Elon Musk’s
artificial intelligence startup xAI is looking to hire bankers and
private credit lenders to make its Grok chatbot better at finance
strategy, joining rival AI firms in pushing software for investing
professionals.
xAI
is actively recruiting Wall Street bankers, portfolio managers, traders
and credit analysts for its data annotation teams that train Grok,
according to a series of job postings on its website. These experts are
expected to teach the AI system to think through financial modeling,
including leveraged loan syndication, distressed investing and niche
bonds such as mortgage-backed securities and collateralized loan
obligations.
The company is also hiring financial experts in the crypto and equity markets, the postings show.
The
top AI developers have increasingly focused on convincing more business
professionals to pay up for their software, with multiple startups
specifically eyeing the financial sector. OpenAI and Anthropic PBC have released tools
meant to streamline market analysis, investment memos and other work.
Those moves have spooked investors in legacy software providers that
some fear may be rendered obsolete.
xAI, which merged with Musk’s SpaceX
last month, is generally viewed as lagging competitors in signing up
business customers. To date, much of xAI’s revenue has come from deals with Musk’s other ventures, including Tesla Inc. and SpaceX.
Musk’s
AI company is rebuilding its business strategy after a turbulent start
to the year, during which it lost many staffers, including much of its founding team, and faced a global uproar over Grok generating non-consensual explicit images.
Last week, Musk hired two senior employees from Cursor, a leading AI coding startup that is in fundraising discussions at a $50 billion valuation.
Musk admitted at a recent conference that xAI is behind on coding, a
feature that has been a key revenue driver for OpenAI and Anthropic....
We've been posting on machine learning and AI for a decade and
strolling through the archives might allow us to avoid reinventing the
wheel. Plus there is some wickedly fun stuff we've collected over the
years.
Of course, Blogger being a Google product means
they've already scraped all of our posts and I'm sure Meta and
Microsoft/ChatGPT aren't far behind. Pity we didn't poison the data-well
a bit more....
....The Pathological and the Perturbed
The other category of adversarial machine learning attacks are known
as "evasion.” This strategy targets systems that have already been
trained. Rather than trying to corrupt training data, it tries to
generate pathological inputs that confuse the model, causing it to
generate incorrect results.
The spam filter attack, where you trick an algorithm into seeing spam as ham, is an example of evasion. Another is "Hyperface," a collaboration between Hyphen Labs
and Adam Harvey, a specially designed scarf engineered to fool facial
recognition systems by exploiting the heuristics these systems use to
identify faces. Similarly, in a recent study,
researchers developed a pair of glasses that consistently cause a
state-of-the-art facial recognition system to misclassify faces it would
otherwise identify with absolute certainty....
Now that the GTC (GPU Technology Conference) has become much ballyhooed in the general media we don't see as much lift for the stock as in days of yore. Going into one of the conferences, either San Jose or Teipei it struck me that unless Mr. Huang can levitate into the auditorium, the media reaction is often "meh."
And so it goes.
Where we have seen some action is in the secondary and tertiary names. When they turned the spotlight (literally) on Michael Dell last year it was, not quite a sign from God but a pretty good tell on the action:
AI Stocks: Nvidia GTC News Could Jolt Broadcom, Dell, CoreWeave, Arista, Lumentum
As volatility in artificial intelligence stocks plays out in 2026, Nvidia's (NVDA)
GTC this week could jolt a wide range of companies beyond the chip
giant itself. Many of the leading AI stocks last year have turned into
laggards. But there are bright spots, such as memory chip makers.
Further, Nvidia's updated AI chip roadmap at GTC will be closely watched by rivals such as Broadcom (AVGO). Its data-center networking strategy could influence suppliers like Arista Networks (ANET), while Nvidia's push into optical interconnects has implications for component makers such as Lumentum Holdings (LITE).
AI computer server makers such as Dell Technologies (DELL) and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) could react to updates on Nvidia's next-generation GPU systems. Cloud computing partners including CoreWeave (CRWV) and Nebius Group (NBIS) may see volatility tied to demand signals for AI infrastructure.
Nvidia GTC: Huang Keynote Nvidia Chief Executive Jensen Huang will deliver a keynote presentation on Monday at 11 a.m. PT. Aside from Nvidia technology, he's expected to highlight developments in the AI ecosystem, including open software models and agentic systems. OpenClaw, an open-source AI agent that can write code and surf the web to complete tasks on behalf of users, could be as big a game-changer as ChatGPT.
While Nvidia is ramping up production of "Vera Rubin" AI
accelerators, this year's GTC is expected to bring news related to
Nvidia's $20 billion technology licensing agreement with Groq announced
in December. One change in the AI accelerator market is that demand will
shift from training AI models to "inferencing," or running AI
applications. At GTC, Nvidia is expected to unveil a new AI inferencing
chip using Groq's technology.
AI Stocks: Hyperscalers Retreat Nvidia stock has retreated 3% in 2026. Further, Nvidia stock has been in a trading range since mid-2025. One view is that investors are focusing on the sustainability of hyperscaler capital spending growth and the longevity of the AI business cycle. In other words, investors are focused on the duration of the AI boom, not the magnitude.
Meanwhile, investors are scrutinizing capital spending hikes by
hyperscalers — cloud computing giants that build massive data centers.
Shares in all the hyperscalers have under-performed in 2026 amid worries
that they're building too much AI infrastructure, too fast.
Four hyperscalers — Alphabet's (GOOGL) Google, Amazon.com (AMZN), Meta Platforms (META) and Microsoft (MSFT)
— are now expected to spend $645 billion in 2026, representing growth
of 56% or $230 billion on a dollar basis. Google stock is down 3% this
year while Meta has retreated 7%. Amazon stock has pulled back 10%.
Microsoft stock is down 18%.
In 2026, investors prefer some data center plays over AI chip
suppliers amid intensified semiconductor competition. Among the
top-performing AI stocks this year have been Lumentum, Ciena (CIEN), Applied Optoelectronics (AAOI), and Vertiv HoldingsVRT.....
