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Warm-Up
- The CTP for Caterpillar announced
- DOD - Disrupter Disrupters
- China markets reopening after Lunar New Year
- Mexico Cartel Wars (Jalisco)

Markets
- Mortgage Rates - looking good!
- Tariffs found illegal - that is not stopping anything
- Refunds requested for the illegal tariffs
- Monday's big drop and AI taking a bite out of stock prices

Tariffs
- First, who actually knows what is going on. 100% chaos
- Supreme court ruled illegal (6-3)
- 10% flat across all countries immediately added
- Wait a day and make that 15%
- FedEx seeks refund for illegal IEEPA tariffs imposed by Trump after the Supreme Court ruled Trump's tariffs exceeded authority
- Numerous lawsuits expected for IEEPA tariff refunds
- Apple has spent more than $3 billion on tariffs since President Donald Trump enacted his trade policies. What about that? (HOW TO FIGURE OUT WHO GETS THE REFUND)
--- Estimate that $175B tariffs have been collected alreay
- A group of 22 U.S. Senate Democrats on Monday introduced legislation that would require President Donald Trump's administration to fully refund within 180 days all of the revenue, with interest, collected from tariffs struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court.
- The legislation would require the Customs and Border Protection agency, which collects tariffs at U.S. ports of entry, to prioritize small businesses.
- The U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency said it will halt collections of tariffs imposed under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act at 12:01 a.m. EST (0501 GMT) on Tuesday

Stop The Presses
- After years of JCD's rants.......
- Apple will soon introduce MacBooks with touch screens
- Apple Inc.'s initial touch Macs will have the Dynamic Island at the center top of the display and OLED screen technology.
The new MacBook Pro models will have a refreshed, dynamic user interface that can shift between being optimized for touch or point-and-click input.

Europe Reacts
- "The current situation is not conducive to delivering 'fair, balanced, and mutually beneficial' transatlantic trade and investment, as agreed to by both sides" in the joint statement setting out the terms of last year's trade agreement, the Commission said. "A deal is a deal."
- All active discussions are halted on any USA/Europe trade deal

The Potential Winners
- Brazil and China may be the winners here
- Chinese President Xi Jinping has a boost in bargaining power after the US Supreme Court invalidated Donald Trump's broad emergency tariffs, a key point of leverage over China.
- The removal of tariff threats will make it harder for Trump to press Xi for larger purchases of certain products and leaves him without a key weapon to strike back if Chinese negotiators make fresh demands.
- Xi's team will likely push harder for access to advanced semiconductors, the removal of trade restrictions on Chinese companies, and reduced US support for self-ruled Taiwan, according to Wu Xinbo, director at Fudan University's Center for American Studies.

NVDA Earnings
- NVIDIA drops its fiscal Q4 2026 (ended Jan 2025) results tomorrow—another make-or-break moment for the AI trade.
- The bar is sky-high after years of blowout beats, but whispers of "peak AI" and slowing growth momentum have investors on edge.
--- Consensus Expectations :
----Revenue: ~$65.6–$66.1 billion (up ~67–68% YoY from last year's ~$39B; guided $65B ±2% in prior report)
------EPS (adjusted/non-GAAP): ~$1.50–$1.53 (up ~70–72% YoY from $0.89).
--------Gross margins: Targeting ~75% non-GAAP (holding strong despite supply chain noise).
-----------Key driver: Data Center segment expected to crush ~$58–$60B, fueled by Blackwell ramp and hyperscaler spend.

Home Depot Earnings
- The home-improvement retailer gained 2.7% after posting fourth-quarter adjusted earnings of $2.72 per share on revenues of $38.20 billion.
- That exceeded the per-share earnings of $2.54 on revenues of $38.12 billion expected by analysts polled by LSEG.

AMD News
- The semiconductor maker rose about 11% after it inked a multiyear deal with Meta to lend up to 6 gigawatts of its graphics processing units to artificial intelligence data centers.
- The cost of the deal is unclear, but the companies’ agreement includes a a performance-based warrant that could amount to up to 160 million of AMD shares, according to a statement dated Tuesday.
- Meta has committed to deploying up to 6 gigawatts (GW) of AMD's Instinct GPUs (high-end graphics processing units optimized for AI workloads) to power its massive AI data centers.
- Analysts estimate the GPU portion alone could be worth $60–$100+ billion over 5+ years

Mortgage Rates
- The average rate on the popular 30-year fixed mortgage fell to 5.99% on Monday, according to Mortgage News Daily, matching its lowest levels since 2022.
- Last year at this time the rate was 6.89%.
- A buyer putting 20% down on the median priced home, about $400,000 according to the National Association of Realtors, would have a monthly payment of $1,916 for the principal and interest. One year ago, that payment would have been $2,105, a difference of $189.

