Daily Coffee — Saturday, February 28, 2026
BRC FinTech Corporation
"He sang the thing from nothingness, hammered it from emptiness, forged from a swan's feather-tip, from barren heifer's milk, from a small barley grain, from a summer fleece tip."
— The Kalevala, Canto 10: The Forging of the Sampo
Today is National Tooth Fairy Day, Kalevala Day, and National Science Day.
One could not design a more precisely calibrated triptych for the morning after the worst February in a year for the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq Composite. On a day when children are taught to exchange a real tooth — a physical object, grown from calcium and enamel and lived experience — for a fictitious coin left by a creature that does not exist, the American financial system invites us to contemplate an economy that has been doing precisely the same thing, at industrial scale, for the better part of two decades. The Tooth Fairy's transaction is at least honest about its fiction. The same cannot be said of the Financial Accounting Standards Board ("FASB"), the held-to-maturity accounting regime, or the private credit industry's "creative marks."
Kalevala Day celebrates the Finnish national epic, compiled by Elias Lönnrot from Finnish and Karelian oral poetry, whose preface was signed on this date in 1835. At the center of the Kalevala stands the Sampo — a mythical artifact, forged by the smith Ilmarinen, that produces endless wealth from nothing. Grain. Salt. Gold. All flowing from a device whose mechanism is never explained, whose provenance is contested, and whose eventual destruction triggers a war between civilizations. The Sampo is, in the Oxford English Dictionary ("OED")'s precise vocabulary, a simulacrum of productive capacity — the appearance of wealth creation without the substance. In 2026, the Sampo is no longer mythological. It is the algorithmic trading infrastructure that generates returns from leverage, the private equity model that manufactures Net Asset Value ("NAV") from marks-to-model, and the Value-at-Risk ("VaR") system that produces safety from assumptions. Each one forges wealth "from nothingness, hammered from emptiness." And like the Sampo, each one will break.
Speaking of Finland: Mikayla Demaiter — the Canadian model and former ice hockey goaltender whose social media presence routinely tests the boundaries of the same anonymous algorithms that Friday's Daily Coffee identified as the intellectual cousins of VaR models — is the perfect embodiment of Kalevala Day's collision between the physical and the algorithmic. Demaiter is a real person, with real athletic credentials, posting real photographs of herself in the real world. The algorithms that censor her images cannot distinguish between a professional model's curated content and the "risk" they have been programmed to suppress. They pattern-match. They are confident. They are wrong at the tails. The same structural limitation — the inability of a pattern-matching engine to distinguish between signal and noise in the extremes of its distribution — is precisely the limitation that makes VaR models unreliable and that makes the Sampo's mechanism unknowable. The algorithms that govern social media content moderation and the algorithms that govern bank risk management are not merely analogous. They are architecturally identical. Both are statistical engines trained on the body of the distribution, deployed in domains where the tails are what matter, and structurally incapable of performing the judgment that the tail demands.
National Science Day, observed in India on the anniversary of C.V. Raman's discovery of the scattering of light that bears his name, reminds us that science proceeds not by confirmation of expectations, but by the rigorous confrontation of theory with observation. Raman did not discover the Raman Effect by assuming his hypothesis was correct and publishing the results. He subjected it to empirical test. What the capital markets need this morning — and what they have demonstrably lacked for the entirety of this cycle — is Raman's discipline: the willingness to let the data override the model, not the other way around.
Lars's coffee this morning is black, unhurried, and Finnish in its temperament — which is to say, disinclined toward small talk and entirely comfortable with the silence that follows an uncomfortable truth.
The Week That Was: February Closes in Red
Let us begin where the models ended: in the red.
Friday, February 27, delivered the exclamation point on a month of accumulating damage. The S&P 500 closed at 5,878.88, down 0.43% for the day and down 0.86% for the month — its steepest monthly loss since March 2025. The Nasdaq Composite finished at 22,668.21, losing 0.92% on the day and more than 3.3% for February. The Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 521 points to close at 48,977.92, shedding 1.05% in a single session. The Dow barely eked out a 0.17% gain for February, preserving by a hair its nine-month winning streak, though the preservation has the quality of a man who has survived a car wreck with his seatbelt intact — technically a success, viscerally a warning.