The war continues to dominate, but the dollar is trading lower against the G10 currencies. April WTI is trading in around a $3 range on both sides of $99 a barrel. US and European benchmark 10-year yields are a little softer. If the markets seem calmer, recognize that it is precarious as the fog of war limits visibility. Meanwhile, Chinese macro data for February were reported mostly a little better than expected, French municipal elections race run-off next weekend and the key is who can form alliances
Before the weekend, a US federal court blocked the Justice Department’s subpoena of the Federal Reserve and US attorney for the District of Colombia (Pirro) says she will appeal but it appears no formal decision has been made. The shift in the calculation of the US PCE deflator from using the CPI measure of legal services to the PPI estimate caught the market by surprise as it was not announced or explained, but seems to have taken about 0.1% off the core measure, playing on fears of the integrity of US data....
I too have known the allure of Ruthenium, Ruthie to her friends.*
From Reuters, March 15:
Ruthenium,
a minor metal in the platinum-group metals (PGMs), has surged to an
all-time high as supply constraints and growing demand linked to
artificial intelligence tighten the market, analysts and producers said.
Used
in electronics, semiconductors, and chemical processing, ruthenium is
seeing rising demand from AI-driven data storage and cloud computing.
Expansion in data centre capacity is lifting hard disk drive
production, where the metal is used in magnetic layers.
Ruthenium
prices were around $1,750 per ounce on March 13, according to data
from LSEG, citing Johnson Matthey's benchmark prices, up from $560 per
ounce a year earlier.
"The
fact that it's establishing itself as a 'precious proxy for the AI
buildout', investors have likely also expanded positioning," said Nicky
Shiels, Head of Research & Metals Strategy at MKS PAMP.....
UAE’s Fujairah oil trading hub targeted by a drone attack, causing large fire
A drone strike on Monday caused a large fire at the United Arab Emirate’s key oil trading hub of Fujairah, authorities said.
The attack comes after a separate drone strike and fire at Fujairah over the weekend.
It underlines the vulnerability of the UAE’s only export route that bypasses the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz.
A drone attack at the United Arab Emirates’ key oil trading hub of
Fujairah triggered a large fire, authorities said on Monday, with no
injuries reported.
“Civil Defense teams in the Emirate immediately
responded to the incident and are continuing their efforts to control
it,” Fujairah Media Office said on social media, according to a Google
translation.
Oil
loading operations at the major oil bunkering hub had been suspended as
a result of the drone attack, Reuters reported, citing two unnamed
sources. CNBC has contacted the UAE’s ADNOC and is awaiting a response.
The attack comes after a separate drone strike and fire at Fujairah on Saturday, underlining the vulnerability of the UAE’s only export route that bypasses the strategically vital Strait of Hormuz.....
Elon Musk's plans to build a chip fab are expected to be unveiled in 7 days, as Tesla's CEO aims to solve the chip supply bottleneck his company faces. Elon Musk Intends to Have a TeraFab That Produces 'Hundreds of Billions' Chips Per Year, But Probably Without a Cleanroom
The semiconductor industry is witnessing some of its 'intense-ever' timelines amid the AI frenzy, as demand for chips is so immense that it is imposing constraints on customers like Tesla. Musk has repeatedly pitched the idea of creating his fab network, saying it would help Tesla fulfill its custom silicon ambitions and, at the same time, allow the US to reduce its reliance on TSMC. While many experts have called Musk's ideas 'wild,' saying semiconductor businesses aren't easy to enter, it appears Tesla's CEO is doubling down on them.
Musk's recent tweet says that the TeraFab project launches in "7 days",
and while he hasn't talked about the specifics, it is likely that he and
his team will give us a rundown on how the fab would actually
materialize. Based on Tesla's CEO's earlier claims, he is eager to achieve an output of 100 billion to 200 billion chips per year,
which would technically make his fab one of the largest in the world,
surpassing TSMC's output in Taiwan. While the ambitions do seem
'awesome' on paper, many have questioned Musk's actual game plan, noting
that the last time he discussed TeraFab, he ruled out a cleanroom....
As they say on the internet: "How can we miss you if you won't go away?"
From the AP via the Los Angeles Times, March 14:
U.S. State Department reduces citizenship renunciation fee by 80%, from $2,350 to $450, ending years of legal battles challenging the charge’s constitutionality.
The steep fee, enacted in 2015 due to surging demand among American expatriates seeking to avoid new tax reporting requirements, faced fierce opposition.
At least 8,755 Americans paid the full $2,350 since a 2023 reduction announcement.
The State Department has slashed by about 80% the fee for Americans to formally renounce their U.S. citizenship.
After
years of legal battles with several groups representing Americans
wanting to give up their citizenship, the department on Friday published
a final rule in the Federal Register that reduces the cost from $2,350
to $450.
The new fee, which took effect Friday, had been promised
in 2023 but never implemented. The cost is now the same as it was when
the State Department first started charging Americans to formally
renounce their citizenship in 2010.
Renouncing
U.S. citizenship can be an intensive and lengthy process. Applicants
must repeatedly confirm in multiple written and verbal attestations to a
State Department consular officer that they understand the implications
of the step before being allowed to take a formal oath of renunciation.
It must then be reviewed by the department.
The fee was raised
from $450 to $2,350 in 2015 to cover the administrative expenses as the
number of people wanting to renounce their citizenship surged in part
due to new U.S. tax reporting requirements for American expatriates that
angered many.
That dramatic fee increase drew significant
opposition from groups such as the France-based Assn. of Accidental
Americans, which represents people mainly living abroad whose U.S.
citizenship is due to their having been born in the United States....
Thinking about the current state of the world and what may be coming from somewhere over the horizon the answer struck me, Yak!
