‘Start the Week’ is coming to you slightly late given the long weekend in the US.

Blind Squirrel Macro’s ‘Start The Week’ note is the weekly review of the BUSHY™ beta portfolio and updates on our ‘Acorn’ trades - anything from single stock ideas and thematic baskets to FX / Credit / Commodity ideas. This week’s edition will focus on risk management and hedging as we make plans to navigate a seasonally tough time of year.

While you are here please ensure that you are signed up directly for Benny & The Squirrel - some exciting developments in the making!

Benny & The Squirrel

Benny & The Squirrel is a twice weekly show about finance and markets. The show notes for members are hosted here on Substack.

By Benny and the Squirrel

In the weekend flagship note, the ‘🐿️20-for-20’ portfolio journey continued as we assembled our shortlist picks in the resources sector. Check it out via the link below 👇:

Autumn Hedging Plans

During my time on the sell side, the week following the Labor Day weekend in the US was one of the busiest of the year, as corporates raced to catch the post-summer capital markets issuance window before their June 30th financial statements went ‘stale’ in the second week of November.

I always found it ironic that auditing calendars and holiday plans forced issuers into one of the most seasonally choppy windows of the year from a risk perspective. Aside from seasonality, the Fall of 2026 gives us some extra risk juice in the form of a couple of ‘live’ Fed meetings, the mid-terms and the Anthropic IPO (which - the 🐿️’s astonishment - appears to be growing by the day).

Yet markets feel remarkably complacent - the dispersion trade (traders long single stock volatility against short positions at index level vol) dominates leaving the VIX and VIX (vol of vol) bumping along the floor.

Notwithstanding the kabuki theater of the ‘Three Soros Amigos’ (Bessent, Warsh and Druckenmiller) publicly squabbling about monetary policy, US Treasury volatility remains remarkable subdued.

Notwithstanding all the jumpiness about seasonality above, this window last year turned out to be a decent performance period for the BUSHY™ portfolio in 2025. It was not until closer to Halloween that we started to chop.

BUSHY™ closed on Friday exactly 150bps behind where the portfolio was in terms of YTD performance at this time in 2025.

The portfolio has clambered back out of the drawdown that started at the outset of the Iran war and accelerated after a premature call of the bottom in front month crude in early June. This drawdown maxed out at -6.43% at the end of June )(steeper than the 4.86% ‘Liberation Week’ drawdown of last year).

BUSHY™ is currently sitting with the following allocation:

So how are we planning to protect ourselves:

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Blind Squirrel Macro’s ‘Start The Week’ note is the weekly review of the BUSHY™ beta portfolio and updates on our ‘Acorn’ trades - anything from single stock ideas and thematic baskets to FX / Credit / Commodity ideas.

This note is also home to new trade ideas that may have been highlighted in The Drey (our member channel on Discord) or do not justify a full write-up via one of the weekly ‘flagship’ notes. For example, last week’s ‘STW’ involve a new ideas in the grains complex - those wheat calls are already +129%! This week, we look at yield sensitive exposures post Jackson Hole and ponder whether or not it may be time to get back into the uranium trade.

The ‘STW’ is delivered to inboxes at 7.30am EST on Mondays. Last week’s introduction report for the 🐿️ 20-for-20 was free for all readers. If you would like to join us on the rest of the journey, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. Click the button below to claim a 30% discount (worth $135) on an annual subscription. OFFER MUST BE CLAIMED THIS WEEK!

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In the weekend flagship note, the ‘🐿️20-for-20’ portfolio journey continued as we assembled our shortlist picks among global financials. Check it out via the link below 👇:

Post Jackson Hole

Aside from some top level trolling (🎩!) of the robots by Warsh with the opening lines of his remarks…

… I think the new Fed Chair did just about enough to settle the bond vigilantes on Friday. As unlikely as it seems from a political perspective, the market seems to be happy pricing the remaining FOMC decisions of the year as ‘live’.

The words were not enough to snap the 10-year note out of their now well established downtrend. I think that long-dated yields need to see an actual hike before they start to behave.

I have no particular desire to either try and fight that trend or indeed to try and press it. I have plenty of exposure to higher yields via my allocation to CTAs within BUSHY™. Positioning within - the SocGen Trend Index replicator - feels representative. We will let the CTAs carry on doing their thing.

The Jackson Hole speech was however enough to check some of the dollar weakness we have seen since Bessent’s ‘inventory management’ announcement and subsequent ‘mini twist’ the other day.

Uranium?

The 🐿️ is a long-term uranium bull but we exited the trade in February (‘Time for a Glowing Hedge’) and entered the short position in Sam Altman’s SMR science project, .

