Stock Taking
Brief notes (which may or may not be useful) on what caught my attention this week
Oil. I started the week watching the price of crude as the headlines shifted back and forth, but ended it thinking about pipelines and refineries. The term “crack spreads” came up repeatedly, so I spent some time learning about them. They’re the margins refiners make by turning crude into gasoline and diesel. Currently, crack spreads are at four-year highs. I don’t think I appreciated how different the refining side can be from the crude side.
Gold. Hong Kong and Singapore are both expanding as gold trading/clearing hubs. De-dollarization feeling less like a theory and more like something slowly acquiring plumbing.
Bitcoin. Still below the two-year moving average, where it’s been since February. A good value zone, historically. ETF flows are mostly negative. (The speculative money that used to chase this seems to be chasing AI instead.) Whales are buying.
EM. I had a small project this week: find an EM ETF that isn’t a semiconductor trade in disguise. No luck... Every road seems to lead back to Korea and Taiwan. Nota bene: indexes are not neutral things.
Defense. NATO countries to spend $50 billion toward long-range precision strike capabilities. This kind of military spending will be structural, I think, making up for years of underinvestment. “Rearmament” - a strange word to see regularly in the news. Like a pocket watch or a top hat, it feels like it belongs to another century.