Matein Khalid “We went eyeball to eyeball and the other guy blinked” – JFK said about Nikita Peasantovich Shoe Bangarov after Stalin’s henchman in the Red Terror back down in the Cuban missile crisis. Trump has gone eyeball to eyeball with the bond market and Xi Jinping but only the Dragon Empire’s Emperor for Life has blinked while the bond vigilantes have gone berserk in the netherworld […]
Matein Khalid As I sensed a few hours after the NYSE opened on Liberation Day, the masters of the universe on Wall Street and the White House have knowingly ignited the mother of all Lehman/Liz Truss moments in the global capital markets. Like Shakira’s hips, my Bloomberg screen does not lie as it speaks to me in its ominous green phosphorescent flicker. The Volatility Index is once […]
Matein Khalid We are now living “ten days that shook the world” in real life, as John Reed did that fateful autumn long ago in Lenin’s shadow as the Bolshies stormed the Winter Palace in October 1917 before he was resurrected to begin his next life as the chairman/CEO of Citicorp in 1984. Is this just a magic realism joke? No. The fall of Tsar Nicki and […]
Matein Khalid Tariffs are to economics what leeches are to medicine, what voodoo dolls are to risk management and what astrology is to astronomy. The very fact that Trump believed in this nonsense with rigid consistency for 40 years as a solution to the very real havoc meted out by Davos Man and the apostles of globalisation to Joe/Jane Sixpack in Middle America is both laughable and […]
Matein Khalid Thank God last night was just a manic Monday and not Black Monday, even though I saw doomsday options trade in the index futures market on Sunday night and the VIX was 60 at the open. This is 100% evidence that some major financial institution is in distress because 60 VIX is a 3-sigma event that I have seen only in 9/11, the GFC and […]
Matein Khalid In a financial panic, investors sell what they can and not what they must. So the most ominous data points for me is the dramatic widening in US corporate credit/high yield spreads, which means Mr. Market is now certain that default risk will strangle capital markets as varied as auto finance, subprime mortgages, student loan and credit card receivables. The widening of Asian sovereign credit […]
Matein Khalid The auguries for the CoreWeave (CRWV) IPO on Nasdaq are not too bright. Nvidia is down 10% in the last two trading sessions, the grapevine on the Street suggests that the pricing on CRWV will be below the $47-$55 range. While revenue growth has been spectacular since 2022, margins, accounting and loan repayments are a red flag. If this IPO flops, the ripple effect will […]
Matein Khalid It took Trump 2.0 to finally dethrone King Dollar. The US Dollar Index has fallen from 110 to 104 as Planet Forex has finally concluded that aggressive tariffs on Canada, Mexico, China and the EU, coupled with stagflation risk in the US and Powell’s dovish take on a potential dual mandate pivot to easy money at a time when Germany ramps up defense spending by […]
Matein Khalid If ever any investor needed a real time lesson in emerging markets risk, the timebombs in Ankara, Jakarta and Bogotá to provided it. President Erdogan ordered the arrest of his top rival Istanbul Mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu and triggered a 10% plunge in the lira against the US dollar, an exodus of offshore money from the local T-bill market and a horrific meltdown in Istanbul bank […]
Matein Khalid Risk assets went ballistic this week as DonnyT did his tariff man war dance, hurled his Tomahawk at Canada, Mexico, China and EU as Liberation Day begins on April 2nd in Year Zero of the Ten Thousand Year MAGA Empire. Long years ago, America made a tryst with destiny and now comes the time, we must redeem our pledge to The Donald, the Don of […]
Matein Khalid Starting in 2016, the US has morphed into the world’s largest LNG exporter, eclipsing Australia and Qatar. Trump is determined to achieve global energy dominance as he exploits the geopolitical leverage American LNG exports give him in his relations with Europe, Asia and the GCC. He has pledged to dramatically expand US natural gas production via his “drill baby drill” ethos, rescinded Biden’s environmental pause […]
Matein Khalid I have warned my friends that US recession risk was rising alarmingly in the past month as I saw the price of oil and money (2-year Treasury note yields) tank in unison while metrics of consumer/business confidence nosedived. Now Wall Street has accepted my thesis that the tariff trauma will lead to a deflation Big Chill and not an inflation spike in the US economy. […]
Matein Khalid There is no economic reason why OPEC+ chose to add barrels to the global oil market at a time when bearish psychology and positioning dominates trading as attested by the plunge in speculative long positions in both the West Texas Intermediate and Brent IPE futures contracts. The only explanation is that both Saudi Arabia and Russia faced political pressure from a Trump White House that […]
Matein Khalid There is no doubt in my mind that the epic US equities bull market is now over since the S&P 500 index broke its 200 day moving average while I was at the wonderful StanChart suhoor with so many old pals from the 1990’s Al Mankhool salad days when the Mexican food at Zodiac/Bordertown in the Imperial Suites provided the hottest salsa (mirchi) in Rolla […]
Matein Khalid 2024 was the annus horribilis for luxury stocks as the Dragon Empire’s cultural DNA under Xi Dada pivoted to Maoist austerity, inflation hit the mass affluent wannabe Gatsbys of Europe and boonie America and Incredible India’s bling-bling badshahs and bhabhijis discovered the hard way that the speculative stock market mania on Dalal Street can and did end in tears. Obviously, Gandhian values are not exactly […]
