I'll translate this content from Chinese to English while preserving all HTML tags, structure, and the `
The information flow is too fast, making it easy for in-depth analytical articles to be drowned out by hot topics. This "Weekly Editor's Pick" column sifts through the vast sea of information to salvage content with judgment value, helping you filter out the noise, retain insights, and gain inspiration.
Macro Landscape
After the Strait of Hormuz Reopens, Which Trades Is the Market Betting On?
The conflict has largely shifted from the military front to the negotiating table. The market is transitioning from a "war shock" to a "supply recovery" mindset.
Following the strait's reopening, the market is shorting crude oil risk premiums, going long on airlines, cruise lines, and tourism chains, betting on Asian energy importers, increasing bond duration, and shorting inflation expectations. LNG, fertilizer, and chemical chains are also being re-priced.
Investment & Entrepreneurship
Ray Dalio: As AI Giants Dominate US Stocks, I Choose Not to Bet on Direction, But Only Do One Thing
Technological progress itself does not automatically make related stocks equally attractive. Major historical technology cycles often go through phases of excitement, overcrowding, volatility, and cleansing.
When a handful of tech companies occupy an increasingly higher weight in an index, investors need to be wary of unconsciously holding highly correlated, concentrated risk exposure. Rather than continuing to chase a few leaders, a truly more robust approach is to build a diversified portfolio of high-quality, low-correlation assets and adjust volatility levels according to one's own risk tolerance.
Crypto 2029: The Ultimate Prediction for the Crypto Industry's Four-Year Cycle
While the logic of products in the perpetual contracts, stablecoins, and asset tokenization tracks is sound and market demand is well-validated, external policy forces outside the industry severely limit their development speed.
By 2029, what will remain in the public eye is the core product that the crypto industry has been truly building through rounds of speculative cycles — the asset trading market.
When BTC is above $120,000, everyone is willing to believe it will go higher; but when it falls back to around $60,000, and on-chain valuations, cycle positioning, long-term holder percentages, and macro variables all point to a bottoming zone, the market's biggest shortage is confidence.
The current zone is closer to a window for phased accumulation requiring patience, discipline, and confidence.
Written After the SpaceX Debut: A $2.1 Trillion Market Cap, Is It Still Worth Chasing?
SpaceX jumped $150, closing its first trading day with a $2.1 trillion market cap. SpaceX's current revenue simply cannot support its massive valuation.
Starlink is currently SpaceX's only profitable business. Space launches are SpaceX's flagship service.
Besides the mismatch between actual business and valuation, the large proportion of retail investors in the IPO might also be a reason for SPCX's suppressed stock price. Musk allocated 20-30% of SpaceX's IPO shares to retail investors. The larger the retail shareholding ratio, the greater the inherent volatility. Retail investors might buy in without regard for cost due to FOMO, and sell off emotionally at the slightest fluctuation. Therefore, retail investors mainly affect volatility, not the final gains.
For investors focused on SpaceX, the following two time points are particularly important:
- Approximately 15 trading days after the IPO (estimated around July 6-7), there is a very high probability that SpaceX will be included in the Nasdaq index, prompting top-tier funds to buy the stock.
- SpaceX's Q2 earnings report (mid-to-late August).
Rising Makes It More Dangerous? The Systemic Risk Behind SpaceX's Soaring Valuation
A gamma squeeze, i.e., a feedback loop where options market makers are forced to buy the underlying stock for hedging, further pushing up the stock price. If SpaceX follows this path and is further propelled by its own narrative strength, limited float, and Musk's personal influence, it could evolve from a high-valuation stock into a systemic variable for the entire market.
The more dangerous part lies in indexation and passive investing. When a company becomes large enough in market cap, it gets included in major indices, passively held by ETFs, pension funds, retirement accounts, sovereign wealth funds, and institutional portfolios. At this point, the bubble is no longer just an adventure for a few traders; it enters the long-term asset allocation of ordinary investors. The higher it rises, the harder the market finds it to bypass it; and the harder it is to bypass, the more capital tends to flow towards it.
The article discusses a structural paradox of modern capital markets: When market mechanisms themselves can amplify narrative, leverage, and liquidity enough to overwhelm fundamentals, can so-called "price discovery" still hold?
