Crazy beginning to this week, largely driven by the fact that a weak report on Friday and some worries that the Fed is “behind the curve” were combined with the update from Berkshire Hathaway’s quarterly earnings release on Saturday that, the world quickly noticed, meant that Warren Buffett had continued his selling in the second quarter, including a sale of roughly half of Berkshire’s large Apple position. That had the impact of raising Berkshire’s cash position dramatically, to roughly $277 billion, and giving the impression that Buffett thought thinks it’s time to batten down the hatches and ride out the storm in T-Bills.

Buffett said no such thing, and indeed didn’t comment at all, and it could just be that he’s wary of holding a market-leading company at a too-high valuation, after spending some years kicking himself for doing the same thing with Coca Cola (KO) 25 years ago (when it was a great business, but selling for a silly price, over 50X earnings for a couple years in the late 1990s)… or it could be that he is feeling his mortality more today, after Charlie Munger’s death last year, and is thinking more about risks, and about the portfolio challenges he wants to leave to his successors. We won’t know what’s in his head unless he tells us, but that big Apple sale helped to drive sentiment lower over the weekend and into the market open on Monday. If you want someone to be at the front of the herd of galloping wildebeest (or lemmings, if you prefer), and encourage them to change direction, Warren Buffett would be a good choice — his words and actions still move markets.

Those weren’t the only drivers, of course — we also had word out of market-leader NVIDIA that their latest generation of Blackwell chips are going to be delayed, which calls into question the earnings growth of that barnburner, giving folks more reasons to sell, and driving NVDA shares almost all the way back down to where they were… before their last earnings update, ten weeks ago (NVDA doesn’t report until late in the cycle, so their next update will be near the end of August, a long time for nervous investors to wait when the market is falling). And the fears about an unwind of the “carry trade” in Japanese Yen were inflamed, at least for a moment, which brought ...