Real Vision Sep 21, 2026 26m 13m saved
South Korea's trade numbers for the first 20 days of the month came in almost 80% above last year, and semiconductors inside that figure are running about 250% up. Andreas Steno Larsen's read is that the business cycle has not noticed the rate hikes, the oil war or anything else.
Positioning says the opposite. Retail investors are as bearish as the American Association of Individual Investors survey gets, the oil market is a crowded long, and the market has stopped falling on news that should have knocked it down.
"the economic cycle is doing very well. And South Korea is typically one of the first gauges that we get of the economic health of the cycle and despite hikes despite oil wars and what have you the economic cycle is not budging."
Macro Mondays is Real Vision's free weekly macro show. Steno Larsen runs the macro portfolio behind it and was, in his own words, made famous on X for calling the Middle East conflict over in April; Mikkel Rosenvold writes the show's geopolitics and both are Danes reading a Greenland deal from the inside.
The full episode is covered here so you can skip it. 26 minutes of audio, 13 minutes of reading.
Here are the 8 calls that matter.
Key Takeaways
AI and crypto are not an either-or trade, and Steno Larsen says so five or six times on air
The crypto rally traces back to Bessent's buyback operations and a short-dollar proxy trade that has been on since July
The oil market is net 44% long of open interest — a crowded position that no longer moves on bad news
Korean exports are up almost 80% in the first 20 days, with semiconductors around 250%, which he reads as a cycle that is not budging
The Trump–Xi meeting has a shared problem behind it: both sides are paying high energy costs and need it not to spiral
Greenland was a tail-risk hedge, on his reading, and one the US took because the tail risk was cheap to mitigate and expensive to insure
The portfolio is long all three sleeves — gold, crypto and AI — and the crypto leg has outperformed precious metals against their own now-casting
He thinks the Middle East is past peak escalation, on a conflict he says moves in sine waves
1. AI and Crypto in Tandem
Rosenvold opened with what he calls a harpoon: how much of the AI book has been sold to buy the crypto rally? The answer was none, and then a complaint about the question.
The framing he rejects
I think it's a wrong question whether it's either or. It's AI and crypto in tandem over time.
Andreas Steno Larsen
His case is that the two are mutually enabling rather than competing. Without AI there would be no agent economy to discuss, and without crypto there would be no plausible way to settle the transactions an agent economy implies.
Why the old rails do not do this job
the old system is not well equipped for a microtransaction regime.
Andreas Steno Larsen
Rosenvold's rejoinder was that the AI stocks are not doing 15% in a day, which is the practical reason the question gets asked at all.
2. What Is Driving Crypto
Asked what is actually behind the move, Steno Larsen's first answer was a currency trade rather than a crypto one.
The trade underneath it
So I obviously think it's related to this, short dollar proxy trade that we've had on since July. It's not as if the dollar is super weak in the foreign exchange market, but we've seen various proxies of that short dollar trade work alongside Scott Bessent ramping up his purchases of longer dated bonds.
Andreas Steno Larsen
The debasement narrative returned alongside it, on the back of renewed focus on the debt level. He was candid that pinning a narrative's revival on one cause is difficult, and then pinned it anyway.
His catalyst
it all dates back to that rally started by Scott Bessent's buyback operations that suddenly revived the whole narrative and the whole momentum of the space.
Andreas Steno Larsen
The show's counterpoint was that this rally has a better foundation than the last one, because it is not being handed to the asset class by Washington — the CLARITY Act did not pass and crypto rallied anyway.
What makes this one different
this is not some government bailout driven rally and actually we're starting to see blockchains being used for something.
Real Vision
The use case named on air was SUI carrying agent-to-agent transactions, and the supporting trend is the count of agents actually running.
The curve that matters to him
if you look at the agent economy since say mid May or early June we're talking about a very very very rapid acceleration of the number of agents live
Andreas Steno Larsen
3. It Looks Like March Again
Steno Larsen had written that morning that the setup is starting to resemble March and April. The evidence he gave is positioning, starting with oil.
A very crowded long
Currently the market is net 44% long in oil of the open market interest in futures. So, it's a very crowded long for good reasons
Andreas Steno Larsen
What he watches for is not the position itself but how the market responds to news. A hotter-than-expected core CPI print, a Fed meeting, a hawkish message from Warsh — and no sustained move.
The tell
even with news that should push the market in a certain direction, we're not really getting a large move in that direction. And that is to me a symptom of a market that has a very exhausted positioning already.
