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A former Russian model and Epstein ‘assistant’ explains how she and other adult victims spent years entrapped by him

After Jeffrey Epstein’s death, Svetlana Pozhidaeva said she finally felt free and started building her life. The former Russian model, who became one of Epstein’s “assistants” and a victim of his abuse, changed her name and moved to another city.

Then the Epstein files dropped.

She didn’t pay much attention, preferring not to revisit that period—the years from 2008 to 2019, when she had been caught in Epstein’s web. She assumed her name would be redacted like the other women who were vetted by settlement administrators in previous victim lawsuits.

The Justice Department did redact her name as the sender and receiver in most emails, but mistakenly left it in the body of some messages. She was among the dozens of victims whose personally identifiable data was initially left unredacted in the Jan. 30 release.

Since the files dropped, Pozhidaeva said she has been playing whack-a-mole with the Justice Department, sending emails to flag redaction errors. The Justice Department addressed initial errors, but when it reposted corrected files, some instances of her name remained exposed.

The Justice Department has said only a fraction of the released files had redaction errors and it is fixing any mistakes when notified by victims or their attorneys. The department didn’t respond to requests for comment.

For Pozhidaeva, the pressure reached a breaking point in recent days, when a blogger started contacting her family and announced plans to expose her new name on the grounds that she was in her 20s at the time of the abuse and said her links to Russia disqualified her from victim protections. The Wall Street Journal isn’t publishing her current name.

“I am so exhausted. I haven’t slept or eaten properly for weeks,” she said in a recent interview. “I’d rather tell this embarrassing story myself and get it over with once and for all so I can finally be free and close this chapter.”

Pozhidaeva spoke with the Journal in 2023 for an investigation into Epstein’s continued abuse of women after his 2008 conviction. She is one of several women Epstein sexually exploited under the guise of “assistant” roles. She explained without revealing her name in 2023 how Epstein controlled her immigration, finances and housing, and pressured her into introducing him to other models. Now she is speaking on the record.

“It’s been hard for me because for many years I’ve been so embarrassed that I wasn’t underage when I met him. I was in my early 20s,” she said in the recent interview. “I kept thinking that I was at fault for putting myself in this situation.”

Confusion about how sex trafficking works and who qualifies as a victim has compounded the problem. The government’s 2019 indictment charged Epstein with trafficking minors between 2002 and 2005, the period covered by his earlier Florida plea deal. The adult women Epstein entrapped after his 2008 conviction weren’t included in the indictment.

In 2019, prosecutors brought charges using the minimum number of victims needed to apprehend Epstein in order to keep the case secret and avoid him fleeing, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Prosecutors continued interviewing victims after his July 2019 arrest and had planned to expand the indictment, including potentially to adult women, had Epstein not died the following month, according to these people and a 2019 Justice Department memo released in the files.

For sex-trafficking cases involving adults, prosecutors must prove the victim was compelled into sexual exploitation through force, fraud or coercion. Fraud typically involves false promises of employment or a better life; coercion can be psychological and take the form of threats of deportation, blackmail or debt bondage, lawyers said.

Federal prosecutors have successfully prosecuted cases of adult sex trafficking. In 2019, the Nxivm group founder Keith Raniere was convicted for his exploitation of adult women and sentenced to 120 years in prison.

Most recently, the Alexander brothers were convicted in a case in which adult women testified that they had been lured to exclusive parties and trips, then drugged and assaulted. Lawyers for the Alexander brothers said they planned to appeal.

After his 2008 plea deal, Epstein shifted his focus to adult women who looked like teenagers—many of them fashion models from Europe and Russia. He dangled fake jobs linked to his famous connections, promising work at places like Victoria’s Secret. He rarely delivered.

Once inside his orbit, the women said they were coerced into performing massages that escalated into sexual demands. Several have said he required at least one such encounter a day, and when no other women were available, he turned to his “assistants.”

Epstein took control of their finances, health bills, immigration and housing. Money he gave to some women and their families came in the form of loans, leaving them unable to disconnect from him.

Sex-trafficking operations often function like pyramid schemes, with traffickers using victims to recruit other victims. Raniere built a secret inner group, DOS, in which each “master” was required to recruit “slaves,” who in turn recruited more women, with victims coerced by handing over compromising photos as collateral.

Epstein’s operation worked similarly. He pressured victims to recruit additional victims, a pattern prosecutors noted in his 2019 indictment. Some victims have said they would offer up other women to Epstein in order to avoid being asked to participate in sex acts themselves.

