stream of consciousness, Monday edition
Notes From the Floor of the Burning Building
February 23, 2026 — stream of consciousness, Monday edition
7:14 a.m. Coffee. Futures down. Of course they are.
The tariff whiplash from last week hasn't finished echoing. The Supreme Court hands down a six-to-three ruling on Friday — IEEPA overreach, unconstitutional, here's your $175 billion in theoretical refunds — and the market breathes for exactly one news cycle. Then, before the weekend can even finish drying, a Section 122 executive order drops. Fifteen percent global tariff, effective immediately. S&P futures off 0.7% before most of America has poured its first cup. The legal challenge didn't kill the policy. It just rerouted it.
What kind of market keeps pricing in "resolution" when the other side keeps inventing new hallways?
Somewhere on the desk, someone has NVDA on a second monitor. Always. The stock closed Friday at $189.82, trading at 46 times earnings, $4.6 trillion market cap, and the entire AI capex supercycle riding shotgun in the valuation. Earnings Wednesday. After the bell. Revenue consensus sitting at $65.6 billion — that's 65% year-over-year growth, which would be extraordinary for a company that already did $57 billion last quarter and beat by $2 billion that time too.
The Q3 print was clean. Blackwell chips sold out. Jensen said "compute demand keeps accelerating and compounding" and nobody really argued with him because the hyperscaler spend data backed it up: Meta's 2026 capex, Amazon's $200 billion infrastructure commitment, Microsoft not blinking. The whole cathedral of AI spending is still standing, stained glass intact.
And yet. The stock is flat year-to-date. Down 11% since October. The market is charging admission and then sitting in the back row with its arms crossed.
Wall Street consensus for Wednesday is $1.52 EPS. What matters more than the number is the forward guidance — any sign of demand softening, any whisper of a Blackwell inventory build, and the stock goes into freefall in Thursday's premarket regardless of what the actual figures say. The bull case is pristine. The problem is that everyone already knows the bull case. When everyone knows it, the only surprise left is the bad kind.
Wednesday after close. Mark it.
Meanwhile, Bitcoin is having what clinicians might call a dissociative episode.
Short-term BTC whales are currently sitting on roughly $26 billion in unrealized losses — among the highest levels recorded this year. The Fear & Greed Index is at 5. To put that in context: 8 is "extreme fear." 5 is something beyond that, some cartographic territory that doesn't have a name yet. The market has technically been in the $60,000-$69,000 demand cluster that Glassnode identified weeks ago and it's just... sitting there. Absorbing. Not bouncing. Absorbing.
Here's the thing that won't leave me alone: there's no FTX here. No Three Arrows. No obvious contagion event, no Sam Bankman-Fried in cargo shorts. Bitcoin and Ethereum are off to their worst start of the year in a decade, and there's been no obvious single catalyst — which, paradoxically, has some analysts feeling more hopeful, not less. The thesis being: when there's no wreckage to clean up, the floor might actually hold.
Maybe. But "no obvious catalyst" can also mean the market is repricing something structural and slow-moving, the kind of thing you don't see until it's already happened. Binance spot volumes down 95% since inauguration. Total crypto market cap down $1.3 trillion in two months. ETH at $1,875. Vitalik selling again — another 1,869 ETH last week, roughly $3.67 million — and the price following him down like it always does, like the market treats his wallet as a leading indicator rather than a personal financial decision.
The Genius Act stablecoin framework is in implementation phase. The Clarity Act is moving through committee. California's DFAL licensing regime opens applications in March. The regulatory architecture that crypto spent three years begging for is finally getting built. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index is at 8, which some analysts argue is "sheer panic" given how much structural progress the sector has made.
The irony, thick as August air: the institutions showed up. BlackRock, Fidelity, the ETF pipes are all in place. The suits arrived. And the price went down anyway. Forty-nine percent from October highs. $62,000 erased per coin. The retail crowd that bought the inauguration narrative is now holding bags while the Fear & Greed index registers readings that suggest a hostage situation.
Gold is at $2,938 this morning. Up 17% year-to-date. Silver up 14%. Oil ticking toward $66 a barrel.
So let's say the quiet part out loud: the hard assets that have been dismissed as barbarous relics or energy plays are doing exactly what you'd expect them to do in an environment where fiscal credibility is visibly degrading, tariff policy is rewritten by executive order on Sunday afternoons, and the Fed is frozen at 3.50%-3.75% while core PCE sits at 3% and won't budge.
The trade of 2026, so far, has not been AI. It has not been crypto. It has not been the Nasdaq. It's been gold, and the energy names, and the boring commodity complex that nobody writes breathless Substack posts about.
There's a lesson in there somewhere about narratives and prices, and how long they can diverge before one of them surrenders.
Wednesday is the axis. Nvidia reports after close and the number will either validate the entire AI spend thesis that has been propping up Nasdaq valuations for two years, or it will introduce the first meaningful crack — not a collapse, just a crack — and the market will spend the rest of Q1 figuring out what that means.
The tariff noise will still be there Thursday. Bitcoin will still be somewhere between $60K and $75K, slowly digesting whatever it's digesting. Gold will keep climbing. The Fed will keep watching.
Nothing is resolved. Everything is live.
Don't look away from Wednesday.