The catalyst was double-barreled. At 8:30 AM Eastern, the Bureau of Economic Analysis ("BEA") reported that the core Personal Consumption Expenditures ("PCE") Price Index — the Federal Reserve's preferred inflation gauge — rose 0.5% in January, more than double the 0.2% consensus estimate. On an annual basis, core inflation accelerated to 3.1%, up from 2.8% in December. This followed Thursday's Producer Price Index ("PPI"), which showed wholesale inflation at 0.5% versus expectations of 0.3%, with core PPI at a startling 0.8% against the 0.3% the Street anticipated. Both numbers, in combination, accomplished something that six months of Federal Reserve communications had been working carefully to avoid: they resurrected the question of whether the Fed will have to raise rates in 2026, not cut them.
For an economy whose consumption model, private credit valuations, and equity multiples are all predicated on the assumption of rate cuts, the resurrection of rate-hike risk is not an inconvenience. It is a structural threat. The market priced it accordingly.
Technology bore the brunt. NVIDIA extended its post-earnings slide with a 4.1% drop — this despite having reported record quarterly revenue of $68.13 billion earlier in the week that beat estimates by nearly $2 billion. The fact that a record earnings beat could not sustain NVIDIA's price for more than a single session is the definition of an ontological crisis: the earnings are real, but the market no longer trusts the narrative that connects them to a sustainable future. CoreWeave, the GPU cloud computing firm, sank 18.6% on disappointing guidance. Block — Jack Dorsey's fintech company — announced layoffs of more than 4,000 employees, nearly half its workforce, explicitly citing AI automation as the driver. This is the Engels' Pause at digital velocity made manifest in a single corporate action: the machine that generates the revenue is the same machine that eliminates the employees.
The financials suffered their own, separate contagion. Apollo Global Management fell approximately 8%. Jefferies Group dropped nearly 9%. Barclays shed 4%. Wells Fargo lost 5%. The catalyst was the reported collapse of UK mortgage provider Market Financial Solutions ("MFS"), with Bloomberg naming Barclays, Jefferies, Santander, Wells Fargo, and Apollo's Atlas SP Partners among MFS's lenders. The private credit contagion that Friday's Daily Coffee described as "cockroaches due in 2026" has now crossed the Atlantic. When private credit losses appear simultaneously in fintech (Block), GPU infrastructure (CoreWeave), and UK mortgage lending (MFS), the word "idiosyncratic" no longer applies. The correct word, in the OED's formulation, is systemic.
Gold closed the week at approximately $5,226 per ounce, up $48.81 on the day. Silver, which closed Friday near $92, continues to strengthen into the weekend. In a month that savaged equities, hammered software, ignited private credit contagion, and delivered two consecutive inflation prints that exceeded every consensus estimate, the hard assets — the things you can hold, weigh, and assay — appreciated. The Tooth Fairy leaves imaginary money. The metals market, on February's last day, is paying in real.
The Sampo Problem: When the Wealth Machine Has No Mechanism
The Kalevala is a work of 22,795 verses divided into fifty cantos, compiled from oral poetry that had been sung in Finnish and Karelian for two thousand years before Lönnrot collected it. It is regarded as the national epic of Finland and Karelia, and its publication in 1835 was instrumental in the development of Finnish national identity and, ultimately, Finland's independence from Russia in 1917. It directly inspired Jean Sibelius's tone poems, Akseli Gallen-Kallela's paintings, and — most relevantly for an audience of capital markets professionals — J.R.R. Tolkien's entire legendarium. The elvish languages, the Silmarillion, the One Ring — all draw explicitly from the Kalevala's architecture of mythological objects with power that exceeds their creators' understanding.
The Sampo is the Kalevala's central artifact. Forged by the smith Ilmarinen at the request of Louhi, the Mistress of the North, the Sampo produces grain, salt, and gold in perpetual abundance. Its mechanism is never described. Its origin materials are — as the epigraph to this post documents — absurd: a swan's feather, barren heifer's milk, a barley grain, a fleece tip. The Sampo works because the narrative says it works. When it is stolen by the heroes of Kalevala and broken in the ensuing battle, the fragments scatter across the sea, and from those fragments — the poem tells us — Finland's modest agricultural bounty is born.
The Sampo is, in 2026, the most precisely relevant myth available to a capital markets analyst.
