LIMA Graduation! Today, we came together to honor the incredible graduates of the LIMA (Law Enforcement Intervention for Mental Health and Addiction) program. The LIMA program continues to provide vital support to those overcoming addiction, mental health challenges, and homelessness, proving that change is possible. Today, we celebrated their strength, resilience, and the bright futures ahead. A heartfelt congratulations to all the graduates. Your journey is an inspiration, and we are so proud of you. Here's to the next chapter!

Hearty congratulations to our toppers of CUET (UG) 2026! 💐 Your dedication and focus have truly set a beautiful benchmark. To every single student who appeared for the exam: your effort, and your resilience matter just as much. Here’s to the entire class of 2026. Your unique journeys and bright futures are just getting started! Congratulations & Best Wishes!

I am the Senior Vice President of Workforce Architecture at Cloudflare and I need to tell you about the best decision this company has ever made. We posted $639.8 million in quarterly revenue. 34% year-over-year growth. Record net retention. The strongest quarter since IPO. And then we fired 1,100 people. Not because of the quarter. During the quarter. I need you to understand the sequence because the sequence is the whole point. My team built the model that made this possible. We call it CIRRUS: "Capacity-Indexed Reduction and Reallocation for Upside Scaling". CIRRUS took our revenue trajectory, our margin targets, and our board's stated appetite for what they called "structural boldness," and it determined that the optimal time to execute a 20% headcount reduction is at the exact moment of peak financial performance. Not during a downturn. Not during a miss. During a beat. The logic is simple. When revenue is surging, the market reads a cost reduction as discipline. When revenue is falling, the market reads the same reduction as panic. Same action. Same 1,100 people. Completely different stock reaction. CIRRUS identified a seven-day window where the earnings momentum and the layoff announcement would compound rather than cancel. I found the math beautiful. I still do. We deactivated 1,100 badges between 9:00 and 9:04 AM Pacific on a Monday. People Analytics determined this was the four-minute window of lowest Slack activity. We called it a "clean cutover." Someone in Infrastructure suggested "zero-downtime deprecation" but Legal thought it sounded too much like a product feature. I thought it sounded exactly like a product feature, which is why I liked it. But I deferred to Legal. I always defer to Legal. That is one of the things that makes me good at this job. The people we cut were not underperformers. I want to be very clear about that because clarity is a Cloudflare value. Sixty-two percent had received exceeds-expectations in their most recent review cycle. Fourteen had been promoted in Q3. One engineer in our Austin office — I'll call him Marcus, though that is not his name and the reason I'm not using his name is not that I've forgotten it — had shipped the caching optimization that directly contributed to $14 million in new enterprise contracts. His manager nominated him for the Raygun Award, which is our internal recognition for outsized impact, six days before I added him to the CIRRUS list. He won the award on Wednesday. His access was revoked the following Monday. The ceremony and the termination were planned by different teams in the same building and neither team knew about the other. I don't think this is ironic. I think this is how large organizations work. The left hand builds. The right hand optimizes. Both hands are attached to the same body and the body is performing well. We let Marcus keep the trophy. It's a small acrylic prism etched with a lightning bolt. It costs us about eleven dollars. His annual cost-to-company was $312,000. CIRRUS selected the 1,100 based on three variables. I'm going to share them because I believe in the methodology. First: salary band. Employees in bands 6 through 8 offered the highest savings-to-replacement-risk ratio. Second: visa dependency. Employees on sponsored visas have a 60-day window to find new employment or begin departure proceedings. This creates what CIRRUS categorizes as "low-friction separation" — the compliance timeline is externally enforced, which reduces our administrative burden. I presented this variable to HR and they requested I rename it from "visa dependency" to "mobility factor" in all future documentation. I agreed. The math didn't change. Third: managerial tenure. Employees whose direct manager had been at the company less than eighteen months were 73% less likely to generate a negative Glassdoor review, because the manager-employee bond hadn't fully formed. CIRRUS weighted this at 15% of the selection score. We call it the "attachment coefficient." We told the market the layoffs were an AI workforce pivot. We said artificial intelligence was making certain roles redundant. We said we were reallocating resources toward our AI gateway products. This was a communications strategy. Not a workforce strategy. The AI framing was my team's recommendation and I'm proud of it because it worked. Two analysts upgraded us the same week. The stock moved 8% in five sessions. The entire AI narrative was four paragraphs in a press release that took my comms partner and me an afternoon to write. Four paragraphs. 1,100 people. 8%. I don't know what the per-paragraph return on that is but I think about it sometimes. The actual AI initiative employs thirty-seven people. We cut 1,100 to fund 37. The ratio is not in any of our public materials. There is a Slack channel called #bright-futures# that our Head of People Experience created for the remaining employees. It posts an automated message every morning at 8:45 AM: "You are the ones we chose to keep." The message includes a rotating motivational quote. Last Tuesday it was a Winston Churchill quote about perseverance. The channel has a custom emoji called :survivor: that the Culture team designed. It's a small cartoon phoenix. Nine hundred people have used it unironically. I find this genuinely moving. I think it shows resilience. My wife says it shows something else but she works in education and I think the frameworks are different. The severance was calculated using a model we licensed from the same consulting firm that built our customer pricing tiers. Median payout: eleven weeks. We benchmarked against industry and landed at the 50th percentile exactly, which our CHRO described as "fair by design." The 1,100 will burn through their severance while our stock price digests a 20% cost reduction applied to a revenue base that was already growing 34%. By the time the last check clears, the savings will have funded the first full quarter of the AI initiative. The one with thirty-seven people. My performance review is next month. I've been told informally that I'm on the COO track. The criteria include "demonstrated ability to execute at scale with minimal organizational disruption." The 1,100 people are the execution. The stock price is the scale. The four-minute badge window is the minimal disruption. I meet all three criteria. I designed all three criteria. Not the review criteria. The outcomes. I keep the CIRRUS model on my laptop in a folder called "Workforce Planning FY26." It sits next to a subfolder called "Offsite Photos — Maui" from the leadership retreat we took in January, where we set the annual targets that the 1,100 people spent four months hitting before we terminated them for hitting them. Marcus's desk in Austin has been reassigned. I don't know to whom. The acrylic prism is probably in a box somewhere. Or maybe whoever cleaned out the desk kept it. It catches the light nicely. I noticed that once, when I visited the Austin office to present the CIRRUS methodology to the regional leadership team. They gave me a standing ovation. The prism was on a desk near the back of the room, refracting a small rainbow onto the wall behind me. I didn't mention it. I stayed on my slides. I'm proud of the work we've done here. I think when people look back at this quarter, they'll see it as the moment Cloudflare became a different kind of company. I think they'll be right. I think the 1,100 people would agree, if you explained the math to them carefully enough.

