Sunday Reads And Listens...Howie's Tour De France Hot Takes, Biden 'Slowly' Shuffles Out The Door and Crowdstrike Reminds Us How Fragile Tech Is...

Good evening from Nice.

Ellen and I are heading back home tomorrow after a great few weeks in UK and France.

Today I dragged Ellen into the mess that is the finish line of The Tour De France. It was not easy to get to or away from it, but it was cool to see the circus up close.

I geeked out looking at all the bikes and gear and the team buses. I also geeked out scanning the scarred and beaten up legs of the Tour cyclists and the incredible leanness of their upper bodies.

My favorite photo is this cyclist enjoying a no fanfare slice of Domino’s pizza after his press tour and his last pedal stroke of his last stage of his 3,900 km 21 days of special hell…

It is back to the real world for Howie and the real world is quite the circus too.

As we were getting back to the hotel tonight, I got a few texts about Biden dropping out of the election (I do not have Twitter on my phone), so I checked the markets and only saw Bitcoin and Solana up slightly. The futures are not open.

If only as a 24/7/365 macro proxy, Bitcoin serves plenty of purpose for me. This evening is just another reminder. Bitcoin and most crypto ran all week from a weak technical position as did Coinbase and sure enough the huge macro news of Biden stepping away breaks on a Sunday afternoon. I guess we know why…also it is why I check prices, not news, especially in an era where the headlines will only get worse.

The at the moment price of Bitcoin is both the aggregation of so much data (news, information, opinions) but in and of it self such a beautiful small piece of data.

I can’t imagine the terrible takes I am missing on Twitter but I am off to bed in just a few.

We will know a lot more in 24 hours but now it is just Fat Nixon who is the oldest nominee in the history of American politics.

I liked this from Meb Faber and hopefully somehow we fix this going forward…

As for the biggest business story - before the Biden Sunday slow shuffle away - it was the Crowdstrike software outage.

If you own technology stocks or the indexes you have exposure to Crowdstrike. It will dominate headlines and a lot of policy in tech so I put together a few links for you.

Keep an eye on $HACK - the cyber ETF which was about to hit all-time highs.

Our weekly co-host on Trends With Friends Michael Parekh will have read everything and be ready to decipher it more clearly for everyone on this weeks show.

This New York Times piece covered the outage well.

Om had this great read ‘What Crowdstrike Teaches Us About Risks And Resilience’

Matthew Prince the CEO of Cloudflare has some free hot takes on his personal Twitter feed. Like this one…

Hope this helps…either way good night.