Consider the structural parallels:
The Sampo produces wealth from no visible mechanism. The private equity model, at its current scale, produces returns that exceed the underlying cash flows of its portfolio companies. The mechanism by which this occurs — leverage, creative marks, Payment-in-Kind ("PIK") interest, amend-and-extend, and the circular financing of data centers — is not "production." It is financial engineering applied to the appearance of production. The Sampo's grain was real grain. The private equity industry's "returns" are, in a disturbing number of cases, marks-to-model that have never been tested against a liquidity event.
The Sampo's provenance is contested. Who owns the wealth it produces? In the Kalevala, this question triggers a war. In 2026, the same question — who owns the "alpha" in private credit? The general partners or the limited partners? The managers or the pensioners? — is triggering a slower-motion conflict whose casualty list now includes BlackRock Collateralized Loan Obligations ("CLOs") that have failed overcollateralization tests, Blue Owl fund mergers aborted amid NAV mismatches, and the Department of Justice publicly flagging "creative marks" as a matter of legal concern.
The Sampo breaks. This is the detail that the Finnish myth captures and that the financial models exclude. The Sampo does not degrade gracefully. It does not decline in an orderly fashion. It shatters. Its fragments scatter. The wealth it produced was never real in the sense that its beneficiaries believed; it was a function of the artifact's integrity, and when the artifact breaks, the wealth does not merely decrease — it ceases to exist in the form that had been assumed.
This is the non-linear event that the Tau Intelligence Engine has been flagging since its structural fragility indicators reached their highest levels since inception. Private credit does not default in a linear progression from 4% to 5% to 6%. It defaults at 4% — and then, when a liquidity event forces marks-to-market, it reveals that the "4%" was itself a fiction, and the actual distress rate was multiples of the headline number. This is the Sampo breaking. This is the cliff edge. And the fact that this metaphor was first committed to poetry in the Karelian language two thousand years ago, and codified by Lönnrot on this date in 1835, suggests that the human tendency to construct wealth machines from swan feathers and barren heifer's milk is not a modern innovation. It is an anthropological constant.
The Tooth Fairy and the Tail: Why the Computer Cannot Help
Friday's companion paper — "Why You Cannot Trust What the Computer Prints on Its Screen" — laid out the epistemological argument in detail. On this Saturday morning, it bears restating in the Kitchen Table idiom.
The Tooth Fairy exchange is simple: a child places a real tooth under a pillow and receives a dollar in return. The child knows — or will soon learn — that the dollar did not materialize from magical provenance. It came from a parent's wallet. The mechanism is visible, the fiction is benign, and the transaction is bounded: one tooth, one dollar, one time.
Now scale the Tooth Fairy exchange to the dimensions of the modern financial system.
A pension fund places $500 million of real capital — the retirement savings of teachers, firefighters, and municipal workers — into a private credit vehicle. The vehicle reports a 12% annualized return. The pension fund's board marks the investment at cost-plus-accrued-interest. The "return" on the computer screen is not a measurement of cash received. It is an extrapolation from a model that assumes the underlying loans will perform as modeled, that the marks are accurate, that the borrowers will refinance at maturity, and that no liquidity event will force a mark-to-market reckoning before the fund's stated term expires.
The tooth under the pillow is real. The dollar from the Tooth Fairy is real (it came from a wallet). But the 12% return on the computer screen? That is the Tooth Fairy's provenance applied at institutional scale. It is a number produced by a model whose assumptions have not been tested against the conditions that now prevail: hot inflation, rising default rates, private credit contagion from the United Kingdom to the United States, and a Federal Reserve that may be forced to raise rates rather than cut them.
Here is the scientific observation that C.V. Raman would have appreciated, and that Nassim Nicholas Taleb and Pasquale Cirillo formalized in their 2025 paper "The Regress of Uncertainty and the Forecasting Paradox":
The future is structurally fatter-tailed than the past.
Every risk model — every VaR calculation, every stress test, every Monte Carlo simulation — is calibrated on historical data. The past is, by definition, realized: its extremes are bounded by what actually happened. The future's extremes are bounded only by what could happen, including events with no historical precedent. The nested epistemic uncertainty inherent in any statistical estimate (errors on errors on errors, recursing infinitely) produces, mathematically, distributions whose tails are always thicker than the distributions estimated from the sample. The model cannot overcome this. A faster processor cannot overcome it. More data from the body of the distribution cannot overcome it, because more depth readings in the harbor do not reveal the shape of the abyssal trench.
