Here's the #1# thing most people don't know about Warren Buffett: There is nothing special about Buffett’s stock picking. That doesn’t mean that Buffett wasn’t a great investor. He was! Buffett was, by far, the greatest investor in history, by a huge margin. Over 486 months between October 1976 and March 2017 –— 41 years –— Berkshire Hathaway’s Class A stock earned an average excess return of 18.6% per year above U.S. Tbills. Annualized volatility was 23.5%. Sharpe ratio: 0.79. Berkshire’s Sharpe ratio of (0.79) is roughly 1.6x times the broad U.S. stock market’s Sharpe ratio of 0.49 over the same period. Among all large-cap U.S. stocks and mutual funds with 30-plus-year continuous track records, those are unmatched numbers. A dollar invested in Berkshire on October 31, 1976, was worth more than $3,685 by March 31, 2017. A dollar invested in the S&P 500 with dividends reinvested over the same period was worth approximately $76. Buffett beat a passive index by a multiple of 48. But he didn’t do it with stock picking! Three researchers at AQR Capital Management –— Andrea Frazzini, David Kabiller, and Lasse Heje Pedersen –— dissected Berkshire’s 50 years of investments through 2013. They expanded and republished their findings in 2018 in the Financial Analysts Journal, which is the most highly respected industry financial journal. Their work won the Graham and Dodd Award for the best published paper of the year. The paper is called Buffett’s Alpha. They found, after accounting for cheap leverage (from the insurance float) and exposure to a handful of publicly documented factor premiums, Buffett’s investment skill –— the portion of his returns that cannot be explained by any mechanical strategy –— is 0.3% per year. That's statistically indistinguishable from zero. In other words, the alpha that Berkshire enjoyed for 50 years (as it compounded capital at 24% a year!) wasn’t due to Buffett’s stock picking. So, how did he do it? He did it by gaining access to a huge amount of investment capital that he did not own, for free. Buffett’s track record was built on leverage. That’s a dirty word for most investors, but it's the secret behind Berkshire. The AQR researchers had access to something most Buffett commentators do not: 40 years of Berkshire’s audited financial statements and the full quarterly history of the public 13F stock portfolio. The researchers asked a specific question: If I take Berkshire’s monthly stock returns from October 1976 through March 2017, and I run a linear regression against a set of well-documented risk factors –— market beta, size, value, momentum, and two newer factors called Betting-Against-Beta and Quality-Minus-Junk (detailed below) –— how much of Buffett’s performance can the factors explain? And after the factors have been stripped out, how much excess return remains? The data show clearly there are a few qualities that drove Berkshire’s results. First, Buffett has always preferred large-cap stocks, contrary to the popular image of him as a small-cap value investor. He buys elephants. Second, no surprise, Buffett buys cheap. Berkshire is almost six standard deviations away from neutral on the value axis. So far the picture is ordinary. Every large- cap value manager in America loads positively on size and on value. Buffett’s genius lies in the last two factors. These last two factors are a little complicated, but please stick with me. There’s a new factor, that, like value and size, characterizes Buffett’s strategy. It’s called Betting-Against-Beta (“BAB”). What it means is intentionally investing in stocks with very low volatility. The BAB factor captures the excess return that accrues to investors who own low-beta stocks. Low-beta stocks have historically earned higher risk-adjusted returns than high-beta stocks. Financial theory teaches that higher beta (higher risk) should mean higher return. But it doesn’t. The opposite occurs, in fact. And Buffett was one of the very first people to figure this out. Why does this factor persist? In an efficient market, once that factor is known to investors, then they should bid the price up on low- beta stocks until it no longer provides an edge. The explanation, per the theory of AQR’s Frazzini and Pedersen’s theory, is that because ordinary investors do not use leverage and seek high returns, they create persistent excess demand for more volatile stocks. (Having worked with retail investors for 30 years, I can assure you that is true.) But, an investor with access to cheap leverage –— Warren Buffett, for instance –— can exploit the mispricing by owning the low-beta names and levering them up to produce market-beating returns. And the last factor that matters