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Blind Squirrel Macro’s ‘Start The Week’ note is the weekly review of the BUSHY™ beta portfolio and updates on our ‘Acorn’ trades - anything from single stock ideas and thematic baskets to FX / Credit / Commodity ideas.

This note is also home to new trade ideas that may have been highlighted in The Drey (our member channel on Discord) or do not justify a full write-up via one of the weekly ‘flagship’ notes. For example, this week’s ‘STW’ involves a couple of new ideas in the grains and energy complex.

The ‘STW’ is delivered to inboxes at 7.30am EST on Mondays. If you are interested in a trial of the 🐿️’s full service, please get in touch via the button below or by replying to this email.

In the weekend flagship note, the 🐿️ launched an exciting new project - an experiment in futurism. Check it out via the link below 👇 (there was no paywall on the note - any one can read it so please do share it widely):

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Another strong week for BUSHY™. The beta portfolio has now finally back at new highs for the year after having been in a drawdown since late February.

It is now over 1000 bps ahead of benchmark and 678 bps ahead of the since inception at the beginning of 2025…

…while realizing a fraction of the volatility. BUSHY™ is at YTD annualized weekly vol of 8.63% (roughly in line with the level for the full year in 2025).

Before we get to the full run down on the portfolio, I wanted to go through a couple of fresh ideas on the commodity front…

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In the weekend flagship note, the 🐿️ attempts to make amends for the worst macro call of his career. Check it out via the link below 👇:

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Q3 continues to be kind to the BUSHY™ portfolio. Last week was the 5th strongest of the year - 3 out of the other 4 were back in January - and we are now closing back in on the high water mark hit at the end of February.

The 🐿️’s beta portfolio remains behind S&P year-to-date returns (but ahead since inception at the beginning of last year. YTD annualized weekly volatility is sitting at 8.54% versus 14.5% for the S&P 500 and 21.6% for VTTHX, our Vanguard Target Date benchmark.

Before we get to the portfolio reviews, a quick rant about Gavin Baker from the 🐿️ as well as a couple of related ideas.

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In the weekend flagship note, the 🐿️ had a crack at valuing Anthropic and OpenAI. Check it out via the link below 👇:

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Before we get to the portfolio review (brief this week), I want to touch on gold. Last week (‘Waving in the ‘Yella Fella’), we were feeling good enough about the metals to write some cash covered puts in BUSHY™’s hedge book. I did not expect the options to decay by almost 50% in a week.

‘Hindsight Capital LLC’ would have obviously strapped on something a bit more aggressive - but I am categorically not complaining. Risk asset markets are in the grip of some wild summer narratives at the moment. Getting my gold weight back to (a much higher) long-term target weight will require a full recovery of the chart.

The more remarkable move last week was of course the gold miners. ripped through all of its major moving averages with a 20% ripper for the week - an epic feat of chart repair.

I have had several questions from readers as to when I would be comfortable adding to the ShinyAcorns™ basket from February.

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In the weekend flagship note, the 🐿️ conducted a ‘red team’ exercise on his long-term ‘passive aggressive indifference’ to the long bond. Check it out via the link below 👇:

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Before we get to the portfolio reviews, I want to follow up on the idea that I teased at the end of the weekend note.

Quick housekeeping note. Several subscribers are not YouTube fans and have asked for an audio edition of Benny & The Squirrel to be available on the podcast apps. This is now possible, please sign up for free (will always be free for Ben and my paid subs) at ⭐ Benny & The Squirrel | Substack ⭐and then connect your favorite podcast app in ‘Manage Settings’ (see below).

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Full show notes (containing the slide deck and pod summary) will continue to come to your inbox from the Blind Squirrel Macro feed. You can disable the ‘extra’ email - again via the ‘Benny & The Squirrel’ ‘Manage Settings’ page.

For now, I do not see great risk/reward in chasing bonds on the short side. 🐿️’s favorite weapon of choice here is Simplify’s ETF. Too much too quickly in my opinion.

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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 👇:

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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?

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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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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?

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Quick reminder that the cost of annual subscriptions will be rising from $360 to $450 TOMORROW! Monthly subscriptions will remain at $45. As ever, all existing subscribers are grandfathered at their original rates.

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In case you missed it, the weekend flagship note drilled down on the recent strength of the USD. Check it out via the link below 👇:

ATS is not a K-pop Band

Before we get to the portfolio review, I owe you some background to the newest edition to BUSHY™’s ETF line up - - Cambria’s Global Value ETF. I have been aware of GVAL for quite some time but my traditional weapon of choice for EM value equity beta has been the iShares EM High Dividend ETF.

