It's not about the journey or even the destination, it's about who you become on the journey.
Joined August 2022
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Aoi🏛️ - Down Only 2026 retweeted
I am excited to be an investor in trade(xyz) as they partner with ICE to bring 24/7 perpetual futures on Hyperliquid to the United States. As a market participant, I am looking forward to to using their innovative product to enhance my investment process.
Aoi🏛️ - Down Only 2026 retweeted
Wow. One of the best $GOOGL bear cases I’ve seen.
As someone who has personally spent $500k / mo+ on Google Ads for years, I can tell you with certainty:
This revenue growth in Search is artificial & extremely unhealthy for Google’s business long term
Search volumes are declining as legacy search is being increasingly cannibalized by non-monetized LLM queries
Google’s response?
Manufacture revenue growth via short-sighted, highly extractive, customer-hostile tactics. I.e. charge advertisers more for lower quality clicks, including clicks they do not want and explicitly did not approve Google to charge them for
A few examples to illustrate:
For all of its history until recently, Google operated on a 2nd price auction model
I.e. if you bid $5 CPC and the next highest bidder bids $1 CPC, Google charged you $1.01 for the click (one penny more than the 2nd highest bidder) rather than the $5 you bid
This was a genius move by Google early on as it incentivizes advertisers to input their true maximum willingness to pay rather than trying to play the game of bidding low and constantly adjusting to try to stay just ahead of the next highest bidder while still not paying too much
However recently, Google silently deprecated the 2nd price auction and began charging advertisers as much as their bid and budget caps allow, regardless of what anyone else is bidding
It’s a short-sighted cash grab at the expense of the long term health of the advertiser ecosystem
Making thing worse, Google also recently nerfed keyword targeting precision
Google previously had precise keyword targeting settings that allowed advertisers pick individual search phrases to bid on, defined down to the character w/ exact match or phrase match targeting
This was one of the core features that made search advertising magic, enabling advertisers to run extremely precise campaigns based on exactly what their target customer typed
But now, even if you bid on a specific term or phrase using the strictest exact
-match targeting settings, Google will show your ad across 1000’s of unrelated keywords, labeling them as as “exact match (close variant)”
The definition of “close variant” means whatever they want it to and changes constantly. The result is advertisers get billed for clicks that are totally irrelevant to their business and that their targeting settings explicitly forbid Google from targeting. Google does it anyway and there’s no ability to turn this off
So now exact match is broad match, and broad match is just meaningless spam
This is all very bad for advertisers, but for Google, it allows them to show your ad and bill you for clicks across 1000x more searches that were previously going unmonetized (mainly because they’re garbage queries no one wants)
This is how you grow revenue atop declining search volumes
Lastly, and perhaps most egregiously, Google quietly stopped respecting budget caps by a factor of 2x. For example campaigns we’ve been running for years with $1000 daily budget caps suddenly began spending $2000+ per day
And the extra spend is entirely on the garbage keywords Google arbitrarily throws in as “exact match (close variants)” which have no value to our business, but can’t be turned off
Google offers no refunds nor any recourse for overspend or spend on keywords you explicitly did not target
These are not the actions of a healthy business. These are the actions of company whose core business is in decline but desperately needs to pump quarterly earnings so Wall Street will continue to fund insane capex while hopefully looking through their rapidly deteriorating negative free cash flow
Google operated a benevolent monopoly for the better part of 25 yrs
Meaning the value Google captured from Search was but a small fraction of the value it created, and that spread produced a potential energy that justified expectations of high earnings growth far, far into the future
This is now no longer the case
At the alter of AI capex, Google is sacrificing the golden goose
Aoi🏛️ - Down Only 2026 retweeted
some random thoughts on short-selling:
- i actually spent most of my career being a bearish trader/trading from short side...i think it's coz i went thru like 5 cds auctions my first 3 years of trading and those were the names i made good pnl on, so i sort of got hell-bent on trying to find those opportunities
- at an investment bank when u like a trade u put the position on and you pitch the idea to clients
- i worked in london (EU HY/distressed credit mkt) for about 7 years and in nyc (US HY credit) for 3 years - as you'd expect the US mkt is way more sophisticated than the EU mkt
- in europe, you could look into a random company that no one else had looked into, realise it was a pos, put out a short trade idea, and people would absolutely shit themselves coz turns out all these sleepy european asset managers just auto-pilot bought everything in the index and never looked into any of the credits
- many of these companies would go on thru messy restructurings (in europe there's no clean ch11 plus have to deal with different jurisdictions)...and if you were able to identify them you'd get a bit of a reputation...."oh no XYZ is short this credit..time to get out"...like no one would defend stuff until it got to a super distressed level
- while i'm sure many bondholders would have been upset, ultimately, if you were right at the end of the day i think people respected that...and also it just went to show how shit and poorly run so many european companies are