Both Epstein and Raniere created a power-imbalance with adult victims and used “continuous drips of promises” alongside “implicit threats” to coerce women to participate in sex acts and trafficking, said Moira Penza, the lead prosecutor on the Raniere case who is now a partner at Wilkinson Stekloff.

Penza said the argument that “they could have just left” misunderstands how consent works in these types of cases. She said once a predator creates an environment of dependency, “consent just becomes irrelevant. There really is no way to consent.”

Brad Edwards, a lawyer who has represented dozens of Epstein accusers including Pozhidaeva, said that documents and victim testimony show that after his 2008 conviction Epstein deliberately shifted to women over 18 to use their age as cover to continue running his sex-trafficking operation—and that the strategy largely worked.

“He drew very little scrutiny from law enforcement,” Edwards said. “There was a DEA investigation opened, so it drew some attention, but not much.”

The recent files include a heavily redacted 2015 Drug Enforcement Administration memo about an investigation into suspicious money transfers by Epstein. Epstein was never charged for drug trafficking or financial crimes. The memo used the words “prostitution activities” and initially left one victim’s surname unredacted on one page.

The woman, a European model who was abused by Epstein, told the Journal that the redaction error prompted some news outlets to identify her in this context and has deepened an already painful public misunderstanding of what she experienced. She said she never received the large sum of money from Epstein cited in the memo and was never contacted by the DEA.

Pozhidaeva, who walked on runways for well-known European fashion brands, said she was introduced in 2008 to Epstein by Daniel Siad, a modeling scout who told her Epstein could arrange a Victoria’s Secret audition. Siad’s lawyer had no immediate comment. Siad recently said that he worked professionally to connect models with Epstein and was unaware of any wrongdoing.

In the U.S., Epstein secured her visa through MC2 Model Management and housed her at 301 E. 66th Street alongside other victims. He later used contacts, including former Russian minister Sergei Belyakov, to write U.S. immigration letters on her behalf, copies of which she showed the Journal in 2023.

Belyakov told the Journal that he “did not remember this letter” and declined to comment further. The former deputy minister of economic development corresponded with Epstein for several years, the files show.

Epstein closely monitored her, took compromising photos and expected regular updates on her interactions with other men, Pozhidaeva said. Money he gave to her and her family was structured as loans and tracked meticulously.

Other victims have told the Journal that Epstein sent them spending reports detailing what they owed him, a tactic that made leaving feel financially impossible. Pozhidaeva said Epstein also appeared to have powerful connections in Russia such as Belyakov, which made her fear for her family if she ever fell out of his favor.

When the promised jobs never materialized, Epstein blamed her for not being good enough. He asked her to take photos with prominent figures he met, and later conjured up roles at his nonprofit entities for her. It wasn’t until after his death that Pozhidaeva said she came to understand there had never been real positions and that he had been making the same false promises to other women.

The recently released Epstein files have dredged up painful memories for Pozhidaeva. A January 2016 message showed Epstein interrogating her over photos she had posted of herself and other assistants on Facebook, which he blamed for drawing attention from the Daily Mail. Another email from October 2016 showed her asking Epstein to deliver on a promise to help her brother in Russia get a job. He never did.

Some emails showed Pozhidaeva suggesting other women to Epstein and forwarding photos and modeling profiles, something she said he repeatedly pressured her and other victims into doing. Dozens of emails show Epstein making the such requests of other women.

Epstein also asked Pozhidaeva and other victims to vet prospective women, including flagging their ages to ostensibly confirm they were of legal age and wouldn’t cause trouble, and to meet women and relay his instructions to them.

“I feel ashamed and think about those other women all the time,” Pozhidaeva said. “That’s the hardest part of all of this—I was too consumed by my own abuse to see beyond it. I had to appear happy, to keep smiling, while privately I was battling eating disorders, depression, and insomnia.”

Bridgette Carr, a law professor at the University of Michigan who founded the school’s human-trafficking clinic in 2009, said she draws the line between perpetrator and victim like this: Someone who aids a trafficker after fully escaping their situation is a perpetrator, while someone who does so while still entrapped remains a victim.

“If a woman is still in that situation,” she said, “there’s no magic that happens on her birthday when she becomes a year older.”​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Pozhidaeva was among dozens of victims who pursued claims against Epstein’s estate after his death. She was also deemed eligible to receive compensation from other victim suits. Each woman had to present evidence to a settlement administrator.

“I was bullied and controlled for more than 10 years by Jeffrey Epstein,” she said. “I have to learn to stand up for myself now. I am done being bullied by anyone.”