Andreas Steno Larsen
The day after the hike, markets started accelerating again. The sentiment side matches: the American Association of Individual Investors survey has its active retail respondents deeply bearish, with a rate hike in the mix, a war that will not end, and a re-escalation between Ukraine and Russia visible in the infrastructure damage.
And yet
the market hasn't really sold off despite so many people being bearish.
Andreas Steno Larsen
He reached for a label someone else had coined for it.
The seasonal explanation
I saw someone label it the September phobia.
Andreas Steno Larsen
His point is that September's bad reputation is a ten-to-fifteen-year seasonal record, that the same fear was in place last year, and that what followed was a rally in momentum names. He expects something similar into the fourth quarter — with a caveat attached to the year after.
Where the bill comes due
when we get rate hikes from all central banks it is something that will put a lid on the business cycle down the road but there's time between now and then.
Andreas Steno Larsen
4. The Trump-Xi Summit
Rosenvold's setup was that the coordination problem on the American side appears to have been solved, with Bessent picking it up, and that the tone coming out is constructive.
What Steno Larsen hears from market participants is concentrated on one question: Korean licensing, and the cross-border treatment of semiconductors. The US side, on his account, has sympathy for added tariffs on semiconductors and for banning more equipment from China — which would probably also produce an understanding that licenses cannot be renewed inside China, including for the Korean companies. He said plainly that he is watching those names closely because the portfolio is heavily invested in them.
But he does not expect a blow-up
it would be a major surprise to see some sort of big escalation towards the end of the week
Andreas Steno Larsen
The show's observation was that the underlying imbalances have not been solved or even addressed — by the logic of spring 2025, this trade war should be restarting — and that it simply is not the focal point any more. Everything is about AI, and possibly Iran, on which little is expected publicly.
The reason Steno Larsen gives for the détente is a shared cost rather than a shared interest.
A problem they both have
they simply need to coordinate their efforts for this not to spiral out of control and both parties know that.
Andreas Steno Larsen
And the general rule he draws from it
it's very typical even foes they can find common ground when they have something they need to solve together right and I actually think this is a big part of the backdrop here
Andreas Steno Larsen
5. Korea's Export Surge
The chart Rosenvold wanted was the Korean trade data, and the comparison Steno Larsen made was to the same backdrop in March and April.
The headline number
the numbers for the first 20 days of the month throughout this morning pointing to an increase of almost 80%
Andreas Steno Larsen
He was explicit that this beat even his own bullish expectations, and that accelerating in year-over-year terms is a hard bar because the base keeps rising.
Underneath it
if you look beneath the hood semis are up 250% year-over-year something like that it's absolutely bizarre
Andreas Steno Larsen
That is the basis for the claim the whole episode rests on.
Korea is the early gauge, and it is not slowing
the economic cycle is doing very well. And South Korea is typically one of the first gauges that we get of the economic health of the cycle and despite hikes despite oil wars and what have you the economic cycle is not budging.
Andreas Steno Larsen
He called the same-day moves in the Nasdaq and in semiconductors fair on that basis, and gave the reason the rebound has room.
Nobody is set up for it
the market is simply not positioned for this.
Andreas Steno Larsen
He was careful to separate the near term from the forecast. Next year could still be bad.
The discipline he wants applied
It may be that 2027 will turn out to be a crap year. I wouldn't rule that out given everything that's happening, but remember the leads and lags.
Andreas Steno Larsen
And his verdict for now
It's simply too early.
Andreas Steno Larsen
6. The Greenland Deal
Both hosts are Danish, and Rosenvold flagged that they have disagreed about this before. Steno Larsen's framework for the deal is a risk-management one.
What the US was actually buying
the US had for many years a big desire to mitigate this tail risk that essentially was Greenlandic independence
Andreas Steno Larsen
The scenario, in his description, was a small number of Greenlandic politicians raising the possibility of aligning with China or Russia after independence — a prospect he called delusional and a risk he called very small.
Why a small risk still gets managed
It's potentially one that could trigger a world war.
Andreas Steno Larsen
Hedging a tail that size is expensive, so the US mitigated it instead, which is what he thinks the deal does. He called it a very good deal and did not pretend the road there was clean.
The cost of getting here
There was a lot of noise and problems in between a lot of drains in the US European relations that shouldn't have happened.
Andreas Steno Larsen
Rosenvold's reading was the same on the outcome and impatient with the scoreboard question Americans keep asking him about who won.
His verdict
It's good for Denmark. It's good for the US. It's probably good for Greenland.