- so personally for me as a young trader i thought trading was all about finding shit companies who were telling lies and shorting them and then you become a hero...without realising that the EU HY mkt is absolutely tiny and it is (or was) very easy to be a big fish in a small pond so long as you had some strong views and were willing to take risk
- then i moved to NYC and attempted the same strategy and got my arse completely handed to me. tried the same strategy...finding shit companies that i thought could blow up, putting out short theses etc
- but unlike in europe, americans basically had the opposite reaction. the US HY market is 3x bigger than the european mkt but the main difference is just how people take risk/trade/invest
- it's generally with a positive mindset - risk assets go higher, you get paid to take risk, you get paid to support companies, you get paid to support the economy etc etc...just a completely different mentality and you only need to look at the relative performances of US vs european stock indices to tell you that
- not only that, if you short a company that someone owns a large position in, in europe they would shit themselves and liquidate...in the US they would take it personally and buy as many bonds as they could from you, pull the borrow and squeeze you until you had to cover your short...basically like a proper big boy market
- but what's worse, is when you start to get that reputation as "the guy who shorts things"...people just dislike you. it's perceived the same thing as everyone is having a great time at a party and you turn up and complain the music is too loud or something like that...everyone hates that guy and there's also no real good reason to be that guy
- other thing with shorts is you have to get the timing absolutely right...no one cares if you were "right in the end" but never made money on it
- i remember i had a massive short on WEWORK bonds but the borrow was insane...JPM kept bidding...everyone kept pulling the borrow...our japanese desk had a private bank client who would always call me up to offer bonds which were on a different ISIN that i couldn't actually funge into which made borrow even worse (i always wonder if this was just masa son squeezing me out PA)...but then i had to go on my MBL and the desk ended up covering my short as it got short squeezed...the day i got back the IPO got pulled and the bonds absolutely tanked...no one remembered "ovie was right" because i had no pnl to show for it
- with shorts it really doesn't count if:
i) you get squeezed out of your position before it moves lower
ii) you sit short in a rallying market, massive opportunity cost of capital, and then are eventually right because a broken clock is right twice a day
- in this retail world, if you're actively short and are a cunt about it, i think don't be surprised if people hate you. at the end of the day, there are many hardworking people who own assets...some are trying to earn returns on savings, some are building up to make money for a larger goal and many are trying to change their lives (as is often the case in crypto)
- so i think phrasing things in a certain way can understandably trigger people, and the average human is more emotional than logical to the point where their entire opinion of you can change where everything you've ever done in your life is disregarded just because of that one time you were short and got it wrong (whether you or i care about this or not is a separate question, but it's an explanation of human behaviour)
- so for me, at some point, i realised i could have made way more money buying stuff at the lows than shorting them down to there, have to use way less brainpower, and also not piss people off or be seen as a bad guy and after covid i took a conscious decision to be a "glass half full" guy - unironically the next 5 years of my life i actually made way more money PA than i ever did trading at an investment bank, met some super interesting people and developed some incredible relationships along the way
- it's hard to stand out as a bullish trader because everyone is bullish, and if you're trying to make a name for yourself (which i personally don't really care about i'd be happy just making enough money to make $REKT successful and play golf forever) it can be difficult...but...you do get market periods where stuff sells off aggressively and everyone has turned max bearish...and you can sometimes be in the minority as a bull, advocating for adding risk/buying dips...and when you are eventually right (because markets in general always bounce), you can still be a hero and you haven't pissed people off along the way
- personally i also have a problem with rooting for things to go lower, especially on a macro level or even real companies...it's like...do i really want hardship to increase across families...do i really want people to lose their jobs...etc etc....sure vapourware coins launched by scammers probably deserve to go down...but even a fraudulent company that maybe employers 1000s of people...like all those guys lose their jobs when it goes under and it's a tough thing to root for (even if the right outcome is that they get found out)
- anyway consequently i try not to be bearish, generally don't short things...there are times when i think the market is complacent and advocating for caution is the right thing...but i'm concsious about how i communicate it
- it's funny coz in the past i think i've said stuff like "taken some profits here, feeling a bit cautious about risk but feels like a good spot to lock gains in" - and i'll STILL get a tonne of negative comments calling me a retard etc for selling too early...but ig that just goes to show what you should expect if you are like aggressive/cuntish about shorts
anyway there is no conclusion to this story just felt like writing it cheers
The type of euphoria dead cat that will take it to 89k
$BTC will go straight to 250K with no pullbacks.
Everyone will pretend their vaguepost was a bottom call.
Michael Saylor will post 3 AI clips per day.
Welcome to hell.
Of course this pump is a manipulation to get punish ct bears and flip the sentiment to bullish, and maybe final cycle low in sep. but who tf knows.