Since the Epstein files release, Pozhidaeva has been contending with social-media posts and blogs insinuating she is a Russian spy. Several other Russian women in Epstein’s orbit told the Journal they have faced similar accusations.

For Pozhidaeva, the suspicion traces back to her father, who told the Journal he worked for Russia’s armed forces until 1996, retiring during the Boris Yeltsin era. He later worked as a sales representative at coffee and wine companies, and then took jobs at state-run energy and railroad companies.

Her father denied that he or his daughter are Russian agents. “Unfortunately, in the current political climate, there is a tendency to label almost any Russian national with a background in government or a high-level education as a ‘spy’,” he wrote in an email.

His early employment history, compounded by Pozhidaeva’s college degree from the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, has been enough to fuel accusations. “I’m willing to take a polygraph test to make this stop,” she said. “Whatever is needed, I will do it, so I can move on.”

Several media outlets have grabbed emails before the Justice Department removed them and published articles using her name. Pozhidaeva has since been contacting journalists asking to have her name removed from their articles. She said most reputable publications have agreed to withhold the names of sex-trafficking victims, but some haven’t responded.

Penza, the former Nxivm prosecutor, said sex-crime victims expect their confidentiality will be protected by law enforcement and when that expectation isn’t met, it “can feel re-traumatizing.” She said that exposing sex-crime victims “can also have a chilling effect on other people being willing to come forward.”

The redaction failures have given ammunition to bloggers and online commentators who have portrayed women trapped in Epstein’s orbit as willing participants. Some have gone further, citing emails in which women expressed gratitude or warmth toward Epstein as evidence of complicity or consent.

“People see a few emails and think they understand what happened,” Pozhidaeva said. “The Justice Department made mistakes, and even when they fix them, we’re left to live with the consequences.”

Amazon Web Services says the partnership will allow it to offer lightning-fast inference computing

Amazon Web Services plans to deploy processors designed by Cerebras inside its data centers, the latest vote of confidence in the startup, which specializes in chips that power artificial-intelligence models.

Under the multiyear partnership, which the companies announced Friday, AWS will use Cerebras’s chip, called the Wafer-Scale Engine, to help power so-called inference functions, which allow AI models to respond to user queries.

The companies declined to disclose the financial terms of the agreement.

The deal underscores a major shift in the market for computing power. The AI industry is increasingly shifting away from model training and toward inference. Companies that design AI tools and agents are realizing that graphics processing units, or GPUs, while fast and powerful for training, aren’t ideal for inference workloads that require more speed. Many of them are seeking to diversify their supplier bases as they rapidly expand and gain millions of new users for their tools.

AWS, the largest cloud service provider, has relied heavily on chips designed by its in-house semiconductor business—known as Annapurna Labs—to power its data centers. These chips, known as Trainium, are roughly the equivalent to the GPUs made by Nvidia, Advanced Micro Devices and other large chips firms.

In January, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI signed a pact worth more than $10 billion to use Cerebras chips to power its popular chatbot, The Wall Street Journal reported. The deal gave renewed prominence to Cerebras, a startup backed by a host of blue-chip financial firms including Fidelity Management, Atreides Management, Benchmark, Tiger Global and Coatue, but which had previously struggled at times to raise money.

The firm had filed for an initial public offering in September 2024, but withdrew its filing about a year later. In February, Cerebras said it had raised $1 billion in a new funding round, bringing its total fundraising to $2.6 billion and its post-money valuation to approximately $23 billion.

OpenAI is seeking to deploy up to 750 megawatts of computing power using Cerebras’s chips. AWS plans to combine Cerebras’s chips with its own Trainium chips in its data centers to improve its solutions for inference computing.

Cerebras bills its chips as a “hyper-fast inference solution” and says they can process the complicated tasks known as “decode”—or the phase of inference computing in which an AI model spits out a response to a user query—up to 25 times faster than Nvidia’s GPUs.

“More people are using AI, using it more often and using it to solve harder problems,” said Cerebras Chief Executive Andrew Feldman in an interview. “This puts a Cerebras-Trainium solution in the largest cloud. It gives us access to a ton of customers.”

The deal represents a fresh challenge to Nvidia, which has seen mounting competition from designers of custom processors and which faces pressure to offer customers new products that are capable of running AI models faster and at a lower cost. In December, Nvidia signed a $20 billion licensing deal with the chip startup Groq and next week plans to unveil a new processing system tailored for inference using Groq’s technology.