Like
other indigenous peoples, the Maasai with their cattle or the North
American plains Indians with their bison, the folks in Tibet have found
the yak to be the big critter that gives sustenance. Although I was
disappointed to find there were no how-to guides, no "1001 Things To Do
With Your Yak."
"In the heart of the awe-inspiring Tibetan landscapes, where the mighty
Himalayas caress the sky, a golden elixir is forged through a delicate
alchemy. It is the essence of sustenance and the lifeblood of a revered
culinary tradition. This delicacy is none other than yak butter – a
majestic ingredient that holds a sacred place in Tibetan cuisine."
Which
is fine as far as it goes but seems a bit wordy for my current
interest. Plus a bit hyper-focused on the lipids whereas I want to know
more about this:
Assuming that saddle-looking thing is really a saddle, can I ride my yak?
Can I dress my yak in festive colors?
Does this yak give milk? I would be disappointed and a bit troubled to find the dangly bits were of the wrong sort.
So many questions. Is there a demand for yak wool?
We've looked at some of the history of the wool trade:
It appears most of the upstream plays involve sheep.
And being something of a neo-Luddite the midstream with the looms and the other textile machinery doesn't entice.
So perhaps wholesale and retail are beckoning Marketing and market differentiation.
Leading to the next question: How risky is yak ownership? Can the risk be mitigated?
The Strange Business of Subsidized Yak Insurance Originally posted in October 2017, an odd corner of the insurance business.
If there was a euro/renminbi to be made, the Dutch re/insurers would already be on it:
...the herverzekering crowd in Amsterdam, they're tough bastards.*
But they aren't, so this reads a bit like Death of a Salesman, Tibet-style.
From Pacific Standard:
On the northeast corner of the Tibetan Plateau, in central China's Gansu Province, nomads can buy insurance policies for their sheep and yaks. The Chinese government subsidizes the plans, and on highways cutting across Gannan, a Tibetan prefecture in Gansu, billboards advertising the insurance programs
share the roadside with signs promoting family planning. Behind the
billboards lie vast expanses of grassland—rolling canvases of deep green
that stretch into oblivion—where sheep and yaks graze, as if Chinese
Communist Party officials have placed them there for a photo shoot.
"Meiguo pengyou! Lai!" "American friend! Come!" The day was young—1 p.m. on a Thursday—and I asked why he'd already begun drinking.
"I took a day off today. There's nothing to do."
"Why?"
"My job has no meaning."
"Business isn't good?"
"It's
bad," he said. "This insurance thing, it doesn't have any meaning." He
looked into his beer glass, sniffled, and shook his head.
I offered, optimistically, that insurance could help a lot of people. There were lots of nomadicshepherds in Tibet—wasn't there demand? He shook his head again.
"Nobody buys the insurance. Nomads don't understand insurance."
This statement perfectly encapsulated the Chinese government's struggle in Tibet. Since the 1950s, when the CCP first occupied Tibet,
assimilation by force had brought little beyond resentment. After
decades of failure, the Party had begun to try a new strategy; instead
of coercing Tibetans for their loyalty, it would try to buy it. The
Chinese government invested in infrastructure, provided generous
subsidies and tax incentives across various industries, and attempted to
bring modern finance—like insurance—to the Plateau. The economic
strategy has, so far, been far more successful than the military one,
but it is an ongoing project, and one with limits.
"They just don't understand this stuff," he said again, referring to the nomads.
He explained the pricing. The payoffs, he said, were far too low.
"It doesn't matter anyway. No one buys the insurance. The job doesn't mean anything."
As
the afternoon wore on, his depression grew more personal. Middle-aged
and far from his home village, he worried about his aging parents. At
one point, he began to sob, imagining them dying alone while he failed
to sell yak and sheep insurance.
After years of starts and stops, workers installed the final blades on the last turbine Friday evening to complete Vineyard Wind, the country's first large-scale offshore wind project.
It
will be at least several weeks until all 62 turbines in the wind farm
off the coast of Massachusetts are fully up and running, generating
power for the New England grid. Still, the end of construction is a
milestone for the project and the U.S. offshore wind industry, which has
faced years of economic and political headwinds.
Gov.
Maura Healey said she was "thrilled" to learn construction was
complete, noting that the project is expected to save Massachusetts
ratepayers $1.4 billion over the first 20 years of operation.
"The
affordable, homegrown power it delivers to Massachusetts residents and
businesses will bring costs down as President Trump throws global
markets into disarray," she said in a statement.
As the
first large offshore wind project to go through the cumbersome federal
permitting process, all eyes have been on Vineyard Wind from the
beginning. Whether it would reach this point was not a sure bet.
Construction has been pushed back several times, beginning in 2019 under the first Trump administration. In 2024 a turbine blade snapped and debris washed up on the shores of Nantucket, causing months of delay. And just three months ago, when the project was 95% complete, the U.S. Interior Department issued a stop-work order.
But with a stretch of good weather offshore, the developers behind the $4.5 billion project managed to get over the finish line.
The
next step is what's called commissioning — the complicated process of
connecting turbines to the grid and ensuring they work properly. In an
earnings call earlier this week, Iberdrola, the parent company of
Avangrid, one of the project's co-developers, told investors that 52 of
the 62 turbines are authorized for operation.
A spokesperson for Vineyard Wind declined to say exactly how many turbines are generating power, but in late January, the company said in court documents
that 44 turbines were operational. When fully online, the wind farm
will be capable of producing 800 megawatts, enough electricity to power
about 400,000 homes in the region.
As Vineyard Wind finished construction Friday evening, the wind
developer Ørsted announced that some of its turbines in the Revolution
Wind project near Rhode Island were sending power to the grid for the first time. That project is nearly complete as well, and will eventually be capable of powering up to 350,000 homes....
Andreessen Horowitz's Top 50 AI Startup Companies A16z's view of the most important AI application companies shaping enterprise adoption in 2025. Executive Summary
The AI landscape has shifted from foundational model development to practical applications. Three trends dominate: vertical-specific AI agents replacing general-purpose tools, autonomous systems handling complex multi-step workflows, and the battle for adoption happening inside existing tools rather than through new platforms.
