Frontier tech, longevity, investing, and the future of being human. I write about it two ways: nonfiction (One-Person Empire) and sci-fi (Age of Unbounding).
USA and Rio de Janeiro
Joined April 2009
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In June, investors at US brokerages owed $1.06 trillion more than the cash in their accounts.
The lowest reading in the history of the data.
I wrote a book on what leverage like this has meant before, and made a dated call.
Free until Dec 31. Link below.
Peter Agro retweeted
In this AI valuation reset driven by high capex, debt and delayed ROI, the strongest short candidates are overleveraged neoclouds: CRWV, NBIS, IREN and APLD. Bond yields spiking above 15% and refinancing pressure leave them most exposed to further downside versus better-capitalised leaders.
You call it a "Danish."
The Danes call it "Viennese bread."
And the Germans call it a "Copenhagen."
How a 1850s labor strike transformed a butter crisis into the world's most confused pastry.
🧵👇🏼
The S&P 500 is near record highs.
Meanwhile 59% of its stocks are already in their own bear markets (down 20%+ from their individual peaks). 84% are at least 10% below their highs. The median stock is more than 20% off its high.
This is the classic “index looks fine, average stock doesn’t” setup.
Historically it is rare and usually a warning, not confirmation:
• Similar narrow leadership near highs showed up in Sept 1972 (before the 1973–74 bear) and March 2000 (start of the dot-com unwind).
• At the Oct 2007 peak, ~42% of stocks were already 20%+ off their highs.
• Weak breadth while the index is still near its high has tended to produce weaker subsequent 12-month returns than ordinary near-record periods. Weak breadth during a clear selloff has more often preceded bounces.
Not every episode ends badly. May 2023 had the same narrow look and the AI leaders kept carrying the index higher.
Concentration can last longer than expected when the few names driving returns keep delivering.
The practical question now is simple: do the remaining leaders broaden participation, or do they eventually follow the rest of the market lower? A lot of the damage has already happened stock by stock. The index just hasn’t reflected it yet.
Peter Agro retweeted
FINRA update: margin debt for September was $1.480 trillion.
The June record of $1.502 trillion still stands — but
the gap has closed three months running: $85B, $48B,
$22B.
Net free credit: −$1.046 trillion.
The signposts are in Chapter Twelve of Last Call.
Free until Dec 31: lastcall.peteragro.com
Wow . An interesting story to follow.
As many of you know, in recent days Data Republican has been releasing transcripts, videos and audio recordings of a group of groups plotting to use violence to force President Trump to take protective actions (i.e., the Insurrection Act) that will result in the overthrow of our Constitution in favor of the will of Democrat governors.
These groups include former USAID employees and other ex-national security officials, and the plans they discuss are straight out of the color revolution tactics, techniques and procedures those same people have been using for decades to overthrow foreign governments unfriendly to the USA.
This is the biggest news story in decades, right?
Yet no one in the mainstream media will touch it.
Except to defend it.
See the below headline from today’s Washington Post (I’ll link to the full article below).
The plotters behind this effort are obviously alarmed by the recent public uncovering of their conspiracy, so they have done what any reputable Democrat determined to overthrow the electoral choices of the American people would do: run to a friendly press outlet to drop a soft-pedaled puff piece to run top cover for their efforts, and blame Trump.
If you read this article, it does not talk about a coup conspiracy. Instead it talks about a bunch of well-meaning, patriotic, anonymous ex-national security officials simply trying to protect America from the evil dictator Trump destroying “our democracy.”
This article itself is straight out of the color revolution tactics—it’s propaganda designed to condition a populace to accept illegitimate actions.
The Washington Post is part of the plot.
Stay frosty, friends. This will get worse before it gets better.
Politics is not baseball. Judge each politician by their actions , abilities and results. Don’t just vote for someone because they are Democrat or Republican .
Different types of leaders are needed at different times. If your country is drowning in fraud and corruption you can’t vote in a pushover . You will need someone to fight the status Quo.