to Buffett is quality. Buffett buys companies with high returns on invested capital. Quality-Minus-Junk (“QMJ”) is a factor described by Cliff Asness, also at AQR with Frazzini, and Pedersen, in a 2019 paper in Review of Accounting Studies. The QMJ factor captures the return to owning stocks of high-quality companies –— profitable, growing, safe, with high payout ratios –— against stocks lacking those characteristics. QMJ has been positive and statistically significant in every major developed equity market for which it has been measured. Berkshire’s loading is 0.37, with a t-statistic of 4.6. –– meaning it is highly significant to Berkshire’s results. In plain English: Buffett only buys large, high- quality, low-volatility stocks of the highest quality. But, Berkshire’s results were not, in any way, unusual. Any investor buying these same kinds of stocks would have earned those same returns –– about 16% a year over time. So how did Berkshire compound at 23% a year? To figure that out, AQR’s researchers built a Berkshire replica. They constructed a simple, rules-based, publicly investable portfolio that mechanically tilts toward large-cap, cheap, low-beta, high-quality stocks, and levers it 1.6- to- 1 to match Berkshire’s insurance float leverage. The correlation between their replica’s returns and Berkshire’s were virtually identical. The authors’ conclusion is unambiguous. “In summary, we find that Buffett has developed a unique access to leverage that he has invested in safe, high-quality, cheap stocks and that these key characteristics can largely explain his impressive performance.” Berkshire’s cost of insurance float has averaged almost three percentage points below the Treasury bill rate across 50fifty years of data. In roughly two-thirds of all years, Berkshire has been paid to hold other people’s money. That is not an investment strategy. That is a financing miracle. It is also the living, breathing heart of Berkshire Hathaway. It’s what Buffett built, starting in 1967 when he paid $8.6 million for National Indemnity’s $19.4 million of float. And it is the factor every retail investor admiring Berkshire’s returns has never paid any attention to. The 1.6-to-1 leverage that AQR measured over the full period, financed at this negative cost, explains the dollar magnitude of Berkshire’s returns. How do we know? An unleveraged version of the same stock portfolio –— which you can approximate by looking at the 13F holdings alone –— has earned an average excess return of 12% percent per year. It’s Berkshire’s leverage that magnifies this excess return to 18.6 %percent. How does this square with Berkshire’s reported gains? Berkshire’s 18.6% excess return, plus the T-bill rate that averaged roughly 4.7% over 1976–2017, gives you a total nominal return of roughly 23% per year, which is the figure you usually see quoted for Berkshire’s historical performance. The 23% tells you what Berkshire returned. The 18.6% tells you how much of that return was compensation for taking investment risk, as opposed to the baseline yield every lender to the U.S. government was earning anyway. With both of Berkshire’s “edges” –— systematic factor exposures to cheap, high-quality, low-volatility stocks and roughly 1.6-to-1 leverage delivered with insurance float –— you get Berkshire Hathaway’s 23% annual gains over 60 years. It’s the structure that’s genius, not the stock picking. And that's very important because it means the original Berkshire formula can work for any investor. I show you exactly how, in my new book.

$CSIQ expects record BESS shipments in H2 2026. ~40% US business. Data Center business has become a key strategic focus for $CSIQ They have already a 2.5GWh FTM order to serve Data Center growth in the US. "we have developed a focused business development team to make sure our solutions have the right technical requirement for fast response DC's demand. That's getting a lot of traction, as well as the fact that WE ARE ABLE TO OFFER A FULLY COMPLIANT SOLUTION FOR DATA CENTERS. So while we cannot actually disclose who we are working with, I can tell you that we are very engaged right now on data center opportunities. We expect it to yield some pretty exciting results for us in the next quarters that hopefully we will be able to be a little more forthcoming about, as we get further along in the contracting processes." This is on top of their global leading position as an infrastructure provider. $CSIQ has ~60% of the Canadian BESS market, with ~4.5GWh contracted. Leading position in the UK. A couple of GWh per year in Australia. Europe and Japan seeing significant traction. +5GWh in BESS expected to be delivered to the US in 2026.

