TheChek News Flow

NEW YORK (Reuters) -Citadel's flagship hedge fund Wellington has reduced its losses after a rough start to March, as uncertainties around President Donald Trump's economic policies triggered a selloff in U.S. equities, according to a source familiar with the matter.

The fund ended March 14 down under 1% in the year, roughly halving a 2% loss it had posted through March 6, with most of the recovery coming from U.S. equities.

The recovery comes as Citadel's founder Ken Griffin told senior management to "play offense" earlier this month amid the selloff, increasing capital allocation to roughly a quarter of the firm's U.S. portfolio managers.

Bloomberg reported earlier on Griffin's message.

Hedge funds unwound positions at the largest amount in years earlier in March after U.S. major stock indexes plummeted over fears tariff policies will drive the world's largest economy into a recession.

The forced unwinding took a toll on hedge funds, including multi-strategy firms like Citadel. JPMorgan said in a recent note that on average multi-strategy hedge funds were down 3.2% this month through March 10, but they gave up part of the losses later and were down 0.7% in the month through March 13.

Citadel declined to comment.

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Huang’s plan to spend half a trillion dollars on electronics over four years shows how AI has turned financial world on its head

Nvidia’s market capitalisation of roughly $3tn has occasionally made it the biggest company in the world. Founder Jensen Huang, a man rarely short of self-confidence, hinted this week at plans that could make it even bigger.

At Nvidia’s annual, festival-like GTC conference on Wednesday, Huang said he expected his company to spend around $500bn on electronics over the next four years. Of that, “several hundred billion” could be produced in the US. This is the kind of remark that plays nicely to the America First agenda of President Trump, who promptly used Nvidia’s remarks as proof of a manufacturing renaissance.

In an industry that thinks in trillions, it’s easy to become blind to such numbers. Gripped by an artificial intelligence boom, market capitalisations and investment budgets have spiralled upwards. But there is not a line in Nvidia’s expenses or cash flow statements for which $500bn, even spread over four years, wouldn’t be a whale of a sum.

So where would the money go? Most likely to suppliers, including companies such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company which makes the chips that Nvidia designs. Huang’s mooted sum would be a big step up. Nvidia will spend just $270bn on manufacturing inputs over the next four years, according to consensus estimates from Visible Alpha. Half a trillion would therefore imply chips output that’s twice what analysts expect.

Money might also be earmarked for investment by Nvidia itself, in the form of capital expenditure. But that too would be a major swerve. Its own capex for the past four years adds up to just $7bn. Huang’s company currently has just $6bn of fixed assets, compared with chipmaker Intel’s $108bn. Yet Nvidia’s enterprise value is 20 times that of its rival, showing how much investors value its asset-light approach to cutting-edge silicon.

The fact Nvidia’s shares barely moved on Thursday suggests investors aren’t looking too deeply into Huang’s claim. It might be because they are so used to hearing executives talk about large, ill-defined spending plans. Huang’s $500bn happens to be the same sum Apple’s Tim Cook and OpenAI’s Sam Altman have each pledged to spend in coming years, both with an emphasis on helping Uncle Sam regain his former greatness.

It shows how AI has turned the financial world on its head. In the past, investors would be happy to hear that a company planned to spend less on inputs or capital expenditure. Now, they don’t even flinch when executives dangle the idea of truly transformational cash outlays, the more ambitious the better. Huang is just the latest to join a growing high-rollers’ club.

Ozempic might feature in future US negotiations with Denmark over Greenland

Can a weight-loss drug become a weapon of war? Once, that question might have seemed absurd. No longer.

Earlier this year, when US President Donald Trump offered to buy Greenland from Denmark, online rumours circulated that the Danish government might encourage Novo Nordisk, the Danish company behind the diabetes and weight-loss drugs Ozempic and Wegovy, to retaliate with a 500 per cent price hike for American customers.

That was a spoof. But earlier this month Lars Fruergaard Jørgensen, its canny CEO, warned that Trump’s trade war could lead to “increased pricing” for the drugs, amid other competitive threats to its fortunes.

And one colourful idea floating around the Trump ecosystem is that the drugs could be a bargaining chip in future negotiations with Denmark, perhaps by pushing for a US acquisition. After all, many American “voters care about Ozempic,” as one observer tells me, noting that another possible tactic would be for the US to demand a krone revaluation, to keep Denmark linked to dollar-based finance.

Will this happen? I find it hard to believe, and plenty of factors might yet derail Trump. But in the meantime, investors parsing the world should pay attention to four practical points.

First: as Elon Musk noted this week, the so-called “Overton Window” — or frame for policy ideas — is widening fast; nothing can be ruled out. Second, Trump’s team want to expand their negotiating leverage by mixing economic, financial, trade, tech and national security issues in a manner alien to anyone trained in a 20th-century MBA programme — or, for that matter, economics.

Third, some of Trump’s advisers have a mental vision of great power rivalry that feels uncannily familiar to students of Central Asian history (of which I myself was one). Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, is the 21st-century version of Samarkand or Kabul — and Ozempic akin to saffron.

This explains why Trump has focused on the frozen north, with its minerals, future transit routes and long borders with Russia and China. So, too, his ambivalence about Nato.

Or as the so-called Dark Enlightenment blogger Curtis Yarvin noted in a recent plea to Trump: “The assumptions of [US] foreign policy must not be inherited from the age of ‘national security’ [so] the organisations that execute this foreign policy should probably also not be inherited from the 20th century.”

Yarvin is considered an extremist, anti-democrat by many mainstream observers. But he has reportedly influenced figures such as JD Vance, Trump’s vice-president. So he is worth reading — not least because he has also declared that “the more power you use, the more power you have . . . you have to keep using power, otherwise you lose it”.

That highlights a fourth point: institutions such as Nato, and smaller countries, suddenly look vulnerable. Just consider the recent ritual humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Ukraine’s president, in the Oval Office. This may be a template for how bullying gets ratcheted up.

Can those threatened fight back? This week Jens Stoltenberg, the former head of Nato, and Mette Frederiksen, the prime minister of Denmark, insisted they could. “In diplomacy you have to spend the most time with people you disagree with,” Stoltenberg observed, following the release of a fly-on-the-wall documentary about him called Facing War. “We have to be prepared . . . that America may reduce their presence in Europe.”

Or as Frederiksen echoed: “Diplomacy is about politics and values. So if something happens like [the incident] in the Oval Office, you have to go back and continue.”

However Nato’s problem is that its sway rests on mindset as much as military hardware — meaning that its deterrence power will crumble if there is disunity. If the White House takes Yarvin’s advice, bullying might get worse, and be directed not just towards Denmark, but also even more towards countries such as Canada, which has the geographic (mis)fortune to lie between America and the frozen north. Indeed, I am told that Trump’s advisers are mulling the Canadian dollar (as well as the krone) as a target for revaluation.

So Novo Nordisk’s investors should watch closely. And many might also join western diplomats in praying, as one put it to me, that “there is a change in the US midterms”.

But if you want some light relief for now, this week almost 300,000 Danes signed a “Denmarkification” petition entitled “Let’s Buy California from Trump — Denmark’s next big adventure.” This calls for a $1tn fund to bring “hygge (coziness) to Hollywood”, “bike lanes to Beverly Hills” and to put Mickey Mouse in a Viking helmet.

A joke? Yes. But it is not “just” funny. Western voters — and investors — are facing a level of geopolitical flux they have never seen in their lives before, and in which fact and wild fiction seem to blur each day.