The leverage is coming out of the machine, and we've been telling you it would.
Hans is hosting today with Tim Colby riding shotgun, and the two of them are pointing at the same alarming charts out of Korea.
FOMO, overcrowding, and margin stacked on margin, and now the bill's due.
The KOSPI cratered almost nine percent Monday and tripped its seventh circuit breaker of the year, with reports that tons of leveraged accounts got liquidated into the hole.
That's what a crowded trade looks like when the exit gets narrow, and it's exactly why you follow Option Pit pros instead of the crowd.
The same rot is showing up stateside.
International Business Machines (IBM) just cratered 20 percent on a pre-earnings warning, and buried in the letter is the tell: clients pulled their capex forward toward servers, storage, and memory to lock in supply before prices jumped. It's the same memory mania blowing up Seoul, now landing on a Dow name.
Then there's Oracle (ORCL), parked on Hans’ hate list for months and printing fresh lows. If OpenAI's in a bind, Oracle's in a bind, because roughly half its remaining backlog leans on that single customer. Think of ORCL as the HYG of the AI buildout, the credit canary that cracks first.
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The Daily News Breakdown
SIREN: June inflation cooled harder than anyone penciled in, and the pump did the heavy lifting. Consumer prices fell four-tenths of a percent on the month, the biggest single-month drop since April 2020, and the annual rate slid to 3.5 percent. Wall Street had modeled a piddly one-tenth dip and a 3.8 percent annual print, so this beat isn't cosmetic. Strip out food and energy and core sat at 2.6 percent, flat from May. The timing's loud too. It lands right as new Fed Chair Kevin Warsh takes his first grilling on the Hill, with bank earnings screaming the economy's still standing.
SIGN: IBM's comeback story just ate a curb at full speed. International Business Machines (IBM) cratered 20 percent premarket after the company pre-announced an ugly quarter nobody saw coming. Sales are pegged at $17.2 billion against the $17.85 billion the Street wanted, and non-GAAP earnings land at $2.93 versus $3.02 expected. CEO Arvind Krishna pinned it on a shortfall in the Z mainframe stack, plus clients yanking capex toward servers, storage, and memory to lock in supply before prices jump. He also name-checked industry-wide cybersecurity chaos as a distraction. Translation: the mainframe engine that was supposed to carry the year sputtered, and management got caught flat-footed on the size of it.
SNEAKER: Oil's back to flashing red, and the Strait of Hormuz is the reason. Brent pushed past $84 a barrel and WTI jumped to $80, both at one-month highs, as the US and Iran swapped strikes overnight and a second US naval blockade sits hours away. Iran reportedly hit two UAE tankers and lobbed missiles at US bases in Jordan and Bahrain, so June's ceasefire is basically a corpse. The part that matters for your positions: the global oil surplus that cushioned the first round got burned through during the war, and the market's staring at a tighter supply picture with no buffer left. Analysts are calling it a straight replay of May's chaos.