Podcast
The ACID Capitalist Podcast
Hosted by Hugh Hendry · EN
Gonzo Finance!
Hugh Hendry is an Award Winning Hedge Fund Manager, Market Commentator, Thought Leader, St Barts Real Estate Investor & Surfer.
Full episodes are available at https://www.patreon.com/HughHendry and https://hughhendry.substack.com
19episodes
Episodes
Newest firstAll episodes
What if AI cuts jobs faster than rates can fall?
Nov 801:02:00Tap to summarizeSend us Fan MailMarkets have a habit of choosing the path that hurts the most people, and this week they proved it. We open with a jolt: CarMax plunges 24%, the CEO is shown the door, and used‑car demand looks like a classic pull‑forward that left a hole in today’s sales. From there, we follow the thread across the macro tapestry: consumer sentiment hovering near crisis lows, layoffs announced at a pace that clashes with payroll prints, and a tech slide that turns “AI capex” from dream to doubt in a heartbeat.I break down how cobweb dynamics and inventory timing errors ripple from toothpaste to autos, why tariffs distorted the clock on purchases, and where the data is more theatre than truth. China’s export picture adds another twist: a bilateral surplus that widens even as shipments to the US shrink, exposing the difference between volume and value in a tariff world. We dig into the money plumbing too, because it’s no longer just M2. Offshore dollar creation rides on the collateral of investment portfolios, trade invoices, rehypothecated claims that shape and form money in ways the Fed doesn’t fully map.For investors, the practical edge is structure and levels. Options now mediate the market’s mood, turning volatility into potential income when used with care. Covered calls on quality after big drops can pay you to wait, but path risk matters. We map Meta’s gap fill and key Fibonacci retracements, and consider Oracle’s round‑trip as a reminder that narratives can outrun cash flows. The stance is clear: acknowledge the pullback, respect the signs of strain, and build selective shopping lists rather than chasing every bounce. Let the market pay you for patience, and let price confirm when the turn is real.If this breakdown helps you navigate the noise, follow the show, share it with a friend who trades the headlines, and leave a quick review. Tell me what level you’re watching next. I’ll bring the charts.Support the show⬇️ Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for full episodes ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/HughHendryhttps://hughhendry.substack.comhttps://www.instagram.com/hughhendryofficialhttps://blancbleustbarts.comhttps://www.instagram.com/blancbleuofficial⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leave a five star review and comment on Apple Podcasts!🧢 Hats & Merch 📸 Instagram 🐦 Twitter / X📩 Substack👂Listen and 🔥 Subscribe📺 YouTube🎧 ...
Transcribe →Is the Market Running Out of Money?
Nov 601:21:20Tap to summarizeSend us Fan MailWhat if the cleanest read on market risk isn’t a sentiment index but the dollar itself? We connect the dots from DXY’s slide and rebound to the invisible gears of Eurodollar credit, showing how collateral breathes through trade invoices, repos, and leverage, and how that breath has begun to shorten. From port softness and a reported 17% drop in trucking volumes to tighter haircuts and slower factoring, we map the quiet contraction that can force risk assets to pay a toll in the form of sharp pullbacks.We dig into why professionals rarely short meme‑charged leaders like Palantir even when valuations look unhinged, and how the “malicious” habit of strong markets is to snap back toward the one‑year moving average before pushing higher. Along the way, we revisit the Supreme Court’s tariff signals, the politics of New York’s vote, and the way those headlines filter into liquidity creation via trade flows. On jobs, we unpack an ADP beat that hides softness in information and professional services while healthcare and utilities carry the print, and we talk frankly about how AI threatens a quarter of tasks, particularly in admin and legal support.Finally, we ask a contrarian question: is Apple right to avoid an AI capex arms race? Preserving balance sheet flexibility might be the smarter bet if we’re edging toward a collateral recession where financing gets stingier and optionality becomes a moat. Expect volatility, not apocalypse; respect the cadence of liquidity; and plan for violent, normal pullbacks within long trends. If this perspective challenges how you track markets, follow, share with a friend, and leave a quick review. What’s your top stress indicator right now?Support the show⬇️ Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for full episodes ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/HughHendryhttps://hughhendry.substack.comhttps://www.instagram.com/hughhendryofficialhttps://blancbleustbarts.comhttps://www.instagram.com/blancbleuofficial⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leave a five star review and comment on Apple Podcasts!🧢 Hats & Merch 📸 Instagram 🐦 Twitter / X📩 Substack👂Listen and 🔥 Subscribe📺 YouTube🎧 ...