1. OpenAI - Foundational Model
Score: 5/5 | Enterprise Developers, Consumers
Offers GPT-4o, o1, DALL-E 3, Whisper, and comprehensive API platform. On track for $13B annual revenue. ChatGPT dominates consumer AI; API powers countless enterprise applications.
Why it matters: Transformed from research lab to infrastructure layer. First-mover advantage created ecosystem lock-in. As Nvidia's CEO said: "just about every application is connected to OpenAI."
2. Anthropic - Foundational Model
Score: 5/5 | Enterprise Developers
Claude family of LLMs trained with Constitutional AI. Founded by former OpenAI members. Automation accounts for 77% of API usage.
Why it matters: Commercialized AI safety. "Constitutional AI" appeals to risk-averse enterprises in regulated industries. Created "Safety as a Service" backed by Amazon and Google.
3. Replit - Engineering Stack
Score: 4/5 | Developers, Students, Businesses
Cloud-based IDE with AI assistant. Supports 500+ languages. 30M+ users projected, 58% in non-engineering roles.
Why it matters: All-in-one platform eliminates tool fragmentation. AI acts as active collaborator across entire development lifecycle from ideation to deployment.
4. Freepik - Generative Content
Score: 3/5 | Designers, Marketers
Stock content marketplace integrated with AI creative suite. AI image/video generation, background removal, sketch-to-image.
Why it matters: Successfully merged traditional stock library with modern generative AI. One-stop shop eliminating need for multiple subscriptions. Actively promotes trend adoption through AI tools.
5. ElevenLabs - Generative Content
Score: 5/5 | Content Creators, Developers
AI speech synthesis and voice cloning. Launched Eleven Music in August 2025 for AI-generated music.
Why it matters: Crossed the "uncanny valley" with hyper-realistic emotional speech. Also its biggest liability—used for deepfakes and scams, creating regulatory challenges.
6. Cursor - Engineering Stack
Score: 4/5 | Software Developers
AI-assisted IDE forked from VS Code. Uses GPT-4 and Claude for editing, generating, refactoring via text-based interface.
Why it matters: Fork strategy enables deeper integration than plugins. "YOLO mode" allows autonomous iteration—AI writes, tests, fixes code until completion.
7. Fyxer.ai - Productivity & Automation
Score: 3/5 | Business Professionals, Teams
AI executive assistant for email, meetings. Integrates with Gmail, Outlook, Slack, Zoom. Raised $30M Series B, grew from $1M to $17M ARR in 8 months.
Why it matters: Not groundbreaking tech but effective packaging. Unified solution beats fragmented tools. Lacks advanced features like shared inboxes found in competitors....
A new 2,500-question exam developed by Texas A&M University reveals how far AI still is from expert human knowledge.
Artificial intelligence systems now breeze through many academic tests
that once challenged both machines and people. That success created an
unexpected problem. The benchmarks used to measure AI progress stopped
being useful because top models were scoring too high.
A massive international research effort set out to fix that.
Nearly
1,000 experts from more than 50 countries collaborated to build a new
assessment called Humanity’s Last Exam, or HLE, a 2,500-question test
covering more than 100 subjects. The project, described in the journal Nature, aims to measure how far modern AI still falls short of expert human knowledge.
“When
AI systems start performing extremely well on human benchmarks, it’s
tempting to think they’re approaching human-level understanding,” said
Tung Nguyen, an instructional associate professor in computer science
and engineering at Texas A&M University
who helped develop the exam. “But HLE reminds us that intelligence
isn’t just about pattern recognition — it’s about depth, context and
specialized expertise.”
The name sounds dramatic. The purpose is practical.
Distribution of HLE questions across categories. HLE consists of 2,500 exam questions in over a hundred subjects, grouped into eight high-level categories. (CREDIT: Nature)
When benchmarks stop working
Large
language models now exceed 90 percent accuracy on well-known tests such
as Massive Multitask Language Understanding, or MMLU, which once
represented the frontier of AI evaluation. As scores climbed,
researchers lost a reliable way to track progress.
That saturation prompted the creation of a harder benchmark that would remain challenging even as technology improved.
HLE
includes both text-based and image-based questions. About 14 percent
require interpreting visual information alongside written prompts.
Roughly one quarter are multiple choice, while the rest require precise
answers that automated systems can verify.
Questions
span an unusual range. Some involve translating ancient Palmyrene
inscriptions. Others ask about bird microanatomy or details of Biblical Hebrew pronunciation. Many focus on advanced mathematics and technical reasoning.
Every
question had to meet strict rules. It needed one correct answer, clear
wording and resistance to simple internet lookup. Contributors also had
to provide detailed solutions explaining how the answer was reached.
The goal was not to confuse people. It was to isolate weaknesses in AI....
A sample question from Humanity’s Last Exam. (CREDIT: lastexam.ai)
The fire in Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates was reportedly triggered by debris from an intercepted drone.
Iran had threatened to strike “legitimate targets” in the region.
The U.S. struck military targets on Iran’s Kharg Island, which accounts for around 90% of the country’s crude exports, last week.
Oil loading operations in the port of Fujairah in the United Arab Emirates have resumed following a drone strike and fire, according to media reports on Sunday.
The
fire at the major oil bunkering hub on Saturday had resulted in the
suspension of some operations, according to reports. Reuters and
Bloomberg reported Sunday citing unidentified industry sources and
people familiar with the situation that the operations have resumed.
A
spokesperson for Abu Dhabi’s state oil giant, ADNOC, which operates in
Fujairah, directed CNBC to the Fujairah Media Office, which did not
immediately respond to CNBC’s emailed requests for comment....
Founder Kim
Fournais will step down as CEO to chair Board of Directors. Daniel
Belfer, CEO of Bank J. Safra Sarasin, will be appointed CEO of Saxo
Bank.
