“I hated every minute of training, but I said, ‘Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.’” - Muhammad Ali

Good morning.

Wife and I had a baby and fatherhood has been magical.

But I’m ready for the blank page.

Market volatility is picking up with geopolitics firmly at the center of the game.

Precious metals and several commodities have violently repriced higher as core components of both the fiat debasement narrative and the AI capex boom.

Major crypto assets have lagged - but we’re confident that these suppressed prices will look like a mass delusion in the coming months.

We know we’re recharged and ready to go.

Note: the newsletter will improve from here - I’m playing with some AI tooling that will 10x my productivity

Today

2:00 PM ET — FOMC statement drops. Hold is a lock. Read paragraph 2 — if they drop labor market risk language, that's hawkish. If it stays, dovish lean.

2:30 PM ET — Powell's legacy presser. The DOJ subpoena. Lisa Cook. Whether he stays on as governor after May. Whether Trump announces his replacement during the meeting. Watch his tone — defiance = bullish for Fed credibility.

After close — MSFT, META, TSLA earnings. AI capex guidance is everything. Implied moves: MSFT ±5.4%, META ±6.7%, TSLA ±6.3%.

Thursday

After close — AAPL earnings. Services + Apple Intelligence KPIs.

Friday

Government Shutdown Deadline — Polymarket: 78% odds of another shutdown after Democrats vowed to block the spending package. Dollar kryptonite.

The DXY just broke below 97 for the first time since September. Yesterday it fell 1.3% — the worst single-day drop since April. It's been a one-way elevator down — from 107 a year ago to sub-97 today. That's a 10% decline in the world's reserve currency.

When asked about the dollar's collapse, Trump told reporters in Iowa: "I think it's great... the dollar is doing great."

What's driving it:

Central bank gold buying has gone parabolic. Poland's central bank just approved a plan to add 150 tons, pushing reserves to 700. China, India, Turkey — they're all loading up. This isn't hedging. It's exit planning.

The Greenland crisis broke something. When Trump threatened 25% tariffs on the entire EU over Greenland in early January, the EU pulled the "bazooka" — and European funds started dumping dollar exposure in real time.

Trump walked it back on Jan 21st, but the damage was done. The message to global capital: the dollar is a weapon, and weapons get de-risked.

This is the macro story of 2026. Every dollar the DXY drops is another tailwind for gold, commodities, and eventually — inevitably — Bitcoin and risk assets priced in dollars. When the denominator shrinks, the numerator explodes.

Bitcoin is the cheapest it's been relative to gold in years. And the chart just told you exactly what happens next.

The BTC/Gold RSI dropped below 30 for only the 4th time in history.

The previous three:

Late 2015 — BTC rallied 3,000%+ over the next two years

March 2020 — BTC went from $5K to $64K

November 2022 — BTC went from $16K to $126K

A 100% hit rate. Three for three. All generational bottoms. And we just got the fourth signal.

This morning BTC reclaimed $90K for the first time in over a week. The bounce is beginning.

Meanwhile, the capitulation trade just peaked. Bitcoin ETFs bled $1.33 billion last week — the worst weekly outflow since February 2025. Five consecutive days of net redemptions totaling $1.72B. Hedge funds dumped basis trades. Retail panic sold.

This is exactly what bottoms look like. Not hope. Not euphoria. Disgust. When Forbes runs "Is BTC Dead?" headlines and ETFs are hemorrhaging, you're getting handed the trade of the year.

At $90K with the rarest buy signal in its history flashing, the risk/reward has never been more asymmetric.

Forget the rate decision. Everyone knows they're holding at 3.50-3.75% (Polymarket: 99.6%) today. The real story at today's FOMC is something we've never seen in modern Fed history: a central bank chair under criminal investigation by his own government, giving a press conference about monetary policy, while the president searches for his replacement.

Let that sink in.

Here's the timeline of what happened since the last FOMC:

On January 11th, the Department of Justice served Jerome Powell with a subpoena and opened a criminal investigation — ostensibly about whether he lied to Congress about the cost of renovating the Fed's headquarters building.

Powell responded with something extraordinary: a recorded video statement calling the probe a "pretext" and accusing the Trump administration of trying to "subject monetary policy to the preferences of the president."

A sitting Fed chair publicly accused the sitting president of using the justice system to bully him into cutting rates. That's never happened before. Not under Volcker. Not under Greenspan. Not under Bernanke during the financial crisis. Never.

Fed Chair nominee odds (Polymarket):

Rick Rieder (BlackRock): 45%

Kevin Warsh: 27%

Christopher Waller: 8%

Kevin Hassett: 6%

Trump told CNBC at Davos he's narrowed it to possibly one person. Wolfe Research says the most likely window for an announcement is during the FOMC meeting itself, to redirect attention from a Fed that didn't cut.

So here's what Powell faces at 2:30 PM today:

He walks into that press conference knowing he's being investigated, knowing his replacement could be named before the cameras stop rolling, and knowing that every word he says about Fed independence will be parsed as either defiance or defeat.

The man has three meetings left as chair. He's not going to wreck markets. But he's not going to bend, either. Expect him to double down on his January 11th video — institutional independence, resisting political pressure, faith in the Supreme Court. Powell is going to make this presser about the institution, not the policy.

What to actually watch in the statement:

Growth gets upgraded from "moderate pace" → "solid pace"

Labor market language softens — they may drop explicit references to deterioration

Inflation stays "somewhat elevated" (core PCE still at 2.8%)

The second paragraph is the signal. If they remove the easing bias around labor risks, that's hawkish. If they keep it, dovish lean.

Morgan Stanley thinks the tone tilts dovish — "the cutting cycle isn't over, we're just pausing." Markets are pricing the next cut for June.

But the real trade isn't about 25 basis points in June. The real trade is about whether the most powerful central bank on earth maintains its independence. If Powell convinces markets that the Fed's institutional guardrails will hold — that the next chair can't just slash rates on Trump's orders — that's actually bullish for everything.

If those guardrails break? Long gold. Very long gold.