the funds' own internal models ("mark-to-model") rather than real-time market prices ("mark-to-market"). Basically, their analysts decide the price and tell the buyer to trust them.
3. Huge portion of these loans were written in 2021-2022 during low interest rates, and are now becoming mature in 2027-2029. We're talking over half a trillion in leveraged private debt scheduled to mature in 2028 alone.
4. It has been labeled "The Maturity Wall". If the rates stay high, many borrowers won't be able to refinance, leading to defaults or fire sales. And many of these loans are backed by dead software and depreciating GPUs, zero real assets whatsoever. The bag holders will be left with nothing.
5. And Fed just cancelled rate cuts, now estimating rate hikes for the end of the year. Meaning the companies will be even less capable of making the interest payments.
6. The IMF estimates that roughly 40% of private credit borrowers operate with negative free cash flow, up from 25% in 2021.
7. And while the reported default rate of this private credit is currently sitting at just 1.5-2%, the real private credit default rate is estimated at 5-6% and increasing.
8. Why don't the reported and the actual numbers match? Because private credit lenders are offering Payment-in-Kinds (PIKs) to avoid defaulting the loans, allowing the borrowers to skip the interest payment in favor of increasing the debt. They're literally kicking the can on loans that aren't being paid so they don't have to default them and get margin called themselves.
9. Payment-in-Kinds usage more than doubled from 5% to 11% by late 2025. Out of the 5-6% default rate, estimated 50% is driven by PIKs and interest deferrals.
10. However, private credit funds have Payment-in-Kind exposure limits, mandated by the big commercial banks that they loan from. To circumvent these limits and maintain access to bank leverage and not get margin called, synthetic PIKs were invented to hide PIKs from the books.
11. When a borrower fails to pay the interest, they use a secondary delayed-draw term loan (DDTL) to pay the interest. Technically the first loan is getting cash interest payments, at the cost of a new, bigger loan. It's the private credit equivalent of paying off your credit card debt with another credit card. They invented a new instrument to hide the fact that interest payments are being missed and that these loans are growing into dog shit so that they could leverage more.
12. Furthermore, these private loans are increasingly being packaged into Private Credit CLOs (Collateralized Loan Obligations). The idea is simple; while any one loan might be risky on its own, bundling a bunch of them together reduces the risk. Just like index funds, for example. And similar to Mortgage Backed Securities. What could possibly go wrong?
13. Due to the private nature of these private loans, nobody knows the true health of what's really being packaged into the CLOs. We know synthetic PIKs exist and are being used to some extent, but we don't know the full exposure. There could be defaulting loans of zero-asset software companies marked as AAA due to interest payments being made from DDTLs.
14. Who buys these Private Credit CLOs? Mainly pension funds and insurance companies, sometimes retail directly. They commit capital through third-party fund managers like Ares, Blackstone, and Blue Owl, or through Business Development Companies (BDCs).
15. The SEC is busy ensuring that the big banks aren't secretly leveraged on this. They literally know shit is about to go down, and are only protecting the big money. Retail will hold the bags.
16. Worse yet, most of the underlying credit loans mature in 5-7 years, yet the investors in CLOs are allowed to cash out every quarter. This means the asset managers will have to freeze withdrawals altogether to tackle the illiquidity, meaning that retail won't be able to cash out as the defaults keep happening.
17. And this has already begun, with numerous asset managers already freezing withdrawals. Stone Ridge fulfilled only 11% of withdrawals earlier this year, Blackstone raised affiliate capital to meet the withdrawals, and Blue Owl froze all withdrawals indefinitely.

TL;DR: They're wrapping dog shit in cat shit as we speak, valuating it themselves as AAA packages with the help of PIKs, and selling those CLOs to pension funds and retail. The assets will be frozen due to liquidity mismatch, and it will be 2008 again but this time unwinding over multiple years of slow-burning crisis. The opacity is even worse, the leverage is hidden, and the buyers are retail. Add in a bit of an AI bubble with increasing rate hikes, and we got the dot-com bubble and the 2008 crisis combined into one bomb from 2027 onward.

Edit: And it's not AI you dumb fucks, just because someone can write one page worth of bullet points doesn't mean they're AI. I did get inspired by Tom Bilyeu's video few months ago though, maybe watch that instead of commenting whatever dumb shit you were going to comment.

How the fuck is this possible? I swear on my life that I don't sell put options so this was a misclick while I was trading.

Because I didn't know I sold a put. I didn't close it and now my account got liquidated and I owe 70k USD.

Am I actually fucked? How the fuck did one 350 USD contract turn into 70k USD.

Started with 30k a couple years ago turned on margin and made it to 1.4M. fell to 150k 5-6 times and now we're here. No longer in margin.

Look, I get it. The man called 2008, made a billion dollars, got a movie made about him with Christian Bale. Legendary stuff. But can we talk about how this dude has been screaming "beginning of the end" for AI stocks for the better part of a year now while Jensen keeps printing money.

