Wall Street piles into ‘NACHO’ bet on looming oil shortages in June
Wall Street piles into ‘NACHO’ bet on looming oil shortages in June
Good morning. On Fortune’s radar today:
AI’s rampant token fraud problem.
Markets: Stocks fall as shooting resumes in the Gulf.
The ceasefire is still in effect, Trump says.
Wall Street’s new “NACHO trade.”
Oil begins to run out in June, J.P. Morgan warns.
The surprisingly good news about unemployment.
The economics of being unhappy.
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Gulf flares up, stocks cool down
S&P 500 futures were up 0.5% this morning. The index fell 0.38% yesterday.
In Europe, the Stoxx 600 was down 0.67% in early trading and the U.K.’s FTSE 100 was down 0.24% before lunch.
Asia: South Korea’s KOSPI rose 0.11%. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 0.19%. India’s Nifty 50 was down 0.39%. China’s CSI 300 was down 0.58%.
Brent crude was $100 this morning, up from a low of $96 the day before.
Bitcoin slipped to $80K.
Why the stock market has done so well despite the international chaos
As this chart from Deutsche Bank shows, corporate America just reported one heck of an earnings season. Something like 85% of companies beat expectations, way above the historic average. (Not all companies have reported yet.) “This represents arguably the strongest earnings growth in two decades,” Jim Reid and his colleagues Binky Chadha and Parag Thatte say.
One in six AI signups is a thief
Criminals are defrauding AI firms by signing up for new accounts in order to steal tokens used to buy computing power, according to Stripe CEO Patrick Collison. Token thieves now account for one in every six new customer signups, he says. Thieves steal the tokens to resell them or use them for criminal ventures. “Token pilfering” is so widespread it’s becoming too expensive for some AI startups to offer free trials to prospective customers.
“I think token theft is the most under-discussed topic in AI,” Emily Sands, Stripe’s Head of Data and AI, told Fortune’s Jeff John Roberts. “One of the things that’s really scary about that is that these attackers can burn inference costs, can rack up massive usage bills that they never intend to pay, and they can do that very, very quickly because they are consuming tokens at machine speed.”
The crooks’ AI agents burn through the tokens in minutes. Unlike at traditional software companies,........
