Last week, we left you with the warning lights on. Turbulence ahead — return to your seat and wait for the signals to go off before wandering around the plane again.

Well, the sign is still on.

The week was as agitated as it could be with the VIX below 15, and the equity markets were mainly driven by what looked suspiciously like rebalancing flows. Our favorite move? The yo-yo observed in VXX on Thursday went from a low of 13.41 to a high of 14.56. Yes, it's not that much in the grand scheme of things, but when you're in a low-volatility regime, it's enough to be noticed.

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In other news

Reddit's IPO is right around the corner, and if you're a Robinhood user, you may have been asked to participate. It's fantastic what technology allows in 2024—had you told us 15 years ago that retail investors would be given the chance to participate in an iconic tech IPO through a smartphone, we would have laughed so hard that a trip to the hospital might have been warranted.

It's the same technology that is bringing clouds over the head of the social media darling. The FTC is inquiring about Reddit's use of data for LLM training purposes. Last week, we left you talking about how Claude, which most likely uses Zoom data, felt more comfortable generating realistic human verbal content. The fact that Reddit is fighting tooth and nail against the allegations from the governing body is another sign of the value of this dataset. And what did Twitter/X do to its own API a few months after Musk bought the company? They raised the price to a staggering $500,000 a year.

At that price point, you need to have a seriously good use case, and AI is definitely one.

Thank you for staying with us until the end. As usual, here are a couple of interesting reads from last week:

  • The looked into investing in the psychedelic industry. Research in this field has gained momentum over the past decade due to its potential mental health benefits, and this could be a major investment opportunity for investors.
  • Markets move quickly, and losing sight of the big picture is easy. has you covered with its thorough article about investing over the last 100 years.
  • Finally, this week at Sharpe Two, we continue exploring volatility trading and market regimes, focusing on low-volatility regime setups.

That's it for us. We wish you a wonderful week ahead and happy trading!


Ksander

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