Mon: Saylor expected announce another BTC purchase
Tue:
Twenty One (XXI) (Backed by Tether, Bitfinex, SoftBank & Cantor) expects to begin trading with more than 42k Bitcoin (third-largest BTC treasury)
U.S. ADP, JOLTs
Wed:
FOMC: expected hawkish cut rate by 25bps, focus will be on Economic Projections, powell presser & dissents ; BE: If Powell leans hawkish at the conference to appease hawkish regional Fed presidents, will it even matter anymore? After all, the next Fed chair — Hassett is the frontrunner — could join the board as soon as Feb, rendering Powell essentially a lame duck for the last few months of his chairmanship
Oracle Earnings
Thu:
Solana Breakpoint 2025 11 to 13
Terra-Luna co-founder Do Kwon’s sentencing
Fri:
TBA/Whole Week: OpenAI’s GPT-5.2 ‘code red’ response to Google is coming;
What Happened:
Cantor has cut its (Micro) Strategy price target by 60% To $229, down from $560:
Cantor Fitzgerald, a bank with some political ties, is the ninth-biggest shareholder in Microstrategy. Their assessment of warranted and unwarranted fears below:
— MSTR Will Be Forced to Sell Their BTC. MSTR has enough cash to fund dividends for 21 months, & its BTC position, worth $60.7B, compares to debt notional of $8.2B, none of which matures until 2028. Also, MSTR can still raise cash through equity facilities should it be needed. Absent a 90% pullback from current BTC levels, This Fear is Not Warranted.
— MSCI Index Removal. MSCI is considering whether to allow companies to be a part of an index if digital asset holdings exceed 50% of their total assets. If enacted, it could result in forced selling of MSTR (as much as $8B), given how much of its float is held by passive index funds. This is Fear is Somewhat Warranted.
— MSTR is Not Buying the Dip. MSTR’s model is to buy BTC when it is accretive to do so, irrespective of BTC’s price. There have been times in the past when it was not accretive to do so, and MSTR did not buy as much BTC (see 2022). The environment we are in is a repeat of 2022. This Fear is Not Warranted.
Bitcoin Is Set for First Yearly Split From Stocks in Decade. The digital asset has rarely deviated so cleanly from other risk assets even during past crypto winters. The dislocation defies expectations that cryptocurrencies would thrive under President Donald Trump’s return to the White House amid favorable regulation and a wave of institutional adoption.
A cryptographically relevant quantum computer (CRQC) in the 2020s is highly unlikely. Even mid-2030s is ambitious: a16z; CRQC is 20 years away (Even under aggressive engineering scaling from here.): ARK Invest
Digital Asset Holdings has raised an additional $50 million from backers including Bank of New York Mellon and Nasdaq. The new funding, which also came from S&P Global and iCapital, adds to the $135 million the company raised earlier this year. That round was led by DRW Venture Capital and Tradeweb Markets, joined by market-making firms Citadel Securities, IMC and Optiver, Bloomberg reported in June. Digital Asset is best known for the Canton Network, a public blockchain the company developed in 2023 that it says is better suited to process financial transactions because users can decide what information to keep private. Several of its backers, including Goldman Sachs and Tradeweb Markets, have been using the network or are involved with its governing entity, the Global Synchronizer Foundation, Digital Asset has previously said.
“Bitcoin options show a clear preference for near-term range trading, with volatility being sold and both wings faded,” Jasper De Maere, desk strategist at Wintermute, wrote in a note Friday. “At the same time, longer-dated optionality is still being added, indicating expectations of stability now but room for larger moves later.”
JPMorgan says Strategy’s stock has already priced in the risk of exclusion from major equity benchmarks, casting the upcoming MSCI decision as a potential upside catalyst, even though a removal would still prompt passive outflows.
Jane Street Leads $105M Round in Antithesis, a Testing Tool Used by Ethereum Network
Sony Group plans for U.S. customers to pay for video game subscriptions and other content using its own stablecoin, according to Nikkei.
Connecticut Joins Fight Against Prediction Market Upstarts.
CFTC Paves Way for Spot Crypto Trades on Futures Exchanges.
Amazon Rushes Out Latest AI Chip called Trainium3 to Take On Nvidia, Google
The big question for Trainium 3 is how many major external clients will adopt the hardware....Amazon has committed up to $8 billion of investment to Anthropic. Google has invested about $3 billion in Anthropic...Anthropic has said that Amazon remains its “primary training partner and cloud provider.” It has said it expects to be using more than one million Trainium 2 chips by the end of the year, including its use of the Project Rainier supercomputer with nearly 500,000 Trainium processors….Amazon declined to provide direct benchmark comparisons for the Trainium 3 servers against the latest hardware from Nvidia and Google, or their power requirements.
Bond investors warned over picking Hassett as Fed chair
Gold Set for Best Annual Performance Since 1979. China’s central bank added to its gold reserves for a 13th straight month, according to data released on Sunday.
