RISK DESK — EOD NOTE, THURSDAY SEPT 10 Cut the noise. Here's what we're actually sitting on. Oracle closed at $162.52 today, up from $158.77 a week ago, up from $156.71 the week before that. That's a stock

Before anyone on this desk repeats the phrase "China's trade data smashed expectations" in a client call today, read this memo. Then read it again, because half of what's being reported as volume

The Oracle Anniversary Nobody's Toasting One year ago this week, Oracle hit $345.72 a share and Larry Ellison spent about twelve minutes as the richest man on Earth on the strength of a slide deck about

When "Proportionate" Runs Out: Pricing an Escalation Ladder With No Ceiling Six months into a war that was supposed to have a ceiling, Iran's chief negotiator said the quiet part out loud. Mohammad

Notes to Self, Written on a Sunday I Should Not Be Working (A trader's private memo, never meant to leave his own laptop) Arthur Burns spent 1972 telling himself he wasn't cooking anything. That's the

Remarks to a Room That Already Knows the Punchline Good morning. I want to talk about the quiet period, because starting today, technically, the Fed can't. As of Saturday, the FOMC entered its blackout

Consensus sits at 53,000 to 58,000 depending on whose survey you're reading. Unemployment rate expected flat at 4.1%. Average hourly earnings up 0.2%. None of that is the interesting part of this memo.

On the desk, September 3, before the open. Notebook open, coffee cold. Thirty-eight thousand. That's what ADP just handed us for August — the weakest private payrolls print since January, missing the 47,000

Let's start with the number that should have broken the desk's coffee machine: ISM Manufacturing prices paid at 71.1 in August, essentially flat with July, while the employment sub-index cratered to 51.2

When the Believer Blinks: Strategy Buys the Dip It Spent Ten Weeks Selling Into There's a specific kind of silence that follows a company ending a ten-week selling streak by borrowing money to buy the

The yen broke back through 160 to the dollar on Monday, its weakest level in a month, and the number matters less than what it confirms: more than half of the gains purchased on July 31 are gone. That

Let's tally what we're actually proposing to spend before Friday's board call, because I don't think the deck captures it cleanly. $12.9 billion for Hugging Face. Company revenue: roughly $150 million

Nvidia guarantees up to $105 billion for OpenAI's Ohio data center. OpenAI uses that backing to raise debt on better terms than it could get alone, then spends the proceeds buying — what else — Nvidia

Six of seven Bank of Korea board members raised the base rate to 3% on Thursday. Second consecutive hike. First back-to-back tightening since the seven-straight-meeting slog of 2022-2023. Governor Shin

You picked "Financial Innovation: Implications for Payments and Policy" as this year's theme sometime last winter, presumably back when payments innovation meant something tidy and academic —

The Bar Isn't the Point Anymore Nvidia will almost certainly beat Wednesday's number. That's the boring part, and everyone quietly agrees on it, which is exactly why it stopped mattering months ago. Management

To whoever signed off on "Financial Innovation: Payments and Policy" as this year's theme: I'd like to understand the thinking, because from where the bond desk sits, we appear to have scheduled

The Arithmetic Nobody at Jackson Hole Will Say Out Loud Before we get into positioning, I want to walk through a number that isn't going to appear anywhere in Kevin Warsh's speech on Friday, because it's

Bessent didn't cut a check to bondholders on Thursday. He didn't have to. He said the word "increase" on CNBC and forty-eight hours later crypto had liquidated $3.3 billion of short sellers and

Let's start with what the sell-side wants you to look at, because it's mostly theater. Consensus has Nvidia printing $91.85 billion in fiscal Q2 revenue Wednesday after the close, against the company's