AWS, a major unit of Amazon.com AMZN -0.89%decrease; red down pointing triangle, and Cerebras said that the partnership would offer some of the fastest inference computing available and would be priced as a premium service.

“Our job is to push the speed and lower the price,” said Nafea Bshara, co-founder of Annapurna Labs and a vice president and distinguished engineer at AWS. The cloud-computing firm will still offer slower computing services using just its Trainium processors at a lower price point as well.

“If you want slow inference, there will be cheaper ways to go,” Feldman said. “But if you want fast tokens, if speed matters to you, if you’re doing coding or agentic work, not only are we the absolute fastest, but we intend to set the bar. We’re in this to win it.”

Investors in social-media platform’s U.S. business, including Oracle and Silver Lake, agreed to give the government several multibillion-dollar payments, sources say

The Trump administration is set to receive a roughly $10 billion fee from investors in the recently completed deal to take control of TikTok’s U.S. business, delivering it a windfall for keeping the popular social-media app alive in America.

The payment is part of the agreement through which investors friendly with the administration gained control of TikTok’s U.S. operations from Chinese parent ByteDance, people familiar with the matter said. It comes in addition to the investments made to create a new entity to run the app in the U.S.

The investors include cloud-computing company Oracle ORCL -2.54%decrease; red down pointing triangle, private-equity firm Silver Lake and Abu Dhabi investor MGX. They and other backers paid the Treasury Department about $2.5 billion when the deal closed in January and are set to make several additional payments until hitting the $10 billion total, the people said.

When announcing the framework for the TikTok deal in September, Trump said, “It hasn’t been fully negotiated, but we’ll get something,” adding that the size of the deal and money and effort put in by the government justify compensation. He had previously said, “The United States is getting a tremendous fee-plus—I call it a fee-plus—just for making the deal and I don’t want to throw that out the window.”

The Wall Street Journal previously reported that the administration was expected to get a multibillion-dollar fee.

The $10 billion payment would be nearly unprecedented for a government helping arrange a transaction, historians have said. Vice President JD Vance previously said the new TikTok entity running the U.S. operations is valued at about $14 billion in the deal, which some tech analysts have said dramatically undervalues the company.

As part of the agreement, the U.S. entity has to share profits with ByteDance, which licensed its popular algorithm to the new venture so it could be fully trained on Americans and still owns nearly 20%.

Investment bankers advising on a typical deal receive fees of less than 1% of the transaction value, and the percentage generally gets smaller as the deal size increases. Bank of America is in line to make some $130 million for advising railroad operator Norfolk Southern on its $71.5 billion sale to Union Pacific, one of the largest fees on record for a single bank on a deal.

Administration officials have said the fee is justified given Trump’s role in saving TikTok in the U.S. and navigating negotiations with China to get the deal done while addressing the security concerns of lawmakers.

Trump arranged the deal to comply with a law forcing TikTok U.S. to reduce ByteDance’s ownership stake or cease operations. Many lawmakers worried about security risks associated with a Chinese company controlling an app with so much personal data on Americans, triggering a saga that goes back to Trump’s first term.

The TikTok fee extracted from private-sector investors is the administration’s latest transaction involving the nation’s largest businesses. Trump took a nearly 10% stake in semiconductor company Intel and has agreed to take a chunk of chip sales to China from Nvidia in exchange for granting export licenses. The administration has also taken equity stakes in other companies and has a say in the operations of U.S. Steel following a “golden share” agreement with Japan’s Nippon Steel in its takeover.

UPS still delivers more packages, but FedEx now has the bigger market capitalization as Wall Street rewards the company for its cost-cutting efforts

All hail the new king of packages.

For the first time in history, FedEx FDX -0.41%decrease; red down pointing triangle eclipsed United Parcel Service UPS -0.69%decrease; red down pointing triangle this week in market capitalization, a sign of how much Wall Street is rewarding the delivery giant that can shrink the fastest to boost profits.

FedEx shares have climbed nearly 40% in the past two years, while UPS shares have dropped by about the same amount. On Monday, FedEx was valued at $84.9 billion, about $44 million more than its rival, the first time that FedEx was worth more since UPS went public in 1999. UPS retook the top spot Tuesday, but FedEx was on top again by Friday’s closing bell.

The longtime rivals have been slashing thousands of jobs and shrinking their operations after adding capacity to their networks during the pandemic. UPS shares have tumbled since the company signed a new contract with the Teamsters union in 2023 that locked in pay raises.

