This week’s Benny & The Squirrel Sunday Show covered ‘The Death Shot’. Today’s ‘Start the Week’ note focuses on the implications of such a move for our portfolios.

In the weekend flagship note, the 🐿️ took a look at the opportunity in Turkish equities. Check it out via the link below 👇:

Subscribe now via Website

So far, the month of July has been kind to the BUSHY™ portfolio - last week saw solid outperformance versus the ‘target date’ benchmark and the S&P.

Performance so far in July has been carried by the physical commodity sleeve (mainly oil - let’s see what the latest ‘Sunday night dump’ does), energy equities and by the managed futures / trend-following allocation.

Managing The Death Shot

Before we go to the portfolio reviews, we have a Fed meeting this week and I want to review our exposure to ‘surprise’ hike.

On fixed income, outside of the allocation to EM local currency bonds, BUSHY™’s only exposure to sovereign rates comes via the trend allocation.

Aside from WTMF with a small long Treasury position, the other 5 funds that trade fixed income markets (AHLT, KMLM, DBMF, TFPN and MFTFX) have significant short positions across the curve. This does not come as a huge surprise given the path of yields over the past 3 months.

STIR pricing is currently indicating a 34% chance of a 25bps hike at this week’s FOMC meeting. My base case is still ‘no move’. But reputational incentives for Warsh mean we can’t dismiss the risk of a surprise hike entirely.

My starting point here is that financial conditions have already tightened significantly since mid June - driven primarily by long rates and FX.

More recently softer equities and widening hyperscaler credit spreads have helped to tighten the market further. The sheer volume of paper hitting the credit market from the AI spenders is almost operating like a form of quantitative tightening.

I am on the record with a view that Kevin Warsh is in a tough spot. Like every new Fed Chair, he is keen to burnish his inflation-busting credentials. But with the government and so much of the economy financed at the front of the curve I am not sure how much scope he has to hike without breaking things.

But the table below (h/t ) still bothers me. With an annual salary of $253,100, the husband of the Estée Lauder heiress is hardly doing the job for the money. It is all about reputation for these guys - my guess is that he does not want to join Arthur Burns with a green box against his name.

If he thinks he has a hike in him, arguably he gets more reputation value for being ‘brave and early’ - although I am not convinced that he would get much of a reward from the bond vigilantes in terms of reduced term premium.

Or, in hiking would Warsh be administering what my podcasting partner Benny likes to call the ‘Death Shot’ - i.e., the hike that ends the business cycle?

The Central Bank ‘Death Shot’ Hall of Fame

So what does a ‘Death Shot’ look like in practice? A few central bankers have already written themselves into the Hall of Fame:

🎯#5 - Japan (1989-1990): The BOJ began its aggressive rate hiking cycle in May 1989 under Satoshi Sumita. The final ‘death shot’ came from his successor Yasushi Mieno who continued to hike aggressively into August 1990, finishing the job and fully puncturing the Japanese asset bubble.

🎯#4 - US (2006): Greenspan may have started the 2004–2006 hiking cycle, but Ben Bernanke took over in February 2006 administered the ‘death shot with the rate increase to 5.25% in June 2006 as the housing market was already beginning to unravel.

🎯#3 - Australia (2008): Glenn Stevens presided over the RBA that hiked the cash rate to 7.25% in March 2008 just as global liquidity was freezing up ahead of the GFC.

🎯#2 & #1 - ECB (2008 & 2011): Jean-Claude Trichet is the all-timer with the top 2 slots on the leaderboard! In July 2008, he infamously raised rates into a slowing economy and rising commodity prices just weeks before the collapse of Lehman Brothers. In 2011, Trichet double-dipped on policy errors, hiking rates twice in 2011 as the European sovereign debt crisis was intensifying.

In every case, the kill shot came after policy had already done most of the tightening. The last hike was the one that tipped risk asset markets over the edge.

How would a Death Shot hit my book?

Read more

Episode 72 was recorded at 6.30pm EST on Saturday 26th July, 2026. Don’t miss this week’s LIVE ‘Ask us Anything’ on Thursday evening at 6.30pm EST.

The show has expanded on the socials! Follow us on Instagram and / or TikTok (if you do that kind of thing!)

Benny & The Squirrel (@bennyandthesquirrel) | TikTok

https://www.instagram.com/benny_and_the_squirrel/

Become a paid subscriber to get the show notes including a summary, today’s slides and the audio edition - as well as the rest of the 🐿️’s tireless work!

Read more

The Weekend Note:

Paid subscribers who would like to listen to these pods on their favorite podcast app (instead of via a browser or the Substack app) can set this up very easily. Click this link while on the device you use to listen to podcasts.

