Good morning! Today, outside of politics, we cover the record number of repeat markets as situation remains volatile in Artemis II launch and Opinion Labs token launch.
It's an interesting case of how some information gets priced in with a delay, while other forces wild market swings, that are ultimately unjustified. But sometimes, even the probabilistic truth machine can have a bug.
Stay ahead of the game with out forward-looking morning brief!
Top Movers
#1 Cabinet Games
In a move that surprised the market, Stephen Miran announced he is leaving the Trump administration.
Rumors are that the former chair of the Council of Economic Advisers is looking for a permanent seat at the Fed Board of Governors. If this is the case, then the consensus view between Bessent and Trump must be that Powell will leave once his term as the chair is over, to make room for Kevin Warsh. However, the market is not that certain:
#2 Inching Forward
While a harsh winter is over Europe, Russia is inching forward with the market now projecting it will enter Sofiivka by the end of the month.
It's not an important village at all, but with so many markets on the war progress, the number of significant moves in a month is a good indicator of how the war is going in relation to expectations resulting from media narrative (markets are highly dependent on the narrative here due to fog of war). Thus we will be watching it and highlighting whenever we see any anomalies.
#3 No Launch After All?
Only yesterday we reported that Artemis II launch is postponed till March, but now the market believes it is also unlikely.
We are unsure what moved the market since yesterday, but intuition says that with March launch as the base case, there is plenty that can go wrong (even weather!) to delay the launch even further.
#4 February LLM Craze
After Anthropic and OpenAI were rumored to launch new models this month, seems like it is also time for xAI to release one.
Grok 4.20 has been rumored for months now, with initial release day promised to be before Christmas. But with competition getting ahead, xAI is essentially forced to release to not fall behind.
#5 Wild Swings
And lastly, we have another interesting situation, this time on the Opinion Labs token launch.
Market briefly spiked to 80c for Yes shares, only to come down shortly after. Some traders bought Yes shares on this announcement, only to learn that the launch must be public. So a warning as usual: read the rules, they determine the market.
Wrap up
That’s all for today - did you catch any of the moves? See you tomorrow for another Morning Brief!
This is not official investment or life advice. Do your own research. This are only my opinions and I encourage anyone to do their own research before putting any money anywhere.