This is why a VaR model calibrated on the last 30 years of silver price data could not have predicted the January 2026 rupture — because the training data contained no precedent for it. No Convolutional Neural Network ("CNN"), no Recurrent Neural Network ("RNN"), no Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback ("RLHF")-tuned model can predict what it has never observed. This is why a private credit model calibrated on the benign default environment of 2017–2024 cannot predict the cascading failure mode that occurs when UK mortgage lenders, GPU cloud providers, and fintech companies default simultaneously. The model assigns near-zero probability to events it has never observed. The events, indifferent to the model's opinion, occur anyway.
The computer prints a number. The number has four decimal places. The number is wrong at the tails, which is precisely where it matters. One cannot trust what the computer prints on its screen — not because the computer is dishonest, but because the question being asked admits no honest answer from the available data.
Raman did not trust the light until he measured it himself. The capital markets, by contrast, trust the model until the model breaks — and then they act surprised that the model broke, despite the fact that every model, throughout all of recorded financial history, has eventually broken.
Silver on First Notice Day: The Aftermath
Yesterday — Friday, February 27 — was First Notice Day for March Commodity Exchange ("COMEX") silver futures contracts. This is the date when holders of long positions declare their intent to take physical delivery, and sellers must demonstrate their ability to deliver actual metal. It is the day when the Sampo must produce the grain, or be revealed as empty.
The data from Friday's session are still being tabulated, but the structural conditions bear restating. Open interest in March contracts approached 127 million ounces. COMEX registered inventories have declined by over 70% since 2020. The global silver market remains fragmented into three islands — Asia, North America, Europe — with arbitrage mechanisms unable to equalize pricing. Shanghai premiums of 12–13% above London Bullion Market Association ("LBMA") spot persist. The Exchange for Physical ("EFP") spread has widened from a historical average of $0.25 to over $1.10 per ounce. Lease rates, which exploded to 39% in October 2025, remain at a still-extraordinary 11%.
Silver's strengthening from Friday's close into the weekend suggests that the First Notice Day process did not relieve the pressure. It intensified it. Gold's concurrent appreciation confirms that the hard-asset bid is not softening as February ends. It is accelerating.
The Tau Intelligence Engine's "pre-fracture" designation from December 2025 remains in effect. The conditions that prompted the January rupture, followed by the bullion banks' violent correction, have not been resolved. They have been temporarily suppressed. The Sampo is still intact — for now. When it breaks, the fragments will not gently redistribute themselves. They will scatter, as Lönnrot's verse describes, across the sea.
The Great 2026 Rotation: What the Headline Index Conceals
The S&P 500's year-to-date performance of approximately 0.7% tells a story that is, to borrow the OED's language, deceptive by omission. The index appears becalmed. Beneath the surface, the rotation is violent — and it is historic.
The Invesco S&P 500 Equal Weight ETF ("RSP"), which assigns each of the 500 constituents an identical 0.2% allocation regardless of market capitalization, is up approximately 6.7% year-to-date. The cap-weighted S&P 500: 0.7%. The divergence — approximately six percentage points in less than two months — represents one of the most dramatic reversals in the relationship between equal-weight and cap-weight indices since the aftermath of the dot-com collapse. The underlying sector dispersion has reached the 99th percentile of historical norms, creating what FinancialContent described on Friday as a "bifurcated" market in which the average stock is materially outperforming the index that purports to represent it.
This is not an abstraction. It is arithmetic, and the arithmetic has a name: the "Magnificent Seven" ("Mag 7") — NVIDIA, Apple, Alphabet, Microsoft Corporation ("MSFT"), Amazon, Meta Platforms, and Tesla — which collectively represent approximately 32% of the cap-weighted S&P 500's total weight but have generated a collective year-to-date return of negative 6.3%. All seven are in the red. The damage is not evenly distributed.
Microsoft — the stock that, alongside NVIDIA, was the gravitational center of the Artificial Intelligence ("AI") narrative for two years — is down approximately 17% year-to-date as of February 27. Amazon has shed approximately 14%. Palantir Technologies, the AI-adjacent software firm that reached cult-stock status in 2025, is down approximately 22%. Adobe, Salesforce, and ServiceNow have each lost 25% to 30% this year. The Roundhill Magnificent Seven ETF is off 6.3%. When the seven largest companies in the index collectively decline by 6% while the equal-weight index rises by nearly 7%, the headline S&P 500 return of 0.7% is not a measure of market health. It is a simulacrum — an appearance of stability that conceals a structural rupture between the megacap digital economy and the physical economy that the equal-weight index more accurately represents.
