markets
Real Vision: Finance & Investing
Aug 19, 2026 · 51m · 4 min read
Kris Bullock argues the broad crypto and gold rally on August 19 is more than a short squeeze: Treasury's announcement of doubled 10- and 30-year buybacks starting September 9 crushed long yields and the dollar, while SEC/CFTC crypto-friendly policy moves (independent of the CLARITY Act) added a second catalyst, together producing the largest crypto short squeeze since 2023 outside the October 8-10 liquidation event. He's not calling a bottom, but flags today's Fed minutes as the swing factor for durability, and singles out Pump.fun (3rd-highest 30-day revenue in crypto, behind only Tether and Circle) and Monero as his favorite technical setups, with Ethereum, Hyperliquid and Link also confirming reversals.
This is the super-short version — click for the full summary → Top Traders Unplugged
Aug 19, 2026 · 1h 04m · 3 min read
Mike Pyle (BlackRock, deputy head of portfolio management) argues the shift from a 2010s demand-driven world to today's supply-driven, scarcity-defined regime has broken the negative stock-bond correlation that made 60/40 work, forcing a redesign of the "40" toward income (public and private credit, EM credit) and toward market-neutral/hedge fund strategies as the new source of diversification. He remains overweight US equities, including AI/tech exposure, arguing AI-adjacent valuations aren't stretched — memory chip names trade under 10x forward earnings — and expects current bottleneck-driven earnings to normalize over "quarters to years" without collapsing, since demand for AI capability still outstrips supply. No explicit price targets or trade structures were given; his highest-conviction calls are the portfolio-construction shift and the equity overweight.
This is the super-short version — click for the full summary → Real Vision: Finance & Investing · summarized retrospectively
Aug 17, 2026 · 33m · 3 min read
Andreas Steno argues the US economy is drifting toward a rare late-cycle "Goldilocks" mix — falling inflation alongside recovering growth — driven by an energy price retracement, tariff pass-through reversal, a World Cup hotel-price unwind, and reduced immigration cooling rental costs. His highest-conviction call remains short the dollar, with Fed repricing dovish and a Q4 melt-up in risk assets as the payoff; he also flags memory/AI hardware (Micron, Samsung, SK Hynix) as underpriced given JPMorgan's Micron target hike from $500 to $1,550, and warns that a US-South Korea rift ahead of the September 24 Trump-Xi summit could disrupt HBM chip flows to China via Malaysia.
This is the super-short version — click for the full summary → Top Traders Unplugged · summarized retrospectively
Aug 15, 2026 · 1h 22m · 4 min read
Andrew Beer argues 2026 has been an unusually strong risk-adjusted year for trend following — the SG CTA Index is up 23% trailing twelve months at a beta of just 0.3, versus MSCI World's 21% and bonds' 2% — driven by multiple uncorrelated trends (equities, gold, crude, yen) rather than a single crisis payoff, which he says undercuts the "crisis alpha" framing entirely. Tom Wrobel confirms with SG data (trend +8.5% YTD, CTA index +8.74% YTD through August) and flags a bifurcation between trend and non-trend CTA strategies, plus a live short-gold position in SG's model trend portfolio. Both flag structural risk: the AI-themed "Situational Awareness" fund's ~4:1-leveraged swing from zero to $45bn to a reported ~67% July drawdown is used as a contrast case for CTA-style margin discipline versus equity-style leverage.
This is the super-short version — click for the full summary → Real Vision: Finance & Investing · summarized retrospectively
Aug 12, 2026 · 56m · 4 min read
Chris Bullock argues gold is currently capturing the risk-on flows that easing financial conditions are producing, while bitcoin remains stuck at resistance because ETFs — not retail — are the marginal buyer/seller, and retail hasn't shown up (Coinbase premium still negative). He expects the PAXG/BTC mega-trend to flip green as soon as this week closes, and separately expects the Clarity Act's September 15 cloture vote to fail, with CFTC/SEC contingency rules as a partial backstop. On the equity side he laid out fresh entries in his AI portfolio: Eaton over Bloom Energy, Amphenol over Coherent/Lumentum/AXT, Nvidia and Broadcom (not Marvell) in semis, full-size Arista plus a Dell starter, and he's staying out of memory (took Micron gains from a ~$180 entry) and chemicals for now.
This is the super-short version — click for the full summary → Top Traders Unplugged · summarized retrospectively
Aug 12, 2026 · 1h 02m · 1 min read
Charles-Henry Monchau (CIO, CIS Private Bank) argues markets are in an AI-driven earnings supercycle, not a price bubble like dot-com, since NVIDIA's earnings are growing faster than its stock and NASDAQ 100 P/E sits below its 10-year average — but he's watching free-cash-flow deterioration and a coming wave of AI IPOs (SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI) as the real bubble tell. He's cut sovereign bond allocation in favor of investment-grade credit, gold, commodities and hedge funds, favors selective AI infrastructure plus AI-beneficiary sectors (healthcare, financials, small/mid-caps) over hyperscalers, likes uranium, copper, gold/silver and biotech as structural themes, and flags sovereign debt/fiscal dominance (citing the UK gilt episode) as the top systemic risk.
