“Big Short” investor Steve Eisman (@EismanPlaybook) says off-balance-sheet financing is “back with a vengeance” in AI. He points to Oracle ($ORCL) and Meta ($META), saying SPVs and guarantees resemble structures seen in the Enron and 2008 eras.

Vals AI co-founder and CEO Rayan Krishnan with a16z's Ben Horowitz and Jennifer Li on grading AI, what it costs, and who gets to make the rules: Every big industry eventually grows an independent testing layer. AI has credit ratings to learn from and Enron to avoid. Model capability today is still mostly self-reported. As public benchmarks saturate and models get better at optimizing for the tests themselves, Rayan makes the case for independent, continuously evolving evaluations. The harder problem is geopolitical. Reagan's "trust but verify" worked during the Cold War because you could fly over and count the missiles. No simple equivalent for AI models exists. In this conversation with Erik Torenberg, they get into how you measure a model's ability to improve itself, why every good benchmark eventually has to be retired, and what happens when token spend begins to rival employee salaries. 00:00 Intro 02:20 Llama 4 on public vs private benchmarks 05:24 Nobody agreed how to test humans either 06:55 What movie ratings teach us about AI 08:55 The Enron problem in benchmarking 11:36 Why a good benchmark has to be retired 13:22 Evals that run for weeks, not seconds 16:20 Where the real workday starts at 4pm 18:08 A firm really is just its evals 20:35 Why Sonnet can cost more than Opus 22:42 One engineer, 6 billion tokens in a day 25:05 Who should set the rules for models 28:55 Public sector enforces, private verifies 33:32 Why sovereign AI is inefficient and happening anyway 35:00 The AI version of trust-but-verify 37:15 Where cyber evals have to go next YouTube: @RayanKrishnan @ValsAI @bhorowitz @JenniferHli @eriktorenberg

Bill Ackman literally gave a 44-minute masterclass that explains money better than any business school. 1. Starting early is the single biggest advantage you have. If you save $10,000 at age 22, never add another penny, and earn 10% a year, you have $600,000 by retirement. wait until 32 to start, and the same money only grows to $232,000. The decade you lose at the beginning costs you more than any decade later because compounding does its heaviest lifting at the end. 2. The return rate matters even more than most people grasp. That same $10,000 at 22 earning 10% becomes $600,000. At 15% it becomes over 4 million. At 20%, the rate Warren Buffett has achieved, it becomes 25 million. Einstein called compound interest the most powerful force in the universe. Ackman's lecture is essentially a demonstration of why. 3. Avoiding losses matters as much as chasing returns. if you reach for a 20% return but lose half your money every 12 years from bad decisions or a rough patch, your 25 million collapses to 1.8 million. Buffett's rule one is never lose money. Rule two is never forget rule one. the math of recovery is brutal, so protecting the downside is not caution, it is strategy. 4. Debt is safer, but the upside is capped. Equity is riskier, but the upside is unlimited. In the lemonade stand example, the lender who put up $250 earns a steady 10% and gets paid back first if the business fails. the equity investor who put up $500 earns over 100% if it succeeds but gets wiped out if it fails. The equity holder earns more precisely because they took the risk the lender refused. 5. The risk that matters is permanent loss, not price movement. most people think risk is the stock price bouncing up and down every day. Ackman says ignore that. the real risk is whether you will permanently lose your money. Short-term volatility is noise. the question that matters is whether you get your capital back with a return over the long run. 6. Avoid startups and complicated businesses. You do not need 100% a year to build a fortune. you need 10 to 15% over a long period. so skip the lemonade stands and unknown ventures. Invest in public companies that are established, liquid, and have to clear real hurdles before going public. If you cannot understand how a business makes money, avoid it no matter how good its track record. Ackman cites Enron, a business almost nobody actually understood. 