TRACK NAV

“The US naval blockade on Iranian ports took effect April 13 at 10AM eastern after peace talks in Islamabad collapsed over the weekend according to NPR. As a reminder, rough estimates, 12,000,000 barrels per day normally transit the straight, and now that is going to roughly zero. Trump warned Iran's fast attack ships if any ships come anywhere close to our blockade, they will be immediately eliminated.”

“I think the bottom's in for markets overall. That doesn't mean you don't get a pullback, especially going to OpEx later this week. But I think, overall, I think you've you've got a bottom. There's so much hedging, so much shorting taking place. There's not many people left to sell, and I think there there are great opportunities out there.”

“And now they put the IRGC in a vice. It's a damned if you do, damned if you don't vice. They have two choices. They can escalate. Right now, they've enjoyed calm and peace for the last two weeks. They've seen their families. They're starting to formulate a picture of what the future might look like. They're glad that they don't have bombs raining down their head.”

“The US naval blockade on Iranian ports took effect April 13 at 10AM eastern after peace talks in Islamabad collapsed over the weekend according to NPR. The fact that this occurred, it seems to have been relatively well received by the market. That is to say this blockade didn't happen, the negotiations didn't fall apart, and we didn't immediately go straight back to hell in the market.”

“It's also interesting to me to see the pressure around this vis a vis their regional, like, neighbors because after they launch rockets and everybody, you know what we're not seeing for the Strait Of Hormuz blockade by The US is criticism from the other regional powers. This moves the war for both sides to a different layer of the strategic level of war.”

“It's not only the overall Iranian economy that's dependent on this revenue, it's particularly the government and within that, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps which gets almost all of its revenue and thus its ability to pursue the war from oil exports.”

“The US Navy needed to do was reverse the dynamic, make sure that it wasn't the Iranians who were controlling traffic through the Strait, but that it was the US Navy that was. And that sounds like a fairly straightforward process given the size of the US Navy. But in fact, it turns out, it's looking like it will be pretty complicated to execute.”

“One major risk, of course, is that the IRGC and Iran itself lashes out. They have threatened to attack these US Navy ships, and so you could have a major escalation of the fighting again based over the ships coming into the strait or even standing back outside.”

“90 percent of the oil that Iran ships out is headed to China. Much of it is on Chinese crewed, Chinese flagged ships. The president's supposed to go to Beijing in about four weeks, and what he was hoping was going to be this meeting all about a new detente between China and the United States.”

“I'd say a third big category of risk is that Iran responds by restarting attacks on energy infrastructure throughout the Persian Gulf. That is one that carries really long-term risks for the global energy system and the global economy, because as you do more damage to the region's infrastructure, prevent refineries from operating, you risk taking energy offline for a long period of time.”

“Cantor starts crypto firm with backing from Tether and SoftBank. As we dig into it, they’re gonna start with about 42,000 Bitcoins, so about $4 billion worth of Bitcoin. Already talking about raising convertible debt, going full micro-strategy. Jack Mollers, who is also the CEO of Strike, is going to be the CEO of this company.”

“What is interesting is how US centric Bitcoin is starting to become, right? So much of the Bitcoin mining is done in the US. So much of the institution, like the vast majority of the institution of Bitcoin, which is an increasingly growing part of the overall Bitcoin pie is held by US entities.”

“And then on the other side of the credibility is, can we bring in substantial amounts of capital? This is a masterful play and obviously, they're much smaller than MicroStrategy. But this is the most single credible play and I think what is really interesting is that this might cause premium compression for the entire space, right?”

“I think this definitely legitimizes Bitcoin further as a treasury asset for a lot of these major public companies. So I think that we've been seeing it move this direction for a while now. I think there was kind of questions around what corporate accumulation would actually look like, but now I think that this is actually something that's going to set a pretty high floor on Bitcoin.”

“So there's two things I want to point out and then move on to a bit more macro and where this does fit in context. First is that this company's sole strategy is raises 500 million in convertible notes issuance to buy Solana tokens. Just putting it on your radar, there's another company actually in Canada that's doing this with Ethereum.”