Buying Broadband Bets and Broken Windows: A Trader's Confession

8:47 a.m. — Monday, watching the Empire State Manufacturing Index print at 18.7

I had my coffee. I had my two monitors. I had my conviction that the economy was slowing. Then I saw 18.7 and I actually laughed out loud. Not the good kind.

New orders up 12 points. Employment ticking higher. Prices paid, prices received—both pointing to a world where companies still think they can pass costs along. The highest reading in a year. And I'm sitting here, bag packed for recession, watching the data do cartwheels.

This is what happens when you spend 60 days in a government shutdown. You lose the thread. The data becomes a Rorschach test. If you're bearish, you squint at Empire State and see it as transitory exuberance before the great deflation. If you're bullish, you're already up 150 bps on the day, emailing your therapist to cancel next week.

10:15 a.m. — Watching Dell get annihilated

Dell down 8%. HPE down 7%. Morgan Stanley flipped both to "underweight" because apparently the AI server boom has a margin problem. This is the part they don't tell you in the CNBC morning meetings: not everyone gets to be a unicorn.

The hardware supply chain is buckling under its own weight. Memory prices surging. Shipping costs eating into profitability. And Wall Street's reckoning with the reality that Nvidia's $500 billion chip orders might look impressive in a press release, but if you're one of the five companies actually building them into servers, you're running on fumes and spreadsheet hopes.

Yet Nvidia itself barely moved on Monday. Closed down 1.9%. That's the weirdest part. The thing everyone came to buy is already priced for perfection, so when you get a 4% miss or guidance that's cautious, what happens?

Wednesday will answer that.

11:30 a.m. — Alphabet surges 6% on Berkshire's $4.9 billion bet

Here is Warren Buffett, 95 years old, trimming Apple, trimming financials, and suddenly buying Google. Not a little. 17.8 million shares. And the entire market reads this as permission to believe that maybe, just maybe, growth still has a pulse.

Buffett doesn't know what will happen with tariffs. Buffett doesn't know if the Fed cuts in December. But Buffett apparently knows that Google's trading at levels where even he—a man who carries cash like a religion—thinks the risk-reward isn't insane.

That matters. Not because Buffett's never wrong. He absolutely can be. But because he doesn't need to be right. He can wait. He can hold garbage for 30 years and die wealthy. The rest of us are volatility tourists praying the Fed pilot doesn't run out of fuel before we land.

2:00 p.m. — Bitcoin's $2.3 billion bleed and the Harvard endowment's weird flex

The Hang Seng does its thing. Tencent crushes it with 15% revenue growth. JD.com prints numbers. China's consumer is apparently still conscious, which is something.

Meanwhile, Bitcoin hits $93,000. Down from $126,000 in October. We're in a bear market, technically speaking. $2.3 billion in Bitcoin ETF redemptions. BlackRock's IBIT shedding half a billion alone.

And what does Harvard do? Drops $442 million into spot Bitcoin right now. The endowment that invented endowments is buying this particular dip with $57 billion at its back. Not on leverage. Not on momentum. Just: we think this is good.

This is either prescient or the institutional version of FOMO. Probably both. Harvard can afford to be wrong for five years. You probably can't.

3:45 p.m. — Fed Governor Waller says December rate cut is coming; Fed Governor Jefferson says not so fast

And there it is. The central bank eating itself from the inside.

Waller: Cut in December to protect the labor market. Economic evidence is mounting that hiring is slowing. Inflation is contained. Do the thing.

Jefferson: crickets, but with conviction

Nothing says "we know what we're doing" like two of your own guys running different plays at the same practice. The market prices in a 48% cut probability for December—essentially a coin flip—and here we are, one Fed governor telling you to buckle up, another one silently texting his lawyer.

This is the endgame of the Fed's inflation fight. They broke something. Not fatally, maybe. But they broke it. And now they're having a public argument about the band-aid while everyone watches.

4:30 p.m. — Close

S&P 500 down 0.92%. Dow down 557 points. Nasdaq down 0.84%. Three straight days of losses. The 50-day moving average is now gone—second-longest streak above it snapped. Asia's down 2%, third straight day. Bitcoin barely holding $95,500.

And I'm sitting here, coffee cold, watching Zymeworks and Jazz Pharma rally 30-50% on Phase 3 data while the world's most important companies leak single-digit declines into a market that's gone 300 basis points soft on rate cut expectations in a month.

The problem is nobody's wrong and nobody's right. Dell's margin compression is real. Nvidia's dominance is real. Bitcoin's pullback is real. Berkshire's vote of confidence is real. The labor market's softening is real. Manufacturing in New York is hot. The economy's weaker than you think and stronger than you fear, all at the same time.

So what do you do?

You buy broadband bets on companies that won't be bankrupt in three years. You stop pretending you know what December brings. You stop checking your phone every 47 seconds.

Or you do what I did: you watch it all happen, realize you've been staring at screens for nine hours, and order dinner at 4:45 p.m. while the rest of Wall Street pretends they know what Wednesday's Nvidia print will be.

Nobody does. We're just all very expensive at math.

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What's your move this week? Are you buying the dip or selling the rip? Or are you doing what most of us actually do—refreshing your email every five minutes while your portfolio yells at you?