J. Safra Sarasin
Group, a global leader in private banking and wealth management, has
completed its acquisition of the majority stake in Saxo Bank, a
prominent international FinTech bank serving investors, traders, and
institutional partners. This transaction marks a significant milestone
for both companies, enabling enhanced global potential and strategic
growth.
The transaction has received all
necessary approvals, including from the Swiss Financial Market
Supervisory Authority (FINMA) and the Danish Financial Supervisory
Authority (DFSA). The acquisition involves J. Safra Sarasin Group
acquiring approximately 71% of Saxo Bank, previously held by Geely
Financials Denmark A/S, Mandatum Group and other minority shareholders.
Kim Fournais retains approximately 28% ownership of Saxo Bank. The
transaction will enhance the global long-term potential of both J. Safra
Sarasin Group and Saxo Bank, with combined client assets of over USD
460 billion.....
ETF Bets on Alien Tech With UFO Disclosure Strategy A new actively managed ETF is positioning for a hypothetical “Disclosure Day,” when UFO enthusiasts believe the U.S. government could reveal evidence of non-human technology.
One of the strangest ETFs to ever hit the market, the Tuttle Capital UFO Disclosure ETF (UFOD) aims to invest in companies that it says could benefit from “advanced or reverse-engineered alien technology.”
Yes, really.
Launched
this week, UFOD is an actively managed ETF with a 0.99% expense ratio,
and it leans heavily into the growing cultural and political attention
around UFOs, now more commonly referred to as unidentified anomalous
phenomena, or UAPs.
“Unidentified anomalous phenomena are now
addressed through official government reports, congressional hearings,
and statutory reporting requirements,” the issuer says on the fund’s
website.
That much is true. In 2022, Congress held its first
public hearings on UFOs in more than half a century, and some former
intelligence officials have testified that they’ve observed unidentified
anomalous phenomena. One official went further, alleging the existence
of highly classified government programs involving recovered non-human
technology.
The Disclosure Day Thesis The issuer frames these developments as building toward what UFO enthusiasts commonly refer to as “Disclosure Day,” the hypothetical moment when the U.S. government formally acknowledges the existence of non-human intelligence and releases what it knows about recovered technology.
The
concept has circulated for decades in UFO and conspiracy-theory
communities and has increasingly entered the cultural mainstream.
There’s even a science-fiction movie from Steven Spielberg titled
Disclosure Day slated for release later this year.
UFOD is
designed to position for what the fund calls the spillover effects of
such a disclosure. The ETF seeks exposure to industries it believes
would receive a surge of funding and new technology in the aftermath of a
government confirmation.
The strategy does not generally assume
companies already possess such technology, instead focusing on which
companies could benefit following a disclosure (though the prospectus
does reference rumors of classified R&D work at certain
contractors).
Long, Short, and AI-Driven According to the prospectus, the fund invests in companies that “might have R&D programs rumored to work with classified technology, potentially leading to groundbreaking advancements,” as well as firms that could benefit from new energy sources or metamaterials inspired by non-human technology. It also targets companies involved in detection and counter-UAP systems, such as advanced sensor platforms.
UFOD can
also use swaps and short positions to bet against companies it believes
could be made obsolete by “alien-level” technological breakthroughs.
These include “conventional propulsion firms and old-guard energy
providers that might lose ground to advanced technologies.”
Company
selection is guided by an AI-driven ranking system that scores firms
based on their potential to benefit from, or be disrupted by, advanced
alien technology, though the portfolio manager retains discretion to
override the model.....
UFOD comes from Tuttle Capital, which has a history of launching provocative ETFs. The firm previously rolled out the Tuttle Inverse Cramer Tracker ETF (SJIM),
which attempted to short stocks recommended by CNBC personality Jim
Cramer. That fund, like this one, relied heavily on manager discretion,
and was eventually shuttered amid a lack of demand and poor
performance.
Tuttle is also behind the proposed Tuttle Government Grift ETF (GRFT), which has reportedly struggled to come to market after major exchanges, including the NYSE and Nasdaq, declined to list it.
That sort of sounds like Iran doesn't want to blockade the Strait any more.
From the New York Post March 14:
Iran said Saturday that all countries besides the US and Israel may pass through the Strait of Hormuz,
in a desperate attempt at coalition busting less than a day after the
US bombed military targets on its oil-critical Kharg Island.
“As a matter of fact, the Strait of Hormuz is open,” Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said.
“It is only closed to the tankers and ships belong[ing] to our
enemies, to those who are attacking us and their allies. Others are free
to pass,” Araghchi told MS NOW....
....Araghchi noted that many ships “prefer” not to undertake the journey due
to “security concerns,” but insisted, “this has nothing to do with us.”....
As the philosopher said: "Just because you can doesn't mean you should."
From the Wall Street Journal, March 13:
A new generation of investors doesn’t want to wait for the traditional market open
While
traditional energy investors spent the past weekend counting down the
minutes until futures markets reopened on Sunday, overseas crypto
traders were already placing their bets on the direction of oil prices.
The
cryptocurrency exchange Hyperliquid lists perpetual futures, a highly
speculative flavor of derivatives, tracking West Texas Intermediate
crude—the U.S. benchmark—and other commodities. And like other
crypto-native contracts, perpetual futures trade 24/7.
This
past Saturday evening, about 20 hours before mainstream derivatives
markets opened, WTI perpetual futures on Hyperliquid rocketed to about
$96 a barrel, up from the $90.90 closing price for regular oil futures
on Friday afternoon. Perpetual futures, or perps, never expire and don’t
have a strike price, the point at which contracts are exercised. They
also give traders access to extreme leverage that can amplify their
profits—or cost them their entire investment.