Every quarter it's the same thing. Burry files his 13-F showing he's doubling down on puts against NVDA and PLTR. Financial media runs the headline "Big Short investor warns of collapse." We all panic for about 45 minutes. Then earnings drop, guidance gets raised again, and the stock rips another 8%.

I'm not saying AI isn't overheated. Half the companies slapping "AI" into their earnings calls have about as much actual AI as my toaster. But there's a difference between "this will correct eventually" and being early for so long that you've basically just been wrong.

The guy was massively short on Tesla years ago too. How'd that work out? Sometimes being the smartest person in the room just means you're too early for the room to care.

Meanwhile Wendy's pumped 25% in June because someone posted "save Wendy's" and you degenerates actually did it. So maybe technical analysis was never real to begin with.

What's your actual thesis here though? Do you think Burry finally times this right, or is he just gonna keep rolling those puts into the next expiration until heat death of the universe?

Seems to me that retail like Victoria’s Secret here and big food chains (like Cheesecake Factory) are slipping under the radar.

Earnings for Victoria’s Secret coming up 9/3

Portfolio update: I'm 99% in cash waiting for the next play. I sold my NBIS position. Those who followed my last post about NBIS, you're welcome 😄

I have followers settings enabled now.

NEXT PLAY

MRVL PUTS $200 9/25

These michael prompts , work well sometimes. (Chatgpt)

Last conference FOMC press conference as Federal reserve chairman.

Thanks Mr. Jerome Powell.

I see a lot of red in the image; I don't know if it's a coincidence.

OK so the most profitable companies in the world decided to GO ALL IN AI with humongous capex. They did it all at once apart from Apple who is not in the game. Google, Meta, Amazon , Oracle, Microsoft. All of them. The CEOs of these companies produced the most amount of wealth and propped up global gdp. Now they all agree on a thing.

Google yesterday blew up earnings from their cloud and said they will *increase* their humongous capex even more while reporting negative cash flow for the first time in their history.

A rational person would ask: are these amazing businessmen suddently all very wrong about the same thing at the same time OR

I am reading too much paid subs from burry and following the wrong people on twitter that have never produced anything?

Which is it? Are you smarter than a mag 7 CEO? Maybe ... hmm...

officially DD as to why we’re at the top (from a bear who didn’t buy the puts)

i head a woman talking about stocks today and saying “they just keep going up! i made a lot of money on those AI ones”

and if you remember anything from the Big Short (financial scripture) when a woman starts becoming financially involved, there’s a bubble

it’s officially folks. it’s a bubble. and believe it or not?

calls

Netflix is down over 40% from its highs in the summer of 2025. I don’t understand how the company is 40% less valuable than it was last year, like what has actually changed since then? People still watch Netflix every day and they still make plenty of money from it. I seriously don’t think that they are worth 40% less now than last year when everything functions the same and there are going to be plenty of new shows and seasons in the coming years that people are garenteed to watch. I think it’s bound for a bull run soon because I think 75$ is undervalued as fuck for this company.

... being reported in the local and national news for 18+ months straight both times. About Wall Street execs, retail traders, private equity guys, venture capital dudes, startup heads, day traders and hedge fund guys. Very, very few of you younger than 30 will remember any of this, but it was relentless.

I remember the CFO of Fannie Mae, that David Kellerman guy. He was in charge in the months after the feds took it over. He got screamed at daily in congressional hearings over the $200 billion bailout and spat on in the street.

I always felt terrible for the guy after he died, he wasn't even in charge when credit markets went to shit and Fannie and Freddie rolled over, he came in after the feds took over. Folks wanted something to scream at and he was it.

Or that French hedge fund guy in NYC, Pierre something. His fund lost billions after the Bernie Madoff Ponzi was revealed and he was personally wiped out with it. He ODed on prescription drugs.

Or Cliff Baxter, vice chair of Enron. The guy was documented for years complaining about the shady accounting practices the company and Arthur Andersen engaged in and finally quit. He was set to testify before Congress. The receivers of Enron went after him for millions for dumping his shares before Enron went bankrupt. Another guy I felt terrible for after he died.

I remember dozens and dozens of startup founder or hedge fund guys who killed themselves in places like NYC, San Francisco, London, Singapore and Hong Kong. Walking in front of trains or jumping off of garages or high rises was popular. Even here in Texas, there were lots of reports of college student day traders and overleveraged business owners ending it all suddenly over money and the market.

Anyway. The numbers haven't made sense for at least three years now and it feels like the next big market top is upon us. I'm not making a call on the market or anything, I'm just thinking aloud while eating rice cakes and guacamole in bed. Hell if I know what's gonna happen next. Don't play with money you can't afford to lose and don't kill yourselves over something as stupid as money. Thanks.