Read more

Subscribe now via Website

Being an investment banker in emerging markets in the mid-1990s had a lot to be said for it. Doing deals in a hot asset class and business trips to exotic places with limited mobile phone roaming and the hotel business center fax machine as the only link with accountability the office.

Turkey was a regular (and favorite) destination for ‘Club Med’ - the secret name we gave to our intrepid corporate finance team covering the Casablanca to Beirut (a lot more fun in those days…) beat.

The bank’s approved hotel list in Istanbul called for a truly challenging (😉) choice between the Ciragan Palace on the edge of the Bosphorus or the Four Seasons (in a converted Ottoman prison - much better than it sounds!) on the Golden Horn.

I am reliably assured that the mezze and flagship brandy-flamed, salt-baked sea bass specialty at Körfez Restaurant on the water front in Kanlıca (Asian side) still melt in the mouth 3 decades on.

Turkey was ‘Downtown Europe’ with ‘Asia Tiger’ growth characteristics and this young 🐿️ was so enamored by the Eurasian fusion of the ‘Pearl of the Orient’ that he started contemplating learning the language and sticking around for a few years to enjoy the ride.

Doing Turkish deals, however, did have its issues. After several months of diligently preparing the IPO of a promising private sector commercial bank, we were sitting in the offices of the lawyers putting the final touches to the prospectus.

All that was missing was for us to drop in the set of completed International Auditing Standard (IAS) financial statements into the appendix and send it over to the printers.

We had been valuing our promising little bank on the basis of its local GAAP accounts and had been told that the ‘IAS 29’ adjustments would not create any untoward surprises for us.

We had of course been making inflation adjustments in our earnings model (CPI was still running in the 70% zip code). But surely we could not be that far off? Wrong! The adjustments - upward reflation of equity book value and ‘monetary losses’ applied to the income statement - had just turned our modestly-sized but attractive private bank into a minnow with an adjusted ROE barely perceptible to the naked eye!

We knew immediately that trying to persuade generalist EM investors to ignore these adjustments and “just focus on the local GAAP numbers” was not going to wash. ‘Club Med’ made an awkward phone call to the boss. We would not be launching a roadshow the following day.

For a ‘baby banker’ 🐿️ in the mid 1990s, Turkey was “Europe with Asia growth” and cheap banks (and great food) on the Bosphorus. ‘IAS 29’ was a reminder that strings were attached. The macro still demands a discount (persistent inflation will do that to you), but the 2026 version of Turkey - the ultimate ‘middle power’ with plenty of options – still offers a compelling stock pitch.

Read more

Benny () & The Squirrel were joined once again by great friend of the show , author of The MacroTourist newsletter.

The show was recorded at 6pm EST on Wednesday 22nd July - just after Google released their earnings - very timely, given the fact that Kev has been doing a great job recently unpicking the S&P ‘earnings bubble’ (hint: most of it is mark-ups on unrealized gains on AI investments). Benny was inspired to use Gemini to make a meme 👇

Benny & The Squirrel will be back on Sunday evening for our regular ‘Start the Week’ show.

Become a paid subscriber to get full show notes, the slide deck, the audio edition and the rest of the 🐿️’s work!

Read more

Subscribe now via Website

Back in the Straddle - the 2026 Edition

Another strong week for BUSHY™ - the energy headwind from June has become, for now, a solid tailwind. But before get to the portfolio reviews, I wanted to take you through why (and how) the 🐿️ decided to strap back on some volatility exposure last week.

As of last Tuesday we are back in the straddle. Newer subscribers should read the old notes on the strategy - start with the one linked below.

Read more

Episode 70 was recorded at 8pm EST on Saturday 18th July, 2026. Don’t miss this week’s guest show on Thursday. has been writing on some really interesting topics lately and he rejoin the show to take us through them.

The show has expanded on the socials! Follow us on Instagram and / or TikTok (if you do that kind of thing!)

Benny & The Squirrel (@bennyandthesquirrel) | TikTok

https://www.instagram.com/benny_and_the_squirrel/

Become a paid subscriber to get the show notes including a summary, today’s slides and the audio edition - as well as the rest of the 🐿️’s tireless work!

Read more

Paid subscribers who would like to listen to these pods on their favorite podcast app (instead of via a browser or the Substack app) can set this up very easily. Click this link while on the device you use to listen to podcasts.

Read more

Subscribe now via Website

Monday sees Andy “we’ve got to get beyond this thing of being in hock to the bond market” Burnham enter No. 10 Downing Street unopposed. 3 weeks later, we get to see if the populist fever dream has hit an absurd and terminal climax in the form of Nigel Farage being vanquished in the Clacton by-election…by a bin.

