All Eyes on Tomorrow’s Fed Rate Decision

Chart of the Day — STRC is Back, Baby
Trade of the Day — Shorting META — Sponsored by Kalshi
Alpha Leaks — Circle, Salesforce, & Uniswap
News Roundup — Fed Decision, AI Slowdown, & CLARITY Vote

STRC is Back, Baby

Remember Strategy’s perpetual preferred, STRC? It faded from crypto’s collective consciousness for most of 2026, but it’s back.

So last year, STRC was the darling of all Bitcoin treasury products, as the company sold an estimated $10.2B in STRC shares and used that cash to buy Bitcoin. But then Bitcoin dropped below $60K in February, which spooked the adjacent Bitcoin treasury markets, resulting in STRC depegging below its $100 par value, and getting as low as $71 on June 26th.

And at that point, many were saying that it was the beginning of the end for Strategy.

But from all available metrics, the doomsayers were wrong. Since June 26th, STRC has grinded its way back towards par, and at the time of this writing, the asset is trading at $99. Now of course, Saylor has been selling Bitcoin to buy back STRC, but that doesn’t change the fact that the product is only $1 from par.

And once STRC hits $100 again - which we suspect is coming within the next few days to weeks - then you know what that means. Strategy will begin buying Bitcoin again.

Shorting META — Sponsored by Kalshi

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Now today’s Trade of the Day is shorting META. We’re on the weekly here, and you can see that META’s price is back to this triangle’s resistance at $661. So, we think there’s a mean-reversion short that’s open right now.

Now go premium for the full technical short on META, with the recommended stop loss and take profit targets. Inner Circle members have been stacking wins recently, with successful BTC, UNI, ZEC, and TSLA trades generating real percentage gains. Go premium today to catch our signals.

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All Eyes on Tomorrow’s Fed Rate Decision

The US Federal Reserve, under Chair Kevin Warsh, announces its latest rate decision tomorrow at 2:00 pm ET. The CME FedWatch is currently pricing a 90.3% chance of a 25 basis point hike, which would move the federal funds rate from 3.50 - 3.75% to 3.75 - 4.00%. A hold has a 9.7% chance of happening, and a rate cut isn’t on the table.

Now here’s the macro backdrop. Inflation is still elevated and sticky. Last week’s YoY PPI came in at 5.4%, and YoY CPI printed at 3.4%. Warsh has said time and again that the Fed is committed to achieving 2% inflation. Meanwhile, US bond yields continue to push into 20 year ATHs as Secretary Bessent and the US Treasury are buying back tens of billions in bonds off the open market, in an attempt to push yields down. The US government needs lower yields to ease the country’s debt repayment burden.

Therefore, if Warsh is to be taken at his word, then the Fed and the US Treasury have conflicting goals. One wants tighter monetary policy (higher yields), and the other wants cheaper debt (lower yields). Then add on the White House’s pressure for the “lowest interest rates in the world”, and you understand the environment that we’re heading into on Wednesday.

Now concerning prices on our risk assets, our best guess is the potential rate hike is already priced in. So if we get it, then we’re not expecting at this point a dramatic price dump. However, if by chance we get a rate hold, then a significant price boost in our assets makes sense, as the market is not expecting it.

Anthropic CEO Calls for AI Slowdown

Huge breaking news over this past weekend. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei published an essay titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” where he argued that AI companies should slow down the improvement pace of frontier AI. And then both OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Elon Musk publicly agreed with him.

How did we get here? Well, last week, researcher Jacob Coxon resigned from Anthropic, and paired his resignation with a post on X, stating that some AI leaders “earnestly believe that [AI] could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Other researchers, including some senior leadership at Anthropic, publicly concurred with Coxon’s statements. All of it then went mega viral, and within 24 hours of the initial post, Coxon was appearing for cable news interviews.

So in the wake of the above, Amodei is now pushing for a development slowdown. Specifically, he’s calling for (1) independent evaluators with employee-like access inside the labs, (2) coordination amongst companies in other democratic countries, and (3) government-level limits on the most dangerous capabilities that are mutually agreed upon with China.

Now, it’s worth outlining the various scenarios as to what might be happening here. We see three primary possibilities:

● The frontier labs are sincere, and they’re right (AI really is an existential threat).

● The frontier labs are sincere, and they’re wrong (AI actually isn’t an existential threat).

● The frontier labs are insincere for self-serving motives (they’re trying to get a monopoly; they need a slowdown because the models are topping out, etc).

Concerning applicable tech stocks, this is a near-term headwind. Pre-market prices into Monday’s open were down for the Nasdaq, AMD, Nvidia, Micron, etc. And that makes sense, because if AI development really does slow down, then so will the need for the latest and greatest chips, infrastructure, and related materials.

Finally, expect the AI safety subject to be a major theme from now through the end of the year (at minimum), especially as the US midterms approach.

CLARITY Cloture Vote Might Happen Today

The US Senate might be voting for CLARITY’s “cloture” today. Meaning, if today’s vote passes, the Senate can officially start considering the actual bill. Basically, cloture approval opens the door to an actual final vote.

Now CLARITY was supposed to get a final vote in early August, but Senate Republicans de-prioritized it at the last minute, as several provisions remained contested and time ran out on the legislative calendar. But the bill got revived last week, and then over the weekend, Republicans released a new draft that included some key breakthrough compromises.

These recent compromises include (1) Trump agreeing that federal officials and their spouses divest from their crypto holdings or put them in a blind trust (with state attorneys general getting an enforcement role), and (2) a “kill switch” that can stop stablecoin rewards for 18 months, in the event that the rewards are pulling significant deposits out of community banks.

Back to today’s vote, Republicans need 60. They hold 53 seats, so all of the Republican senators need to vote yes, and then they need an additional seven Democrats or independents to go along with them. If cloture passes, then a final Senate vote can happen, then reconciliation with the House’s version, and then to Trump’s desk for his John Hancock. And all of this needs to happen before the midterm elections.

Concerning prices, treat today as a volatility event. A successful cloture vote likely boosts crypto prices, because the market has largely priced in passage not happening in 2026.

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