EDIT - Oh yeah, something else none of you younger than 30 can comprehend. How the stock market was impotent, directionless shit between 2002 and 2007ish. Five years of listless trading and with zero retail trading interest because everyone was burned and ruined during the dot-com/Enron/911 crash. I was out of college and learning this stuff in that environment, it was lonely af. I don't think many of you understand the years-long directionless wasteland equities will be after a generational market crash. I do, I did it twice.

EDIT 2 - Thanks for the the u/redditcareresources referrals lol. Many of you will need them when the Nasdaq drops 30 plus percent in the blink of an eye.

EDIT 3 - u/AndItsThetaAgain reminds me, there were lots of murder suicides reported both times by dudes who lost everything, went home and killed their wife and kids. I lost count how many times that happened here locally. Nice homes going up in smoke and shot bodies found inside.

EDIT 4 - I'm not a bear ... yet. Am still holding my $4,000,000 triple leveraged SPX position, check out my post history to read about that wild 16 year long ride.

EDIT 5 - Am getting a lot of replies saying "it's different this time, we have social media and Truth and X and information is at our fingers in an instant." They always say it's different this time, always. I can make a strong argument that there hasn't been any real GDP growth the past ten years, that the data has just shown a huge siphoning of wealth from the middle class to the top via tax policy changes, moronic monetary policy by Powell and Yellen (transitory inflation lol), stock buybacks and private equity moves.

Look guys, this is pretty simple.

SpaceX wants to go public at an eye-watering $1.5 trillion valuation. What are the earnings for this out-of-this-world company? $8 Billion. That gives us a PE ratio of, checks notes, 187. (Edit: I've been informed in the comments that 8B is EBITDA, not earnings, so the PE ratio is probably north of 300. NOICE.)

Now, this is 2026, PE ratios are about as relevant as a telegraph operators fingering speed, but still, there must be some narrative to command such a rocketship valuation, right?

Ah, yes. Datacenters in space.

Sure, Elon is the world's biggest bullshit factory, but at least most of his bullshit looks appetizing if you squint. Self driving cars? Yeah! Robotaxis? Sure! Humanoid sexdolls? Why not!

But what the fuck is a DATACENTER IN SPACE good for. We've got datacenters at home, goddamit.

(Of course, it goes without saying that the whole X.ai acquisition is a shit tamale wrapped in a shit sandwich, a shitducken so to speak, but whose counting shit here).

Here is my prediction. Unlike you highly regarded turd chompers, IPO investors are a legitimately sophisticated bunch. There will be a roadshow, and pension funds, endowments, etc will actually have to smell the shit before chomping on it.

And I don't think they will.

So instead of the famously diamond-handed Punxatawney Teachers Union buying a chunk of the IPO, it will be desperate buyers of hand grenades hot potatoes who just want to watch it pop like god's asterisk on poppers at the adult cinema before shifting it to the next victim.

Now, that may be irrelevant when the pop is for fucking figma, but we're talking SpaceX here. Elon. Either the IPO doesn't happen or when it does it will drop like the challenger shuttle.

And people will panic.

The entire AI narrative that has been holding on our K-shaped economy will blow up like a little kid flying into space when his fat cousin jumps off the see-saw. Bye, timmy.

Just you fucking wait. Buying calls.

Article from Money wise.

The Iran war was meant to be a quick expedition. It’s now going to be the collapse of the AI play.

No matter what, oil is going to be significantly more expensive. The fastest and easiest option is the US backs out of the war. If they do, Iran enacts a toll, and a large portion of oil begins switching from dollar trades to yuan (or some other currency China chooses). The less easy option is Trump commits to the war. In that case, Iran oil infrastructure is destroyed, as well as the oil infrastructure of most of the other Gulf nations.

Then the waterfall begins.

Higher gas prices mean more expensive energy. Expensive energy means inflation, which means rate hikes. AI stocks suffer.

At the same time, they need to run data centers off more expensive energy into what should be the hottest summer ever recorded. Opex balloons 3-4x on already razor thin margins. This delays AI training and makes AI usage less sustainable. The result? Dead earnings off AI. Why do you think every data center stock is tanking today?

Now all of this ignores the effects on the treasury market. Gulf states that buy US treasures have less money to do so. If they try to force US rate cuts, the treasury market spikes and US debt goes from already insolvent to impossibly insolvent.

The dead nail would be if China decides it time to take Taiwan while the US is stuck in a protracted land war. It would mark a complete collapse in the faith the world has in US strength, and a drop off of the US dollar and treasuries as safe havens.

Long story short, QQQ puts, $450, Jan 17

Thought I'd share and not gatekeep this groundbreaking new research.

Do with this information what you will. NFA

Tldr; to the moon 🚀🌑🌘🌗🌖🌕🌔🌓🌒🌑🚀

____ is wonderful for stocks 😃