Trading Tips Blog

West Texas Intermediate crude broke above $90 a barrel on Friday and posted a 35% weekly gain — the largest since oil futures trading began in 1983. Brent crude briefly touched $94. And the shockwave is just getting started. The catalyst is the U.S.-Iran conflict, which has escalated from saber-rattling to active military engagement. When you take shots at the world's fourth-largest oil producer, the commodity market doesn't wait for diplomatic channels. It prices in disruption immediately. And with global spare ...
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Thousands of people lost their jobs last week. And the stock market threw a party. Block — the fintech company formerly known as Square — announced it would eliminate 4,000 employees, roughly 40% of its entire workforce. The stock surged 24% after hours. Billions of dollars in market cap appeared out of thin air. All it took was erasing 4,000 paychecks. But here's the part that should keep every knowledge worker awake at night: CEO Jack Dorsey didn't blame a downturn. He ...
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Remember when getting serious market intel meant either working at Goldman Sachs or dropping $24,000 a year on a Bloomberg terminal? Yeah, those days are basically over. Substack has quietly become the people's Bloomberg—and Wall Street is having a minor existential crisis about it. The shift hit critical mass last month when a research outfit called Citrini Research dropped a dystopian thought exercise about AI's future on Substack. The report was basically financial fiction, but it tanked the Dow by 800 ...
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When the market gets weird, some stocks get weirder—and not in a bad way. Dollar General (DG) is basically the cockroach of retail: it thrives when everything else is getting stepped on. Here's the thing: while the Nasdaq has been taking a beating (down over 10% since mid-February), Dollar General is up about 7% this year. That's not just beating the market—that's beating it while the market is actively on fire. The S&P 500? Down 2%. DG? Up 7%. Do the ...
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Jack Dorsey just dropped a bomb on the fintech world, and Wall Street loved it. Block announced it's cutting 4,000 employees—roughly 40% of its workforce—and the stock popped 24% after hours. Thousands of people lost their jobs, and investors threw a party. Welcome to the AI economy. Here's the thing: this wasn't a desperate restructuring. Dorsey didn't blame the economy or pretend it was temporary. He basically said, "AI made these jobs unnecessary, and honestly, we'd rather admit it now than ...
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It’s been a brutal stretch. Stocks just posted their worst week since April, oil is above $90, the jobs report was a disaster, and the VIX is screaming at levels not seen since last year’s tariff crisis. But Jefferies’ equities trading desk is pounding the table: buy this mess. “I think we rally from here,” said Michael Toomey, a managing director on Jefferies’ equities team, in a Friday note to clients. “This has been the most painful week in a long ...
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When the world’s largest asset manager starts limiting how much money you can take out of a fund, it’s worth paying attention. BlackRock announced Friday that it’s capping withdrawals from its HPS Corporate Lending Fund — a $26 billion private credit vehicle — after investors flooded it with $1.2 billion in redemption requests in Q1 alone. The fund paid out $620 million, hitting the 5% net asset value threshold that triggers withdrawal restrictions. BlackRock shares dropped 5% on the news. This ...
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Friday’s jobs report didn’t just miss expectations — it obliterated them. The U.S. economy shed 92,000 jobs in February, turning what was supposed to be a modest 59,000-job gain into the second-largest monthly payroll decline since January 2025. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.4%. And the three-month average? A pathetic 6,000 jobs per month. That’s not cooling — that’s stalling. The damage was nearly across the board. Healthcare — the sector that’s been carrying the labor market like Atlas holding ...
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