Rambling Random Ruminations of a Relic - a series Hey, Gen Z and younger Millennials—especially those of you who trade the markets. I get it. You’ve been screwed by the Boomers. Expensive education. No clear career path in your chosen field. Student loans. Another internship that leads nowhere. Close-to-minimum-wage work—not a living wage—waiting tables or doing something similar. And when you finally find a job, the owners expect you to work your butt off. What’s with these four-day, nine-hour-a-day jobs, anyway? Owning a home is not even imaginable. Marriage? Why would you want the lives your parents had? As an early-years Boomer, I fully acknowledge the disaster created for you by your parents’ and grandparents’ generations. You have every right to be angry. But I am seeing more and more of you come into equity and futures trading with expectations that are absolutely off-the-charts insane. You poo-poo this claim!!!! Many of you are chasing stories about turning $5,000 into $5 million in five years. The Market Wizards stories are incredibly compelling. One of the things I am most proud of during my 51-year career—supporting my family and building wealth—is having been featured in Market Wizards. I remain deeply honored. You might be a three-standard-deviation wonder. I am cheering for you—I truly am. Welcome to trading. It has been a thrill and an honor to trade my own money as my full-time occupation since I was in my 20s. I am now within spitting distance of 80, living in a body that betrays the fact that I once had a Division I university ice hockey scholarship. I strongly believe that the pursuit of becoming one of the three in 1,000 will ultimately reveal the full character and integrity of those three. Am I advising you not to invest in stocks? Nope. I am advising you to prepare for a career with a future, work hard and save as much as you can every month. Then I would advise putting 80% of those savings into SPY, 5% into Bitcoin and 15% into gold and silver. There is big money to be made in precious metals—but the move does not need to begin next week, Mr. and Ms. FOMO. There is a very strong chance that, 30 years from now, you will wish you had annualized 20% to 30%. You will recognize that your dream of doubling your money every year originated in Fantasyland. Please believe me: I am NOT, NOT, NOT trying to insult you. I believe in you. My grandchildren are Gen Z. Your generation has enormous potential for wealth and happiness. So, what is my advice to you???? You probably won’t accept it now, but print this X post and place it in an envelope marked, “Open in 2060.” Believe me—life goes by faster than you can possibly understand right now. If you want to learn trading—and I mean consistently profitable trading with your own money—it is possible. But you must get the idea of doubling your money every year out of your mind. Instead, think in terms of reaching 20% annually during years four and five, measured from the first year you begin trading. The best living investor/trader, in my opinion, is Stan “the Man” Druckenmiller. The best trading operation? That’s easy: Renaissance Technologies. Both have hovered in the 40%-plus zone over long periods. Let me square with you on this next statement: If you can learn to average even 30% annually over five years—with a Calmar ratio of 2.5 and without much variation across several hundred Monte Carlo simulations—you will have no trouble becoming a millionaire-plus, if money is your thing. More importantly, you will feel an enormous sense of accomplishment. Also, in my opinion, futures markets are far superior to equity markets for building an account and supporting any reasonable lifestyle. Why futures? Lots of reasons—more than enough to explore in another installment of “my story on X.” But I mean trading with real money. Not the pretend “prop shop” nonsense. If that is what you have in mind, unfollow me immediately. I have nothing to say to you. There are micro and even smaller contracts available these days, especially if you live outside the United States, where CFDs are permitted. Traders with access to CFDs have an advantage over those of us in the Stars and Stripes gang. I believe the CME even offers a one-ounce gold contract. And as more hard assets are tokenized, still more alternatives to traditional futures contracts will become available. I believe it is entirely possible to succeed in futures trading—if you enter the business with the right expectations. For your first three years, your primary goal should be simply not to lose money. If you accomplish that, you will already be way ahead of your peers. I mean WAAAY ahead. If you can survive three or four years in futures and still have your original money intact, then you may indeed have a very bright future in futures. One warning: DON’T EVER pay some service to provide you with signals, setups or whatever else the YouTube and X Wonder Kids of the Century want to sell you. You have to do this on your own. There is no other way. If there were, I would tell you. Please believe me. Perhaps I will wander deeper into this tunnel in the future. But that’s all the rambling for now.