For Those Still Obsessed with Altcoins, Just Go All-In on HOOD
HOOD has recently risen amid multiple positive factors.
For a long time, cryptocurrency-related revenue has been a significant part of Robinhood's total revenue, and HOOD's stock price has shown a strong correlation with cryptocurrencies. However, recently, there have been some signs that Robinhood is breaking free from its dependence on crypto business and positively decoupling from this correlation. Its stock trading, prediction markets, Pre-IPO, and newly added underwriting businesses are still expected to support its performance growth.
If the crypto market returns to a bull run in the future, Robinhood's crypto trading revenue will likely explode in tandem, and HOOD will still enjoy the dividends from industry growth.
Missing the Crypto Stock Wave, Korean Exchanges Forced to Chase "Meme Coins"
Against the backdrop of a weakening crypto market and Korean crypto investors shifting to stock trading, Korean exchanges saw a collective decline in their Q1 2026 performance, forcing them to desperately take measures to reverse the slump. However, unlike other overseas exchanges that can transform into "everything exchanges" listing a large number of tokenized stocks to meet crypto traders' demands, Korea classifies tokenized stocks as securities, thus banning crypto exchanges from such transactions, as well as prohibiting them from trading crypto futures, derivatives, or spot exchange-traded funds (ETFs).
Korea's regulatory measures aimed at protecting investors have instead pushed exchanges towards the most speculative corners of the market. With revenue sources and new product lines like derivatives, tokenized stocks, and prediction markets all prohibited, exchanges, in order to boost platform trading volume, tend to list "meme coins" that can attract attention and are more speculative.
Web3 & AI
Nearly $1 trillion in procurement commitments, over $800 billion in non-cancelable lease contracts, and tens of billions in supplier financing arrangements together constitute approximately $1.8 trillion in off-balance-sheet exposure—these liabilities exist outside the balance sheet but genuinely lock in future cash outflows. The market has not yet fully priced in these risks.
Morgan Stanley warns that the leverage ratio of hyperscale cloud companies has soared from 0.9x to 1.8x in just two quarters, with capital expenditure growth consistently outpacing revenue and free cash flow growth, while the real impact of depreciation pressure has yet to hit.
Meanwhile, private credit institutions like Apollo and Blackstone are using SPVs (Special Purpose Vehicles) to transfer leverage to the supply chain level, creating a highly circular and opaque financing structure. If the commercialization of AI falls short of expectations, or if corporate clients massively switch to cheaper alternatives, the fragility of the entire financing chain will be exposed.
Large models like Qwen, ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, DeepSeek, and Copilot can not only answer "which team is more likely to win," but also provide score predictions, upset possibilities, red card risks, key player performance, and game trend analysis.
For prediction market participants, AI's pre-game simulations are becoming another reference layer alongside odds, news, team data, and market sentiment.
Who Gets Your AI Monthly Fee? A Chart Breaks Down the Computing Power Supply Chain Behind $20
A cost breakdown chart for Claude's $20 subscription, tracing the monthly AI fee from the model company to cloud computing, GPUs, electricity, and the supply chain.
AI subscriptions have ongoing inference costs and cannot simply apply the high-margin assumptions of traditional SaaS.
Related assets: OpenAI, Anthropic, Microsoft, Amazon, Google, NVIDIA (NVDA), TSMC, SK Hynix, Samsung, Micron, data centers, and the power chain.
Prediction Markets
The First Pure-Play Prediction Market Stock Has Arrived!
Kalshi had announced a partnership with US online broker Robinhood, where the latter would use the former to offer prediction market trading services to its users, allowing them to bet on events related to politics, economics, sports, etc. However, this relationship has recently undergone some subtle changes. Robinhood is gradually discovering that what is truly scarce might not be the market itself, but the user entry point it firmly controls. Robinhood holds a key resource — distribution capability.
After about half a year of accelerated development, the Rothera product has taken shape, and Robinhood has finally made the almost inevitable move — gradually shifting orders that were previously directed to Kalshi into its own controlled system. Robinhood deliberately chose a perfect launchpad for Rothera: the World Cup.
If the theme of the prediction market industry in the past few years was a market battle between Polymarket and Kalshi, the theme for the coming years might become a channel war.
