u/thugexx

Buffett at berkshire this weekend said investors using leveraged etfss are playing with fire and pointed to CAPE near record highs,bank of korea too warned single stock leveraged etfs on samsung and sk hynix could create systemic risk from one way flows.

There are now 600 leveraged trading tool etfs in the US and a third of everything launched in 2026. MSTU( the 2x Strategy ETF) is down 91% over a year when MSTR itself is down 67% so the gap is its daily compounding doing exactly what its designed to do in a downtrend.
while SCHD up 18% this year,VTI up double digits and neither required a daily reset or a prospectus disclaimer about total loss.

FBI Director Kash Patel did not disclose a stock purchase of up to $250,000 worth of MicroStrategy (MSTR) for nearly six months, when officials are legally required to disclose within 45 days. MicroStrategy has conducted millions of dollars' worth of business with the Department of Justice, the department that oversees the FBI…raising obvious conflict-of-interest concerns. Patel's team says the late disclosure was an honest mistake, that the filing has since been amended, and that ethics officials cleared the issue. The typical penalty for a late filing is just a $200 fine. Separate from the disclosure issue, the investment itself hasn't performed well as MicroStrategy shares are down roughly 50% from their peak, meaning many retail investors who bought near the highs are in the same position.

Also a filing showed 30+ members of congress trading late too. bitcoin exposure is now everywhere, held by regular people and powerful ones alike, it’s kind of a proof that either it's gone fully mainstream or could be a sign everyone's piled in at once.

Also, MSTR is basically a company that buys and holds bitcoin. so people treat its stock as an easy way to get bitcoin exposure through a normal brokerage or retirement account, without touching crypto directly.

So MSTR isn't the same as holding bitcoin, It's a much more extreme version. the company borrows money to buy more bitcoin, and people often pay more for the stock than the bitcoin inside it is actually worth. So when bitcoin dips a little, MSTR dips a lot.

if you hold MSTR thinking it's just bitcoin, know that it can fall harder than bitcoin and take longer to recover.

Have been seeing a lot of CEXs are fundamentally broken takes after the binance eu lockout, and I think thats overreading a very narrow event.

What actually happened is that one company didnt get a specific license by a deadline in one regulatory bloc, while three of its direct competitors did. Its withdrawals still work and binance itself says its actively pursuing a license in france and expects to be back within months which is closer to company temporarily losing permit in one region than the CEX model is dead.

Compare it to what an actual systemic event looks like m, FTX for instance where funds were gone,nobody's out any money here. The worst case for most users is to use kraken or coinbase for a few months lol which is an inconvenience, (not crisis)

The self custody argument is a good argument on its own merits and it just doesnt need this event to be bigger than it is to be true,the fact that funds are safe and withdrawable is binance's system working as intended under a licensing failure

Only place I would half concede if you were already sitting on the fence about moving some trading onchain (i havve had a slice on ostium for RWA/FX/gold exposure for a while now, unrelated to any of this), an event like this is a reasonable nudge to actually do it ,just dont let it talk you into believing the sky's falling on CEXs generally.

Where I think this gets interesting is longer term,iff Binance is locked out for months and users route around it fine, thats actually the bearish case for Binance specifically regardless of what it says about CEXs generally.does anyone thinks I'm underrating this though?

Yesterday was a strange day in crypto as stripe, visa, mastercard, blackrock, coinbase and over 140 other companies announced a new stablecoin called open USD. Circle the company behind USDC immediately dropped 17%

so coinbase and circle built usdc together and under their current agreement, coinbase earns 100% of reserve income from usdc held on its platform and splits off platform income 50-50 with circle which paid coinbase roughly $908 million in 2024 and its up for renewal in August and coinbase just publicly signed onto a rival stablecoin explicitly designed to redirect that exact revenue stream away from issuers and toward distribution partners.

Open usd's entire pitch is that it shares reserve income with the 140+ businesses using it instead of keeping it at the issuer level and stripe said OUSD will become the default stablecoin for businesses on its platform. blackrock which manages the actual assets backing USDC's reserves is also backing the competitor ,the people closest to circle's business turned up on the other side of the table.

Consortiums of 140 companies with competing interests are genuinely hard to hold together and it is clear that the stablecoin market which tether and usdc have split between them for years got the most serious institutional challenge it's ever seen. If you are holding usdc on any platform including ones like bitpanda (like me) that supports it, the underlying issuer dynamics shifted in ways that will play out over the next 12 months.

Tether ceo paolo ardoino's response was simply "Welcome OUSD. Player 2 has entered the game."

Does anyone actually think OUSD displaces USDC?

Route by complexity is the most repeated cost-cutting advice in this space and i've genuinely never seen anyone post real before/after numbers, so here's ours after a full month of running it.

Setup so the numbers mean something. Agent doing customer support triage, ~5 steps per ticket, planning, a couple tool calls, an intermediate summarization step, and a final response. Around 40k tickets/month. Before this every step went to Claude Sonnet. Not a considered decision, just what got wired in during the first build and nobody looked at it again, which is embarrassing in hindsight because we already had eval sets sitting around from an unrelated project and it never occurred to any of us to point one at our own model choice.

The change was simple, route each step by what it actually needs. Planning and final response stayed on Sonnet, those are where reasoning quality actually reaches the user. The summarization step and a small classification sub-step moved to Haiku since those are format-following, not reasoning.

We run this through Orq's gateway so the routing rules live in one config instead of if/else scattered through the agent code. The part that actually mattered for us: when we want to move a step to a different model we change one rule and it applies everywhere, no redeploy, and we can see the per-step cost breakdown in the same place so we actually know which steps are expensive instead of guessing. That per-step cost visibility is basically what made this whole exercise possible, we couldn't have found the waste without it. LiteLLM or Portkey will handle the raw routing too if you'd rather self-host or want more granular per-request knobs, worth checking what fits, but the central-config-plus-cost-visibility combo is what worked for us.

Numbers, month over month, traffic within ~3% either way:

Total LLM spend dropped about 41%. The two steps we moved turned out to be a bit over half our total call volume, which is why the savings were that big, we'd been paying frontier rates on the majority of our calls for no reason.

On quality, before switching we reused one of those old eval sets, ~500 examples with human labels, and ran both models on the re-routed steps. Summarization came out 96.1% acceptable on Sonnet vs 95.4 on Haiku. The classification sub-step was basically a tie, low 94s for both, i didn't bother writing the exact Haiku number down at the time because the gap was clearly noise. Where they disagreed it was on genuinely ambiguous cases, not Haiku confidently blowing it. Thumbs-up and escalation rates in prod after the switch stayed basically flat, nothing outside normal week-to-week wobble.

So ~41% off with no quality drop we could measure, because most of our volume was low-complexity steps that never needed a frontier model.

The actual lesson isn't that Haiku is good. It's that whatever model you wire in first becomes the default for everything and just never gets questioned. Switching requires testing, testing requires an eval set, most teams don't have one per step, so the expensive model stays the path of least resistance. The routing is trivial. The eval work to prove it's safe to route down is the real cost, and it's exactly the part everyone skips, which is how you end up paying Sonnet prices to sort tickets into five buckets.

Curious how people set the thresholds for this. We did it per-step by hand off eval scores, but i keep wondering if anyone's routing dynamically, scoring each request's complexity at runtime instead of static per-step rules. Feels like the obvious next move and i haven't seen it done well yet.