What Happened Today?
Monday March 2, 2026
MACRO:
After this weekend’s assault here is how various nations’ exchanges traded.
China was mixed.
Japan was down. This is because Japan is not seen as a strong-arm and the dollar rallied.
Germany and France were down. Probably due to energy reliance.
Israel was up 4%, on the continued existence narrative.
Keep that in your mind for the next time we bomb the middle east. There will always be a next time we bomb the middle east.
Oil spiked. I sold everything this morning.
Easy money. I don’t expect this conflict to end soon though so continuing my rolling PUTS strategy.
MICRO:
Premarket in the US, these companies all moved. Notably each had tripped consolidated recently (gold diamonds) so market participants had front-run the Iran bombing and just waited for a moment to unload onto retail. In retrospect, buying any/all of these would have been a very smart trade to make last week while the rumors were swirling around. Two were below the channel, one at an FST and the other below the delisting threshold.
The signs were there if you just took a second to look. And had the right code. Did I think to look for microcaps with “oil” in the name?
Nope. But, someone did.
The FDA rejected uniQure. Probably because the company is not American. There are issues with the trial but this feels more like anti-European postering to me.
That company, Nektar Therapeutics and C4 I discussed online and in a substack a few years ago explaining how buy programs worked. This was back when ($QURE) was just a few bucks.
We currently still own ($CCCC) but both ($QURE) and ($NKTR) are too risk elevated at present. Today the former collapsed even more. It’s now down 80% from when Twitter got all excited about it.
I went to a book fair this weekend and met up with some dealers I have known for 10-15 years now to get a bead on the state of that market. Antiquarian, rare and high-spot fiction books are the domain of the comfy class a class that comprises the wealthy and the unstressed, usually unburdened by children, middle class. For the last few years, prices have been insane. There are books in my collection that in 2012 you could buy at a house sale or at a used book store for $1-$5 that are now selling for more than $1000.
Books only come on the market in cases of death, debt and divorce usually and its the debt piece I wanted to find out about. When the economy is good people will spend $2500 on a first edition of The Great Gatsby (of course an unsophisticated copy sans the extremely rare jacket.) When the economy is sputtering: they won’t.
I wanted to speak to Ken et all this weekend because they will all be heading to St. Petersburg for the Florida Fair which is the second most important book fair in the US being the last one before the New York book fair. At the St. Pete fair dealers adjust their holdings to make sure they have the best chance of banking in New York. Much like tax accountants make all their money in March and April, so do book dealers.
What I heard was not good for the economy. Sales are down. I’ve heard this from coin dealers and comic book dealers as well.
And, they are getting more inquiries about evaluating collections. But, on the bright side there isn’t any panic selling either. In 2010, entire collections (not just books) flooded the market as people suddenly went from wealthy to behind on their bills as mortgage payments ballooned (pun.) These markets collapsed.
When households are under stress there is a priority to assets. Your house is the last thing you will sell. Collections are usually the second to last thing people will sell. Ironically, in stressful times these two assets are also the least liquid so selling in a pinch means taking quite a hair cut.
In financial history, there had never been a housing market downturn like 2008. Well, there has never been a private equity/private credit implosion either. So whatever might be about to happen is going to be a new “never happened before” situation for everyone.
There is a lot of talk right now about how private credit can’t crash. Reminds me a lot of 2007, when everyone was saying people will always pay their mortgages.
What is different today is the people who were wealthy in 2006 and 2007 were human beings with natural predilections. For example, the wine market was hot. Bill Koch has an impressive cellar.
The people who are wealthy now, as far as I can tell, just collect security personnel. What does Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Barron Trump, etc enjoy other than sitting on mountains of money? If that group is stressed what gets sold?
I have no idea.
In 2006-2007 the nouveau riche were buying condos in Miami as rental properties and whatever status was their stylist set to. A remember Dali ties were a big thing for people to own. The people who made money out of the tech crash were tech recruiters, mortgage writers, etc. People who liked status and to throw dinner parties.
The newly rich today are instagrammers and vLoggers, people who like “likes” and “followers” and play video games online. They have been parking money in Pokemon and sports cards.
I already bought and sold a 1952 Mantle rookie card before.
As always, if you think there are spelling errors update your dictionary to the latest version. Happy speculation!
— AJ