It would be darkly fitting for that kind of political theatre to coincide with bond markets throwing another tantrum at UK fiscal policy. UK gilts are topping the global sovereign bond league table in ways that will be a headache for the ‘King of the North’s incoming Treasury team.

Benchmark 10-year yields are sitting at a meaningful absolute and relative (to US Treasuries) premium to Truss / Kwarteng / “lettuce” peak of late 2022.

Not hugely surprising with the UK’s public sector net borrowings sitting at levels (ex-Covid) not seen since Brexit a decade ago.

Speculative short positions in CME GBP futures are at Brexit-era extremes, with high open interest.

The latest BofA fund manager survey has UK equities underweights tracking in line with the political chaos period that came in the wake of the EU Referendum. Outflows by domestic UK mutual funds reached almost £20 billion in Q1, the highest of recent years.

Let’s dig in…

Read more

Benny () & The Squirrel were joined once again by David Dredge, Founder and CIO of Singapore-based Convex Strategies.

The show was aired live at 6pm EST on Thursday 16th July.

David has had a front row seat for pretty much every complex economic and market event going back to the October ’87 crash, actively managing risk and risk businesses for Bank of America, Bankers Trust, ABN Amro /RBS before moving to the buyside with Artradis, Fortress, City Financial and now Convex Strategies. Dave’s excellent monthly essays can be found at Updates – Convex Strategies.

Benny & The Squirrel will be back on Sunday evening for our regular ‘Start the Week’ show.

Become a paid subscriber to get full show notes, the slide deck, the audio edition and the rest of the 🐿️’s work!

Read more

The Weekend Notes:

Paid subscribers who would like to listen to these pods on their favorite podcast app (instead of via a browser or the Substack app) can set this up very easily. Click this link while on the device you use to listen to podcasts.

Read more

Episode 68 was recorded at 7pm EST on Sunday 12th July, 2026. Don’t miss this week’s guest show on Thursday. Dave “The Judge” Dredge rejoins us during what promises to be an interesting week up in Japan.

Become a paid subscriber to get the show notes including a summary, today’s slides and the audio edition - as well as the rest of the 🐿️’s tireless work!

Read more

In case you missed it, the weekend flagship was a deep dive into our energy positioning. Check it out via the link below 👇:

Subscribe now via Website

Refining the ‘Straya Ruggedization Basket

Those of you that made it to the end of the weekend note will know that the 🐿️ is 3 weeks away from becoming an Australian citizen. In late March I wrote about the need for my new home to reinvest in sovereign resilience.

I put together a basket of stocks - yet to be implemented - that I felt stood to benefit from political focus on the topic. There have been promising developments on the political front but we need to make some refinements.

Read more

Another early edition. Given our overweight positioning in energy, Part 3 of the 🐿️’s annual stock take considers the implication of China’s emerging control of oil prices.

Subscribe now via Website

I touched briefly on the topic of energy in Part 1 of this year’s ‘Stock Take’ last weekend. However, given my overweight position across multiple sub-sectors of the energy complex, we need to do some more work.

In some ways, it has seemed that life for energy bulls has been tougher than lived reality. If you track the performance of the main energy categories since AI hijacked the global equity narrative in November 2022, energy equities have managed to keep pace with world stock markets.

In fact, in the past 12 months, most energy sub-sectors were outpacing broader equities before things kicked off in Iran in the face of a “super glut” narrative headwind.

I will leave the fight over SPR “tank bottoms” to the professional barrel counters. I have sympathy with the view that treating strategic reserve releases as a kind of synthetic demand destruction makes no sense. Sovereign resiliency lessons have been learned the world over in the past 6 months.

National energy reserves have proven their strategic value. They are going to be topped back up even if I now think that this can be achieved without the need for spot crude to spend an extended period of time in the triple digits. China has just proved that it can cut off the right tail for non-existential supply shocks.

The China Collar

Through its use of strategic inventory management, China may be effectively taking over from OPEC+ as the primary “price maker” in the global crude market. It has built itself into a position such that it will never again be forced to compete on price for spot cargoes.

In what could be viewed as the ultimate triumph of engineers (building storage tanks) over lawyers (negotiating quotas and artificial supply cuts), has China now effectively removed the source of traditional crude price volatility?

Read more

In Episode 67, Benny & The Squirrel welcome back our regular guest Charlie Peabody. Charlie is a partner and the founder of financials specialist Portales Partners.

The show was recorded at 6pm EST on Wednesday 8th July, 2026.