At
the moment, U.S. residents aren’t able to access Hyperliquid, and the
exchange’s oil-futures trades still account for less than a drop in the
barrel. In the global commodities markets, millions of energy contracts
have changed hands daily since the war with Iran unfolded. But the
crypto exchange’s oil perps, listed for the first time in January, offer
a glimpse of a future where traditional and digital finance
converge—and all forms of assets can be traded at any moment.
Wall Street is already racing to transform stocks and other traditional assets into tokens
using the digital-ledger technology that underpins bitcoin and other
cryptocurrencies. Like digital assets and prediction markets, the
so-called tokenized stocks are increasingly capturing a younger
generation of investors who want to trade 24/7 and react to geopolitical
events and corporate breaking news in real-time.
“You don’t need to wait until Monday for markets to open and everyone to move,” said Hyunsu Jung,
chief executive of crypto firm Hyperion DeFi. “That is shifting the
paradigm in terms of what serious players can do when events happen over
the weekend.”
Since the start of the U.S.-Israeli airstrikes in Iran,
many traders have flocked to Hyperliquid to buy or sell oil perpetuals.
That has led to rapid growth in the oil markets on the exchange, which
also offers contracts tracking Brent, the international oil benchmark.
Within days, the cumulative volume on the exchange’s oil futures surged
to about $7.3 billion on Thursday from $339 million on Feb. 28,
according to crypto data provider Kaiko.
On Sunday, Kaiko analyst Laurens Fraussen
started betting against the oil perps on Hyperliquid. In his view, the
price of oil had reached unsustainable levels. He was right: On Monday,
oil futures pulled back below $100 after President Trump
said that the war with Iran was “very complete, pretty much.” Brent
ended up rising 11% this week to $103.14 a barrel. U.S. benchmark WTI
gained 8.6% to $98.71.
Round-the-clock
trading is a feature already familiar to crypto investors. Bitcoin and
other cryptocurrencies can be bought or sold on weekends in the U.S.
Overseas, tokenized stocks and derivatives are available on platforms
such as Robinhood Markets
and Kraken. Hyperliquid listed gold and silver perpetual contracts
recently, just as those precious metals experienced unusual volatility.
Both metals surged to record highs before experiencing a massive crash, while bitcoin is stuck trading in a range.
“Crypto traders have a short attention span, so they want to see quick returns and they want to see volatility,” said Fraussen....
The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ come from the seating arrangements in
the National Assembly during the French Revolution, where the combatants
used the medieval estate groupings to define their battle lines.
According to their writings, land-owning aristocrats (the Second Estate)
were the party of the Right, while the interests of nearly everyone
else (the Third Estate) belonged to the Left. This Third Estate included
peasants working for the landowners but also every other kind of
business owner and worker. Decades later, Karl Marx offered a different
analysis of capitalism: he put owners of both land and businesses
together on one side (the bourgeoisie), while grouping workers from
fields and factories on the other side (the proletariat) in a single,
world-wide class struggle. The trouble with both these ways of parsing
Left and Right is that voting patterns never seem to line up with class.
Both historic analyses leave us with questions about the contemporary
world – and not just the paradox of why so many Left-leaning places are
so rich. Why, for example, do working-class conservatives appear to vote
against their material interests, year in and year out, across
generations?
The 18th-century philosopher and political theorist David Hume
had answers to these questions, though he was writing decades before
the French Revolution. While his essay ‘Of Public Credit’ (1752) was a
warning about the dangers of Britain’s increasing reliance on debt
financing, his apocalyptic vision of the future turned out to describe
some features of our current political map surprisingly well. Hume was
writing because he believed that debt financing had the power to upend
Europe’s traditional power structure and culture by creating a new
source of money divorced from tradition or responsibility: stocks and
bonds. Unlike land, anyone with some cash could buy war bonds and get an
immediate passive income in the form of interest. This was the thin end
of the wedge caused by the debt financing that Hume believed was
destroying every part of society. The governments of antiquity, Hume
argued, saved money to use in battle and then waged wars in
self-defence, or else to expand their territory. But the British had
invented a new form of warfare that Hume saw no precedent for, even in
the merchant states of Nicollò Machiavelli’s Italy: war for trade, funded with money borrowed from private stockholders.
Hume acknowledged the potential for riches in securing trade routes
overseas, but the debts worried him. Of the many downsides to the
practice of borrowing money in pursuit of empire, possibly the most
interesting is that Hume foresaw what the historian Richard Whatmore in The End of Enlightenment (2023)
describes as ‘an addiction to the idea of liberty among the populace
and politicians’. Once Hume realised the connection between liberty and
debt financing, he lost his taste for the philosophical concept
entirely.
he connection between liberty and debt financing isn’t obvious at
first – it could easily seem like a coincidence that the concept of
liberty became so popular among Enlightenment thinkers during the same
period that their governments began habitually borrowing money. To see
the connection as Hume saw it, we need to understand the contrast
between these new economic practices and what had come before.
Through the centuries leading up to Hume’s time, the majority of
British people undertook the same kinds of work as their parents, and
the primary source of wealth was land. Most landowners had inherited the
land from their fathers, passing down responsibility and identity
through the generations. Other classes had similarly unchanging patterns
of life; peasants and tradespeople lived as their parents had lived, or
with slight variations depending on the education or marriages that
parents were able to secure for their children. There was little social
mobility, and most forms of wealth were concentrated in the oldest
generation of each family, giving them power over younger generations.
Hume pointed out that the occasional merchant might get rich enough to
buy land, but the necessity of caring for the land and its inhabitants
would soon transform even a risk-loving merchant into the same boring,
responsible personality as his land-holding neighbours. All of British
society was structured around landholding, and the shapes of life and
character that were most compatible with it.
A View of the Old Bank of England, London (c1800) by Thomas Hosmer Shepherd.