The parallel to the late 1990s is no longer speculative. Over the three years ending December 2025, the cap-weighted S&P 500 outperformed the equal-weight version by approximately 32 percentage points — the widest three-year divergence since the dot-com era, when the comparable figure was 31 percentage points (1997–1999). The historical precedent is instructive: after the dot-com bubble burst, the equal-weight index outperformed the cap-weight for seven consecutive years. During the "lost decade" that followed, equal-weight produced a total return of 65% while the cap-weighted S&P 500 declined 9%. History does not repeat, but it does — as Mark Twain is credited with observing — rhyme. The 2026 rotation rhymes with 2000–2002 with uncomfortable precision.
Two sectors in particular merit attention for February's carnage, because they were, for the better part of three years, the two leading sector groups in the market: Technology and Financials. Technology, Communication Services, and Consumer Discretionary — the three megacap sectors that powered the 2023–2025 rally — are each down 2% to 4% in February. The S&P 500 software and services index has experienced what J.P. Morgan's analysts describe as the largest non-recessionary 12-month drawdown in over 30 years, erasing approximately $2 trillion in market capitalization.
Financials, the other pillar of the 2023–2025 rally, were savaged on Friday by the MFS private credit contagion. Apollo fell approximately 8%. Jefferies dropped approximately 9%. Barclays shed 4%. Wells Fargo lost 5%. The financial sector — which had been the second-best-performing sector for two consecutive years on the back of rising net interest margins and the private credit boom — is now the worst-performing sector in February, dragged down by exactly the private credit "cockroaches" that the Daily Coffee has been documenting since January.
The market, in short, has rotated out of the two sectors that defined the last three years and into the sectors that the Mag 7 narrative had left for dead. Energy is the best-performing sector year-to-date, up 24%. Utilities have posted their best month since 2003, up approximately 10% in February alone. Consumer Staples gained roughly 8%. Real Estate and Health Care are both positive.
The financial press has a term for this: the "Heavy Asset, Low Obsolescence" ("HALO") trade. The market is rotating from the digital to the physical, from the leveraged to the tangible, from the Sampo to the rock. This is not a sentiment shift. It is a structural repricing of the relationship between paper claims and physical reality, and it validates the thesis that Friday's Daily Coffee articulated at length: in a world where the models are wrong at the tails, the assets that retain value are the ones that do not depend on a model — or a Mixture of Experts ("MoE") architecture, or a Vector Database, or an Embeddings layer — for their valuation.
Corning Incorporated ("GLW") — the sine qua non of the AI fiber optic buildout — remains at all-time highs. Generac Holdings ("GNRC") — the "Kitchen Table" hedge against grid fragility — remains at its 52-week high. Both are physical-infrastructure companies whose revenue derives from objects that exist in the material world, not from marks-to-model or algorithmic extrapolations. Both are, in the Kalevala's language, rocks — not Sampos.
The Geopolitical Overlay: Iran and the Barrel
Buried beneath the inflation data and the private credit headlines on Friday was a development that the Tau Intelligence Engine is monitoring with elevated concern. The United States embassy in Jerusalem issued a directive to staff that they may leave Israel, with Ambassador Mike Huckabee describing the action in an email as arising from "an abundance of caution" and conversations with the State Department. Oil rose $1.31 to $66.81 on speculation of a U.S. strike on Iranian nuclear facilities.
If the United States engages militarily with Iran, the implications for every theme in this post — inflation, rate policy, precious metals, energy sector performance, private credit stress — become dramatically more acute. Oil above $80 in a hot-inflation environment with a Federal Reserve unable to cut rates is a scenario that the models have not priced, because the models assign low probability to events they have not previously observed. One more Tooth Fairy dollar under the pillow.
A Scientist's Saturday: What Raman Would Measure
C.V. Raman, whose 1928 discovery of the inelastic scattering of photons earned him the 1930 Nobel Prize in Physics, understood a principle that the capital markets have systematically violated: you do not know what the data show until you measure the data. Raman did not begin with his conclusion and work backward to find supporting evidence. He began with an observation — that scattered light changes frequency — and designed an experiment to test whether the observation was reproducible, quantifiable, and theoretically explicable.
If Raman were analyzing the February 2026 capital markets, he would measure the following:
The divergence between reported private credit returns and realized cash flows. He would not accept the marks at face value. He would demand the underlying cash.
