What Happened Today?
Friday February 27, 2026
MACRO:
PPI came in hot. Companies had stock piles from front-running tariffs and left over from the post-COVID boom cycle and where willing to eat some of the costs of tariffs. Not anymore.
All of those annoying “it’s the 1970s all over again are smirking. Wait, I am one of those guys.
Do I really think we are about to go through a rampant resurgence of inflation? No. I think the Fed is competent. But, CEOs aren’t so are they going to raise prices if they can? Yep, so I do expect at least some sort of secondary bump.
AI layoffs have started. Block just laid off 4000 workers. I am fairly certain they have issues related to over estimating the credit worthiness of their customers and are beginning to see dropoffs in new customer signups due to the economy. The problem with Afterpay is you don’t know how many BNPL accounts a person has and after COVID everone’s credit spiked so I suspect delinquencies are starting to rise.
CEOs never want hire. CEOs want costs down. Since 2014, hiring and head count have been Wall Street’s gauge of “growth” and because of ZIRP CEOs were happy to obliged. But, now that they can shift blame for cutting costs to AI that is what they are going to do. Same with cutting SaaS applications from the stack.
Waste is going to be cut. It’s just waste in this case are the only segment of the workforce supporting the economy who aren’t 65+. The white-collar office types. The people who just had kids after COVID. Thiel, Musk, Altman, Dorsey, Trump don’t just want middle schools named after them they want to own their own States and replaced the Julian calendar at this point.
David Foster Wallace was right. About everything.
All of this is expected. I wrote about it last year so you shouldn’t be surprised.
The US Embassy in Israel warned, hinted at, is probably a better word, that all Americans might want to leave.
There have been rumors going around on social media. It’s amazing how many experts there are on covert night-time bombing raids. There are detailed scouting reports of weather and the lunar cycle. Stand-by reporting in harbors watching US Naval Vessels do whatever US Naval Vessels do. There were people tracking the Prime Minister of Indian’s schedule and watching for his plane to take off. How did watching planes work out for Abivax investors?
But, I took positions in oil futures and GUSH 0.00%↑ (the latter is not a trade anyone should do because of slippage and spread effects) against Iranian production being shut-down for awhile.
I am not a doom-and-gloom kind of guy but betting on the market rolling over has been really quite profitable this year as it has rolled over nearly every day. Sometimes twice a day.
MICRO:
I did add to various positions in the speculative account and picked up two new ones. One I can’t chart unfortunately and two recent accumulation signal trippers. ProQR Therapeutics and Cardiol Therapeutics.
NASDAQ:$CDRL is also an FST setup. This is purely speculative.
As always, if you think there are spelling errors update your dictionary to the latest version. Happy speculation!
— AJ