Hume viewed the sale of government debt to private citizens in the
form of bonds as a profound threat to this social structure, because the
passive income it generated them offered a means of opting out of
social responsibility. Young aristocrats who didn’t want to wait to
inherit, and anyone else who wanted to live differently from their
parents – for the first time, these people had access to another source
of income, disconnected from tradition, lineage or obligation. For Hume,
this threatened to spell the end of ‘all ideas of nobility, gentry, and
family’. The change was not just political, it would be felt in
personal relationships at every scale: every tie that composed a stable
society was at risk....
Camel pageant thrown into chaos after 20 competitors disqualified for using hump-plumping injectables
Camel owners had used injections to enhance the camel’s lips, dermal fillers around their noses and silicone wax to enlarge the humps
A camel
beauty pageant in Oman has been plunged into chaos as 20 of its
competitors were disqualified after their owners enhanced their humps
and other features using injectable fillers, silicone wax and Botox.
Last month, veterinary inspectors at the 2026 Camel Beauty Show Festival in Al Musanaa, Oman, discovered that the camels
had undergone several cosmetic procedures to enlarge the size of their
humps using a mix of injectables similar to dermal fillers used on
humans.
According to ViceandForbes, the
disqualified camels had received a mix of injectables, including
hyaluronic acid injections for pouty lips, dermal fillers around their
nose, Botox to soften their faces and silicone wax to inflate their
humps....
"In the gilded arenas of Omani camel pageantry, where the desert wind carries whispers of ancient Bedouin pride and the scent of freshly groomed dromedary, beauty has always been a serious business—less red carpet, more sand-carpeted runway...."
I think that's what reporters call getting too close to your subject.
The planners dreamed of gleaming cities. Instead they brought three generations of hollowed-out downtowns and flight to the suburbs.
Think of what the typical American city looks like today: its
hollowed-out core dotted with parking lots, its run-down inner-city
neighborhoods, its sprawl.
How did this happen? Cities weren’t like this a hundred years ago.
They were real cities in the sense in which most people would understand
the word, with jobs, businesses, houses, churches, and every other
institution related to daily life concentrated around a dense center.
Today, cities are almost the inverse of that, with a large population
settled out in sprawl, and a hollowed-out center where far fewer people
live.
Conversations about this transformation typically collapse into a
focus on attitudes about cars. On one extreme, urbanists blame an
American fetish for SUVs and highway construction for our lack of
charming walkable neighborhoods and the destruction of areas that might
have developed into such places. On the other extreme, suburbanists view
urbanists as anti-car fanatics who want to use government policy to
choke off the low-density single-family housing development that has
characterized America since World War II.
What they both tend to overlook is that almost all Americans today
have spent their entire lives under a set of federal laws and rules that
have helped hollow out the cores of our cities. Uncle Sam played a
decisive role in creating the distinctive sprawling pattern we all now
take for granted.
Yes, the rise of mass-produced cars is a big reason cities today
sprawl. But it can’t explain why European cities developed so
differently, given that their residents adopted the automobile around
the same time as Americans.
The explanation lies elsewhere: in the unintended consequences of a
set of well-meaning choices by federal lawmakers in the 1930s and 1940s.
The first choice was an ambitious, even utopian, initiative meant to
transform American cities for the age of the automobile and
suburbanization. An example of a kind of central planning rarely seen in
the United States, these bills were meant to make housing in the city
affordable, clean, and safe, and to limit urban blight.
The second legislative choice was a series of bills initially passed
to meet the needs of home borrowers during the Great Depression and the
aftermath of World War II. Those subsidies, granted at the individual
level and thus decentralized, would help build out the suburbs, and come
to be the defining characteristic of U.S. housing policy.
Within a generation, the first of the two — the urban renewal and
public housing effort — would be abandoned. But the second one — the
subsidies for mortgages and private housing — would remain in place.
Americans are now three generations into a set of policies that, on
the one hand, provide open-ended subsidies for sprawl and, on the other,
do little to ameliorate the problems of the urban core — and maybe even
aggravate them. Over time, this has come to seem like an unalterable
fact of life and the work of the invisible hand of the market. But in
this case, the hand is being nudged by Uncle Sam.
Photos of St. Louis comparing how the city looked in the 1920s to how it looks today show a dramatically different layout.
In 1926, St. Louis was a dense city, not so different from its
European counterparts, packed with tenements and factory buildings right
up to the Mississippi River. It had neighborhoods with rowhouses made
with bricks from the red clay taken from the nearby river valley,
neighborhoods anchored by immigrant churches, and a system of
streetcars. The city then was not so different from older East Coast
cities like Boston or Philadelphia, and by extension like European
cities of the time.
Downtown St. Louis, circa 1926: with dense housing right up to the Missouri riverfront … Missouri Historical Society
Today, St. Louis has a totally different look. It’s been hollowed out
to a shocking extent. The population of the city proper has dropped from nearly 900,000 in 1950 to 300,000 today.
… and today: a place where you work, drive, and go to the park, but not where life is lived iStock
True, there are some notable landmarks downtown, such as sports
stadiums and, of course, the Gateway Arch. But the most noticeable
change is that much of what was previously neighborhoods — full of
houses, shops, and businesses, which, whatever their shortcomings,
represented urban living — is now unlivable space. Much of it is
occupied by superhighways that connect the downtown to the sprawling
suburbs, where most of the population resides. More of the space is
accounted for by parking lots, which take up over a quarter of the downtown land. And a large amount of downtown St. Louis today is simply open unused land.
St. Louis is like many other U.S. cities. Its urban form is one that
most Americans, over the decades, have gotten used to — a core with some
big buildings surrounded by sparse, rundown, and unsafe neighborhoods,
connected via highways to spread-out suburbs containing the majority of
the population.
It didn’t have to be this way. It isn’t in Europe. As a point of
comparison, St. Louis’s metro population — that is, the population of
the entire built-up area of St. Louis city and the surrounding suburbs
and exurbs — is roughly 2.2 million, similar to that of the Cologne and Bonn region in Germany, but it is spread out over an area three times the size.