John does a deep dive into why every podcast has fake wood panels in the background now — a setup popularized by @hubermanlab — and shares a behind-the-scenes look at TBPN’s soundproofing in the Ultradome: "When you’re recording a podcast, you want good audio quality. You don’t want reverberation, you don’t want flat walls bouncing sound back, creating echo, distortion, and hollowness." "For a long time, people would put up that egg-crate style." "The problem is, it makes it look like you’re in a sound booth. Not very aesthetic." "So companies said, 'Let’s get the best of both worlds, something aesthetic but still sound-treating.'" "They launched wood slat walls, the spaces between the panels capture sound, act as a little deadening, and you can hide acoustic material behind them." "Andrew Huberman did it, it went mega viral, and everyone copied it." "He wound up painting his black." "Now, if you’re in the black paint industry, that’s where the money is, because everyone with fake wood panels is painting it black." From an April episode of the show.

My 14th Grammy award is a very special one. Being a songwriter, all I want to do is tell stories that touch peoples hearts. Telling this story with Bruno about love is truly a piece of my soul—love is what we all need right now. Thank you little monsters—wherever you go that’s where I’ll follow. Photo Credit: Rankin for The Recording Academy

Recently, we received some player feedback: “Someone keeps grabbing Lightning in the room, then starts chasing everyone down. It’s impossible to play!” ⚡🐍 At first, we were confused. Our first reaction was: wait… is someone cheating? Then we checked. Nope. Not a hack. What made it even crazier was that some players actually recorded videos showing exactly how they could grab Lightning again and again, then use it to hunt down other players. At that moment, as developers, we honestly had a small breakdown. The game wasn’t broken. The players had evolved too fast. Some high-level players now understand PumpSnake’s map, item spawns, movement rhythm, and chase routes to an absolutely ridiculous level. They’re not playing Snake anymore. They’re hunting. 😵‍💫 But here’s the problem: When a few skilled players master the Lightning mechanic too hard, new players might enter a room, barely understand what’s happening, and get wiped out in seconds. That’s not very friendly to beginners. So this time, we’re making an adjustment: ⚡ The Lightning item will be removed from the map 🪲 The Lightning Buff will now come from in-game beetles ⏱️ As compensation, the Lightning Buff duration will increase from 15s to 20s This is not about nerfing skilled players. Good players can still dominate through mechanics and prediction. But we want Lightning to become a little more random, give new players more room to adapt, and add more uncertainty to every match. Now, whether you get Lightning or not is all about luck. But once you get it… Go ahead and start the killing spree！！！😈 #pumpsnake# #web3# #gamefi#

How can the Democrats not like how the U.S. Supreme Court votes. The Democrat Justices stick together like glue, NEVER failing to wander from the warped and perverse policies, ideas, and cases put before them. They ALWAYS vote as a group, or BLOCK, even that new, Low IQ person, that somehow found her way to the bench (Sleepy Joe!). The Republican Justices don’t stick together, they give the Democrats win after win, like a 159 Billion Dollar pile of cash on a completely ridiculous Tariff decision, and nasty, one sided questions on the country destroying subject of Birthright Citizenship, something which virtually NO OTHER COUNTRY IN THE WORLD IS STUPID ENOUGH TO ALLOW. It was meant for the babies of slaves, not for the babies of Chinese Billionaires. No, certain “Republican” Justices have just gone weak, stupid, and bad, completely violating what they “supposedly” stood for. Handing over 159 Billion Dollars in Tariff refunds to people who have been Ripping Off our Country for years, is unexplainable. One little sentence would have stoped this record setting payment from having to be made. It is a travesty! Their Tariff decision was an unnecessary and expensive slap in the face to the U.S.A., and a giant victory for its opponents. If they rule against our Country on Birthright Citizenship, which they probably will, it will be even worse, if that’s possible. It will cost America massive amounts of money but, more importantly, it will cost America its DIGNITY! No, the Radical Left Democrats don’t need to “Pack the Court,” it’s already Packed! President DONALD J. TRUMP (TS: 22 Apr 09:41 ET)