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Quick reminder that the cost of annual subscriptions will be rising from $360 to $450 at the end of this month. Monthly subscriptions will remain at $45. As ever, all existing subscribers are grandfathered at their original rates.

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In case you missed it, the weekend flagship note covered the opportunity created by ‘Reverse De-Equitization’ in US equity markets. Check it out via the link below 👇:

Now What?

The 🐿️ has had one paw tied behind his back on the risk front since the start of a war that the markets - rightly or wrongly - appear to have moved on from. Or have they? The mood music from Switzerland over the weekend suggests that we just going to have to live with a high degree of Hormuz ambiguity for some time to come.

Does that make it the right time to add back risk to our portfolios? Frankly, does not feel great. We are far from having clarity, but it feels like time to (at least partially) get back on the horse. Some significant changes…

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In case you missed it, the weekend flagship revisited my basket of global financial exchanges. Check it out via the link below 👇:

The Brent Bleed

Before we get to the portfolio reviews, an urgent word on oil…

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This week’s ‘Start the Week’ was sent via email to existing paid subscribers at 4.50am EST on Sunday 7th June if you want to search your inbox. It will be put back in the online archive here once subscription billing is un-paused next week.

Start the Week note will be brief again this week. A few changes to the portfolios this week that we need to go through. I will finally make it home to Melbourne mid-week when normal publishing cadence will recommence (and billing will be un-paused).

Supply!

Last weekend’s note covered the 🐿️’s JOMO (Joy Of Missing Out) philosophy as regards the prevailing feeding frenzy in the memory semis market. Last week’s rout of the leaders frankly came much sooner than I had been expecting.

In last week’s Sunday Show, Benny & I discussed the shift in the sources of funding that the hyper-scalers were employing to finance AI data center (‘AIDC’) capex.

Quick plug: the interview that we recorded with Ameesh Agarwal last week was a fascinating deep dive on on AIDC credit markets. Do at least scan the show notes if you do not have the hour to spare. We have more work to do on this space - there will certainly be trade ideas.

What initially was being covered by internal free cash flow from the tech giants soon migrated into private then public debt capital markets. I am still struggling to understand the corporate finance logic behind financing a 10-year useful life asset with a 30-year JPY/GBP bond issue.

The 🐿️’s worst ever personal macro call was to leave an ECM job in Asia in July 2003 - on the eve of a decade long Chinese IPO mega boom. On the flight back from Hong Kong to my new job in London that summer, I read Rob Buckland’s note (below) with a degree of trepidation. What looked to be great outlook for equity prices (and it was!) and for M&A bankers was decidedly a ‘no bueno’ for IPO bankers!

Since the start of the year, I have been increasingly concerned that the tailwinds that have supported US equities in the past 15 years - namely share buybacks, LBOs and 401k flows - could be about to move into reverse just as the market faces a wall of AI-related equity supply.

Back to the Sunday Show. We were discussing this very topic. I commented that “…if we start getting MAG7 common stock supply on top of these IPOs, I’d be really worried”. Less than 24 hours later, the Alphabet $80bn capital raise news hit the tape. The physics of the SpaceX IPO layout just got considerably harder.

The 🐿️ had been booked by CNBC in Hong Kong to chat about the SpaceX IPO the following morning. But for me, the Google news was probably the bigger deal to discuss (link to the relevant clip via image below).

Google’s raise certainly robs liquidity from the SpaceX deal in the near term. More importantly, it has already potentially triggered its first ‘copy cat’ deal from Zuckerberg.

Who next? Amazon? Microsoft? The age of reverse de-equitization appears to be upon us! The hyper-scalers and foundation model companies could be issuers of primary equity for the foresee-able future.

In my view, the S&P index committee has 100% made the correct call to require SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI to satisfy the profitability and seasoning standards before inclusion in the benchmark.

I had assumed that they would cave alongside the Nasdaq 100 and FTSE Russell compilers. Am glad that they did not.

For me, we have the makings of a really interesting long equal-weight S&P versus short market-cap weighted S&P (or or ) trade that could work for the next couple of years as the largest stocks in the index become net suppliers of paper to the market.

This may now need some further refinement following the S&P announcement. More on this to follow. The chart below from WisdomTree has been doing the rounds lately on social media. Scary right?

Because the 🐿️ is a nerd, he decided to put together the same analysis of the S&P500 equal-weight / :

With less than 10% exposure to paper valued at > 10x Price to Sales, I kind of know where I want to rent my beta over the next few quarters -especially if it is those most expensive and largest components of the US benchmark are are planning on being net suppliers of equity paper to the market.