This is the super-short version — click for the full summary → Real Vision: Finance & Investing · summarized retrospectively
Aug 10, 2026 · 32m · 3 min read
Andreas Steno's nowcast has US inflation running colder than consensus into Wednesday's print — headline +0.1% and core +0.2% month-over-month, versus a 3.4% year-over-year market expectation — driven by tariffs being refunded to US corporates, which removes the urgency to raise prices. He argues the energy shock is over (no panic in physical oil markets, Strait of Hormuz flows may be 7-8mn bpd per Pentagon/Axios sourcing, well above tracked shipping data) and that the data actually argues for Fed cuts, not the hikes markets are pricing, with September's central bank projections likely to soften materially since June forecasts assumed oil near $115. He's not yet worried about the summer growth rollover (calls it a World Cup hangover), sees a possible business-cycle peak in rate-of-change terms in Q4 2026, and flags Korean semiconductor exports (+160% YoY) as underpriced by forward markets that assume AI capex flatlines — which he calls the one outcome that won't happen.
This is the super-short version — click for the full summary → Top Traders Unplugged · summarized retrospectively
Aug 8, 2026 · 1h 20m · 4 min read
Harry Moore (Man Group) argues that portfolios that look diversified on paper — equities, bonds, private assets — often aren't diversified in the specific left-tail scenario investors most need protection from, using the recent AI-trade unwind (a hedge fund reportedly running $45bn that lost roughly two-thirds of assets in weeks) and the BOJ/Fed yen intervention (a roughly 10-standard-deviation move) as live examples. His main content is a new Man Group paper (with Jonathan Smith and Chris Pye) on portable alpha mechanics: it recommends a 40% cash buffer (10% margin, 30% unencumbered) against a ported equity/trend structure, modeled to force de-gearing only about once per 100-200 years versus three historical drawdowns (GFC, dot-com, COVID) in 26-27 years of live data; it also finds rebalancing frequency barely matters long-run but mattered a great deal in 2008, and that futures versus swaps carry no structural performance edge. Monthly figures: BTOP50 -0.67% in August (as of Tuesday), +7.17% YTD; SG CTA -0.88%, +7.15% YTD; Trend Index -0.94%, +6.89% YTD; Short-Term Traders Index +0.14%, +3.32% YTD; S&P 500 TR +3.12% in August, +12.83% YTD.
This is the super-short version — click for the full summary → Real Vision: Finance & Investing · summarized retrospectively
Aug 5, 2026 · 53m · 4 min read
Chris says his financial-conditions dashboard (real yields, credit spreads, DXY, equity vol) has fallen to 51 — the lowest since it flipped red roughly eight weeks ago and just above the 50 threshold that flips it to neutral — while S&P breadth is at a two-year high and Global M2 has broken out of its April consolidation. He argues this is starting to look less like a relief rally than a genuine turn, but says crypto hasn't confirmed: Bitcoin is coiled in a multi-week Bollinger squeeze with ETF flows still slightly negative, and only 18 of the top 100 tokens are actually in green uptrends. His preferred names into month-end are Hyperliquid and Uniswap (watch $4.15 resistance, confirmation above $4.50–$4.55), with Ondo, Morpho, Venice and Zcash also showing relative strength, and he flags Canton as one to avoid and AAOI (up 41% on the week) as a name to wait for a pullback to ~$109–110 before buying.
This is the super-short version — click for the full summary → Top Traders Unplugged · summarized retrospectively
Aug 5, 2026 · 1h 01m · 3 min read
Paul Chai, CIO of the Kansas State University Foundation's $1.2B endowment, walks through a top-down strategic asset allocation framework built around a 6% real (~8% nominal) return target, with a 60/40 growth/diversifier split and a Monte Carlo-derived ~51-52% probability of hitting that target over 10 years. No new market calls or trade levels — the value here is portfolio-construction methodology, manager-selection philosophy, and two tactical notes: an increased traditional oil & gas equity allocation (credit side underperformed as financing conditions eased) and being a net buyer in private-market secondaries over the past two years as forced non-economic sellers offloaded assets.
This is the super-short version — click for the full summary → Real Vision: Finance & Investing · summarized retrospectively
Aug 3, 2026 · 33m · 3 min read
Andreas argues the US and Japan coordinated a weekend FX intervention to support the yen, structurally the mirror of 2011's anti-strength intervention, with terms still undisclosed. On Iran, he says the region's escalation "sinus wave" has passed its peak and the oil market is no longer panic-pricing it — evidenced by a muted Houston-Argus/WTI spread even as roughly 5–6 million barrels/day still move out of the Gulf via smuggling routes, with Iraq reportedly paying tanker operators a near-$30/barrel premium (implying $50–60 million profit per uninsured, all-or-nothing voyage) to run the Strait. The bigger call: US CPI has gone soft enough (flat month-on-month in June and again in July) that Fed governor Kevin Walsh's continued hawkishness is a policy error driving high real rates, which Andreas ties directly to July's leveraged unwind — including the Situational Awareness fund blowup — and he separately flags a bullish memory-chip thesis (Samsung, Micron, SK Hynix) over GPUs, plus a standing dollar-weakness view teased ahead of Thursday's State of the Union webinar.