Transcribe →
A One-in-a-Thousand Market Moment
Nov 401:16:52Tap to summarizeSend us Fan MailWhen logic fails, hedges break, and the models panic.Markets rarely behave. In this episode, Hugh Hendry unpacks why. Exploring what happens when models flash red and logic collapses in real time. From George Gammon’s CarMax hedge to the intricacies of dating, calculating sexual market value and the Fed’s confused dance with Treasury policy, Hugh dissects how a “Z-score of 3” moment becomes a one-in-a-thousand event that reshapes portfolios.He links collapsing used-car stocks to compressed thirty year immigration trends, digs into the stealth recession in U.S. housing, and considers how risk managers unknowingly amplify panic by reducing exposure. Along the way he spotlights Martin Marietta, BioNTech’s AI ambitions, and why the next big opportunity may lie inside America’s housing-linked equities.This is a raw, late-night macro sermon from St Barts: part reflection, part market therapy. Traders and macro mavens will find insight in Hugh’s irreverent exploration of fear, liquidity, and conviction.Support the show⬇️ Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for full episodes ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/HughHendryhttps://hughhendry.substack.comhttps://www.instagram.com/hughhendryofficialhttps://blancbleustbarts.comhttps://www.instagram.com/blancbleuofficial⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leave a five star review and comment on Apple Podcasts!🧢 Hats & Merch 📸 Instagram 🐦 Twitter / X📩 Substack👂Listen and 🔥 Subscribe📺 YouTube🎧 ...
Transcribe →
What If Government Debt Isn’t Debt at All?
Nov 101:09:27Tap to summarizeSend us Fan MailThe Ricardian Equivalence, Treasury Debt, and the Modernity of MoneySupport the show⬇️ Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for full episodes ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/HughHendryhttps://hughhendry.substack.comhttps://www.instagram.com/hughhendryofficialhttps://blancbleustbarts.comhttps://www.instagram.com/blancbleuofficial⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leave a five star review and comment on Apple Podcasts!🧢 Hats & Merch 📸 Instagram 🐦 Twitter / X📩 Substack👂Listen and 🔥 Subscribe📺 YouTube🎧 ...
Transcribe →
Do Deficits Make You Rich?
Oct 3001:31:54Tap to summarizeSend us Fan MailDo Deficits Make You Rich?The uncomfortable truth: fiscal stimulus creates wealth, not consumer inflation.Sat pondering in a Caribbean bar, thinking about intelligence, the Fed, deficits, and why inflation lives in Wall Street not in your supermarket basket. When the government runs a deficit, it injects reserves into the system, an automatic overdraft with the banking system. Later it issues Treasuries that drain those reserves. Economists call it a swap. Net financial wealth in the private sector rises because no one in the private sector owes that shortfall. The government owes it. Not another private entity.So does government spending make you rich? Deficits don’t spill into the supermarket, they seep into the trading book. Treasuries move through repo markets, pledged and rehypothecated, transformed into money-like instruments that lubricate leverage. CPI stays calm while portfolios swell. Fiscal deficits expand collateral, leverage builds, and asset prices rise. The inflation we should fear isn’t at the checkout counter. It’s in the mirror of prudence we call Wall Street.Support the show⬇️ Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for full episodes ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/HughHendryhttps://hughhendry.substack.comhttps://www.instagram.com/hughhendryofficialhttps://blancbleustbarts.comhttps://www.instagram.com/blancbleuofficial⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leave a five star review and comment on Apple Podcasts!🧢 Hats & Merch 📸 Instagram 🐦 Twitter / X📩 Substack👂Listen and 🔥 Subscribe📺 YouTube🎧 ...
Transcribe →
When America Pretends to Be Reckless
Oct 2800:54:27Tap to summarizeSend us Fan MailIn this acid breath of mine, I drift between the sublime and the sardonic. I trace how America, once the debtor, became the empire, how quantitative easing rewired the flow of wealth from the cautious creditor to the restless entrepreneur. China hoarded savings, America dis-saved, and the machine rolled on until an American administration was bold enough to call time. Gold gleams like a reflexive meme, Bitcoin hums like a ghost in the circuitry, but US equities might just scream louder toward 10,000 on liquidity fumes. Tariffs, deficits, and Fed theatrics are the new imperial tributes. Maybe the real story is that America, by pretending to be reckless, keeps proving it’s the only grown-up in the room.Support the show⬇️ Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for full episodes ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/HughHendryhttps://hughhendry.substack.comhttps://www.instagram.com/hughhendryofficialhttps://blancbleustbarts.comhttps://www.instagram.com/blancbleuofficial⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leave a five star review and comment on Apple Podcasts!🧢 Hats & Merch 📸 Instagram 🐦 Twitter / X📩 Substack👂Listen and 🔥 Subscribe📺 YouTube🎧 ...