Apple suddenly undergoing its biggest personnel shake-up in decades:
Apple’s Chip Chief Srouji (the architect of Apple’s prized in-house chips effort) informed CEO Cook he is seriously considering leaving the company and would likely continue his career elsewhere rather than retire. Apple is urgently pushing to keep him. He remains at least for now
Executives Left/Leaving:
* John Giannandrea, AI Head (stepping down)
* Alan Dye, Apple’s most prominent design executive (Poached by Meta in Major Coup)
* Kate Adams, General Counsel (retiring in late 2026) (Apple hired Meta’s Chief Legal Officer as replacement)
* Lisa Jackson, governmental affairs executive (retiring)
* Jeff Williams, COO (retired last month)
* Luca Maestri, CFO (stepped into smaller role in early 2025, likely to retire soon)
* Robby Walker, overseer of Siri (left in October)
* Ke Yang, Walker’s replacement (left after only weeks for Meta’s Superintelligence Labs)
* Jian Zhang, leader of AI robotics software team (left for Meta)
* Many hardware designers (followed Jony Ive to LoveFrom or went to other companies)
* Ruoming Pang, AI Models Chief and reportedly he took ~100 engineers with him for Meta.
* Roughly a dozen other top AI researchers have left, mostly to Meta and OpenAI.
Apple hasn’t launched a successful new product category in a decade. Apple Intelligence has suffered from delays and subpar features, somewhat due to its on-device AI and privacy commitments While Apple did announced Private Cloud Compute to enable private AI processing, even this hasn’t resolved the lag and other competitors like samsung offer both on device & cloud processing already for an year now. Also Apple’s highly touted overhaul to the Siri is roughly a year and a half behind schedule. Apple planning to pay ~$1bln/y for an 1.2t parameter AI model developed by Google to power Siri, next year)
The turnover is expected to continue, with many of the remaining top leaders, including Cook (unlikely to leave soon, possibly after 2029 but FT reported in last month that board is preparing Cook to step down as early as next year, John Ternus is likely successor), nearing typical retirement ages (either in their 60s or nearing it).
Oracle Credit Fear Gauge Hits Highest Since 2009 on AI Bubble Fears
Jane Street Trading Revenue Up 18%, on Pace for Record Year; Citadel Securities on Track for Record Trading Revenue This Year
Netflix agrees $83bn deal for Warner Bros studio and streaming businesses. Under terms of the deal announced Friday, Warner Bros. shareholders will receive $27.75 a share in cash and stock in Netflix, valuing the business at $82.7 billion including debt. The total equity value of the deal is $72 billion. Warner Bros. will spin off cable networks such as CNN and TNT into a separate company before concluding the sale of its studio and HBO to Netflix. Media mergers of this scale have a rocky history and this one is expected to bring intense regulatory scrutiny in the US and Europe.
Alphabet is the only company with leadership in every layer of AI; Morgan Stanley’s Asia semiconductor analyst, who expects about five million TPUs to be bought in 2027, up roughly 67% from previous estimates, and seven million in 2028, 120% above prior estimates. While most of this will likely come from Alphabet’s first-party use and Google Cloud Platform sales, it “speaks to the potential for GOOGL to sell more TPUs,” he wrote in a note to clients on Dec. 1.
Every 500,000 TPU chips sold to a third party data center could add about $13 billion to Alphabet’s 2027 revenue, and 40 cents to its earnings per share, according to Morgan Stanley’s estimates. Alphabet is expected to post roughly $447 billion in revenue in 2027, based on analyst projections, so adding $13 billion would boost sales by almost 3%. Consensus estimates for the company’s 2027 revenue have risen by more than 6% over the past three months, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
SpaceX is preparing to sell insider shares in a transaction that would value the firm as much as $800 billion. SpaceX aiming for an IPO of the entire company in the second half of next year.
SEC delayed for the second time this year the deadline for hedge funds and other big investors to comply with much-watched disclosure rules for short selling and related stock lending.
China’s trade surplus tops $1tn for first time: By destination, exports to the US continued to slow in November, despite the trade truce. November exports to the US were down -28.6% YoY, a three-month low, bringing the year-to-date growth to -18.9% YoY. It’s likely that November exports have yet to fully reflect the tariff cut, which should feed through in the coming months. Also, the frontloading effect as US importers ramped up purchases ahead of tariffs will act as a headwind on trade in the coming months. Instead of the US, the beat in November’s data came from an acceleration of exports to the EU. They were up 14.8% YoY in November to bring the ytd growth to 8.1% ytd. We also saw a rebound of exports to Japan, which rose 4.3% YoY in November for a ytd growth of 3.4%. Exports to ASEAN, which have in recent years been China’s most important destination, fell to 8.2% YoY in November.
More than three-quarters of the allocators were positioning portfolios for a risk-on environment through 2026. Multiple respondents flagged European autos as a “no-go” area for 2026, citing intense competitive pressure from Chinese carmakers, margin compression and structural challenges in the transition to electric vehicles.
Trump’s New National-Security Strategy Takes Aim at Europe:
Document calls for an end to NATO expansion and chastises Europe over ‘unrealistic expectations’ for how to end the war in Ukraine
Trump’s strategy takes aim at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s policy of keeping its doors open for the potential admission of new members. A Trump administration priority, it states, is “ending the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”
The strategy says Europe needs to “take primary responsibility for its own defense.”
2017 strategy emphasized the need of the U.S. and Europe to work together to “counter Russian subversion and aggression” and dubbed Moscow a “revisionist” power that along with Beijing was determined to “shape a world antithetical to U.S. values and interests.”
It is also starkly different from the strategy issued by the Biden administration in 2022, which portrayed the world situation as a competition between U.S.-led democracies and autocracies and stressed the need to push back against Moscow’s “imperialist foreign policy.”
In contrast, Trump’s new document stresses the need to “reestablish strategic stability” with Russia and casts Washington as a potential moderating force between Moscow and a Europe that is anxious about the Kremlin’s objectives.
Charts:
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