7. Invest in a business you could own forever. if the stock market closed for 10 years, you should not be unhappy holding it. Coca-Cola is his example. easy to understand, sells a syrup and earns a profit on every drink, the population keeps growing, and it is nearly impossible to disrupt with new technology. McDonald's is another. People have to eat, the food is cheap, and they keep growing. find a business you would be comfortable holding through anything. 8. You want products people are loyal to and will pay a premium for. People buy generic flour and sugar without caring about the brand. but they want the Hershey bar, the Cadbury bar, the see's candy specifically. you do not want to sell a commodity that anyone can sell cheaper. You want something unique that customers refuse to substitute even at a 20% discount. 9. Low debt is a safety feature. In the lemonade stand example, $250 of debt was manageable. But if it had been $1,000 and the business hit a rough patch, it could have gone under and wiped out the shareholders. Find companies with little debt or so much profit relative to their interest payments that a bad year cannot sink them. 10. Barriers to entry protect your returns. You want a business that is hard for someone to compete with tomorrow. Coca-Cola's market presence is so strong that you expect to get a Coke at any restaurant. Pepsi has coexisted with it for decades, but neither can put the other out of business. If a competitor can show up next year with a better version and steal the customers, the business is not worth owning long term. 11. The best businesses are immune to outside factors you cannot control. Coca-Cola has survived 120 years through world wars, nuclear weapons, and every kind of crisis, and each year it makes slightly more money. You want companies that do not depend on commodity prices, interest rates, or currency moves. A business that keeps earning regardless of what is happening in the world is the kind you hold forever. 12. Low capital intensity is one of the most underrated qualities. The worst businesses require massive reinvestment to grow. The auto industry has to build enormous factories and buy machine tools before selling a single car, and those tools wear out. GM's stock barely moved over 40 to 50 years for exactly this reason. Coca-Cola, by contrast, sells a formula and collects a royalty. American Express takes a few percent of every dollar spent on its card. a business that earns a royalty on other people's capital is one of the best things you can own. 13. Pay down debt and build a cushion before you invest. If you have high-interest credit card debt, paying it off is a guaranteed return equal to the interest rate. same logic, to a lesser degree, with student loans at 6 or 7%. and you want 6 to 12 months of expenses in the bank so that losing your job tomorrow does not force you to sell. You can only handle market volatility if you do not need the money. 14. Be a buyer when everyone is selling and a seller when everyone is buying. The natural human tendency is the opposite, a lemming-like instinct to sell in a crash and buy in a bubble. people sold into the 1987 crash when they should have been buying. The only way to resist this is to be financially secure enough that the money at risk does not affect your life, so you can withstand the swings without panicking. 15. The stock market is a voting machine in the short term and a weighing machine in the long term. Ben Graham's idea, which Ackman repeats. short-term prices reflect the whims and emotions of investors. long term, prices reflect the actual value of the underlying businesses. If you buy good businesses at reasonable prices and hold them while they grow, you make money over time as long as you are never forced to sell at the wrong moment. 16. A stock is just a bond where you do not know the coupon. Flip a price-to-earnings ratio over, and you get an earnings yield. A stock at 10 times earnings is a 10% earnings yield, which you can compare directly to a 3% treasury. the difference is the bond's coupon is fixed and the stock's coupon, its earnings, moves up and down. Ackman wants an earnings yield higher than a treasury that will also grow over time, so he does not need to be right about explosive growth to earn a good return.

