Pro trader and investor. Sharing daily market insights, stock picks, and cycle analysis. Follow for actionable alpha in stock and crypto markets.
Lisbon, Portugal
Joined November 2020
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Tech valuations are at multi-year lows despite massive earnings growth.
If there is no bubble, how can one burst?
So the QQQ just hit a 10% correction and everyone is getting super bearish, going to cash, shorting, hedging, adding puts.
I was shorting/bearish 2 weeks ago. Now (unless we get a big bounce and credit stays stretched) it is not the time to be shorting, when everyone is screaming “it’s a bubble, sell it all!”. This is how people get ruined and sell the low.
I’m not saying the lows for this correction are in, but no one knows. Right now this is a 10% drop. Nothing is signalling that this is a crisis at this point. Comparisons to late 2018 are noteworthy but credit was a lot worse then and the Fed hiked into weakness, we don’t yet have the same setup (yet!).
This is a growth scare, but it is a far milder one at this point according to the macro data. One solid earnings report or Fed speaker shifting tone and this market can reverse quicker than you can close those shorts and reposition.
I expect the worst of this sell-off is behind us, yet I’m still prepared for lower, until we get confirmation.
Bottoms are always ugly, never clean, and it never looks like a bottom until after it’s happened. One thing is for sure, prices today are the best value in months, some in years.
Unless we are heading into a recession, no one ever went broke buying a 10% dip in the index in a bull market.
Bottoms are always ugly, right now QQQ is in free fall, whilst we can go lower I have closed my shorts here and expect a bounce soon.
QQQ 700 FOMC low has been taken. At this point the risk of upside is greater than continued downside IMO.
While downside risks remain, I'm favouring longs over shorts here. Positioning is part cleared and sentiment is washed out enough to favour scaling in.
I’m not calling a bottom just yet, but I think we are close to a relief bounce in AI stocks.
700 on the QQQ might get swept first.
Lower than that would be problematic, and is not my base case.
If the week closes here or lower, then a lot of you owe @benjamincowen an apology.
Overly bullish positioning can really hurt even the most fundamentally bullish trades.
Assuming AI capex spend keeps rising, the current sell off is an opportunity.
Wow, this chart from @sonusvarghese looks at AI vs non-AI.
It sums up the devastation we've seen in AI this week quite well.
Absolute shambles of customer service from @British_Airways on the eve of a £16k family holiday. Agent books a partner onto the wrong flight, refuses to cross-reference our existing group, and then forces a £1k charge to fix the mistake after auditing their own call. Disgusted.
Inflation shock vs growth scare.
Judging by the data, the latter currently seems more likely.
Either is bad for stocks, but only the latter is good for bonds.
Cash is the best hedge against either scenario.
This current market seems to be trading at 2x speed, I wouldn’t be surprised if we extend the losing streak by another couple of days before a strong rebound.
The Nasdaq 100 fell every trading day this week, marking only the 19th 5-day losing week since $QQQ began trading.
QQQ rebounded within 4 trading days in 17 of the previous 18 cases. Odds favor the bulls for next week.
ALT Bluekurtic Market Insights chart showing QQQ price history since 1999, highlighting 19 instances when the Nasdaq 100 ETF declined on all five trading days of a week. A historical forward returns table shows QQQ gained four trading days later in 17 of 18 prior cases (94.4%), with an average return of 1.8%. The latest signal occurred on October 16, 2026.
The double standard is incredible.
European nations buy Russian energy for years, but the moment US policy shifts to manage a global energy shock it's “sickening”.
Rules for thee, but not for me.
It is sickening that the USA is now lifting sanctions on Russian fuel, and transparently ridiculous to blame Ukraine for the spike in prices that obviously began with the closure of the Strait of Hormuz. Putin is murdering innocent Ukrainian civilians every day. The Ukrainians are fighting for their lives. And yet the White House is apparently determined to force American drivers to bankroll Putin’s slaughter. It won’t work and I doubt it will make much difference to the price of fuel.
If we want Russian oil and gas back on the world market then let’s end this war - with a free, sovereign and independent Ukraine.
Banks run on AES-256 and closed access controls, web TLS uses RSA and post-quantum standards not ECDSA.
Crypto's signature layer is exposed on a fully open ledger in a way traditional banking isn't. The "banks will break first" argument is pure cope.
