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The market is trading within a tight consolidation band as macro data continues to send mixed signals to investors. Sticky inflation prints have kept central banks on their toes, while pockets of labour-market cooling offer hope to bulls.

This week brings a rapid-fire sequence of catalysts headlined by the Federal Reserve's internal notes and global growth indicators that will dictate the next major directional leg for risk assets. Here is what is on the radar and exactly how it matters for your portfolio.

Date: Wednesday, May 20, 2026

Markets will get a look under the hood of the Federal Reserve’s latest policy meeting. While the public press conference struck a balanced tone, the minutes will reveal the raw consensus regarding sticky inflation.

The Stock Market Angle

Equities are highly sensitive to the "higher-for-longer" narrative. If the minutes reveal that multiple voting members actively debated the need for an additional rate hike (rather than just holding steady), expect a pullback in mega-cap tech and dividend-heavy sectors. Conversely, if the tone shows deep concern over economic growth, cyclical stocks may stutter while defensive sectors catch a bid.

The Crypto Angle

Bitcoin and the broader crypto market have evolved into high-beta plays on global dollar liquidity. Hawkish minutes push bond yields higher and strengthen the US Dollar Index (DXY). A surging dollar acts as a mechanical anchor on crypto prices. If the minutes lean hawkish, expect Bitcoin to test lower liquidity ranges; if they lean dovish, it clears the way for a challenge to overhead resistance.

Date: Thursday, May 21, 2026

Thursday brings a deluge of forward-looking data via the Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) flash readings for the US, UK, and the Eurozone, alongside weekly US jobless claims. This is where we see if tight monetary policy is finally fracturing real-world business activity.

The "Good News is Bad News" Dilemma

Hot PMI/Low Jobless Claims: Suggests the economy is too resilient. This gives the Fed an open runway to hold interest rates high without risking a hard landing. Stocks likely drop, yields climb, and crypto experiences a risk-off flush.

Soft PMI/Spiking Jobless Claims: Signals economic deceleration. Paradoxically, the stock market often rallies on this initially because it forces the Fed’s hand toward rate cuts. Crypto typically thrives in this environment as markets begin to price in the return of cheaper money.

Date: Friday, May 22, 2026

The week closes with the revised University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment report. While the headline sentiment matters, institutional desks care infinitely more about one specific metric embedded inside: 5-Year Inflation Expectations.

Why it Matters: If consumers believe inflation will remain high long-term, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as workers demand higher wages and businesses raise prices.

The Market Impact: Any upward revision in long-term inflation expectations on Friday will trigger a swift sell-off across both stocks and crypto. It signals to the market that the Fed’s job is far from over, effectively crushing any lingering hopes of a summer rate cut.

I was asked by many to talk a bit about my position in the VVV token. 

The bull thesis for Venice Token (VVV) centers on its positioning at the intersection of two of crypto's most massive narrative waves: Artificial Intelligence and Sovereign Privacy.  

Unlike many speculative "AI coins" that are essentially whitepapers or wrappers for centralized tech, Venice (founded by crypto pioneer Erik Voorhees) is a fully functioning, private, and uncensored generative AI platform.  

The primary pillars driving the long-term bullish outlook for VVV include its connection to the adult industry.

The connection between the VVV token (Venice) and the adult/NSFW (Not Safe For Work) industry comes down to one core philosophy: uncensored, private computing.  

While Venice is not an explicitly "adult-only" platform, its structural design naturally makes it the primary safe haven for NSFW text, character roleplay, and image generation.

Because the VVV token represents the capital layer of this entire ecosystem, its value is directly impacted by the massive consumer demand for unfiltered adult content.

Mainstream AI apps like OpenAI (ChatGPT), Anthropic (Claude), and Google Gemini heavily restrict and sanitize any prompts relating to romance, mature themes, sexuality, or creative adult writing.

The Guardrails Dropped: Venice intentionally uses open-source foundation models, most notably customized "Dolphin" variants, that do not judge the user's morality or flag NSFW prompts.  

The Pro Settings: In Venice, creating an account or upgrading allows users to bypass standard safety filters entirely, unlocking unrestricted generation for adult content, erotic creative writing, and romantic AI companions.

Adult AI usage is an intensely private consumer activity. Centralized tech companies log every prompt, which risks exposing users to data leaks or account bans when they explore explicit content.

Zero Server Logs: Venice uses an architecture in which conversations are encrypted and stored only locally in your browser.  