Also recommended: World Cup Kicks Off: A Look at the "Huge Wins" and "Huge Losses" in the Prediction Market.
CeFi & DeFi
IOSG: The First Real-World Test of Three Perpetual Mechanisms on SpaceX's IPO Day
Without a public spot price, how does the market price an asset? This is the core challenge for the entire Pre-IPO perpetual category.
In the SpaceX case, trade.xyz captured the on-chain market (about 96.5% of volume), not because its oracle was smarter, but because near-zero funding rates made it nearly costless to hold, it launched riding the IPO catalyst, and its per-share pricing allowed for cross-exchange arbitrage.
However, while Pre-IPO perpetuals are good at handling prices, their handling of events remains primitive. Corporate actions, especially stock splits after conversion, have no pipeline on-chain: trade.xyz hasn't disclosed any rebase mechanism, while Ventuals outsourced this to a single data provider, which has already caused an issue (an outdated split data point caused its market to flash crash 45%). The bottleneck isn't price discovery, but that boring 'corporate action' processing layer: traditional markets took a century to standardize it, but no one has rebuilt it on-chain yet. Whoever can reliably deliver it will fill the last gap between these markets and the markets they aim to replace.
STRC Severely De-pegs, What Risk Is the Market Pricing In?
STRC fell to around $89. Based on an annualized dividend of $11.50, the simple current yield is approximately 12.9%.
The market disagreement is not about whether Strategy will immediately fail to pay dividends, but about how to discount BTC reserves, high-interest financing, on-chain leverage, and competition from similar products.
Related assets: STRC, MSTR/Strategy, SATA, BTC, Pendle, and related on-chain yield products.
STRC De-pegs 11%. Can Strategy's Perpetual Motion Machine Still Turn?
The market's pricing of STRC reflects not only investor sentiment towards a preferred stock but also market confidence in Strategy's entire capital operation model.
Within Strategy's balance sheet expansion loop, STRC is not just an ordinary financing tool; it is the most powerful engine of Strategy's current capital flywheel. Through the loop of "issuing more STRC ➡️ raising fiat currency ➡️ buying BTC ➡️ increasing company book value ➡️ boosting STRC trust," Strategy has successfully built a seemingly infinite capital flywheel. However, the key prerequisite for this flywheel to operate smoothly is that STRC must maintain its value near the face value of $100.
The failure of the dividend correction effect means the market is pricing in risks beyond STRC's yield itself. Firstly, there are superficial technical factors. Some market participants believe the recent decline is largely due to herd-like de-leveraging by arbitrage funds. The deeper concern lies with Strategy's liquidity reserve status.
Annualized 15%-25%, Is BlackRock's Bitcoin Income ETF an Opportunity or a Trap?
BITA, backed by BlackRock's spot Bitcoin fund IBIT, generates stable option premium income for investors by selling covered call options, but at the cost of sacrificing some of the potential upside from Bitcoin's price appreciation. This income-oriented Bitcoin fund is designed for investors and institutions seeking stable cash flow, addressing the pain point of institutions being unable to hold zero-yield assets.
Fund flows will provide the final answer. If BITA and IBIT continue to attract Bitcoin inflows while BTC holds the $65,000 range, it suggests sustained institutional buying interest. Conversely, if the income ETF only diverts existing capital from the spot fund, then the bears' "income trap" thesis will be validated.
Ethereum & Scaling
Sharplink CEO: A Million Ethereum Developers, Who Can Compete?
Ethereum's core advantage is not speed, but its ability to attract the largest and deepest talent pool. Its true moat lies in the long-term ecosystem built by composability, standard-setting, and credible neutrality. These builders are focused on cutting-edge issues like scalability and quantum resistance, continuously solidifying Ethereum's position as the default operating system for the financial internet.
Weekly Hot Topics Catch-up
Policy & Macro Markets
Iranian media released detailed terms of the US-Iran Memorandum of Understanding, including reopening the Strait of Hormuz and releasing $24 billion of frozen Iranian funds;
The US and Iran announced an immediate and permanent end to military operations on all fronts;
The US-Iran agreement was finalized, crypto and gold surged, and oil plunged;