Become a paid subscriber to get the show notes including a summary, today’s slides and the audio edition - as well as the rest of the 🐿️’s tireless work!

Read more

The 🐿️’s BUSHY™ Portfolio x Plutus

I am delighted to announce that Blind Squirrel Macro’s BUSHY™ beta portfolio is now available through Plutus, an SEC-registered investment advisor.

Check out BUSHY™ on Plutus

By connecting you…

Read more

In this week’s ‘Start the Week’ note we start with ‘Part 2’ of the 🐿️’s annual ‘Stock Take’ - covering China and other EM equity exposure - ahead of the usual portfolio reviews. An important BUSHY™-related email will be hitting inboxes in about an hour.

Subscribe now via Website

In case you missed it, the weekend flagship note contains Part 1 of the ‘Stock Take’. Check it out via the link below 👇:

Stock Take Pt 2 - EM Edition

2026 has been an unusual year for Emerging Markets as the main benchmark - driven by the chip giants of Seoul and Taipei - got swept into the AI capex trade.

China

China has been having its own AI party. The chip stack on the domestic SSE STAR Market has been going a valiant job trying to keep pace with the memory giants in Korea and also outrunning the broader EM index.

Offshore however, China’s traditional tech giants have acted as dead weight for the MSCI China.

We took action in early March to part company with EM tech laggards (‘Doc, my EM Tech is Sick’). By then, we in ‘sell only’ mode when it came to risk. As such when it came time to rethink the 🐿️’s Concentrated China portfolio at the beginning of May, we were in ‘window shopping mode’ only.

We exited 7 (mainly consumer) names and trimmed the names that we were sticking with (but at a lower weight). The ‘top-ups’ and the new adds were left in the post-Hormuz ‘pending trades’ bucket. Now what?

Read more

Episode 66 (‘66 was the last time England won - a sign??) was recorded at 7pm EST on Sunday 5th July (with a rain delay for the England vs Mexico match providing the window to record!)

Become a paid subscriber to get the show notes including a summary, today’s slides and the audio edition - as well as the rest of the 🐿️’s tireless work!

Read more

It’s that time of the year again. The 🐿️’s annual ‘drains up’ review of inventory! Part 2 will come in tomorrow’s ‘Start the Week’ note, with Part 3 in next weekend’s editions.

Subscribe now via Website

First, a quick retrospective.

I don’t think that the 🐿️ is alone in feeling relieved that Q2 had ended. A sea of green for most risk assets - many of which we had trimmed ahead of and after the onset of the Iran war - interspersed with deep red patches in the places where we had remained overweight (especially energy).

By contrast, Q1 was certainly this rodent’s favorite type of equity market. January through March saw the dividend yield, low volatility and value factors dominate the US equity leaderboard. From April onwards, unless you were ‘max long’ high beta and momentum stocks, you were struggling.

The story of the quarter was of course memory. Hats off to the HBM bulls and to the team at Roundhill. Their ETF (launched in April) topped $25bn of AUM at the end of June - edging out Blackrock’s spot Bitcoin ETF in most of the ‘fastest to raise’ leaderboards. My back-of-envelope math has Roundhill collecting around $260m in management fees (for a 9 stock long-only portfolio!) since launch.

Then we had the first 2 days of July (although did bounce on Friday!)…

For me, it is ETF closures that are typically a more reliable timing signal for bottoms than launches are for tops. I well remember VanEck shuttering its coal ETF in December 2020 just weeks before global coal prices embarked on a massive multi-year bull run. Then last May Range closed its Offshore Oil Services ETF (OFOS). Those drillship stocks promptly doubled!

On the launch side, who can forget the flurry of ‘hot innovation sector’ ETFs brought out during the Covid tech peak in late 2020 / early 2021 - only for many of them to underperform and then be withdrawn after being destroyed by the 2022 hiking cycle. The track record of thematic ETFs is no bueno.

The 🐿️ will be interested to see the answer to this poll - it will be one pointer to as to whether or not - just perhaps! - memory chips are cyclical after all…

So, where does this leave us as we look forward to Q3. Let’s review the first half scorecard, staring with the beta portfolio.

Read more

In Episode 65, Benny & I were joined by Laks Ganapathi, Founder of and Portfolio Manager at Minerva. Unicus Research provides actionable, short-focused investment ideas to institutional managers worldwide, applying proprietary primary research and thorough fundamental and investigative analysis.

Laks has been all over the emerging meltdown in the private credit market. Join us for a deep dive.

The show was recorded at 6pm EST on Thursday 2nd July, 2026.

Become a paid subscriber to get the show notes including a summary, today’s slides and the audio edition - as well as the rest of the 🐿️’s tireless work!

Read more