Decentralized Routing: When a user prompts for an NSFW image or text story, the compute request is encrypted, partitioned, and routed through decentralized GPU networks (such as Akash). The node processing the data never learns the user's identity or email address.  

A massive growth driver for Venice has been its Characters and Social Feed features, which allow the community to build custom AI personas.  

Market Capture: A large portion of Venice's organic user base utilizes the platform for immersive, long-context AI girlfriend/boyfriend simulations and adult roleplay.

Developer B2B Integrations: Third-party developer frameworks that build autonomous romantic bots and adult applications use Venice's API because it guarantees their back-end pipeline won't be suddenly cut off by a centralized corporation's terms-of-service changes.

The connection to the adult industry isn't just a marketing gimmick; it forms a fundamental part of the VVV token's economic loop.

Subscription Revenue: Millions of users pay fiat or crypto for premium tiers ($18 to $200 per month) to get unrestricted, fast access to advanced text and image models for adult content.

The Burn Mechanism: A chunk of this revenue is programmatically used to buy back VVV tokens from the open market and burn (destroy) them forever. The massive demand for unfiltered consumer AI directly accelerates the deflationary supply squeeze on the token.

VVV is the gooning AI token, and we are not fading it.

Equities have drifted higher again over the past week, helped by solid Q1 earnings and a tight group of AI and high-market-cap tech names doing most of the work. Other parts of the market (small caps, speculative growth, anything sensitive to higher rates) have mostly chopped sideways or lagged. The big swing factors are a cluster of earnings from AI, chip, and infrastructure names, a couple of inflation and jobs prints that can nudge rate‑cut odds, and any surprise moves in oil or long‑term yields.

The sentiment indicator below shows that US equity positioning has moved back above neutral but is not yet at the “stretched” extremes seen in past risk‐on episodes, suggesting investors are optimistic but not all-in. The recent jump from deeply negative readings in 2022–2023 to around +0.8 now marks a clear regime shift from de‑risking to rebuilding equity exposure. That backdrop usually means pullbacks are more about shaking out fast money than about a full positioning unwind, because there is still some dry powder left to deploy.

Additionally, in terms of sentiment and flows, equity positioning remains below what you would normally expect given the strength of S&P 500 earnings growth, based on the historical relationship between the two lines. Since 2010, positioning has tended to track earnings with about a 50% correlation, but today, earnings are rebounding faster than investors’ willingness to own stocks. If that linkage holds, the gap implies there is room for positioning to catch up to the earnings path, which would support further inflows into equities if growth stays on track.

T1 Energy has been one of the most talked-about stocks in the past 24-48 hours. It has risen about 500% over the past year and now trades at around 2x sales and roughly 6–7x book, despite still losing money, with negative EBITDA of roughly $125–250m and a deeply negative return on equity. The business itself now has Leopold following its Twitter page and backing it on paper. It’s a US-based solar module manufacturer and a Texas cell fab with about $750 million in annual revenue and recent quarterly sales of nearly $178 million. However, the balance sheet is under strain, and the stock now carries implied volatility above 100%, a put/call volume ratio near 0.1, and extremely heavy trading volume, indicating it is a crowded, sentiment‑driven battleground rather than a clean fundamental story. Given the Fuzzy Panda short report, the questions about governance and Chinese exposure seem like a potential buy-the-dip opportunity with a small percentage of the spot portfolio. I’ll personally be watching this name from the sidelines, but the outlook looks positive. 

Last week we echoed caution as the market was starting to appear overbought in quite a few pockets to us, and I remain cautious as the S&P500 (which just recorded its 7th weekly gain in a row) flattens out, and a hot April inflation reading (core rose to 2.8% from 2.6% prev.) saw both yields (10YR hit 4.59% vs <4% in Feb!!) and a strengthening dollar which saw our commodity names take a beating, which is okay.

Thus, I am continuing to trim winners (ELVR, FANG, FCX, CRWV, SHAZ, etc.) and consolidate my portfolio as we wait for a resolution on SOH and Warren's first Fed meeting on June 16-17, with CME probabilities now 50/50 on a 25bp/50bp rate cut by December.

I remain super bullish on the critical metal space and see the next step of AGI usage being in the form of Humanoid robots, which are going to increase the amount of permanent magnets (which are made of rare earths) by up to 25x, as well as electrification as a whole, which feeds into our lithium bullishness. 

I have been aggressively buying LAR between $9 and $ 10 and will do the same for REA at <$20.

I also got hit on my ASPI at $5.50 on Monday. First TP level is $7.70. 