Big news today that CME launched single stock futures - these will trade 23hrs/day, weekends, cash-settled leverage, on the 55 most liquid equities names in the US market! But this is actually not the first time CME has tried to do this. In fact, they made a huge effort in 2002- and failed fantastically. It's worth studying what happened, what's different now, and what this means for the frontier of finance. Time for a side quest- That story starts with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. This was the ugly byproduct of a 20yr reg turf war between the SEC and CFTC (sound familiar guys?), in which margin rules/short sales/reporting requirements were so complicated that even after approval broker dealer compliance framworks had no idea how to handle it. Most people don't remember this brief glitch in history because this was in fact just a big sideshow for what was actually the bigger/$$$ gamble of a darker legacy - exempting OTC derivatives from regulation altogether; this would in turn allow the CDS market to expand without oversight, and we all know what happened after that... But perhaps more practically speaking in fairness to the regulators, the more obvious reason why SS futures failed at the time was probably that there was just no genuine economic advantage over existing tools- because you can in fact get most of the leverage via listed options! Maybe you got slightly better capital efficiency for directional bets, but it wasn't good enough to otherwise offset the biggest reasons why most financial products fail: fragmented liquidity. So why are they attempting to do this again? There are many factors you can point to, but the single biggest difference now is that the retail market structure has changed enormously. American retail is more comfortable with leverage than ever in history, zero commission trading has brought in surplus liquidity beyond wildest dreams, levered ETFs and 0DTE options cant grow fast enough, and crypto perps have demonstrated that there is a ton of appetite for this kind of risk that simply just didn't exist before 2008. If you look at what the CME has been doing, the "retailification of leverage" has been happening for a long time already, starting with micro bitcoin futures called "BFFs" (Bitcoin Friday Futures lol) and the cringy Gen Z social ad that followed for those that are still scarred from seeing it. It's why CME launched for SS futures standard contracts (100 shares) but also micro contracts (10 shares). Honestly - who needs 10 shares futures contracts? The other reason, and probably more critically important, is to pursue a defensive posture. The CME doesn't compete in a vacuum anymore - with exchanges like Coinbase, Robinhood (+ a JVs between Susquehanna for predictions market), Hyperliquid all going after the same retail customer, the race to become the "everything brokerage" is just as much about distribution as much as it is about product design. And we know distribution is everything in finance because the beauty of Reg T + futures based margining is at its most competitive with scale and diversity, for the physics of money operates like a gravitational field: the larger the mass, the stronger its pull. So what does this mean for you? The single stock futures is not the product. You are the product. YOU are the yield. You are the currency that feed these HFTs, market makers, "big finance" just like you were the data currency for social networks, marketers, "big tech." Your intent to trade, the order book you create as makers, the tape you paint as takers, your inability to discriminate for best price when there are tens of seemingly fungible but slightly variant risks being offered, is their profit. And while it may all sound really dire when I frame it like this, but there is actually a way to win. And it goes back to the first principle of why the single stock futures failed to gain traction back in 2002. You must trade OPTIONS. Of course none of this is actual investment advice and you must always do your own research. But as I've written many times before on X already, options are the best tools retail investors have to protect against big finance. That's because options have the greatest asymmetric leverage embedded in the physics of its product that allow great convexity with great duration. When CME's Duffy says "perps are bad products for retail" he is not necessarily wrong- perps have the potential to be the most dangerous products for retail because they have no assurance or guarantee to control their own outcomes, especially given retail is so small- institutions can liquidate you (or each other, and you're just an ant caught in a stampede of bulls) where you have no agency. The reality is that the commodities futures market since the beginning of time has been found useful because it combines speculators WITH natural hedgers. And there is no natural hedger on earth who would take perps risk to hedge their long term business. Duration is an asset. Duration deserves a premium. Term structure exists because there is in fact a market for time. And when you own an option, it means you have the choice, but never the obligation, to meet time where and when you demand it. As I write this, I'm reminded that history has a peculiar sense of humor, delighting in the ironies of fate. The same bill that allowed then failed single stock futures market in 2000 is the same bill that gave us the reg vacuum for the CDS market that basically is the single biggest proximate legal cause of the 2008 financial crisis. And twenty years later yet again now as we head into CLARITY posturing for the next two weeks, on another epic settlement for a CFTC vs SEC battle, there are public debates occurring on various salient features that the crypto industry cares about. But you would all be wise to take note that if the past precedence holds again, the most consequential thing that will happen will actually be interpreted as a footnote, just like the "the Enron loophole" (aka. the OTC swap exemption) and it WILL involve offshore derivatives just as it did last time. And that footnote is what is going to let crypto industry expand again, bigger, stronger and faster. Because that is the other physics of money beyond a gravitational field: the harder you try to confine capital, the faster it leaks across borders.