Real Vision
His analogy was that friends going to lunch do not need a negotiation strategy for the bill. Steno Larsen refused it.
The rebuttal
I'm not sure I completely buy that analogy because no matter whether we use my credit card or yours, it will end up in the same account.
Andreas Steno Larsen
On timing, Steno Larsen reads the deal as a win taken where a win was available.
Why now
I think it's interesting that we see the deal right now. Given that we've seen a lack of progress around the Strait of Hormuz and a lack of progress in the negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.
Andreas Steno Larsen
The motive he assigns
to me it seemed like they wanted to capture the victory somewhere in the geopolitical space ahead of the midterms.
Andreas Steno Larsen
His warning is about what happens next, and he compared it to the first memorandum of understanding between the US and Iran, where the two sides told different stories about what had been signed.
The standard failure mode
as per usual after such a deal is being signed the two parties signing the deal they don't agree on how to represent this deal
Andreas Steno Larsen
Where he lands anyway
I sincerely think that this is a good step forward for NATO.
Andreas Steno Larsen
7. Three Sleeves, All Long
Asked what is coming on the show's paid tier, Steno Larsen previewed the allocation question rather than the trades: semiconductors against what he called the soft-dollar sleeve, meaning gold and bitcoin.
The position
We hold both. Let me just stress that we're both invested in gold, some in the crypto sleeve and some in the AI sleeve. So, we're basically long all three
Andreas Steno Larsen
The part that has not gone to plan is the relative performance inside that.
What surprised the models
to me it's been a bit of a surprise to see the crypto sleeve outperform precious metals to the extent that we've seen. It goes against the sort of machinelearned observations that we've seen from our now casting technology.
Andreas Steno Larsen
His read on the quarter
it looks incredibly interesting the fourth quarter now and then most people wouldn't have anticipated that a few weeks back.
Andreas Steno Larsen
8. Past Peak Escalation
The closing topic was the Middle East, and the signal he took from the weekend was a negative one — something that was not said.
What he took comfort from
I took a lot of comfort in Trump's words over the weekend, where he at least wasn't fully rejecting the possibility of meeting the Supreme Leader in Iran.
Andreas Steno Larsen
He was open about his own record here. He called the conflict over on X in April, which he says proved to be the right take, and then did not pivot from it as much as he needed to over the summer.
His model of the conflict
my reading of the conflict in the Middle East is that it moves in sine waves
Andreas Steno Larsen
And where he thinks it sits now
we're basically moving in circles and we're now past peak escalation
Andreas Steno Larsen
That is the specific reason the episode keeps returning to March: a grand escalation, followed by both parties finding an incentive to de-escalate.
Bonus Insights
Oil is falling toward $100 despite fresh strike threats
Rosenvold's framing for the de-escalation argument was price action: oil dropping back toward $100 from higher levels, even as Trump is reported to be considering restarting strikes in Iran. The fear premium, in his phrase, may have evaporated a little.
The Paul brothers at the Pentagon and the Treasury
The episode opened on Logan and Jake Paul visiting the Pentagon and Scott Bessent's Treasury, and a weekend joke about who should be running the Interior Department. Steno Larsen would not dismiss the 2028 idea.
Yeah, I honestly wouldn't rule it out. so this is maybe the only thing that makes me slightly upbeat on behalf of the Republicans ahead of the midterms because they have a tremendously good grip on this whole influencer crowd in the US.
Andreas Steno Larsen
Europe watches and waits a cycle
So as per usual as Europeans we're kind of watching this and then we expect it to arrive in a cycle or two here.
Andreas Steno Larsen
The show's own record, stated on air
Steno Larsen said the desk has guided members in the right direction for two or three weeks running on the bearish-positioning call, and credited Rosenvold for calling the de-escalation a few weeks back — both claims made about their own published work rather than backtested.
The bottom line from the show is that positioning, not fundamentals, is what has been holding markets down, and that the Korean export data is the evidence the cycle is still running underneath it.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
SUI (The blockchain named on air as carrying agent-to-agent transactions — the fundamental leg of the crypto case)
Nasdaq (Up a couple of percent on the day, which Steno Larsen calls fair given the Korean data)
Bitcoin and gold (The soft-dollar sleeve; the crypto leg has outperformed precious metals against their own now-casting models)
American Association of Individual Investors (Its sentiment survey of active retail investors is the bearishness reading the whole contrarian case rests on)
Steno Research (The house behind the Monday and Friday articles, the macro portfolio and the now-casting technology referenced throughout)
Real Vision (The publisher; Macro Mondays is its free weekly macro show)
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