Life Insurance Record
- Manulife Financial Corp. sold a $300 million life insurance policy in Singapore, topping what Guinness World Records certified as the most valuable policy ever issued.
- The policy surpasses the previous record of $250 million, set by HSBC Life in Hong Kong in 2024. Manulife said in a statement Tuesday that the deal reflects growing demand from ultra-wealthy clients to preserve their assets.
- In Singapore over the past 12 months, Manulife has issued 25 individual policies each worth more than $50 million.

Bitcoin Rout
- Gemini said it was axing as much as a quarter of its staff and exiting the UK, European Union and Australia entirely.
- This week, it parted with its chief operating officer, chief financial officer and chief legal officer, all in a single day.
- Its stock has fallen more than 80% from a post-listing high last year, collapsing its market value from a peak of almost $4 billion to under $700 million.

Over the Greenland
- USA sending a "hospital ship" over
- Trump's post on the ship came hours after Denmark's Joint Arctic Command said it had evacuated a crew member who required urgent medical treatment from a U.S. submarine in Greenlandic waters, seven nautical miles outside of Greenland's capital, Nuuk.
- Greenland said thanks but no thanks

So Long!
- U.S. investors are pulling money out of their own stock market at the fastest pace in at least 16 years as Big Tech returns fade and better-performing overseas markets look more attractive.
- In the last six months, U.S.-domiciled investors have pulled some $75 billion from U.S. equity products, with $52 billion flowing out since the start of 2026 alone, the most in the first eight weeks of the year since at least 2010

AI Disruption - DOD (Disruption of Disrupters)
- CrowdStrike -9.8% and other cybersecurity names under heavy pressure again as AI disruption fears build following Anthropic’s Claude Code release
- - Cybersecurity stocks are under broad pressure today, extending recent weakness following Friday's launch of Claude Code Security by Anthropic. Claude Code Security scans codebases for vulnerabilities and suggests software patches for human review, fueling a narrative that AI platforms may be moving more quickly into parts of the security workflow than investors had previously expected.
For cybersecurity, that raises concern around the forward demand outlook and competitive positioning, particularly in areas tied to application security, cloud security, identity workflows, and security operations automation, where AI-native tools could start to narrow perceived differentiation.
- The move suggests investors are still sorting through the implications for product overlap, pricing power, and competitive positioning as AI capabilities evolve quickly.
- IBM shares dropping toward lows of the session; attributed to news that Claude can automate cobol modernization

COBOL

(Common Business-Oriented Language) is a high-level, English-like programming language created in 1959 for business, finance, and administrative data processing. It is renowned for its verbosity, readability, and reliability, processing massive amounts of transactions on mainframe systems,, notes NetCom Learning and IBM. Despite being decades old, it remains critical in banking, insurance, and government sectors.
- It is estimated that 70-80% of the world's business transactions are processed by COBOL

Grok's Prediction about Future of OpenAi/ChatGPT

Scenario	Likelihood (My Estimate)	Key Factors	Outcome for OpenAI/ChatGPT
Thriving Leader	Medium (40%)	Sustained breakthroughs, partnerships (e.g., Microsoft), regulatory wins	OpenAI as AI giant; ChatGPT as ecosystem hub for agents/robots
Evolved Survivor	High (50%)	Adaptation to agents/hardware; mergers	Exists but rebranded; ChatGPT integrated into daily life tools
Decline/Acquisition	Low (10%)	Overcompetition, funding collapse	Absorbed or legacy; ChatGPT commoditized or obsolete

Quick check on Europe Shares
- European company earnings growth is picking up this reporting season against a tentatively improving economic backdrop, but wary investors are demanding more than solid results to justify sky-high valuations.
- Companies representing 57% of Europe's market capitalization have reported so far, achieving average earnings growth of 3.9% in the fourth quarter, ahead of estimates for a final result of a contraction of 1.1%
--- That is a big differential.... +3.9 vs -1.1

Iran Talks
- News over the weekend that Iran will look to discuss a variety of items and potentially get a deal.... energy, mining and aircraft
- Best guess: Iran will string us along like Russia is doing and we will say we have some kind of bogus deal.
--- There is some talk of US "going in" as we are building military presence. Supposedly there are some saying it could be a multi-week incursion.
- What is the plan - Regime change?

What is this?
- A divided Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled that Americans can’t sue the U.S. Postal Service, even when employees deliberately refuse to deliver mail.
- By a 5-4 vote, the justices ruled against a Texas landlord, Lebene Konan, who alleges her mail was intentionally withheld for two years. Konan, who is Black, claims racial prejudice played a role in postal employees’ actions.
- Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for a majority of five conservative justices, said the federal law that generally shields the Postal Service from lawsuits over missing, lost and undelivered mail includes “the intentional nondelivery of mail.”
- So can ballots just be thrown in garbage for mail-ins for one party that will throw out another party's?

 

 

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