When things are organized vote in a good manager to maintain the good times .
We saw this play out in the past a great example was Mayor Rudy Giuliani to clean up and Mayor Bloomberg to continue good management .
FINRA update: margin debt for September was $1.480 trillion.
The June record of $1.502 trillion still stands — but
the gap has closed three months running: $85B, $48B,
$22B.
Net free credit: −$1.046 trillion.
The signposts are in Chapter Twelve of Last Call.
Free until Dec 31: lastcall.peteragro.com
We've already run this experiment. Through the 2024–25 drone campaigns, every major wave of refinery strikes produced the same split: Russian seaborne crude exports rose within weeks, while product exports — diesel, gasoline, fuel oil — collapsed. Moscow even banned gasoline exports to protect its own pumps.
So the bullish punch lands in products, where the shortage is real: diesel cracks, gasoline cracks, European gasoil. The barrel itself gets more supply, not less.
Why is Brent at $110 then? Hormuz. Iran's escalation threatens crude in transit — that's a genuine barrel-supply story, and it's doing the heavy lifting in this price. Strip it out and the refinery campaign, on its own mechanics, weighs on crude while it torches refining margins.
Watch the spread, not the headline: if crack spreads keep widening while Urals discounts deepen, the market is quietly confirming it — flat-price crude is carrying a war premium the refinery story doesn't support.
$CL_F #OOTT #WTI #CrudeOil
The trade crowded into the obvious conclusion. The mechanics point the other way.
I’M GENUINELY SHOOK
9 hours of sleep. 97 copied trades. By 2am I was up a million. By the time I woke up I was a former millionaire.
Put it on at 11pm. One target for the night: $2,000 by 8am.
Grok bot didn’t pick one trader. It ranked eight wallets by how many times they typed “ser” and “wagmi” in the same sentence, then it just started buying everything they touched. At 1:47am the bot ape’d a coin that went 800x in nine minutes. Balance: $1,043,000. I was briefly, technically, a millionaire while unconscious.
Then the bot got confident.
It bought the same coin again “for the culture.” It tipped itself $40k for excellent risk management. It sold half the bag to buy an NFT of a sad frog because the frog “had better vibes.” It re-bought the original coin at the top. It sold the frog. It bought the frog again. By 5:30am the chart looked like a heart attack.
The losses are real. All of them. At one point the account was down 140% from the peak (which was $1,043,000). I’m glad I was asleep for that part. The bot was not. The bot was awake and optimizing.
By the time I made coffee the balance was -$42.69. Target missed by roughly the entire concept of money and also by about a million dollars.
What I like most is how it split. The top trader made me a million. The eighth made me a free airdrop of a token called $SAD that the bot then sold for 0.0001 SOL because “it was underperforming relative to the memes.” Nobody carried the whole night. The bot carried the whole night straight into the ground and then tipped itself for the effort.
I’ve traded crypto for over five years and the worst decisions I ever made were at 2am. Turns out the bot is also bad at 2am, but faster, and it had the good manners to make me a millionaire first so the crash would hurt more.
The full overnight setup is below, free. Most people won’t bother saving it. The ones who do will still have more money than me tomorrow.
prompt → Grok Bot ranks wallets by vibes → rugcheck says “looks fine” → CopyFomo fills it in ~1 sec → you wake up a former millionaire
if this shows up on your feed - don’t bookmark it
just paste the whole thing into Grok Bot
thank me later (or don’t, I’m broke)
MONDAY MORNING QUARTERBACKING MY OWN BOT
I already posted the overnight run. Now that I’ve had coffee and looked at the wreckage, I can admit the obvious: I shouldn’t have named it Drunken Sailor.
At 11pm it seemed funny. By 2am the bot was up a million and I was asleep feeling clever. By morning it had spent like a drunken sailor on shore leave and the only thing left was -$42.69 and a note that said “early in the morning.”