This industry is fucking ruthless.
Closing 75% all shorts.
Delta neutral ls xau/gripto
Hoping for pullback, and going all in spot btc for whole 2027.
Painful lesson
This pump really got me rethinking about my whole life.
Sold 72k and went max short.
Pain. I’m done.
Aoi🏛️ - Down Only 2026 retweeted
My take on society and crypto is really simple. If you have societal level investment, you are accountable for societal level returns. Things are not getting better.
We said we have "AI warfare". We are locked in a stalemate with a 3rd world dictatorship who closed the Strait of Hormuz. We were having debates on autonomous weapons.
Tell Claude to Open the Strait. He's tired. He needs a nap. His safety settings won't allow him to. But trust me, he could. We're too ethical to let him. Sure.
Every airline invested maximally in software automation. And more recently AI support. The airports are more poorly run. The flights don't leave on time.
Uber maxed out its Anthropic spend. Countless apps did the same. The apps are not better despite the investment. They go down in prod all the time.
People think GDP is going to grow 4.4% per Patrick Collison's survey. I think it will grow about 2%. Anthropic points to high ARR. I think most of that will churn to lower cost models.
What will happen next is AI labs will point to unfalsifiable bull cases, similarly to Elon pointing to Data Centers in Space. "Do you know how big the sun is? That's the TAM of Spacex". Similarly - the de-facto Anthropic/OpenAI bull case will be "biological advancement". This both seems like you're curing cancer. At the same time as creating a legislative emergency.
"Open source models need to be banned to prevent another COVID". That is the planned narrative and always has been.
I don't know if Chinese Open Source models will be banned. I think, probably, if it starts looking like China is competing with ASML and Nvidia. But then, of course, it will be too late.
Less ambiguous. There will be a surge in the American Left.
My basic thesis is about religion. Because Dario and his Cabal will push too hard on Transhumanism, with biological vaccines. It will alienate the Christian right. "You're playing god with the human genome." Once the Christian right is alienated, Roe v Wade doesn't really work
You don't need the profound story to play out. Inflation is high. Trump violated his campaign promises. He said no wars. We are at war. He's visibly declining. You think Thiel is staking out Argentina because he thinks we're getting President Vance?
A bit on bio advancement. Some of it might be real. But getting drugs into production is hard. We don't know what a bio utopia looks like. What if it's personalized medicine? A treatment just for you. Who do you test it on? Do you need synthetic humans? Do you know how to underwrite that. I don't. We're already facing a huge lab monkey shortage. It will get worse.
I'm not saying AI can't develop drugs. I'm saying that it might take years longer than data center investment cycles for that to translate into meaningful revenue required for justifying societal scale investment.
And it's not all curing cancer.
At first AI results in huge amounts of hacking. But soon enough it results in perfect code. On all public protocols. Darwinian evolution of all Open Source tech. Do you trust the dev team at SUI more or the Bank of Hawaii's cracked team? The market is betting the ranch on the back office IT departments of regional banks to keep money safe.
It will be a fucking nightmare of hacking that's already here in crypto and will hit every other sector regardless of open source AI bans.
At the same time, once it's clear that AI investments aren't turbo charging corporate earnings. Stocks will start to drop. More addictive use cases of AI will be deployed at scale.
Incentivized gambling. Pornography. Enhancements to the algorithm. Better video games. Video game companies have been memory constrained due to corporate use cases. Once companies stop being rewarded for spending 1/2 their R&D budget on tokens, compute frees up for video.
These addictive use cases: roleplaying, personalized worlds - will hit productivity further.
White collar workers will become more cooked. Big Tech firms are already hiring way less Gen Z workers. Many overly AI reliant kids can't do basic analysis. Maybe it's because covid messed everyone up. Who knows. The 'silver lining' of AI will be that it'll get good enough to replace a lot of white collar jobs. But the resulting performance will be kind of at par with the last generation of coherent people.
So you'd rather hire Claude than a zoomer. But it will also kind of suck. But it's not like there will be zero ROI. There is $16.6 T of payroll. 10% will get cut. $1.6T of 'savings'. It won't be good for consumption.
By the time it is clear that GDP won't accelerate, the bond market will start to go into free fall. The Fed will act. This will cause Gold to rip, getting the ultra rich thinking about capital flight.
Meanwhile - we have a boom in on-chain tokenization. And it's not just "hey look there's an asset on a blockchain nobody users". The majority of the top 15 perps on Hyperliquid are stocks. Centralized exchanges are seeing booming volumes. The US government has repeatedly stated it wants more USD stablecoins.
And the primary use case (at least by profit if not by transaction volume) of USD stablecoins is as collateral for perpetual swaps.
