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Yet Another Wildberries Facility - Russia's Amazon - Goes Up In Flames After Ukraine Drone Strike

Zero Rss
2 months 2 weeks ago
Yet Another Wildberries Facility - Russia's Amazon - Goes Up In Flames After Ukraine Drone Strike

Another large warehouse and logistics hub for major online Russian retailer Wildberries has been targeted and struck by Ukrainian drones.

This is the third time in a week the company widely considered to be the 'Russian Amazon' has seen its warehouses go up in flames. At least eight of its shipping facilities have been attacked overall this month. Wildberries co-founder Tatyana Kim confirmed the fresh attack on company facilities Friday morning:

Kim, Russia's wealthiest woman, said Wildberries facilities in St. Petersburg and the surrounding Leningrad region, as well as in annexed Crimea, were hit overnight. Fires broke out at several locations, though Kim said "parts" of the warehouses were saved.

While Kim said none of the company's employees were injured, Leningrad region Governor Alexander Drozdenko wrote in a post on Telegram earlier in the morning that three people were hurt during the attack in his region.

Moscow Times via Telegram

Operations at these facilities have been halted, while all personnel a the impacted warehouse in Crimea have been evacuated.

The St. Petersburg attack resulted in especially dramatic scenes of a huge smoke plume stretching high into the atmosphere, and even visible from space, NASA satellite imagery showed.

It was just last week that the company's warehouses in central Russia were struck, which killed eight people. In the face of the Kremlin calling the attacks acts of terrorism and war crimes, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has claimed that the hubs were "involved in providing the Russian army with drone components, navigation equipment and other gear."

The Wildberries facilities have been increasingly targeted amid broader nightly drone waves out of Ukraine, with a separate Friday attack in the Kirov region killing at least six people.

Anadolu/Getty Images

NBC News has noted, "Wildberries, whose banking arm had sanctions imposed on it by the European Union this week over its financial contribution to the Russian budget, plays a central role in Russia’s consumer economy."

"Its targeting by Ukraine appears to be part of Kyiv’s attempts to ensure ordinary Russians feel the impact of the war which has raged on Ukrainian territory for more than four years," the report adds.

The company says it is working around the clock to restore service to areas impacted by the warehouse attacks. 

Stunning footage of Wildberries hub fully on fire from earlier this week in Krasnodar:

Clear view of the entire Wildberries hub in Krasnodar fully engulfed in fire. https://t.co/PcQN5uFauU pic.twitter.com/I8jn0BAtAM

— Special Kherson Cat 🐈🇺🇦 (@bayraktar_1love) July 22, 2026

Reuters has reviewed that "Together with smaller rivals, Wildberries and Ozon sell goods and services worth the equivalent of 8.5% of Russia's gross domestic product. They provide jobs for 4 million people, or more than 5% of the country's workforce."

Tyler Durden Fri, 07/24/2026 - 09:40
Tyler Durden

Caught on bodycam: Sunny Hostin’s son caught on train tracks before dropping ‘lawyer mom’ card

NY Post
2 months 2 weeks ago
“The View” co-host Sunny Hostin’s son was nabbed trespassing on Metro-North Railroad tracks in Westchester County – and wasted no time dropping his famous mom’s name, The Post has learned. Gabriel Hostin, 24, was spotted jogging along MTA tracks in New Rochelle on June 16, ignoring “no trespassing” signs and giving lip to cops when...
New York Post Video

"It's Getting Worse": HSBC Warns Commodities Face Squeeze As Chokepoint Chaos Spreads

Zero Rss
2 months 2 weeks ago
"It's Getting Worse": HSBC Warns Commodities Face Squeeze As Chokepoint Chaos Spreads

The key takeaway heading into the weekend is that maritime chokepoint chaos has spread from the Strait of Hormuz to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, while fighting across the Black Sea has intensified between Russia and Ukraine. The widening disruptions have prompted several institutional desks this week to warn that a potential squeeze on physical commodity markets could send prices from energy to agricultural goods higher.