USDH powered by Sky The best stablecoin offers so much more than just a stable medium of exchange - it should also deliver highly efficient returns, generated by actively developing, building and growing the ecosystem it lives in. By using Sky to power USDH, the Hyperliquid community will gain unbeatable advantages that no other stablecoin project can offer. Sky, formerly known as MakerDAO, is the 4th largest stablecoin project in the world with more than 8 billion USDS in circulation, with 13 billion of highly diversified collateral. To see the high-level real-time overview of Sky and USDS, check out: TL;DR of what Sky can offer Hyperliquid for USDH * USDH will access 2.2 billion USDC instant liquidity for offchain redemption * USDH will be natively multichain powered by LayerZero * Sky will be able to deploy its 8b+ balance sheet into HyperLiquid * Hyperliquid will receive 4.85% return on all USDH on Hyperliquid. This is a better rate than t-bills, backed by advanced risk management, and has potential to increase further. * USDH will benefit from the 7+ year security track record and unbeatable Lindy of the Sky Protocol * Sky can provide 25m in capital to create an independent Hyperliquid Star - a project that will autonomously grow DeFi on Hyperliquid, serving the needs of the Hyperliquid community, and will have tokens that are exclusively farmed on Hyperliquid, potentially bringing in billions in TVL * To better understand Stars: Spark, which runs is the best example of a Star Token farm, and it currently has 1.2 billion TVL * Sky can move its Buyback System on to Hyperliquid, using its more than 250m per year in profits to build SKY liquidity on Hyperliquid * USDH will have deep transparency and verifiability of its collateral with * USDH will benefit from the industry’s best risk management, built on models from the banking sector. * USDH will be the only stablecoin in the world issued by a protocol with an official Credit Rating by S&P (alongside DAI and USDS). * The Hyperliquid community will be able to customize USDH, e.g. to make it GENIUS Act compliant. * Sky has immense research, development and builder capabilities and would prioritize the development and synergies possible with Hyperliquid as its top priority. The team: Sky Frontier Foundation The team behind this proposal that would work to implement the Sky Powered USDH is the recently established Sky Frontier Foundation. It contains top leadership and core developers from the Sky Ecosystem organized into a single entity for more efficient management and execution, and will directly work on, and prioritize, the implementation of USDH. All the commitments and outcomes described in this proposal would be achieved by a combination of the SFF using its resources and capabilities, and also implemented through governance proposals to modify the decentralized Sky Protocol. USDH implemented as Sky Stablecoin similar to DAI USDH powered by Sky would be built as a token technically identical to DAI and USDS, the two major Stablecoin tokens that Sky currently governs, that together have a TVL of more than 8 billion and a security track record of more than 7 years. USDH would inherit all of this from the start. USDH will have access to more than 2.2 billion in instant USDC liquidity, enabling large scale offchain redemptions at any time. Deep 1:1 liquidity with USDC would also make it easy and frictionless for users to shift to USDH-margined perpetuals contracts and USDH-quoted spot markets. The 2.2 billion in instant USDC redemption liquidity is available through a system called the Peg Stability Module (PSM), and can be accessed by users on websites like and others. USDH will be natively integrated and work with the PSM alongside DAI and USDS everywhere. USDH will be natively multichain, being able to bridge to and from any other blockchain via LayerZero. Having a secure, integrated bridge also means that Sky would be able to deploy its 8 billion+ collateral portfolio directly on to Hyperliquid with a low risk premium. USDH will be able to natively convert to and from sUSDS, one of the largest yield-bearing assets in the market, giving its users instant, unlimited, permissionless access to the Sky Savings Rate (Currently at 4.75%) Earning a return on USDH for the HyperLiquid Community The HyperLiquid Community would earn the highest possible rate on all the USDH on Hyperliquid - right now this is 4.85%, which is currently significantly above the T-Bill rate, but with very high diversification and high quality risk management (see security and risk management below). The return may increase further as Sky capabilities and efficiency increase over time. The entirety of the 4.85% earned by all of the USDH on Hyperliquid will be used for HYPE buybacks for the assistance fund. Growing HyperLiquid TVL and bootstrapping DeFi innovation with a 25m HyperLiquid Genesis Star Sky’s infrastructure can provide uniquely valuable support to the Hyperliquid community via the Sky Stars. The best examples are Spark and Grove, autonomous projects that allocate Sky collateral with a combined allocation of 6 billion dollars. The Sky Powered USDH stablecoin will be accompanied by a Hyperliquid Star that can drive huge amounts of growth and innovation, as well as potentially attract billions in TVL by farming out its Star Tokens (The Spark SPK farm currently has a TVL of 1.2 billion Sky can commit to capitalize