Brian

*perking up*, dammit. The way AI has utterly fucked up autocorrect is just another data point supporting my blistering contempt for anything emerging from the robotics club kids at Silicon Valley High.

By mid-January, the entire oil complex was in confirmed bull on trade and trend durations,
and Brent was up 20% before the first shot.

Also, crude itself it traded almost entirely by industry professionals with nearly perfect information.

Wouldn't shock me if it faded by end of day tomorrow.

This war was the most telegraphed shit in recent history. Signal strength on the oil and oil services stocks started parking up in late December, so I started watching them then.

They teased a flip to bullish trend first week in January, and I sold a 7% palladium position to put them on my sheets.

Last night's futures were pretty predictable, albeit mild: indices down .5 - .75%, oil up $2, PMs up pretty strongly.

I really thought it would be worse with Straits of Hormuz threatened, and especially all the trouble we had with Shahed drones, of which Ukraine kills hundreds per night.

Accountability thread for the week ending 2/28/2026. 4 days lifting: 2 top half, one bottom half, one back, with cardio and stretching last Sunday.

Felt pretty decent again this week, maybe I really am recovered.

Also considering they've never done an amphibious assault over open water in their entire military history.

Kinda suspect it's a backdoor government bailout for OpenAI and its partner Oracle. Pretty sure both would fail without intervention.

At this point, you gotta be a little more specific. Kind of an everyday thing nowadays.

Once I started reading boomer billionaires' correspondence in the Epstein evidence, I began to understand why olds think LLMs are great.

I watch vol surfaces. Oil and oil services woke up the last week in December. It teased bull trend until it finally flipped in mid-January. Safe to say it was pretty common knowledge what was going to happen.

But, consider that oil, the commodity, is traded by professionals with near-perfect info.

It's a backdoor government bailout for OpenAI. They're not gonna make it otherwise.

Saddam Selloff, they called it. Oil was +40% bottom to top. But, hell, Brent was already almost +20% since mid-January.

We'll get a look at the futures at 6 pm EST today.

Remember, you don't get a say in any of this, so your primary job is to transfer cash from dumbfucks with the impulse control skills of a 5th grader into your own pocket.

bsky.app/profile/bren...

Oh, by all means, stick your foul little nubby into another Middle East quagmire without a clear rationale, and no exit strategy. That should go well for you.

Interesting, because crypto tends to do well in stagflationary environments, but I don't see a single THING pointing to a trend reversal in bitcoin on the horizon.

International: Breather this week. Japan +8.3 MoM, India +3.2, Mexico +4.0, Turkey +2.7, corrected last week.

US sectors: Industrials +6.4% MoM, short discretionary -5.2%, tech - 6.2%, and financials -3.6%.

Monthlies is shaping up to be stagflation in March.

- Volatility: Dancing around 19, edge of the chop bucket. Mechanical flows still negative, dealers in negative gamma. VIX flipped to bull trend on Thursday, feel dumb for not buying it.

- Commodities: Oil bullish on both durations.Brent up 2.7% WoW. Silver +10.9, Platinum +9.3, Gold +3.2, Copper +2

The macro week, and what I'm looking at:

- If you get $USD right, you get LOTs of shit right about the market. $USD exited bear trend and is right in the middle of a neutral risk range, from 97.07 - 98.17. No edge.

- Rates: rates from 2s to 30s rates are bearish. Almost time to own some duration.

I do confess, ge is one of the few columnists thst I regularly hate-read just to see what the most tarted-up, Christianity-infested arguments supporting the most loathesome possible principles looks like.

Sold my palladium position back in Jsnuary to fund about a 6% position in oil and oil services.

Never forget your own role in this shitshow...

What will forever blow my mind is how signal strength and volatility characteristics signaled all this 6 weeks ago (and, honestly, ut started to perk up as early as the last week of December).

I didn't understand why when I bought it. Now, here we are, 20% later.

Yeah, I remember paying $6 to maybe $12.50 by the end of the 70s for a concert.

CLOs fell out of both trade and trend ranges earlier this week. Had a little position in a tax-advantaged account, so I booted it.

But, holy shit, there's nothing like crypto crime. Often it involves lots of illicit drugs, organized crime figures and state intelligence agencies.

There is, let's say, CONSIDERABLE overlap there between financial crime and true crime.

My wife asks me why I spend so much time reading about financial fraud. I tell her it's the same reason she reads true crime. And in some cases, there's considerable overlap between our two interests.

Unfortunately, you'll be out of a job, so it won't do any good unless you're already wealthy to begin with...

Depends on where the collapse catches me, I may possibly have 3 months of meds, no more. Even assuming I take them every other day, and my conditions begin to reassert themselves, I *might* have 9 months, and the last bit is going to be unpleasant as fuck, probably total blindness for starters.