There’s nothing I enjoy more than being with young people. And last week, I had a chance to speak with some of the bright students at Hyde Park Academy taking part in our Futures Series with the @ObamaFoundation. Here's a look at some of the advice I shared with them:

Why You Keep Getting Chopped Up (And How to Fix It Today) Want to know why you keep getting chopped to pieces even when you pick the exact right stock and the exact right direction? Hint: Your timing isn't broken—it’s just not yours yet. There is no YOU yet as a trader. At our Annual SMB Trading Summit in NYC, Jeff Holden, our Head of Trader Development, took the stage in front of a packed house to break down one of the most liberating truths in professional trading: The 3 Trader Archetypes. Jeff has trained hundreds of traders on our desk. He’s taken guys from raw summer interns and mentored them into consistently profitable, seven-figure, and even eight-figure producers. Point of personal privilege please...If you are a hungry, bright, and ambitious developing trader looking at trading as a serious career, you need to understand something fundamental about SMB Capital: We don't try to clone traders. Since 2005, our firm has backed active traders across equities, options, futures, and automated quantitative systems on proprietary technology. We provide the capital, the custom technology, the elite coaching, and the seat alongside star traders pulling multi-millions out of the tape. But most importantly, we give you the mentorship and environment to discover your own authentic trading DNA. (Okay back to Jeff's presentation.) As Jeff showed a packed room of traders, top performers make money in completely different ways across the very same chart: The Players (The Early Turn): These are the traders who naturally see turns before everyone else. They excel at "stuff scalps" and rubber-band trades off key failed levels. If this is your DNA, your edge is playing that structural failure—not trying to ride a multi-hour trend. The Runners (The Momentum Drivers): These traders feel the momentum building and strike on the breakout. Their edge is entering when volume confirms and holding through the meat of the move until the tempo slows and the momentum officially dies. The Finishers (The Late Structure Masters): These traders hate early noise and are comfortable missing the first 70% of the move. They wait for the range to break, let the structure hold for 10–15 minutes (what we call a "Puppy Dog Consolidation"), and then aggressively size into high-probability continuation moves when the war between buyers and sellers is already decided. The Multiplier? Trading Teams. When you force a Finisher to trade like a Player, they bleed capital. But when you put a Player, a Runner, and a Finisher into the same trading pod—backed by institutional capital and proprietary tech—they feed each other real-time edge, eliminate blind spots, and expand each other's P&L exponentially. Trading can be a beautifully brutal game. You will feel frustrated at times. But as Jeff reminded everyone: Frustration is proof you've actually learned the rules of the game—it's a foundation you can build greatness from. Stop trying to trade like someone on TickTok. Figure out who you are, anchor to your unique strengths, surround yourself with an ecosystem that brings out your best, and go put in the work! From all of us at SMB, we hope this presentation adds value to your trading. #DayTrading# #PropTrading# #SMBCapital# #TradingMindset# #TraderDevelopment# The 3 Types of Traders (How Each One Makes Money) via @YouTube