The ratio between paper silver claims and deliverable physical metal, and he would note that the ratio has inverted from the historical assumption of fungibility into the empirical reality of fragmentation.
The correlation between asset classes during stress, and he would observe that the correlation converges to one — invalidating every diversification model built on the assumption of low correlation.
The distribution of returns, and he would observe that the tails are fat, that the Gaussian assumption is empirically falsified, and that the models calibrated on the Gaussian are, in his precise scientific language, wrong.
Raman would, in short, do what the Standard Business Report Model ("SBRM") is designed to enable at institutional scale: subject the claims to machine-readable, empirically verifiable, independently auditable scrutiny. The system is broken not because the data are unavailable, but because the system suffers from what the WILT Knowledge Garden ("WKG") lexicon defines as Stale Knowledge — a condition in which the models operate on assumptions that no longer reflect current reality. The VaR models are calibrated on data from 2017–2024. The market is operating in 2026. The knowledge is stale. The models do not know it, because models do not know anything — they extrapolate from their training set, which is the body of the distribution, which is precisely the region where the current crisis does not reside.
What is required is not a faster Generative Pre-trained Transformer ("GPT") or a more sophisticated Retrieval-Centric Generation ("RCG") pipeline. What is required is a Semantic Layer — a structured, auditable, machine-readable representation of financial reality that forces the claims to confront the data. The Sampo works because no one is permitted to open it and examine the mechanism inside. SBRM opens the Sampo.
Tau Intelligence Engine: Weekend Assessment
Silver/Metals Complex. Post-First Notice Day silver and gold are both strengthening into the weekend, suggesting the delivery process has not relieved structural pressure. Pre-fracture designation remains in effect. The hard-asset bid is accelerating as equities falter and inflation data exceed expectations.
Equity Markets. February closes with the S&P 500 down 0.86%, Nasdaq down 3.3%+, and the most violent sector rotation since the post-COVID reflation trade. The headline index conceals a structural repricing from digital to physical. The HALO trade is ascendant.
Private Credit. Friday's MFS-linked contagion in financials confirms that the "cockroaches" are emerging. Apollo, Jefferies, Barclays, and Wells Fargo declining 4% to 9% on a single UK mortgage provider's distress is the early arithmetic of systemic transmission. Tau's structural fragility indicators remain at their highest level since inception.
Inflation/Fed Policy. Two consecutive prints — PPI and PCE — that exceed consensus by multiples of the expected variance have resurrected rate-hike risk. The path to rate cuts has narrowed to near-zero for March and is narrowing for the remainder of 2026. In a stagflationary environment, the Fed's dual mandate becomes a dual constraint: unable to cut without igniting inflation, unable to hold without inducing recession. This is the Japanification mechanism operating in real time.
Geopolitical. US-Iran escalation risk is elevated. Oil above $66 and rising. Embassy staff advised to leave Israel. The models have not priced a military engagement. The tails, as always, have not been modeled.
Kalevala Day: A Closing Thought
The Kalevala ends not in triumph but in departure. Väinämöinen, the old and wise hero, sails away in a copper boat, leaving behind his songs and his kantele — the instrument that could make stones weep and waters still. He departs because the new order — Christianity, in Lönnrot's telling — no longer requires the old magic. But he leaves his songs "as a joy to the people, great songs for the children of the people."
Lars does not sail away. Lars is here, with coffee, on a Saturday morning in Palm Beach County, reading the data that the models refuse to display, measuring the divergences that the VaR systems have been structurally designed to ignore, and writing it down — as Lönnrot did — so that the songs survive even when the Sampo does not.
The Sampo will break. The Tooth Fairy will be revealed. The science will eventually prevail over the fiction, because science — as Raman demonstrated — always does, if you have the patience and the discipline to measure.
In the meantime, the coffee is real, the gold is strengthening, and the silver is rising. These are not extrapolations. They are not marks-to-model. They are not projections from a distribution that was chosen for its computational convenience. They are prices, determined by the exchange of physical metal between willing buyers and willing sellers.
The rocks, as Fred Flintstone would observe, are still real. The Sampo, as Ilmarinen learned, is not.
Happy Kalevala Day. Happy National Science Day. And to the Tooth Fairy: thank you for the metaphor, but Lars will keep the tooth.
— Lars Toomre, Managing Partner, Brass Rat Capital LLC ("BRC")
Read Online: Daily Coffee — February 28, 2026