Insider selling is mostly noise.

Insider buying is mostly signal.

✔️ @venture

💸 Strategy sold Bitcoin to reduce its financing costs

Strategy sold 1,638 BTC last week, about 0.19% of its holdings. The move sparked concerns that the company was abandoning its long-term Bitcoin strategy, but the numbers tell a different story.

The company says its cost of capital is 10.8%, while its STRC preferred stock is currently yielding around 13.4%. Instead of holding Bitcoin, Strategy used part of the proceeds to repurchase STRC below par, reducing future dividend obligations. The rest went toward preferred dividends and strengthening the cash reserve backing those securities.

At the same time, Strategy issued 3 million new common shares, raising $290.6 million, with $250 million added to its reserve.

The key point is that Strategy is optimizing its capital structure, not exiting Bitcoin. The company still holds 842,138 BTC, has paid preferred dividends for 18 consecutive months, and Michael Saylor says it remains a net buyer over the long term.

One number stands out: Strategy generated $122.4 million in quarterly software revenue, while annual preferred dividends and interest are approaching $1.76 billion. The balance sheet is becoming just as important as the Bitcoin holdings themselves.

✔️ @venture

Quality investing is out of favor, but this does not last forever.

✔️ @venture

🇯🇵 Why the U.S. stepped in to support Japan for the first time in 28 years

Japan has already spent around $160 billion this year trying to stop the yen from collapsing. Despite record interventions, the currency still hit its weakest level since 1986.

The bigger issue isn't the yen itself. Japan is the largest foreign holder of U.S. Treasuries, with about $1.19 trillion. If its cash reserves run low, defending the yen means selling U.S. government bonds, putting even more pressure on American borrowing costs, which are already at 19-year highs.

That's why the U.S. intervened in the currency market for only the fourth time since the mid-1990s. The goal wasn't to save the yen. It was to reduce the risk of large-scale Treasury selling.

Sometimes the biggest market intervention isn't about the market everyone is watching. It is about protecting the one behind it.

✔️ @venture

Rich is about how much you make.

Wealthy is about how much you keep and own.

✔️ @venture

✨ Starlink is quietly becoming SpaceX's most valuable business

Everyone focused on SpaceX's first earnings report: $7.81 billion in quarterly revenue, up 92% year over year, and a smaller net loss. But the number that stands out is 12 million Starlink subscribers, double the level of a year ago.

While rockets grab the headlines, Starlink generates recurring monthly revenue from millions of customers. That predictable cash flow helps fund the company's much more capital-intensive space ambitions.

Recurring subscribers are becoming just as important to SpaceX's valuation as rockets.

✔️ @venture

💴 Traders are betting against the yen at near-record levels

Bearish bets on the Japanese yen have climbed to the second-highest level on record, even after Japan and the U.S. reportedly spent $88 billion trying to support the currency.

Combined net short positions have reached 205,000 contracts, while USD/JPY has already rebounded from 155 after the intervention to around 158.5.

The market's message is clear: intervention can slow the move, but it can't fix the underlying problem. As long as the interest rate gap between the U.S. and Japan remains wide, traders continue betting on a weaker yen.

The last time positioning became this one-sided, the unwind triggered sharp moves across global markets.

✔️ @venture

📣 Leopold Aschenbrenner is changing strategy after a 67% collapse

Just days after Situational Awareness lost 67% of its value, the fund announced a new $400 million investment in a private company. It had already invested $100 million in the same business last month.

The fund reportedly fell from $45 billion to around $10 billion after margin trading losses and the Citadel transaction.

The shift is notable. Instead of doubling down on leveraged public stocks, Aschenbrenner is moving capital into private companies, where positions cannot be margin called.

After July's collapse, avoiding forced selling may have become just as important as finding the next winner.

✔️ @venture

On this day in 2018: Elon Musk considered taking Tesla private.

It would’ve valued Tesla at $71 billion.

Today, Tesla is worth $1 trillion.

✔️ @venture

Stanley Druckenmiller:

“I like putting all my eggs in one basket and watching that basket very carefully.”

✔️ @venture

🇯🇵 Japan's biggest insurers are sitting on $91B in bond losses

Japan's 4 largest insurers now hold ¥14.5 trillion ($91B) in unrealized bond losses. In March 2024, that figure was below ¥2 trillion, and it has increased every quarter since.

The problem is rising Japanese government bond yields. As yields climb, existing bonds lose value, leaving institutions that accumulated huge portfolios during the low-rate era with mounting paper losses.

These losses only become realized if the bonds are sold, but they complicate the Bank of Japan's path. Faster rate hikes would push yields higher and put even more pressure on the value of bonds already sitting across the financial system.

Japan needs higher rates to support the yen, but raising them too quickly creates another problem at home.

✔️ @venture

“Read 500 pages every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”

- Warren Buffett

✔️ @venture

💰Berkshire ends a 14-quarter selling streak with a $10B Alphabet bet

Berkshire Hathaway became a net buyer of stocks for the first time in 14 quarters, purchasing roughly $23.5B in Q2 while selling only about $3.7B. Its cash pile fell from a record $397.4B to $365.5B.

The standout purchase was $10B of Alphabet, personally initiated by Warren Buffett. Berkshire bought the shares directly from Alphabet at a roughly 1% discount to the simultaneous public offering, saving around $100M versus what public investors paid.

Berkshire also spent $4.53B buying back its own shares, then continued repurchases after the quarter ended. Alphabet is now among Berkshire's 5 largest stock holdings.

After years of building cash, Berkshire is finally deploying some of it, with Buffett putting one of his biggest new bets on Google.

✔️ @venture

☁️ AI could more than double the cloud market by 2028

The global cloud market is projected to grow from around $432B in 2026 to $890B by 2028, as AI training and inference create a much larger pool of infrastructure demand.

Expected 2028 market share:

🖱 Amazon AWS: ~33%
🖱 Google Cloud: ~28%
🖱 Microsoft Azure: ~27%
🖱 Oracle OCI: ~11%

AWS remains the leader, but the bigger opportunity is moving beyond basic compute. Services like Amazon Bedrock let customers route workloads across 100+ AI models, allowing AWS to earn from the infrastructure regardless of which model wins.

The AI model race gets the attention.
The hyperscalers can make money from almost everyone competing in it.

✔️ @venture

✔️ @venture

📱 A $27 Instagram post turned into an 8-figure startup
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Kale started with a simple idea: instead of paying major influencers huge fees, brands could pay everyday users for posting about products they already use. The first proof was just $27 paid for an Instagram post about dog bandanas.
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Five years later, Kale has crossed 8 figures in annual revenue, grown roughly 9,000% in 3 years, and adds a new user every 90 seconds. Its clients include Unilever, P&G, Nordstrom and DoorDash.
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Creators choose brand challenges inside the app and earn from a few dollars to several hundred per post depending on engagement. Kale says this content generates 20x the engagement of traditional influencer posts.
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Kale's bet is that the next layer of influencer marketing belongs to thousands of small creators who look more like customers than celebrities.

✔️ @venture