the Hyperliquid Genesis Star with 25 million in USDH, and exclusively farm it out on the Hyperliquid Blockchain. The ecosystem of Star Incubators would work with leaders from the Hyperliquid community to assemble a highly capable founding team that would work on the Hyperliquid Star to bootstrap a massive, thriving DeFi ecosystem on Hyperliquid, in the same way Spark has done it for Sky. Buyback engine native on Hyperliquid Sky generates 250m in profits per year, and currently uses 36m per year for SKY token buybacks. This number is planned to increase to 150m per year, and will grow even more as Sky profits increase over time. Currently, this buyback system uses Uniswap. As a part of the Sky Powered USDH proposal, Sky can move its native Buyback System to Hyperliquid, increasing liquidity and use cases, and setting the example that Hyperliquid is the standard solution for Protocol token buybacks that all other protocols should use. Security and Risk Management Sky has a security track record of more than 7 years of continuous operation without losses for stablecoin holders, building a Lindy effect through multiple crypto cycles and bear markets, making it by far the safest and most proven decentralized stablecoin. These characteristics will be fully inherited by USDH. Add to the that, the fact that Sky is the only stablecoin project in the world to have an official credit rating from S&P, which gave it a B- on August 7 While a B- rating is a middle rating, which reflects S&Ps lack of familiarity with Crypto and DeFi, being able to get any rating at all is a massive breakthrough because it shows that S&P are able to access all of the data they need to produce a holistic credit assessment they can stand behind, so it signals a much lower chance of tail risks hidden inside the protocol, which is usually the big issue with DeFi and Stablecoins. The Sky Risk Management Framework that controls the diversification of the collateral portfolio that backs USDS, DAI and USDH, is derived from Basel III, the framework used to control risk in banks. For RWA collateral such as CLOs or T-bills, Basel III is used directly, while for DeFi collateral such as allocations into lending markets, an extension of Basel III that captures its fundamental approach but applies it to DeFi, is used. The amount of Junior Capital protecting each positions exposure can be verified in real time on Autonomy and customization of USDH Sky is a decentralized protocol and ecosystem that gives partners unparalleled levels of autonomy and ability to customize the Sky infrastructure they use. Unlike monolithic systems, Sky will simply provide Hyperliquid with the infrastructure and the tools to pursue the strategy the community prefers, and that uniquely fits the special conditions of Hyperliquid. In the longer term, as the Sky Agent Framework that powers Sky Infrastructure matures, the USDH stablecoin will be put under the control of a dedicated Sky Generator Agent, turning USDH into an independent Sky Generated Asset. This will also happen to USDS, and means that USDH will gain the full first-class citizen features of the entire Sky Protocol alongside USDS and other Sky Stablecoins. It will be possible for the Hyperliquid community to customize USDH with its own risk management framework and collateral portfolio, separate from USDS. This gives the Hyperliquid community a lot of options: for instance USDH can be made compatible as a GENIUS Act compliant stablecoin, or it can pursue a higher risk approach and exclusively be backed by Hyperliquid perp positions, or any other strategy the community prefers. At its core, Sky is built to support partners like Hyperliquid using a Sky-powered system like USDH to grow and succeed. This means a focus on autonomy and reliability, with the core of Sky having very little governance and strategic direction beyond protecting, developing, scaling and de-risking the core Sky infrastructure that all other ecosystem participants share and rely on. This means that the priorities of Sky can never end up conflicting with the priorities of Hyperliquid, making it a safe bet as a long term partner. Commitment to build in the Hyperliquid Ecosystem regardless of vote outcome The similarity of Sky and Hyperliquid in focusing on real profits, building useful decentralized infrastructure, means there is a natural alignment between Sky and Hyperliquid Regardless of how the USDH ticker vote turns out, Sky is committed to expand and work with Hyperliquid to explore all the synergies of the two projects. Many of the concepts described above were already under development, and the outcome of this proposal would speed them up and increase their scale, but fundamentally it is clear that both Sky and Hyperliquid will deeply benefit from close integration in the long run no matter what.

Little Barrie created one of the shortest and most memorable opening title theme songs ever. This intro was picked from 17 different tracks submitted to the BETTER CALL SAUL music team.