BUSHY™ and Acorn Review

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No changes to discuss beyond closing the call leg of the strangle (retaining the September puts). BUSHY™’s assault on the front end of the Brent curve is still pending - but we are getting close.

In case you missed it, the 🐿️ made a guest appearance on The Compound with Josh Brown and Michael Batnick last Wednesday. They asked me on to question me about my work on the SpaceX last week.

Hynix JOMO

The 🐿️ is suffering from a grave bout of amnesia - he has NO MEMORY (in his portfolio)! The only recent exposure I have had to the investor feeding frenzy in DRAM and HBM semiconductors in the past 2 months has been the call leg of the strangle in BUSHY™’s hedge book - and we took that off last week!

As I have mentioned many times before, I have PTSD-related reasons for not participating in this cycle’s DRAM risk ‘orgy’ in Korea (and elsewhere). Significant personal history with multiple recapitalizations of Hynix in the early 2000s has left me with scar tissue and a core mantra that there is no such thing as a value trade in the highly cyclical semiconductor sector.

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Blind Squirrel Macro paid subscriptions are paused until early June. I am unable to accept new paid subscribers until then. While I am on the road, I am continuing to publish the ‘Start the Week’ note on Sundays. Please get in touch if you recently subscribed to the letter and are interested in a trial / review of the archive.

This week’s ‘Start the Week’ was sent via email at 4.30am EST on Monday 25th May if you want to search your inbox. It will be put back in the online archive here once subscription billing is un-paused in June.

If you had not had a chance to look at the new SpaceX piece I put out on Sunday - I think this IPO is the biggest risk factor facing US equity markets this quarter. You need to understand the potential flow of funds impact even if you have no interest in investing in Elon’s rockets.

At the moment, BUSHY™ is underweight risk assets out of choice. The only risk that the beta portfolio has added since the start of the war has been in agricultural commodities and energy equities.

As such, the portfolio is always destined to underperform in market conditions like we saw last week - with energy producers being the weakest US equity sector.

A Quick Note on Crude

I am writing this on Monday afternoon Asia time (c.4am EST). Sunday night futures appear to be paying tepid lip service to the ‘Iran deal proximity’ being sold over the Memorial Day weekend. Equities are well bid and $4-5 per barrel has been shaved off front month Brent and WTI crude prices (about half of what was suggested by Hyperliquid markets over the weekend).

The current headlines out of Washington and the Middle East are not exactly screaming FINAL RESOULUTION! at me but I am prepared to at least concede that we are closer to the end of the war than the beginning.

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Blind Squirrel Macro paid subscriptions are paused until early June. I am unable to accept new paid subscribers until then. While I am on the road, I am continuing to publish the ‘Start the Week’ not…

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As previewed last week, the🐿️ has been restructuring his China equity concentrated long-only portfolio. 17 stocks, 55% in top 5 names. Check it out via the link below 👇:

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Oh Canada!

The M&A bankers of Toronto’s Bay Street are creating a bunch of extra work for the 🐿️! Delighted for you fellas, but please cut it out! I keep on needing to find portfolio replacements.

Last week saw a $16.4 billion bid for ARC Resources (ARX:TSX), whittling down my #COM Mafia basket to just 5 stocks (after losing MEG Energy to Cenovus late last year.

I agree with the excellent commentary from (a consistent bull on Canadian energy assets for as long as I have followed him) on the deal:

The previous week saw Agnico Eagle swoop on my namesake Rupert Resources (RUP:TSX), one of the development assets sitting within the 🐿️’s ShinyAcorns™ basket.

Am still working on a ‘like for like’ replacement for both portfolios.

What are the bets placed?

BUSHY™ had a strong week and continues its attempt to reel in its end-February high water mark.

Since inception (1/1/25), BUSHY™ has been compounding at over 25% with less than 9% annualized weekly volatility.

As part of my research for the weekend note on the new China basket, I spent some time looking at the multi-asset portfolios that I track to figure out how investors that I respect are positioned in China equities and elsewhere (TLDR - very light still!).

But there were some other interesting observations to make:

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In case you missed it, the weekend flagship covered the Asian Life market - specifically AIA (1299.HK) and Ping An Insurance (2318.HK). Check it out via the link below 👇:

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Gradually…

The cash-heavy BUSHY™ lagged the S&P again last week but another week of gradually closing the gap with its end of February high water mark.

Before we get to the portfolio review, we need to discuss some further portfolio additions - modest ones, the Strait is still shut after all….

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