This is why no one should have money invested in crypto today that they are not fully prepared to lose.
Crypto went from an asymmetric 100-1 bet several years ago, to now risking 1 to make a half.
Ask yourself at this stage, are the odds really worth it?
Today I call upon the blockchain industry to calmly begin planning for "bunker mode". My personal recommendation is to set in motion a controlled mass migration of assets to fresh addresses, i.e. addresses whose pubkeys remain hidden behind a hash.
Holders, starting with large and sophisticated ones, should consider moving the bulk of their funds to addresses that have never signed a transaction. And when they do sign one, they should also move remaining funds to a new address (possibly generated from the same seed phrase).
Don't rush. While I believe there is cause for action a rushed migration would do more harm than good. Don't panic either. Moving assets to protected addresses is a simple, preventative step which does not require new cryptography or new wallets.
IMO it is now reasonable to brace for the possibility that ECDSA breaks before qday, in the worst case in months not years. By "break" I mean fast private key recovery (e.g. in one week) on available hardware (e.g. a large GPU cluster).
Recent days have been humbling for human mathematical intuition. Long-held, unquestioned hypotheses have fallen. This includes the n log(n) bound for integer multiplication and the 3SUM conjecture. In hindsight, May's unexpected disproof of the Erdős unit distance conjecture was our warning shot.
Yesterday's OpenAI drop made it clear that mathematical superintelligence is upon us. They say there are weeks where decades happen. We are about to live through weeks where centuries of mathematical progress happen. Could our magic 64-byte ECDSA signatures be too good to be true? Was it just security through obscurity all this time?
Elliptic curves feel especially vulnerable to superintelligence. Curves carry rich structure, with room for fancy tricks like Schoof, Frobenius, pairings. (By contrast, hashes are designed to minimise algebraic structure.)
Separately, as Ewin Tang can attest, an efficient quantum algorithm sometimes foreshadows an efficient classical one. We should be open to the possibility of a classical counterpart to Shor that breaks elliptic curves and RSA at once.
Also noteworthy is the striking under-representation of cryptographic breakthroughs among the 722 mathematical results OpenAI published. I've witnessed first-hand the US government censoring academic quantum cryptanalysis results. Backroom interventionism is my base case.
I urge large, sophisticated actors to lead by example. Project11's "risq list" (bitcoin-risq-list.projecteleven[.]com) is a great tracker of exposed BTC pubkeys. Binance, Bitbank, Robinhood, Bitfinex, and Tether have an opportunity to harden their cold storage. Next month I'll address institutions in London in a live Q&A (forum.ethereuminstitutional[.]org/london-2026).
Again, please do not rush. Wallets holding under 50 BTC enjoy partial cover from "Satoshi's shield", i.e. his 20K exposed addresses that hold 50 BTC each. Load-bearing signers like oracles and L2 security councils should consider rotating ECDSA pubkeys with every signed message and/or multi-signing with a hash-based schemes like SPHINCS.
Exiting bunker mode safely will require post-AI cryptography. My inclination is to go all-in on hash-based cryptography and avoid structured mathematical assumptions entirely, whether from curves, lattices, or isogenies. A single battle-tested hash (e.g. from the SHA or BLAKE families) yields plausible post-AI security.
The Ethereum roadmap on strawmap[.]org fully embraces hash-based cryptography with end-to-end formal verification as a response to the quantum threat. Those timelines must now be revisited and accelerated in light of mathematical superintelligence. I'll be pushing for maximum defensive acceleration.
Bitcoin broke the resistance. Bullish!
I immediately closed all shorts and I have entered longs.
The ability to switch your outlook on a market based on new information is one of the hardest but also most important things to do as a trader.
I expect Bitcoin >90k soon.
bitcoin:native
Peter is correct, the tokensation of stocks will result in capital flows from Bitcoin and sh*tcoins to the stock market.
Yesterday’s big Bitcoin rally following the SEC’s tokenized stock announcement makes no sense. The news is actually bearish for Bitcoin, which must now compete with tokenized securities. Digital ownership of tokens backed by profitable, dividend-paying companies is a superior, more reliable store of value than a token backed by nothing. Tokenized stocks offer all of the conveniences of Bitcoin, but without the risk of a decentralized Ponzi scheme collapsing.