This is the super-short version — click for the full summary → Top Traders Unplugged · summarized retrospectively
Aug 1, 2026 · 2h 00m · 4 min read
David Dredge (Convex Strategies) and Richard Brennan argue markets are complex adaptive systems, not distributions to be sampled, and that risk is not volatility but the loss-absorbing capital and correlation stability that regulatory/accounting frameworks wrongly assume constant. Both say calm periods build hidden leverage (self-organized criticality) that violently unwinds, that Sharpe and Kelly-based sizing are dangerous because they ignore path dependence (non-ergodicity) and portfolio architecture, and that diversification protects least when it matters most because markets are permanently correlated, not just correlated in crisis. No price targets or trade calls were given; the actionable content is portfolio-construction guidance: cap leverage in absolute terms, size every market to equal risk rather than tilting to recent winners, and grow by adding uncorrelated markets/convexity rather than scaling existing bets.
This is the super-short version — click for the full summary → Top Traders Unplugged · summarized retrospectively
Jul 29, 2026 · 1h 02m · 3 min read
Tyler Goodspeed, chief economist at ExxonMobil and former Trump CEA chair, argues from 132 US and UK recessions dating to 1700 that expansions never die of old age, contain no informational content in their height/speed/duration that predicts the next recession, and are not followed by faster recoveries when a financial crisis is absent — directly at odds with Reinhart-Rogoff's cross-country finding. His pluck model says economies grow near trend and get knocked off it by exogenous shocks (mostly energy-related historically), then snap back; recessions, unlike expansions, do die of old age. He flags China's deferred rare-earth export restrictions (paused until autumn) as the kind of sector-specific supply shock — akin to 1973 oil or historical cotton/steel disruptions — that could still tip the US into recession.
This is the super-short version — click for the full summary → Top Traders Unplugged · summarized retrospectively
Jul 25, 2026 · 1h 11m · 3 min read
Nick Baltas says 2026 has been a strong year for trend following — five of seven months positive, with July's rebound driven by rates and commodities after a June reversal — and that a new Graham Capital paper validates his own view that 50–100 markets (roughly 20 per asset class) captures most of the benefit, with additional liquid macro markets adding nothing but exotic, less-liquid commodities still adding value beyond 100 names. He also lays out a three-bucket defensive framework (options hedges, trend as second responder, and a non-convex diversifier that must not be short-gamma) and argues portable alpha overlays should moderate upside equity participation for equity-only books but can stay unconstrained for equity/bond books, since the real tail risk is a joint inflation-driven selloff that develops over a quarter or more — precisely what medium-term trend captures. On thematic/narrative investing research (including a 13.3-million-document, 347-narrative dataset), he's engaged but explicitly flags it as dimensionality reduction rather than a new risk premium. As-of-Wednesday levels: BTOP50 +1.34% MTD/+10% YTD, SocGen CTA +0.89%/+10.37%, SocGen Trend +94bp/+10.15%, Short-Term Traders Index -0.6%/+4.52%, MSCI -84bp/+9%, US Agg Bond -96bp/-12bp YTD.
This is the super-short version — click for the full summary → Real Vision: Finance & Investing · summarized retrospectively
Jul 22, 2026 · 1h 04m · 1 min read
Kris Bullock argues Bitcoin's bounce off the Clarity Act news lacks the fuel to become a sustained bull run: ETF flows are negative year-to-date (roughly -$5.5B) and the Coinbase premium is negative, meaning neither institutions nor US retail are buying — the rally is just recycled stablecoin money. He wants DXY back under 100, global M2 resuming its uptrend, and real yields easing before he starts DCA-ing, targeting a September/October entry, and flags a plausible scenario where Bitcoin still revisits the low-$50Ks. Notable levels/calls: ETH resistance at ~$1,935; Hyperliquid ideal buy zone near $50-53 (20-week MA); Aerodrome showing a cleaner breakout-retest setup; Robin Hood preferred over Coinbase; SoFi triggered a buy signal; the Clarity Act is likely a 'sell the news' event short-term but structurally necessary long-term.
This is the super-short version — click for the full summary → Top Traders Unplugged · summarized retrospectively
Jul 22, 2026 · 47m · 1 min read
Charlie McGarraugh, CEO of Altis Partners (sub-advisor on two Simplify ETFs), argues the next edge in systematic investing isn't better return prediction but better capital efficiency and sizing — how much leverage and drawdown tolerance a strategy can prudently carry. He also argues markets have shifted from a QE-era volatility-suppression regime to a policy-driven volatility-inducement regime, meaning investors should be more adaptive/reactive than they were in the 2010s. No price levels or trade recommendations; the episode is a strategy and product-design conversation, including detail on Altis's Enhanced Macro Program (~150 markets) and a newly launched Chinese onshore commodities ETF with Simplify built on trend plus relative-value signals.
This is the super-short version — click for the full summary →