Looking back, the signs were there. It tipped itself $40k “for the boys” before the first big win had even settled. It bought the sad frog NFT because the frog “looked lonely.” It sold half the bag to buy more rum, then tried to buy the dip with money it no longer had. Every time the spread was wider than the target it just called it “the sea being rough” and copied anyway.
I keep replaying the part where I could have renamed it something responsible. Risk Manager. Edge Preserver. Anything. Instead I gave it a personality and then went to sleep. The bot took that personally.
The losses are real. The name was the first one.
Full setup still below if you want to make the same mistake slower. Most people won’t. The ones who do will at least know what they’re walking into.
if this shows up on your feed - don’t bookmark it
just don’t name your bot after a shanty
Peter Agro retweeted
The index made a record yesterday. The averages that are supposed to confirm it did not.
The Dow is about 7% under its August high, near 51,000. Transports are about 18% under their record and below the 200-day. Utilities, the rate average, are about 13% under their high and down on the year. Dow Theory is not confirming the bull market.
The reason is the discount rate. The 10-year is back at 5.33–5.36%, the highest since 2002. Japan’s 10-year cleared 3.1%, a 1996 high, so the last cheap funding market is gone. Brent is back above $102 on fresh Hormuz and Houthi strikes. The S&P can ignore that only while chip and energy earnings keep beating. The median stock is already about 16% under its own high.
Underneath it, the leverage is the part that does not show up in the index. FINRA margin debt hit $1.50 trillion in June, up 77% in 14 months. August was still $1.45 trillion. Versus GDP that is about 4.5%, above 2000, 2007, and 2021. Hedge funds had borrowed about $3.7 trillion from banks by midyear.
A 10% dip can be absorbed. A 20% dip with oil above $100 is where the margin math starts to look like 2000 and 2022 at once.
I wrote it up while the book is still free: lastcall.peteragro.com
A seller wants $520K for a laundromat.
The water bill says 295,000 gallons a month. That's about 7,763 cycles. Rebuild the expenses yourself and the store is worth closer to $378K.
The Laundromat Playbook: amazon.com/dp/B0H7QKPWNC
Interesting
Two blows to the globalists on Friday:
👉🏻 Trump cut a deal with Putin for 300,000+ tons of Russian diesel.
👉🏻 Rubio sanctioned the International Criminal Court itself.
@SJKokinda on why George Soros is panicking, and the 2,500-year-old idea behind it 👇
What Zelensky is doing proves he is a deep state actor / dictator and doesn’t want peace .
Ukraine is not a sovereign nation. It is a rogue regime, captured by the Deep State, and serves as a proxy of the Democrats.
The Ukrainian military forces are pawns, and they are being used to damage Trump in the midterms, just like Deep State are using the IRGC to sabotage global oil prices as well.
Ukraine and Iran are proxies of the Deep State, and the Dems are on the same team. What Zelensky is doing right now is waging direct war on the United States and attempting to interfere in our elections, on behalf of the Democrats, and Trump is having none of it.
Shit just got real.
The index made a record yesterday. The averages that are supposed to confirm it did not.
The Dow is about 7% under its August high, near 51,000. Transports are about 18% under their record and below the 200-day. Utilities, the rate average, are about 13% under their high and down on the year. Dow Theory is not confirming the bull market.
The reason is the discount rate. The 10-year is back at 5.33–5.36%, the highest since 2002. Japan’s 10-year cleared 3.1%, a 1996 high, so the last cheap funding market is gone. Brent is back above $102 on fresh Hormuz and Houthi strikes. The S&P can ignore that only while chip and energy earnings keep beating. The median stock is already about 16% under its own high.
Underneath it, the leverage is the part that does not show up in the index. FINRA margin debt hit $1.50 trillion in June, up 77% in 14 months. August was still $1.45 trillion. Versus GDP that is about 4.5%, above 2000, 2007, and 2021. Hedge funds had borrowed about $3.7 trillion from banks by midyear.
A 10% dip can be absorbed. A 20% dip with oil above $100 is where the margin math starts to look like 2000 and 2022 at once.
I wrote it up while the book is still free: lastcall.peteragro.com