Sharon AI has been on fire, with the Company announcing another US$950m TCV contract over 5 years with a 'large global technology' company based in APAC, bringing total customer contracts to $2.2bn and providing healthy diversification from the ESDS anchor contract. 

Following Q3 deployment, SHAZ's CY26 exit revenue run-rate will be >US$450m, and the company is just getting started, having announced that it has secured another 30MW of Data Centre capacity in Australia and New Zealand. This brings available capacity that they expect to contract by the end of year to 70MW, and assuming they contract these out at the ~$16 million / MW they have averaged over the first two contracts, this implies they expect to add another $1.1bn of ARR over the next 7 months, which would imply a Q1 CY2027 exit revenue run-rate of ~$1.5bn vs a mcap of $1.4bn today. 

Looks very cheap. Stock traded strongly on Monday, aided by Situational Awareness declaring a holding in their 13F. If you don't know who Leopold Aschbrenner is, see X snippets below.

Next PT is $75, my LT price target is $95.

Toast delivered a strong start to the year, with durable recurring gross profit growth, robust new-location adds, and continued margin expansion. However, the stock traded down by ~15% due to weaker guidance, where management stated they are facing margin headwinds.

Whilst TOST is a leader in its vertical and trades at a reasonable valuation, its exposure to consumers is clearly weighing on sentiment, and I fail to see a catalyst that will get it moving over the next 6 or so months. 

I am cutting here at $22.64 (~16% loss) and will look to re-add lower in the future as the memory situation sorts itself out. As mentioned above, I am generally risk-off and trying to reduce the number of positions in my portfolio, albeit noting ~10 of these names make up 1.0% of my portfolio each (ERO, CRWV, FCX, NVA) and are just free carried profits.

Recap: This week, we saw our SOL short idea dump 10% from our entry at Crypto Clarity peak. Really has me wondering how much smart money got trapped that day, given the extent of the dump with no decent bounce. We also had HYPE. 

There was some negative feedback regarding this HYPE newsletter idea, which makes sense. But I do want to address the fact that I invalidated the trade idea in TG 1.5 hours before our limit sell would have been filled. For context, HYPE was below 39, and we had two hours to remove our limit orders after the news. Shorting this news was not the trade idea I had posted hours before the news broke.

Anyways, let’s start with Solana.

What a great setup that played out this last week! We mentioned that “SOL is super weak”, and that “… his idea will trigger as we break below the resistance range of the upper consolidation range. If we show weakness, the price may retest the level we have lost. We will plan to enter there. This level is 92.63. Stop will be above the range highs around 98.8 (can be a bit tighter), with targets of 88.68 and 83 for now. 79.32 reach target.”

The price did exactly as expected. SOL showed weakness, and we shorted the bounce as the price moved up during the Crypto Clarity Bill vote. As we pumped as a result of the vote, price attempted to move back into the 6-month range resistance, which we identified weeks ago as a range we would sell. 

There may not have been a more accurate trade setup I posted this year outside ZEC. Newsletter short entry exact top of clarity act pump followed by pretty much no bounce and hit TP1 of 88.68 and wicked within 30 cents of TP2 at 83. The price should be at TP2 by the time this is released. If not, it makes sense logically to close. 

This week, we are focused on taking profits and managing this position. The general thought process at this point in the trade, and for that matter any trade near TP, is to lock in profits while considering the opportunity cost of continuing to hold a short position after a -10% downside with our short idea. Especially in such a short timeframe, it's best to avoid greed. 

Looking ahead, I would watch the 88.68 level for a reaction to re-short. 

When I thought about writing about HYPE after last week, I hesitated. I think of this as even more of a reason to explore this setup, given the contrarian nature of the positioning. 

I will be placing limit sell orders on HYPE at the originally targeted HTF long idea of 49.96, with a DCA order at 51.42 and a stop loss at 55.14. I will be targeting 44.22 (derisk), 40.39 and 35.11.

If you are going to only sell one level, sell 51.42.

I like the idea of shorting a previous HTF long TP level on a strong coin with no real correction since the 38 to 26 drawdown from the start of this uptrend. 

This is a spot idea (not sure if there are perps anywhere). I am looking to bid the 0.05 level with targets of 0.083 and 0.09. Our stop loss is 0.036. Clean 3R setup. 

Going to keep this idea as simple as possible with the thought that FUN could hit price discovery within after our main TP level. 

And the elephant in the room: World Cup catalyst, which is already in effect, may continue to play out. 