Transcribe →
Copper, Gold and Trading the Fuzzy Cloud
Oct 2500:53:07Tap to summarizeSend us Fan MailI began with CPI, but as usual, I ended up somewhere between Beethoven and gold. The headline CPI 3%, core the same. The whisper was higher. The market calls it “Goldilocks.” Not too hot, not too cold. I call it “Never be a dick for a tick.”That’s how you survive this racket. Everyone obsesses over decimals while the system quietly breaks and remakes itself. The models are wrong, the Fed’s neutral rate misplaced, and shelter data a bad joke.Markets have music. Sometimes off key, sometimes perfect pitch. Beethoven wrote his best symphonies when he couldn’t hear. Euler saw math more clearly after he went blind. My best trades happen when I stop staring and listen. Markets are sound before they’re numbers.Then someone messages me: “Copper, all the way.” I laugh. NVIDIA doesn’t need a century of copper. The chips use little. The heavy copper is in data centers, transformers, cables feeding the AI gods. One megawatt of data power needs twenty-seven tons. There’s a story there, but not the one the hype merchants sell.Copper is pregnant in expectation. It mirrors the world’s mood and that mood is uncertainty. The charts show past booms and fatigue. The next leg will come from real demand, from grids and wires that make the world hum.Gold refuses to fade. I mocked it before, but I’m giving it credit. Maybe this rise is necessary, the price to end mercantilist misery. China’s citizens buy stablecoins and gold to escape the red cabbage trap. They know seven cabbage for a dollar is a steal.America sits on 262 million troy ounces. At ten thousand an ounce, that’s 2.5 trillion in fiscal firepower. While everyone says “Rome is falling,” they’re wrong. This isn’t the fall of America; it’s the fall of Chinese communism.Russia produces forty percent of global palladium, quiet leverage no one mentions. Even Trump treads carefully. Geopolitics meets gigawatts. Metals and power are the same story.I’ve talked CPI, Beethoven, copper, gold, palladium, geopolitics. A full orchestra. I never promised coherence, only curiosity. The market, like life, is a fuzzy cloud. You don’t predict it. You play with it.Support the show⬇️ Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for full episodes ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/HughHendryhttps://hughhendry.substack.comhttps://www.instagram.com/hughhendryofficialhttps://blancbleustbarts.comhttps://www.instagram.com/blancbleuofficial⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leave a five star review and comment on Apple Podcasts!🧢 Hats & Merch 📸 Instagram 🐦 Twitter / X📩 Substack👂Listen and 🔥 Subscribe📺 YouTube🎧 ...
Transcribe →
Shooting The Breeze
Apr 10, 2025Tap to summarizeSend us Fan MailWelcome backThe breeze is talking again. The sea too, whispering something older than the market, more enduring than yield curves. This episode was recorded beneath Saharan skies on the island of St. Barts, during Acid Capitalist Summer Camp 2.0. But what is a camp if not a gathering of searchers. A pause in the trade winds to ask the old questions.I was met by a journalist. Young, wide-eyed, barefoot. She carried a pencil and the memory of a mixtape. She asked me to speak of fear, folly, volatility and love. I answered not with answers but with exhalation. We spoke of exile, of turtles, of the dull ache of markets remembered and misremembered.Just like Johnny Rotten sang, "This is Not a Love Song", in 1983, this is not an investment interview, more a moment.The market is a hallucination. It's also a mirror. I once managed billions. Today, I manage time. There's something here, in this place, that bends the arc of memory. You come to St. Barts to heal, or to vanish. Perhaps both.There is no grand thesis. Only a few half-remembered charts, a Rolling Stones lyric, and the suspicion that finance was never about spreadsheets but about stories.This episode is a love letter. To serendipity. To misfits. To the exquisite loneliness of being early.Draw close to the speaker. Tilt your face toward the trade winds. Pour something cold and forget, for a moment, the noise.The tape begins...Hugh HendryThe Acid CapitalistSupport the show⬇️ Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for full episodes ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/HughHendryhttps://hughhendry.substack.comhttps://www.instagram.com/hughhendryofficialhttps://blancbleustbarts.comhttps://www.instagram.com/blancbleuofficial⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leave a five star review and comment on Apple Podcasts!🧢 Hats & Merch 📸 Instagram 🐦 Twitter / X📩 Substack👂Listen and 🔥 Subscribe📺 YouTube🎧 ...
Transcribe →
Hurricane MACRO
Jun 2, 2022Tap to summarizeSend us a textWe're joined by the Macro Compass writer, Alfonso Peccatiello, former bank prop trader, to discuss all things macro in the wake of JP Morgan's chief, Jamie Dimon, issuing a hurricane warning - bad things are coming. We examine the meteorological landscape.Support the show⬇️ Subscribe on Patreon or Substack for full episodes ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/HughHendryhttps://hughhendry.substack.comhttps://www.instagram.com/hughhendryofficialhttps://blancbleustbarts.comhttps://www.instagram.com/blancbleuofficial⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Leave a five star review and comment on Apple Podcasts!🧢 Hats & Merch 📸 Instagram 🐦 Twitter / X📩 Substack👂Listen and 🔥 Subscribe📺 YouTube🎧 ...
Transcribe →