Something happened to St. Louis between the 1920s and today that
diminished its downtown and led its population out to the suburbs and
exurbs — something that Cologne escaped even though almost three quarters of it was destroyed by Allied bombing in World War II.
A crucial part of that something is federal government policy.
The prewar development of St. Louis was mostly guided by the free market. As historian Mark Gelfand writes in A Nation of Cities, in 1920 “not a single dollar of federal expenditures” was spent on municipal affairs.
But two long-term trends converged to produce a sea change in
American cities that would lead to a federal role in urban development.
The first trend was demographic. In 1920, the urban population
outnumbered the rural for the first time. American cities had become the
industrial engines of growth, drawing millions of workers not only from
the countryside but also from Europe and beyond.
The second trend was indeed the rise of the automobile. As with horses, streetcars, and commuter rail before,
cars altered the urban form when they became economically obtainable
for the middle class. They allowed workers to live in suburbs twenty
miles or more out of town, connected only by highway.
Fearful of the living conditions of people crowded into tenements in
these booming cities, Congress passed the Housing Act of 1937, which
would be refined and broadened in 1949, the product of years of lobbying
by progressive reformers and housing advocates.
Ironically, the aim of the progressive reformers who shaped this New Deal–era legislation was to save
cities, by building new, gleaming, modernist urban cores with spacious,
clean, well-lit housing for the broader middle class. But when all was
said and done, they instead hastened the rise of the suburbs and the
exurbs and the decline of the inner city.
For example, the 1949 law would facilitate the razing of St. Louis’s Desoto Park and Carr Square neighborhoods
— and similar immigrant and black neighborhoods around the country — as
well as the construction in their place of Pruitt–Igoe, a project so
ill-fated that it was torn down within 20 years.
Pruitt–Igoe, the “infamous” projects of St. Louis, built in the 1950s … Wikimedia Commons
For anyone familiar with the history of American cities, Pruitt–Igoe
stands out as the archetype of the ghettoization, dysfunction, and
undesirability associated with federal projects. It was envisioned as
revitalizing the heart of the city and upgrading the existing
neighborhoods, which were deemed to have substandard and backward
housing stock. A series of towers, it was planned by leading architects
according to the latest thinking from the social engineers of the day.
In the end, they not only failed to improve the inner-city neighborhoods
but ultimately destroyed the possibility of any neighborhood in the
area.
… and torn down in the 1970s Wikimedia Commons
The problem, in the eyes of the progressives, was slums.
In her 1934 book Modern Housing,
considered the intellectual impetus for the federal legislation to
follow, public housing advocate Catherine Bauer condemned the urban
neighborhoods of the day, which were filled with migrants from abroad
and, increasingly, the black South. The first order of business, she
wrote, was to stop the construction of new slums. The second was to set
“an entirely new standard of urban environment” via public housing, one
that had no place for a Boston triple-decker or a New York tenement but
instead ensured that all housing was built to a standard that would
eliminate overcrowding and promote social hygiene.
In fact, New York City, which as a modern megacity was at the
vanguard of urban trends, had already enacted several major building
code laws — a legal novelty — meant to regulate tenements. But Bauer and
her progressive allies blamed the ubiquitous dumbbell-shaped apartments
for crime, disease, and political corruption. And she and her allies
viewed code enforcement, the preferred route of private industry for
rejuvenating run-down neighborhoods, as insufficient.
For that reason, the progressive housing movement entailed not just a
refurbishing or upgrading of the housing already present in the years
before the Great Depression, but a wholesale replacement along modernist
lines.
At the time, urban modernism was gaining intellectual currency thanks
in large part to a group of planners and designers led most prominently
by the French-Swiss architect known as Le Corbusier. Le Corbusier
envisioned cities totally remade along scientific-rationalist lines, and
even called for tearing down much of Paris and replacing it with
modernist structures. His idea of the “Ville Radieuse,” a blueprint for a
city built with wide boulevards and tall apartment blocks spaced out to
allow for ample green spaces, inspired plans for cities all over the
world, including BrasÃlia and Chandigarh. The modernist vision would be
the intellectual scaffolding that progressives used for remaking
American cities through law.
At the heart of the progressive criticism of the neighborhoods of the
day was the idea that slums caused social ills such as disease, crime,
and poverty. This was a faulty pathologization — the slums may have been
associated with those problems, but they did not cause them — that
lives on in popular mythology today.
It is true that the neighborhoods of East Coast cities were
disease-ridden by today’s standards, on top of being plagued by crime
and political corruption. But the far bigger factor than crowding in
accounting for the ill health of the early-20th-century slums was the lack of access
to clean water. And the recent experience of Covid, which hit rural
areas just as hard as cities, indicates that it is not density per se —
in the sense that city planners use the term, to mean the number of
people in a given unit of land area — that facilitates the spread of
airborne disease (although it does suggest that the poor ventilation of
tenement buildings was a problem).
Similarly, it is not density that breeds crime. The success of New
York City, America’s one true megacity, in the Giuliani and Bloomberg
eras demonstrated that.
Nevertheless, the eradication of slums and reworking of the city was
the goal of the progressive reformer. Edith Elmer Wood, a housing
reformer who would, like Catherine Bauer, go on to influence the 1937
bill and serve in the United States Housing Authority it created, was
motivated in part by the fact that she had experience seeing
tuberculosis while living in Puerto Rico. As a response, she wrote a
building code for San Juan.
For Wood, the goal was to turn all housing into a public utility, to allow central planners to control the standards for workers....
...Millions
of dollars and scores of commission meetings and task-force projects
were expended in a last-ditch attempt to make Pruitt-Igoe habitable. In
1971, the final task force called a general meeting of everyone still
living in the project. They asked the residents for their suggestions.
It was a historic moment for two reasons. One, for the first time in the
fifty-year history of worker housing, someone had finally asked the
client for his two cents’ worth. Two, the chant. The chant began
immediately: “Blow it … up! Blow it … up! Blow it … up! Blow it … up!
Blow it … up!”