"The Middle East conflict has escalated, putting a substantial squeeze back into commodity markets," Paul Bloxham, HSBC's chief economist for Australia, New Zealand and global commodities, wrote in a note on Friday morning.

Bloxham continued, "Traffic through Hormuz has almost stalled again, and the disruption has spread to the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, the key access point for the Red Sea, for Saudi oil going to Asia and Europe-Asia trade through the Suez Canal."

Bloxham warned that with Brent trading above $100 a barrel and strategic petroleum reserves being rapidly depleted worldwide, energy markets face a mounting risk of a "super-squeeze."

His message was blunt: "It's not over yet," adding, "Hormuz, Mandeb, oil at 100 ... it's getting worse. "

Here's more:

The Brent oil price has risen sharply, to over USD100/b recently; European and Asian gas prices are more than 40% m-o-m; refined product prices, like jet fuel and diesel are surging; urea prices are up 13%; and wheat prices are at a three year high – all on supply constraint concerns. With inventory rundown having been a key adjustment factor preventing much bigger prices spikes earlier in the conflict, and stocks now much lower, concerns about 'tank bottom' levels and non-linearities are expected to come back into focus. It's a 'super-squeeze'. And it's not over yet.

Bloxham also highlighted the market mechanics that prevented Brent from spiking even higher a few months back, including US strategic reserve releases and China's reduction of oil imports and SPR.

But he warned that these buffers are finite and can suppress the price shock for only so long:

As we have actively written about over the past few months, a key reason that commodity prices – particularly oil – did not spike higher earlier has been active reduction of inventories, particularly with the US release of strategic reserves and in China, where oil imports have been drawn down (see 'Better, but the Hormuz disruption is not over yet', 25 June 2026; and 'Hormuz is reshaping commodity markets', 25 May 2026).

However, the challenge is that inventory reduction can only provide an offset for so long.

At some point, concerns about stocks falling to critical levels may show up in non-linearities in markets (see Hormuz still closed: Beware Strait non-linearities, 28 April 2026). However, even with a deep-dive looks at measured stocks and supply pathways, it is hard to be definitive about when reserves will reach these critical levels. Commodity markets are highly adaptable, and when the demand is there, flexible markets often find a way to deliver. Aggregate price benchmarks also only go so far. In the face of acute supply shocks, commodity markets tend to fragment, with many different prices for the same products in different locations and for different delivery times (see More fragmentation as Hormuz blockage continues, 13 April 2026).

That said, the longer the disruption is in place – and the recent escalation suggests it is, indeed, going on for longer – the more likely it becomes that commodity prices will spike higher, in non-linear ways, as stocks are depleted.

A growing list of institutional commodity desks, including Goldman Sachs, RBC Capital Markets and JPMorgan, has warned that the expanding maritime chokepoint crisis is entering a more dangerous phase.

Helima Croft, RBC's head of global commodity strategy, cautioned that the "war enters a dangerous phase with the Red Sea and critical infrastructure at risk."

These desks have raised their near-term Brent forecasts as the disruption spreads. Goldman commodities strategist Daan Struyven warned that Brent could exceed $120 a barrel in the fourth quarter if the Hormuz crisis persists.

Related:

With the US national average for regular gasoline now above $4 a gallon, the energy shock has crossed a politically sensitive level (again), which could increase pressure on the Trump administration to pursue a diplomatic off-ramp.

Tyler Durden Fri, 07/24/2026 - 09:20
Tyler Durden

Braggawatts, Cheap Chinese Compute, & Simple ROI

Zero Rss
2 months 2 weeks ago
Braggawatts, Cheap Chinese Compute, & Simple ROI

Authored by Peter Tchir via Academy Securities,

With weakness in chips and AI the prior week, that was a major topic of conversation, as was the escalation in Iran (please see Academy’s Geopolitical Analysis for the latest on Iran and geopolitics more broadly).

Two key themes from last weekend’s From Trinkets to Compute seem to be playing out:

Cheap Chinese Compute

Most importantly, the story of Cheap Chinese Compute is garnering staying power. While DeepSeek may have been a one-off, the story is increasingly about China delivering Cheap Compute. We have seen China flood/control markets in the past. I didn’t see it coming in compute (at least not yet), but it might be here?

