Independent Markets Research · Est. 2022
Financial
Gurkha
Equity valuations, macro analysis, and market coverage — researched, written, and filed from Wall Street, New York.
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Featured Analysis
09/26/2026 · Niraj Neupane
The Bond Market's Bad Week Was an Episode, Not a Day: Why VaR Can't See It
The 10-year Treasury yield reached 5.23% this week, its highest since 2007, through a connected run of bad days rather than one shock. Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall cannot tell that run apart from the same losses scattered across a quarter. A new working paper proposes Tail Episode Risk (TER) and Conditional TER (CTER) to measure the worst connected run of extreme losses. Tested on 26 years of data across six markets, it finds that Treasury episodes are the most predictable, and that a richer forecasting model still did not beat a simple EWMA volatility baseline.
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09/21/2026
Tanker Stocks in 2026: Record Profits, Near-$1 Million-a-Day Rates, and Whether It Is Too Late to Buy
Six listed tanker companies earned $1.83 billion in Q2 2026, 5.6 times a year earlier, as the Strait of Hormuz crisis pushed VLCC rates to records. Five of the six stocks now sit within 2% of their 52-week highs. We read the filings and ask whether the boom is already priced in.
09/20/2026
Reading BRICS Like a Risk Manager: Why Dollar Diversification Is a Model-Risk Problem for U.S. Financial Markets
BRICS is not replacing the dollar. The more consequential question is whether a more diversified global financial system could make yesterday's risk assumptions less reliable.
09/16/2026
Federal Reserve Raises Interest Rates to 3.75%–4%. Twelve Votes, Zero Dissents.
The Federal Open Market Committee raised the target range for the federal funds rate by a quarter point to 3.75 percent to 4 percent — unanimously. In July, three voters dissented to hike and were outvoted. Seven weeks later, nobody dissented. We go through the 12–0 vote, what "expanding at a solid pace" actually commits the Fed to, every line of the Implementation Note, and what changed word by word from the July statement.
09/11/2026
When Markets Turn Volatile, Can Machine Learning See the Risk Coming?
ML-LiqVaR combines GARCH volatility modelling, Extreme Value Theory and gradient-boosted quantile regression to forecast one-day-ahead Value-at-Risk on US equities. Across 8,072 out-of-sample observations from eight S&P 500 constituents between 2018 and 2024, it delivered the closest 99% calibration and the lowest average pinball loss of five models tested — but its improvement over GARCH-EVT was not statistically significant at the 5% level. This is what the paper found, what it did not find, and why the second half matters as much as the first.
09/04/2026
The State of US Energy: Crude Production, Petroleum refining, the Strategic Petroleum Reserves, and Why Nobody Will Build a Refinery
A full read of the US crude complex as of the week ending August 28, 2026. Domestic production is at 13.86 million b/d, refiners are running at 98% of a capacity base that shrank again last year, Cushing is scraping tank bottoms, the Strategic Petroleum Reserve has fallen to its lowest level since 1983, and the diesel crack just printed above $100 a barrel. Compiled from EIA weekly data, Bloomberg terminal research, and reporting on why the record margins are not buying a single new refinery.
08/30/2026
US National Accounts, Gross Domestic Income Components, Fiscal Deficits, and Housing: Insights from Bloomberg Terminal Research
A comprehensive macroeconomic study of US Gross Domestic Income breakdown, 70-year wage share trends, housing inventory anomalies, mortgage rates, budget balances, and global superpower comparisons.
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