Matein Khalid Trump inherited a US economy with 3% growth, a 4% unemployment rate and near 0% recession risk a mere 6-weeks ago. His outrageous tariff threats, policy U-turns, DOGE cutbacks in government spending and mass deportations have ignited a global trade war as well as slashed economic growth, business/consumer confidence. A US recession has now begun as the Atlanta Fed’s GDP Now sees a -2.8% slump […]
Matein Khalid Some guy wrote to me that I was bearish for 4-years. Poppycock! In mid-Jan, I wrote a bullish analysis of Prologis (PLD), the world’s largest industrial REIT. PLD was 105 then and 124 now. An 18% return in 6-weeks is a gift for those with the IQ to grasp my logic. Which poor Densa could not. What about VNO at 18, Citi at 60, Wells […]
Matein Khalid All roads lead to Riyadh, which has replaced Geneva as the epicentre of global diplomacy in 2025. Presidents Trump and Putin will meet in the Saudi capital amid the most dramatic U-turn in US foreign policy as Washington switches sides in the Ukraine war in favour of the Kremlin, bypassing the EU and the embattled Ukraine state. Egyptian President Abdul Fattah al-Sisi is in Riyadh to coordinate the Arab […]
Matein Khalid Had Warren Buffett, oracle of Omaha, been born North Indian, he would have summarized Wall Street’s temper tantrum since last Friday with his famous observation “only when the tide goes out do you discover who’s been swimming nanga punga (naked)”. When history’s most iconic value investor ran up $300 billion in cash, I knew that the tide had run out for this deliciously profitable but […]
Matein Khalid I butcher the great Regency poet William Blake’s surreal ode to tigers and dark satanic mills “China, China burning bright/in the forest of the night/what immortal hand or eye/could frame thy fearful symmetry”. JD is up 8% overnight, Alibaba is up 72% since my $85 golden goose post 3-months ago and the KWEB is up 24% YTD. The PBOC is easing monetary policy. Fiscal stimulus […]
Matein Khalid My mystical vegan-pivot makes Christmas goose taboo for the rest of my life but my quest for those rare geese that lay golden eggs for me on the stock exchanges continues unabated. Alibaba (BABA) was despised/dissed by everyone I respected, from CNBC honcho Jim Cramer to my Indian luminati (but never Illuminati) friends in the DIFC and even hedgies in New York and London who […]
Matein Khalid Who would have thought that an elegiac hillbilly like J.D. Vance would articulate the requiem for the Western Alliance and NATO at Munich even as Donald Trump prepares for his alpha male sword dance in the Saudi desert, though I really hope POTUS-47 does not try to take on Putin in judo because the little guy is a certified black belt, who can pulverize DonnyT […]
Matein Khalid An English poet once lamented, “golden boys and golden girls must, like chimney sweeps, also turn to dust”. The fate of pre-pandemic Silicon Valley unicorns, whose dreams of a wildly successful IPO amid the market mania of 2021 was deflated by a killer virus and the Powell Fed’s most draconian monetary tightening since the Volcker era may also turn to dust. This is as true […]
Matein Khalid SpaceX is up 7X since my post in 2020, when we invested at $46 billion pre-money and it is now $350 billion. I do not recommend anybody put new money in this or any of the big AI plays. There are 300 AI startups that were rejected by two Palo Alto brand name VC partners I respect in the past year and this sector will […]
Matein Khalid V.S. Naipaul once said that ancestral memories are like “trap doors to a bottomless past”. This was my first thought when I heard about the death of HH Prince Karim Aga Khan, the 49th Imam Zaman of Islam’s Ismaili sect and unquestionably the world leader who has inspired me most in my lifetime. I am not an Ismaili. In fact, my direct ancestor, the Mukhi […]
Matein Khalid The selloff in emerging markets FX before Trump granted a 30 days reprieve to Canada/Mexico on his 25% tariff threats created multiple trading opportunities. I would stay away from Mexican peso as it is easily the most liquid, most shortable currency in the EM FX constellation. The Sherlock Holmes dog that did not bark in this case was the measured ping pong on tariffs with […]
Matein Khalid t is significant that President Trump, despite his bluff and brinkmanship with 25 percent tariff threats against Mexico and Canada, chose only to impose a 10 percent tariff on China. China is Washington’s only real peer competitor in great power realpolitik and its preeminent rival in Cold War 2.0. A 10 percent tariff is not a threat to global economic stability as would have been the 60 percent […]
Matein Khalid Trump’s vision of Gaza as a “riviera of the Middle East” at his press conference with Netanyahu, whose IDF warplanes, drones and tanks just butchered 45,000 Gazans is as deranged as it is surreal. Trump views Gaza as a New York real estate development opportunity as if he was gentrifying Spanish Harlem or the Bronx. I can imagine his zest at the idea of Trump […]
Matein Khalid The ideologues of MAGA assured us that Tariff Man’s threats were pure bombast and Wall Street believed them, the reason equities and crypto went ballistic after the election of POTUS-47. Yet Trump’s tariff threats were all too real and the global markets must now pay a bitter price for history’s second worst economic own goal after Brexit. The 25% tariff on Mexico will immediately send […]
Matein Khalid In a week where Nasdaq’s fabled AI trade was slammed by the emergence of Chinese startup DeepSeek and the vision of a much lower cost efficient and less intensive energy usage performance models, it is ironic that Microsoft (MSFT) shares have traded down to 413 on its Azure stumble even though the world’s preeminent software franchise will be the prime winner from lower cost AI […]
