A daily market update from FS Insight — what you need to know ahead of opening bell

“In newness we are forced into presence and focus. Newness can even slow down our sense of time. This explains why time seemed slower when we were kids.” — Michael Easter

Overnight

An AI officer for every federal agency (Semafor)

An Officer and a Gentleman and Roots actor Louis Gossett Jr. dies at 87 (NBC)

Radio Free Asia has folded its Hong Kong bureau (RT)

Tens of thousands of Israelis protest Netanyahu’s government in Jerusalem, demanding early elections and pressuring the government to secure the release of remaining hostages held by Hamas (FT)

A law decriminalizing possession and home cultivation of cannabis takes effect in Germany (Semafor)

Sequoia’s former Indian arm reaps benefits of investors moving money from China (FT)

Reddit is using AI to help marketers sound like Redditors (Adage)

There is a new interactive tool for modeling extensions to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (CFRB)

D.C. planning new bond issuance (Bond Buyer)

First news

• Not unpredictably, mysterious Havana Syndrome is linked to Russia
• Aid for Ukraine may finally be approved in the visible future
• A surprise from China, whose manufacturing sector actually rebounded over the past six months
• Heavy-industry jobs as avocation, literature as vocation – a way of life for immigrants from Eastern Europe living and creating in Scandinavia.

Charts of the Day

MARKET LEVELS

MORNING INSIGHT

Good morning!

The updated list of 36 Granny Shots appears below.

The list is sorted by the most attractive (most frequently cited) to least. To be a Granny Shot, the stock needs to appear in at least two portfolios or themes.

There are 5 stocks appearing in at least 4 of 7 themes: GOOGL -0.99% , META -0.99% , AMZN 0.54% , AXP 0.31% , NVDA -0.78% . Consider these the stocks that are the most commonly seen as Grannies and thus the higher-quality ideas.

TECHNICAL

SPX has now logged five straight monthly gains, with 2024’s 1^st quarter performance having exceeded 10%. This represents the 11^th best 1^st Quarter since 1950. 

Since 1950, the top 24 instances of the best 1^st quarter returns have never led to a down year. Of the top 15 Q1 returns, only in 1987 did the year prove negative from April into year-end. However, as we remember, the year as a whole still turned in positive gains.

The median return after a positive string of four straight winter months of November-February has been 15% from March into year-end. This string has occurred 16 times in the last 90 years and has an uninterrupted track record of gains from March into year-end.

Click HERE for more.

CRYPTO

Here are our selected deals from last week:

• Parallel, an on-chain trading card game, raised $35 million in an undisclosed round with participation from notable names including VanEck, Big Brain Holdings, Solana Ventures, The Spartan Group, Golden Chain, and others. Parallel is redefining traditional card games like Pokémon with its NFTs representing trading cards. The funding will be used to expand the Parallel universe across different mediums and platforms.
• DappOS, an intent execution network, raised $15.3 million in a Series A round led by Polychain Capital. The funding round valued the DappOS at $300 million and other investors included Flow Traders, Waterdrip Capital, Nomad Capital, Bing Ventures, and others. DappOS is striving to make dApps more user-friendly with core advantages like removing seed phrases, wallet reset options, chainless apps, and account unification.
• Alex Labs, the company building the finance layer of Bitcoin, raised $10 million in a strategic round led by The Spartan Group. Other investor participation included CMS Holdings, DWF Labs, Foresight Ventures, Ouroboros Capital, and others. ALEX, or “Automated Liquidity Exchange” is supporting Bitcoin DeFi with products like decentralized exchanges, bridges, oracles, and launchpads, all built on top of Bitcoin. The funding will be used to continue enhancing activity on Bitcoin and expand the team.
• Illuvium, a crypto gaming studio, raised $12 million in a Series A funding round led by from The Spartan Group, Animoca Brands, Arrington Capital, and King River. Other investors included Laser Digital (Nomura), Polygon Ventures, Golden Chain, and others. The funding will be used for game development within its ecosystem. Illuvium is one of the larger Web3 gaming studios with its token, ILV valued at $1.3 billion, fully diluted. Holders can stake their ILV to earn revenues from in-game purchases.

Click HERE for more.

FIRST NEWS

The Fourth Estate Dept. It could be that because coverage of Central Asia has effectively evaporated over the last decade, few commentators expected a group of Tajik terrorists affiliated with ISIS-K to attack Moscow. (Eurasianet)

Deepfakes in the permafrost. Once run by former oligarch and media mogul Vladimir Gusinsky, NTV, a leading Russian news channel – controlled, as are all Russian news channels, by the Kremlin – ran a deepfaked video of a top Ukrainian official calling the Moscow terror attack “very fun”. (NewsGuard)

Their Man in Havana. A recent investigation by 60 Minutes has shed light on the mysterious Havana syndrome, linking Russia to the incidents that for years had affected U.S. officials worldwide without a clear explanation. What is already a well-known fact is Russia’s willingness to engage in disruptive electronic warfare tactics, potentially posing risks to civilian aviation and military operations. The report also highlighted a concerning trend of large-scale GPS disruptions across Europe, which appear to be Russian attacks.