Updates from last week:

HOME: Closed at 0.021 (trade concluded)
BTC: First trade went to 2R, before going lower to hit our breakeven
NEAR: bids are active

I'm still bullish on BTC; technicals support the bullish case as long as the area above the $73k–$74k region holds. We expect to form a proper higher low in that region, which will serve as our next base for a move higher.

We have bids lined up from last week's NL that are still valid. Additionally, we have two new support regions lining up: the VAL of the current range and the AVWAP from the lows. The AVWAP is currently crawling its way back up to provide additional support in the same region, making that area highly likely for a bounce.

Failing to hold that region, however, will cause BTC to form a massive failed auction of the previous range, after which we will be looking at a huge breakdown. In my opinion, that scenario is less likely to play out.

I am making a small adjustment to last week's bids, though:

Technically, I really like $LIT here. Their business is performing relatively well despite the HL craze. I've shared some stats below comparing HL vs. LIT, but the TL;DR is that it looks way overpriced.

From an HTF perspective, we have formed, or are about to form, a triple div. I have two setups aligned for this:

I'll be taking both of them.

There is something different about the TON rally this time. They have fixed their ecosystem to a good extent, Arkham has re-listed them, and some of their ecosystem coins, like UTYA, CHERRY, and REDO, are crossing the $50M+ mark.

We are seeing a healthy retracement on TON and are now sitting right around the 0.618 Fib of the rally. Technically, this is a nice support area to form a higher low before the next move toward a new higher high.

The trade structure looks like this:

In this episode of Money Magic, we’re talking about how you can grow, progress and improve as a trader.

We’ll go through the 3 core steps, and we have something special to go with it.

Step 01: Diagnosing

The first step to growth is diagnosing your current situation.
You have to know what your biggest problems are if you are going to solve them.

This is done through reviewing your recent trades and through introspection.

Figure out why you enter trades, what mistakes you make, and how you feel when you make those mistakes.

Before we go to Step 02, we need to talk about our new Trading Roadmap.

The 5-Stage Trading Roadmap is something we developed to help you figure out where you are in your trading journey.

It’ll help you figure out what stage you’re at, and what specific actions you can take to grow to the next level.

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For a limited time, you can have a free assessment call with me directly about your trading roadmap. I’ll get a grasp of your situation and give personalized recommendations for your next step.

You can book yours here

Now let’s continue on.

Step 02: Adjusting

Once you have diagnosed your core issues, you’ll want to make some changes.

These changes could be anything.

Like setting strict risk limits and max daily losses.
Or switching to a specific strategy.

The important thing is that you make reasonable adjustments,

And then be disciplined in step 03.

Step 03: Journaling

Once we’ve made the changes, we need to make sure they’re working.

The way we do this is simple, though a bit boring:

We log our trades.

Every single trade.
Each correct choice.
And each mistake.

You keep track of why you entered the trade.
Where were your entries and exits?
What you risked.
And what the result was.

We want these trades to show how you felt in the moment you opened them,
As well as the moment you closed them.

Through this process, you’ll learn a lot about yourself and about your trading.

You’ll find patterns in your behaviour that are keeping you stuck.

And the mistakes that are costing you money.

And then the cycle repeats:

If you’re teaching yourself to trade, this is the way you should go about it.

Build yourself a system.

P.S. Don’t forget to request your free assessment

P.P.S. If you are looking for more hands-on, direct help with the learning process, our Trading Mentorships are going live in June. You can apply for one of the 10 mentorship spots here

Sponsored by USD1 

World Liberty’s USD1 just took a real step up the crypto dollar hierarchy, with Binance confirming three key integrations. 

First, Binance has launched the inaugural USD1‑settled futures product, BTCUSD1, which effectively puts USD1 on the same playing field as the major stablecoins that serve as base collateral for leverage in perps.

Second, USD1 has been assigned the top collateral tier in Binance’s portfolio margin system (99.99%), meaning traders can post it almost one‑for‑one as futures collateral, a privilege historically reserved for only the largest and most trusted stablecoins.

Taken together, USD1 is now usable across the full trading stack on a tier‑1 venue: you can hold it as cash, trade against it as a quote currency, and post it as margin/collateral in derivatives. 

That dramatically increases its utility for active traders and market makers, and (if sustained volumes follow) should tighten its spreads, deepen liquidity, and pull more of the “pro” flow into the USD1 orbit. For investors, it is a reminder that stablecoin moats are increasingly about integration and capital‑efficiency status on major venues, and not just peg mechanics or brand.

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