Guild’s Global
Market Commentary

Contrarian News and Views To Help You Avoid Risk
and Find Opportunity In Global Markets.
China
Rudolph von Abele

China’s Eternally Postponed “Rebalancing”

Xi Jinping arrives in Washington later this month; when the two presidents met in Beijing in May, Xi reached rhetorically for the “Thucydides Trap” — national security scholar Graham Allison’s framing of a rising power and an established one stumbling toward an unnecessary and accidental conflict. He may reach for

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Agriculture
Rudolph von Abele

Trading, Trending, and Treading Water

As we wrote last week, the Treasury said on August 19 that it would at least double its buyback operations in the ten-to-thirty-year sector, from $2 billion to at least $4 billion apiece. Long yields fell on the news… and climbed straight back. Secretary Bessent called it a “Treasury Twist.”

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Gold
Rudolph von Abele

Bessent Blinks

We were planning to write about rates already after watching them climb for months. On Tuesday, as we were wrapping up this piece, yields on thirty-year Treasuries touched 5.339 percent, their highest since 2007. Then on Wednesday morning, the Treasury Department for all intents and purposes said “Enough!” and announced

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Alternative Energy
Rudolph von Abele

Freeing and Moving Electrons Remains a Big Theme

In last week’s commentary, we briefly discussed the destruction and fire sale of a large, highly leveraged hedge fund portfolio called Situational Awareness that was run by a smart 20-something year old. The fund was eyeball-deep in the AI trade; long all the important inputs AI requires (mainly semiconductors), and

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Artificial Intelligence
Rudolph von Abele

The Auditors Arrive

Very little has happened in markets these past few weeks that will alter the trajectory of artificial intelligence; a lot has happened regarding the financial market frenzy surrounding it. Here are three items: What is that list? It is just a sample of how when markets are very extended and

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Earnings Season: Five Things That Matter More Than the Beats, and One Wildcard

We were surprised to read that Wall Street has never carried higher expectations into an earnings season than it is carrying into this one — recession rebounds aside. The bottom-up consensus (that is, analysts’ company-by-company estimates, added up) calls for S&P 500 earnings to grow 26.2% from a year ago,

AI Is Revitalizing the Industrial Sector, Not Killing It

If you strip the AI rally down to what the money is actually buying, you finally find transformers, high-voltage switchgear, copper, industrial-scale cooling, gas turbines, and data centers whose power draw rivals that of a midsize country — a build-out that Goldman Sachs estimates at roughly $7.6 trillion between 2026

America at 250: If Given a Choice, Continue to Bet on the Country

Happy Fourth of July to all our readers! Here’s our patriotic but unsentimental analysis of where we stand midway through 2026, why we think it makes sense to keep betting on America, and how you should be thinking about market risks and dynamics. You can watch the video here and

Priming the Pump Before November: Three Washington Tailwinds

Next week we’ll give you a video presentation of our first-half 2026 wrap-up and offer some thoughts as we enter the second half of the year. Beyond the MOU signed with Iran — which markets and the G7 have basically treated as a likely success — Washington has spent June

Talking About Tokens, Not “Tokens”

For most of the past decade, “tokenization,” in the minds of most investors, was in the same category as 2017’s meme coins and 2021’s million-dollar cartoon JPEGs of apes — a silly distraction in a then-madly exuberant fringe market, easy to wave away. If that’s still your view, it needs

Gravity Is Relentless… Even In Elon Musk’s Orbit

This Friday, June 12, SpaceX — now enlarged by the recent merger with Elon Musk’s xAI and the X platform — begins trading on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. At the indicated initial pricing of $135 per share, the offering raises roughly $75 billion and implies a market value

When the Announcements Outpace the Concrete

There is a particular kind of chart that tends to make us equal parts pleased and uneasy: the parabola. Lines that bend skyward at an accelerating rate are exhilarating to own, painful to watch from the sidelines, and miserable to time, because the same steepness that rewards you on the