Over 1,600 passenger aircraft in Europe had their GPS systems jammed last month; the number of such incidents has increased since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The most recent GPS disruption lasted 63 hours between March 22 and March 25, affecting a wide area across Sweden, Germany, and Poland. In a previous incident, the U.K. defense secretary’s plane experienced GPS disruption en route to Poland. NATO has acknowledged Russia’s track record of jamming GPS signals and its capabilities for electronic warfare. Semafor

Aid to Ukraine at Last? House Speaker Mike Johnson outlined plans for an upcoming Ukraine aid package while Congress was in recess, stating that upon returning next week, he intends to bring a bill to the House floor containing several key provisions. This includes the REPO Act, which would utilize seized Russian assets to provide aid to Ukraine, as well as offering loans to Kyiv, an idea previously proposed by former President Trump.

Johnson also indicated the package aims to reverse Biden administration policies that paused permits for liquified natural gas projects. “We want to unleash American energy,” the Speaker explained, suggesting efforts to ramp up U.S. energy production will be part of the legislation.

CNN reports that during the Congressional recess, Johnson has been strategizing on how to navigate the divisive Ukraine aid issue within his party as he faces a looming threat of a motion to vacate the Speakership from some Republican members opposed to continued assistance for Ukraine’s defense against Russian aggression. Semafor

Six Months of the Dragon. China’s manufacturing sector actually rebounded in March, marking the first expansion in six months and fueling optimism about an economic revival. This positive trajectory aligns with a surge in exports and robust industrial output seen during the initial two months of the year, prompting several analysts to revise their annual growth projections for China upwards. These indicators suggest that the industrial sector could play a pivotal role in driving the country’s recovery, although experts have emphasized that stimulating consumer spending should be the priority.

Beijing is also setting its sights on establishing a commanding presence in the high-tech realm. As a China tech analyst remarked to The Economist, “What China truly aspires to be is the leader of the next industrial revolution.” This ambition underscores China’s determination to forge ahead in cutting-edge domains, even as it navigates the challenges posed by its faltering property market, which continues to exert a drag on overall growth. Bloomberg

Immigrants Find Heavy-Industry Jobs No Match for Heavy Literary Duty.* The birthing of a new aesthetic in the Eastern European novel has adversely impacted driving and safety records in the heavy-machinery and municipal-services sector in Western Europe, particularly among drivers of garbage trucks in Denmark and assembly-line workers in Sweden.
Fiery young literary Turks hailing from the Balkans are finding it hard to concentrate on mundane truck-maneuvering and rubbish-collecting duties while in the throes of creative paroxysms, on heady trips guided by febrile imaginations. Concomitantly, head injuries at tractor and bulldozer assembly lines are up 400% as the next generation of literary geniuses manning the conveyors suddenly slips into states of literary grace, with lines of sublime poetic power writing themselves indelibly across the blinking terminal screens of their internal word processors, while large motor and excavator-arm assemblies tilt destiny-like in the direction of their heads, which – though helmeted, as per workplace-safety regulations – are no match for the inexorable trajectories of multi-ton juggernauts of high-strength tensile steel.
The rash of accidents and resultant injuries has been attributed to the passing close to Earth of a comet’s tail, predicted by Vanga, the sightless Bulgarian seer whose person and predictions are blindly venerated on the Balkan peninsula and beyond. Doctors believe we may be witnessing a mass psychosomatic phenomenon, the symptoms triggered in the young immigrants by news of the comet’s approach as reported in the press. According to scientists, even a passing mention in their distant childhoods of the prediction regarding the comet and its effects would have been sufficient to plant a time bomb that goes off when the comet is said to actually near our planet.
Commenting on the rash of workplace incidents, Vladko Wojčic-Šuker, labor union representative and expatriate Croatian essayist of some note, said “We are thankful to [our] adoptive countries for [the] opportunities they [have] provided, and we mind [the] need to ensure safety, but [the] Number One consideration in our minds must and always will be [our] literary duty. We live for it and, if need, we die for it every day of [our] lives!”
Incidentally, ten minutes after giving the interview, Mr. Wojčič-Šuker had his little finger impaled on a retaining pin securing a large elbow joint on a wheeled crane. Snapping the pin at the base with a pair of pocket pliers, he displayed his now three-and-a-half-dimensional left hand for the benefit of impressionable onlookers ever seeking literary material.

“Let this felicitous mishap –” he broke off, evidently enervated. His bloodlet face evinced great physical shock. Proletariat peers cheered him on,

“Àyde, Vladko!”

Vladko continued.

“Brothers!” he managed in a broken voice, the cold nectar of genuine artistic suffering accreting at his spontaneously graying temples. “Let [the] precise nature of this occurrence serve as [a] reminder of [the] sacred power of ineluctable fate, as well as [the] significance of names. We are men of Melpomene, and our deeds are our words. In other words, our words are our deeds. It can be ‘Impaler’ or ‘Impaled’, but this is proof that fate is coming for us all!”
The crowd murmured encouragement.

“So keep your head in [the] clouds. Keep imagining! Keep creating! Keep writing [the] new and great in your mind, and before you know it, it will translate itself into [the] world!” He lifted up the clenched fist of his left hand high into the air, in the process impaling the base of his palm with the pin anchored to his pinkie, the point particularly jagged where he had snapped off the pin with his tool. A rivulet of crimson making its way down his exposed forearm, he looked out once more over the crowd before fainting, exhaling the barely audible words, “I enjoin you! I exhort you!”
Despite repeated attempts, we have been unable to confirm either Mr. Wojčič-Šuker’s identity nor his connection to the industrial facility where the incident took place.

^{* Happy April Fools’!}