Dimitris Plessas
Dimitris Plessas
Greece
1mo
๐— ๐—ถ๐—ฑ๐—ฑ๐—ฎ๐˜† ๐—ฏ๐—ฟ๐—ถ๐—ฒ๐—ณ | ๐—ช๐—ฒ๐—ฑ ๐Ÿญ๐Ÿฏ ๐— ๐—ฎ๐˜† Asia closed mostly higher. KOSPI +2.6% led on chip strength, Nikkei +0.8%, Shanghai +0.7%, Hang Seng +0.2%, ASX -0.5%. Europe is grinding higher. STOXX 600 +0.4%, DAX +0.8%, FTSE +0.1%; CAC -0.3% the outlier. EUR/USD slipped to 1.17 (-0.5%) as DXY firms. ๐Ÿฏ ๐˜€๐˜๐—ผ๐—ฟ๐—ถ๐—ฒ๐˜€ ๐˜๐—ต๐—ฎ๐˜ ๐—บ๐—ฎ๐˜๐˜๐—ฒ๐—ฟ 1. Private credit cracks widen. $JPM-led bank group is reining in the credit line to $KKR's troubled FSK fund as losses mount, while Blue Owl retail fundraising has collapsed to a fraction of last year. $FSK has become the most visible fault line in the shadow-credit story. If defaults pick up here, the spillover hits regional banks before it hits the tape. 2. Oil refuses to come down. Brent at $108, WTI at $102 with Aramco's CEO warning fuel stocks are "critically low" and the market won't normalize before 2027 if Hormuz stays disrupted. Morgan Stanley sees a path to $150 by summer. Congress is now floating a federal gas tax suspension, which tells you how nervous Washington is. $XOM and $CVX remain the cleanest hedges; $NEM bid as gold prints fresh highs at 4,702. 3. Trump-Xi summit, weakened hand. Air Force One is en route to Beijing with $NVDA's Jensen Huang, $AAPL's Tim Cook and $BLK's Larry Fink onboard. Trump arrives with 3.8% inflation, an unresolved Iran war and a Supreme Court ruling that just clipped his trade powers. The optics matter; tariff de-escalation would be the bull case for $TSM and $ASML. ๐—”๐—น๐˜€๐—ผ ๐˜„๐—ฎ๐˜๐—ฐ๐—ต๐—ถ๐—ป๐—ด Yardeni lifted his S&P target to 8,250 citing "unprecedented" earnings, even as Dimon warns on exuberance. KOSPI's +2.6% rip was led by $SMSN.L on AI-memory demand. $SAP.DE up on the n8n agentic AI partnership. Anthropic reportedly in talks to raise $30B at a $900B valuation, the largest private round on record. ๐—จ๐—ฆ ๐—ฝ๐—ฟ๐—ฒ-๐—ผ๐—ฝ๐—ฒ๐—ป S&P futures +0.2%, Nasdaq +0.8%, Dow -0.3%. 10Y UST at 4.46% (holiday close). Bond market reopens with CPI in the rearview and oil still bid; watch the long end. The melt-up narrative and the inflation narrative are now in the same room. Earnings are carrying the index, but $108 Brent eventually shows up in margins. Stay long quality, but I'm keeping energy and gold as ballast, not as trades. Not investment advice.
Not investment advice. The author may have financial interests in the mentioned instruments.
null
.