Cracks In The Bull Market or More Bricks In The Wall of Worry

Good morning…

Shana Tova to my friends that celebrate the Jewish New Year as I do.

I am in Montreal this week at the Portage event. Portage is a global venture capital firm focused on fintech. They are LP’s of ours at Social Leverage and we have invested together in Alpaca.markets and Fiscal.ai. Many of our portfolio company founders in fintech are in attendance so it is a great week to catch up, work and strategize.

Next up…

Stocktoberfest is a few weeks away in New York on October 5-7. The details, including the guests and programming is up on the site.

Here are some of the topics I dive into with our guests…

Onward…

Larry has a great technical overview of what he calls ‘cracks’ in the current bull market.

There is so much ‘front page’ news right (rising rates, Iran war, midterm elections, oil price increases, inflation) now that has NOT cracked the market, but it is obviously adding up.

The question is, when does any of this news matter or is there something we don’t see on page ten that explodes on to page one.

A fresh front page story exploding this weekend is Elon Musk, Dario and Sam, the Nerd Shmenge Brothers, have all agreed that AI might be moving too fast and that it is in ‘everyone’s (their)’ best interest to slow down.

I am not sure how they can slow down when their spend and need for capital is accelerating…

I can assure you that China will not slow down.

Color me skeptical, but I assume Chinese ‘open source’ is more centralized than any US Frontier model. I assume/imagine that China is a bottomless pit of centralized capital for the AI arms race.

I also assume that is the story Elon, Dario, Sam and the venture capitalists are telling Trump.

At this point in the AI financial soap opera and smorgasbord, I trust nobody!

Our tech overlords, the venture capitalists and the White House have attached us all to frontier model LLM’s of Anthropic, Open AI and whatever Elon has cobbled together.

Is the AI scare a fresh crack in the bull market or a brick in this bull market’s ‘wall of worry’?

Next up…

This week, the ‘degenerate economy’ took many turns for the wierder and darker as it rages on.

Novig declared itself as a sports only betting site (we would never stoop to death bets or political bets) with this saucy Sydney Sweeney ad campaign…

(Note - We are indirect investors in Novig through a fund investment in Multicoin)

The FOMO app ‘where traders become legends’ according to the company says had some staggering ‘numbers’ to share…,

What FOMO calls ‘creators’ I call ‘front runners’. I asked AI to explain ‘creator payouts’

Let me get this straight…FOMO buys ads on Tik Tok etc to recruit people to promote memecoins to their network which we know 99 plus percent go to zero.

We saw all this in 2024 and 2025 with Fartcoin/Memecoins and I wrote about it a few times - here and here.

In a world where the President did it/does it, should we be surprised?

I am not here to judge any of this behavior. The degeneracy is global, open and parabolic. We are in the ‘wink wink, if you don’t know now you know phase.’

I will call it as I see it though and this degeneracy is getting very dark and dirty.

I was very early to the idea that ‘social trading’ would be a huge trend. I did not foresee any of what I am seeing of late.

I hear numbers that 94-97 of all ‘traders/legends/creators’ on the FOMO app lose money.

I’ll stick with indexing.

Most of the 97 percent who lose on FOMO will do the same and index at some point soon. The three percent that are winning will no doubt run for office.

Have a great Sunday.