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Warm-Up
- The Impact of Flagrant Braggadociousness
- Hard rug pull?
- Tariffs - giving out like candy
- TikTok Saga continues - with a twist

Markets
- Deflating Stocks - Thread Pull (Before the rug pull)
- Monday Mayhem - S&P 500 down 1.9%, Equal Weighted down 0.35% - DEEPSeek
- Tuesday - plenty of buyers stepping in ....
- Staples, Banks are in favor all of a sudden...

ANNOUNCING a New CTP!

$600 Billion Lost Monday - for one company! BIGGEST one day drop ever!

Monday Markets
- News of a cheap AI model (program/app) from China hit the tape and it pulled the loose string and tech / markets felll apart.
- DeepSeek, has more downloads that ChatCPT
- DeepSeek's latest app comes just days after Mr. Trump announced a new $500 billion venture with ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Softbank and Oracle, dubbed Stargate, which he touted as ensuring "the future of technology" in the U.S. (Which is higher than anyone could calulate as the actual value- more like $60-$80 billion)
- ORCL -13%, NVDA -17%, AMD -7%, ASML - 8%. Nuke power companies getting squashed - NASDAQ 100 down 3.2%
- DeepSeek is also catching investors off guard because of the low development costs for its AI app, which Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives pegged at only $6 million. By comparison, OpenAI, Google and other major U.S. companies are on track to invest a total of roughly $1 trillion in AI over the coming years, according to Goldman Sachs.
- FWIW - DeepSeek excels in technical tasks like coding and reasoning, while ChatGPT is better for creative writing and conversational tasks
- Founder Liang, who had previously focused on applying AI to investing, had bought a "stockpile of Nvidia A100 chips," a type of tech that is now banned from export to China. Those chips became the basis of DeepSeek, an MIT publication reported.
- DeepSeek is looking to differentiate from its competitors with its reasoning capabilities, meaning that before delivering the final answer, the model first generates a “chain of thought” to enhance the accuracy of its responses.
- Question: Will this shed reality on the AI bubble or just a bump in the road?
---- Lesson: As an investor, be careful of the current administration's hype - we saw this last time and many of the "deals" never got done fully or at all.
---- In addition, DJIA was flying high as staples and other ramping. HD, CRM, JNJ
- 10Yr Yield drops to 4.52%

Hard Rug Pull
- Hard rug pull: The developers have no intention of completing the project and plan to scam investors from the start

In the End...
- The narrative with switch... Was:  How great all of this as capital spend is going to be great!
- Will morph to: No need for capital spend therefore companies will have the benefit of not spending the money!
- The usual Wall Street Machine
--- Update: That has already started in the background. The idea that this is great as there is more competition AND a layer has been built that can support faster and cheaper build out of this AI .....

One More Thing
- Wang (CEO of ScaleAI) said DeepSeek actually has more H100 chips from Nvidia than expected — about 50,000 of them.
- At $25,000 a piece that is $1.25 billion. Sooooooo how is it that it took only $6 million to build..

Big Cuts
- The Trump administration is offering millions of federal workers the option to accept buyouts through a government-wide "deferred resignation" program if they resign by Feb. 6.
- Those who accept the offer will receive pay and benefits through Sept. 30, according to a draft email obtained Tuesday by NBC News.

Colombia - Tariff Test
- President Donald Trump's newly announced tariffs on goods from Colombia could drive up the price of some items Americans buy every day.
- Trump said in a social media post Sunday that he would immediately impose a blanket 25% tariff on all goods coming into the U.S. from Colombia, among other sanctions. The announcement came after Colombia rebuffed a U.S. military flight of deported migrants.
- Trump also said that the tariffs would soar to 50% in a week.
---- Colombia yileds, takes in the migrants - coffee drinkers should rejoice!

Thought Moment
- Will some countries look at these "Negotiating tariffs" as ways to negotiate?
- Less fear - as now they know as it has been telegraphed that they are only really for negotiating?

TikTok Saga
- Perplexity AI on Sunday revised the merger proposal it had submitted to TikTok parent ByteDance.
- The proposal, which would create a new entity combining Perplexity and TikTok U.S., would now also allow for the U.S. government to own up to 50% of the new company upon a future IPO, CNBC has learned.
- All of a sudden we are going to have state-owned enterprises. (WTF?)

Change of Tune
- Clearly this is all political at this point
- The CIA has shifted its stance about the origin of the virus that causes Covid-19, NBC News reported on Saturday.
- The intelligence agency now believes that the coronavirus escaped from a Chinese lab, a shift from its previous stance, in which it did not take a position.
- "CIA assesses with low confidence that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin based on the available body of reporting,"

Diet Drugs - Still Good
- Shares of Novo Nordisk jumped Friday after the Danish pharmaceutical giant reported positive early-stage results for its once weekly amycretin obesity drug.
- The trial showed average weight reduction of 22% in obese and overweight patients after 36 weeks.
- The study was conducted on 125 overweight or obese patients and the most common side effects were gastrointestinal.
- Amycretin targets the same gut hormone that Wegovy mimics, known as GLP-1, as well as a pancreas hormone called amylin that affects hunger.
- Sooooo, how is this different?
-- NOW - The Food and Drug Administration approved Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic for patients with both chronic kidney disease and diabetes, expanding the use of the wildly popular injection in the U.S.
- What next? Help for hair growth or make you taller....

Airline - Not So High Flying
- Insta-thought - Airlines are doing better because of weight loss medicine - people are lighter so less fuel used for flights
- Earnings: The carrier forecast an adjusted loss per share of 20 cents to 40 cents for the first three months of 2025 based on current demand trends and fuel-price forecast, a wider loss than the 4 cents analysts were expecting, according to LSEG.

Tech Earnings
- Starts this week with Microsoft, IBM, META, Intel and a few others.
- The week after it will pick up pretty good.

Politics This Week
- A Republican House member introduced a resolution Thursday to amend the U.S. Constitution in order to allow President Donald Trump — and any other future president — to be elected to a third term in the White House.
- Trump "has proven himself to be the only figure in modern history capable of reversing our nation's decay and restoring America to greatness, and he must be given the time necessary to accomplish that goal," said Rep. Andy Ogles, the Tennessee lawmaker who introduced the resolution.
- Remind everyone again about what it takes to do a constitutional amendment????
- Trump signs executive order to unclassified files for MLK, JFK, RJK.

Around the World
- South Korea's economy expanded 1.2% year on year in the fourth quarter, marking its slowest expansion since the second quarter of 2023.
- Advance figures showed the figure missed the 1.4% expansion expected by economists polled by Reuters, and the growth was also softer compared with the 1.5% rise seen in the third quarter of 2024.

Football?
- Congrats to Kansas City and Philadelphia
- Who are our favorites?
- KC is 1.5 point favorite
- Will Kelce propose to Swift if the win? (Will he have to sign pre-nup?)

IF interested:
- Beyoncé (US$760 million) ...
- Dr. Dre (US$800 million) ...
- Madonna (US$850 million) ...
- Bruce Springsteen (US$1.2 Billion) ...
- Selena Gomez (US$1.3 Billion) ...
- Rihanna (US$1.4 Billion) ...
- Taylor Swift (US$1.6 Billion) ...
- Jay-Z (US$2.5 Billion)

Crypto
- Bitcoin was below $100k on Monday as risk assets were not in favor
- All other coins also drop...

Egg Prices - ALERT
- High in Jan 2023 - $4.23
- Dropped to $2.06 in September 2023
- Current is $4.14

 

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