  • China doesn’t have to deal with NIMBY, but they do make a lot of chips (generally lower quality, but a lot), and have been ramping up all forms of electricity production and storage for years. The U.S. is finally getting on board with this ProSec™ theme, while the rest of the world is only starting to wake up to the need and potential opportunity that adopting a ProSec™ mindset delivers.

  • On the less “savory” side are “allegations” (and I’m being polite here) that a lot of the Chinese compute trains by “distilling” from existing models (inundating existing models with requests, to somewhat “copy” their answers) rather than training their models from scratch. It is a big cost advantage and time saving mechanism.

Earnings

Less important was my flipping from “earnings will matter” to “earnings might not matter.”

We don’t really spend a lot of time on single stock earnings. It isn’t our “thing” in general. But we do follow the earnings. What we can say so far on this front is that when the earnings and announcements hit the tape, they seem very strong. The instant reaction in the media (and social media) tends to support the strength of the results. Then the stocks seem to drift lower (in some cases worse than drift). 

The earnings bar seems to be set incredibly high, so far.

This is concerning when trying to determine the direction of the next leg.

Braggawatts

I’m not sure how I missed the term Braggawatts, but it caught my attention when my friends at ZeroHedge sent out a tweet that used the term.

The Next Phase Of Shrinkflation: Rolling Blackouts https://t.co/dYmR3d7Kn9

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) July 20, 2026

  • Basically, braggawatts is a term used to express skepticism over how much in the data center and AI space can be physically constructed (i.e., in the real world) versus all the existing announcements and expectations of future announcements.

    • From access to chips, to water, to electricity, to getting all of the various state and local regulatory approvals, the argument is that a lot more compute has been announced than can be completed within the timeframe of the announcements.

    • This is consistent with some anecdotal evidence of cost and time overruns on projects (that is something we were hearing about more frequently than in the past).

If braggawatts are real (we need to explore this more):

  • This should be good for credit spreads in the sector. The logical conclusion would be to announce fewer new projects and prioritize existing projects.

  • Would be bad for the “picks and shovels” in the AI / Data Center industry.

Simple ROI.

To a large degree, return on investment analysis surrounding AI and the AI spend has been minimal in my view.

  • On the one side you have a “build it and they will come” mentality (often the “only” risk has been described as not building enough, fast enough – which hardly encourages traditional scrutiny of costs versus revenue).

  • On the other side, no CEO in their right mind would say anything other than that they were launching AI initiatives within their firm to capture efficiencies. The cost of compute has gone up. Actually, let me rephrase that, companies are being charged a cost of compute more in line with the cost of producing the compute than they were before. While the cost of providing compute seems to be increasing (shortages, etc.) part of what users are seeing is that the price that was subsidized to encourage use and to create moats (to the extent moats can be created and held) is being subsidized less. Increasing, and we’ve been writing about this for months, we are moving from “we have to try AI, or be left behind” to “we’ve been using AI, now let’s analyze the cost benefit of that.” Is that why some of the token utilization charts are showing declines from the peak?

If I’m right and some of these forces connect, it could bring pressure to bear on the space. That is “fine and normal.” What concerns me is how much money has flown into passive vehicles in the space, and how many leveraged products there are in the space. Not just the very large SOXL (which is index based) but also a lot of individual stocks in this have leveraged ETFs. 

I fear that this is a risk that can and will accentuate moves to the downside (just like it does on the upside).

Bottom Line

The escalation in Iran is not good for my view on potential rate cuts. While my outlook on inflation wasn’t entirely dependent on the free flow of oil (including more oil that had previously been sanctioned), it helped a lot.

On the AI front, I’m positive on credit spreads, but remain vigilant on valuations. The recent reaction in markets to what seemed like strong earnings releases only accentuates that concern.

Tyler Durden Fri, 07/24/2026 - 09:00
Tyler Durden

zero rss