Vincent Deluard (@VincentDeluard) on where the VIX would be with normal correlations: “What’s been extraordinary really since the summer is that this correlation matrix basically is zero. We have about a third of US stocks trading at negative beta.” “The average stock correlation with indexes is around 5%. This is unprecedented. It probably has to do with pair trades by pod shops, the AI trade and great earnings.” “I’ve actually recalculated where the VIX would be if we had a normal correlation between stocks. By normal, I mean 50-60%. The VIX would be around 40.”

Balyasny's founder Dmitry Balyasny on what a $50 million trader pay package actually is: "If you have something that says Trader XYZ lost $50 million, that sounds like a giant number, but you have to remember, we're managing $28 billion." "A typical portfolio manager might be managing a couple billion in gross market value. So that's 2.5%, which is not good." "That pay package is composed of lots of different things." "It might include a guarantee for the time that the person is out of the market. It might include a budget for hiring out their team." "And it also might include extra upside incentives which are only paid out if the person delivers a certain amount of P&L." "Usually with that type of number, you're budgeting that person to generate P&L of one hundred million plus a year."

there is no moat

Despite front-month flat-to-lower in the last 6 weeks, Mid-2027 oil continues to grind higher. $USO /CLM7

Andy Jassy reveals AWS capacity is sold out for 2026, largely sold out for 2027, and a good chunk of 2028 is gone “If you think about it, there’s only so much data center and power today. There’s only so much memory, and I don’t think that that shortage ends in 2027." "I believe, one of the reasons, coming back to the capital investment, why I think we could invest a lot more and it wouldn’t be a bad use of capital is that '26 is obviously at this point sold out. '27 is largely sold out. We always leave a certain amount for on-demand in our inference service, Bedrock or EC2, but largely sold out, all the big chunks. A good chunk of '28 is sold out." "There’s so much demand. If you think about the AI business and what we call core business, which think of core as non-AI, they’re both growing at really rapid rates right now. And if you have only a certain amount of memory, you have to decide how much of the memory you want to allocate to HBM, to the AI accelerators, versus to DRAM, into your core. So these are real trade-offs you have to make.”

5-year chart: $XOM in white vs $SPX in blue. ExxonMobil is extending its lead as 2028 oil prices keep moving higher.

I like Blackstone and JG but I don't think this is quite right. While Gray's description of general conditions in spot market for compute is correct, that isn't super relevant to Coreweave since a vanishingly small % of Coreweave's compute can harvest these lucrative spot market rates. 98% of $CRWV's compute is locked up in contracts whose average life is 5 years. The irony is that if Coreweave was more "speculative" and wanted to build compute before having customers first, they would be gushing cash now. But because they were "responsible" and secured offtake partners that gave Blackstone and other lenders the confidence to lend, they are locked in at "low" compute rates.