2026, day 232 Good morning from Asia. ‘U.S. conducting stealth operation to transport oil through Hormuz’ (Axios) - “About 10m barrels of oil a day are being transported out of the strait and injected into the global energy market”; ‘Declaring ‘economic d-day,’ Trump says any country trading with Iran will be sanctioned’ (ToI); ‘UAE's financial embargo on Iran after missile threat puts rivalry back in spotlight’ (Reuters); ‘UAE trade embargo could shut Iran’s key economic escape route: Here’s why’ (AJ); ‘Mossad chief, Syrian foreign minister discussed Turkish military deployments before strikes, sources say’ (Reuters); ‘Netanyahu says Israel sent message ‘clearly’ to Turkey in Syria’ (AFP); ‘Israel's Syria strike risked scrambling Turkish jets, military escalation, US envoy tells 'Post'’ (JPost); ‘Israel army chief vows in Syria not to allow threats along border’ (AFP); ‘IAEA finds ‘tons’ of nuclear material in Syria; Damascus: We’ll keep it for ‘peaceful’ energy use’ (ToI); ‘Fish, ships and sovereignty: Iceland weighs its European future’ (Reuters); ‘Europe should wish Marco Rubio a bright future’ (FT) - “Americans who support reckless wars are sometimes also the likeliest to defend Europe”; ‘Brussels backs international court after US sanctions’ (Euractiv); ‘New Drone Unit to Be Phased Out as Hegseth’s Army Pick Makes His Mark’ (WSJ) - “Gen. Christopher LaNeve takes aim at a cutting-edge drone unit, one of several moves he has made since taking over the Army”; ‘The New Physics of Power’ (NYT); ‘USS Lincoln woes highlight US Navy limits in prolonged Iran war: Experts’ (AJ); ‘Trump plans Kim Jong Un meeting, says North Korea has 57 nuclear weapons’ (Reuters); ‘Lee says respects Trump's decision to promote dialogue with NK through scaled-back military exercises’ (Korea Times); ‘Why China will need a ‘more persuasive security offer’ to win over middle powers’ (SCMP); ‘NATO’s nightmare’ (Atlantic) - “The U.S. and Europe have no clear plan for a joint attack from Russia and China.”; ‘Malaysia fears military 'miscalculation' near Sabah amid US-China rivalry’ (SCMP); ‘China's J-36 fighter jet designers report danger of military AI hallucinations’ (SCMP); In geoeconomics, ‘US could cut key tariffs as part of proposed Canada deal, source says’ (Reuters) - “Source says proposed deal cuts top-line tariff to 15% from 25%”; ‘Trump is trying to wage an ambitious trade war with a shrinking army’ (Politico); ‘Money and 'a lot of noise: how the US' critical-minerals sector vies with China’ (SCMP); ‘China tells companies not to help with EU probe into (Euractiv); ‘Brussels wants Buy European' but voters lean domestic, poll shows’ (Politico); ‘Ukraine to renegotiate access to EU agricultural market, minister says’ (Euractiv); In politics, ‘Volodymyr Zelenskyy fires top aide as corruption allegations pile up’ (FT); ‘Most Americans believe Trump has inappropriately profited since returning to power, Reuters/Ipsos poll finds’ (Reuters); ‘Why a stunning democratic socialist win in Florida is different’ (WaPo); ‘Andy Burnham makes No 10 North responsible for economic growth’ (Times); ‘Behind the Curtain: The new existential threat to Al’ (Axios); In markets, ‘US government debt hits $40tn as borrowing rises at historic rate’ (FT); ‘Treasury Secretary Bessent doubles US long-bond buybacks in the face of surging yields’ (Reuters); ‘Bessent Leans Into His Role as America’s Bond Trader in Chief’ (WSJ); ‘Why Scott Bessent Is Playing With the Treasury Market’ (WSJ) - “The simple explanation for all this is that the world is going into a new era of capital need, for data centers, the military and reshoring”; ‘China debuts offshore government bond futures to promote yuan use’ (Nikkei Asia); ‘Federal debt passes grim $1trn milestone for the first time’ (AFR); ‘South Korea’s rookie investors lose small fortunes amid AI stocks frenzy’ (AJ)

President Xi offers a toast at the state banquet dinner in Beijing: "To the bright future of China-U.S. relations, and the friendship between the two peoples, and to the health of President Trump and all of the friends present."