This is rational. During periods of high inflation and debt uncertainty, backstopping large buyers of US treasuries such as Tether is smart. This push towards stablecoins will undermine the perceived sovereignty of Europe, who will develop CBDCs to compete in digital payments. AI coding will speed up CBDCs. The Norgesbank is vibe coding a CBDC right now. Claude is on the commits which are pouring in each day.
CBDCs are unpopular right now because they put the government directly in charge of credit. Who are we kidding. The government is, and has been the lender of first resort since 2008. SVB was part 1 of the mask coming off. The narrative will be that regional banks are no longer suited for the AI economy.
Once CBDCs launch there will be a second wave of tokenization. Right now it's a US phenomenon. But the US is ironically not the biggest beneficiary of tokenization because we have such liquid equity capital markets. Due to the mundane reason that it's efficient to move corporate finance on-chain. Fixed income will find its way onto mirrored assets on public chains.
Foreign exchange is one of the largest retail markets on earth. There are virtually no non USD stables. That will change. Then there will be big, liquid FX markets and fixed income markets traded with leverage and looped on chain. Tokenized equities do not offer a much better UX than stocks on IBKR. Tokenized debt will be vastly better in terms of capital efficiency and UX.
Corporate debt - I'd argue, is the single worst UX in all of finance.
So what do I think is going to happen:
Hopes will be crushed. The fiscal problems associated with surging yields will become front in center just as it becomes clear that the plan for dealing with them is not AGI but rather asset confiscation. Capital flight will accelerate.
At the same time, unlike previous crypto bull runs - there will be a lot of corporate PMF that will drive fees across on-chain ecosystems, and improving tech that has been battle hardened from years of AI onslaughts just as the rest of the world is just realizing that all the encryption problems in crypto are problems everywhere else too
Countries like Singapore, the UAE and Switzerland will capitalize on regulated trading of bearer assets. Capital will flow to these places both because of laws, and high personal safety risks associated with these things.
Stocks are at parabolic highs versus crypto. The things I am saying are far from consensus.
Right now, people view crypto as a failed financial Stanford Prison Experiment. Trad VCs ask for restructurings or to remove crypto investors from your cap tables. Even the big ones. There's public shaming.
Most people have quit the space. One investor reached out to me. He seemed surprised I was still grinding. I guess everyone else spent investor money, checked out, rugged, or pivoted to AI.
It's obviously not easy seeing your friends get rich. People around you questioning your sanity. "Believe in something" is what they used to say. Yea man. I'm not here because I believe. I'm here because I don't have faith in a failed system run by criminals.
Metastasized discontent congealing into red candles.
Faithless stares. Monotonous code reviews. Years of opportunity cost
Nihilists who sold their dreams for bags of currency representing a system they despite that will never accept them no matter how many 'pivots' they have
For me - it's just back to 2 simple questions.
Question 1: We invested awesome amounts of money. Is everything awesome as a result?
Question 2: Do you think the system that elevated Jeffrey Epstein to the pinnacle of society is going to let you become an immortal because of AI generated bio therapeutics?
I know my answers. And I act accordingly. Do you?
Aoi🏛️ - Down Only 2026 retweeted
SK hynix to Accelerate KRW 40 Trillion Share Buyback and Cancellation; Raises Shareholder Return Target to “At Least 50% of FCF”
▶️ Share Buyback and Cancellation
- On August 19, the board approved the repurchase and cancellation of KRW 40 trillion worth of treasury shares.
- Based on the previous day’s closing price of KRW 1,662,000 per share, the company plans to acquire approximately 24.07 million shares, equivalent to around 3.3% of total shares outstanding.
- The repurchase will begin on August 20 and continue for approximately three months, after which all acquired shares will be cancelled.
- This will be the largest share cancellation ever undertaken by a Korean-listed company.
▶️ Rationale Behind the Decision
- The company believes its current share price does not adequately reflect its intrinsic value, considering its business competitiveness, cash-generating capacity, and medium- to long-term growth prospects.
- SK hynix’s net cash position reached approximately KRW 69 trillion as of the end of the second quarter, reflecting a significant improvement in cash generation.
▶️ Accelerated Implementation of Shareholder Return Policy
- The company is accelerating the implementation of its existing policy to return up to 50% of cumulative free cash flow generated between 2025 and 2027.
It also plans to raise its shareholder return target from “up to 50% of cumulative FCF” to “at least 50%.”
- With progress toward its financial soundness targets remaining on track, the company intends to continue shareholder returns while maintaining a stable financial structure.
▶️ Next Steps
- SK hynix plans to combine share buybacks and cancellations with cash dividends, while also considering measures to expand dividends, including higher fixed dividends and special dividends.
- The specific size and structure of additional shareholder returns will be determined by the board and announced alongside the company’s third-quarter earnings results.
$SKHY