Here is a look at how the two companies stack up now compared with a decade ago:

For decades, Wall Street judged the companies on how big they could grow, focusing on metrics including parcel volume and revenue. During the pandemic, they expanded at a breakneck speed to keep up with demand. But when demand for e-commerce shipments eased as consumers returned to normal life, investors started paying attention to their cost-cutting efforts.

FedEx had $88 billion in revenue in its last fiscal year, just behind the $88.7 billion in revenue that UPS reported in the 2025 calendar year. But FedEx delivered fewer packages: Its average daily domestic parcel volume was 14 million compared with 20 million for UPS.

FedEx Chief Executive Raj Subramaniam, who has held the top job since 2022, has moved to combine the company’s express and ground-delivery units and spin off the freight cargo division. Those two efforts are continuing, and the company has said they will make its operations more efficient.

In a recent meeting with investors, Subramaniam said FedEx has become more resilient and is focused on business-to-business deliveries, especially in the healthcare, automotive, data-center and aerospace industries.

UPS said in January it planned to cut an additional 30,000 roles this year, after cutting 48,000 in 2025. Early last year, CEO Carol Tomé announced plans to wind down UPS’s partnership with Amazon to focus on higher-margin business.

The decision was a vindication for Jerome Powell, but shows that Fed independence now depends on judges

A federal judge threw out criminal subpoenas targeting Fed Chair Jerome Powell, concluding they aimed to pressure him to lower rates.

The Supreme Court is weighing whether President Trump can remove Fed governor Lisa Cook over mortgage-fraud allegations that Cook disputes.

Sen. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) vowed to block Fed nominees, stalling the replacement process for Powell.

For decades, the Federal Reserve’s independence from the White House rested on an unwritten set of norms: Presidents would name appointees including the chair to the central bank’s board and grumble about interest rates—but ultimately leave the place alone.

A federal judge’s ruling Friday throwing out a pair of criminal subpoenas targeting Fed Chair Jerome Powell underscored how President Trump has upended that arrangement, pressing to exert direct control over interest-rate decisions in any way possible. The result has been an arrangement where Fed independence is protected no longer by norms, but by court orders.

U.S. District Judge James Boasberg dismantled the investigation sought by U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro, a longtime Trump ally, in a 27-page ruling unsealed Friday. He concluded that the subpoenas, which center on a few minutes of congressional testimony on the Fed’s building renovations last summer, were designed to “harass and pressure” Powell into lowering rates or resigning. Pirro said she intends to appeal.

Boasberg, an Obama appointee, said the government hadn’t provided evidence of any criminal wrongdoing, a point several Republican senators on the committee that heard the testimony have also made.

The subpoena fight isn’t the only front where the Fed’s independence is being defined by judges rather than political restraint. The Supreme Court is weighing whether Trump can remove Fed governor Lisa Cook over mortgage-fraud allegations that Cook disputes.

That case could determine for the first time how easily a president can dismiss members of the central bank’s board. A ruling upholding Cook’s removal protections would reinforce the legal walls around the Fed. A ruling against her could give any president a direct lever over monetary policy that none has previously had.

The Supreme Court is expected to rule against Trump in the Cook case. “He’s tried two flagrant ways to go after two governors. He’s been rejected by one court and he’ll be rejected by the higher court,” said Mark Spindel, an investment manager and co-author of a book on the history of Fed independence.

The Fed’s independence exists because Congress and presidents have recognized the trade-offs of pushing for lower rates to juice short-term growth at the cost of higher inflation later.

U.S. law gives the Fed the power to control its own budget, gives officials long, staggered terms and insulates them from removal over policy disputes. Countries where political leaders have controlled monetary policy, such as Turkey or Argentina, have suffered chronic inflation that erodes living standards and destabilizes economies.

Legal victories alone might not be enough to secure the Fed’s autonomy. The central bank ultimately depends on sustained and broad political support to protect its independence. The most significant consequence of Trump’s approach might have been that it awakened a Senate that had otherwise shown little appetite to push back on executive power.

In particular, retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R., N.C.) has vowed to block Fed nominees, stalling the process for replacing Powell, whose term as chair expires in two months. Trump has nominated former Fed governor Kevin Warsh to serve as chair.

The transition—and Trump’s public statements that he expects his next Fed chair to bring rates down—make the court battles over the subpoenas and Cook’s removal all the more consequential for determining the limits of presidential power over the central bank.

For Warsh, the saga carries its own paradox. A strong judicial and congressional defense of Fed independence could offer a valuable shield once he takes the job, assuring investors that the central bank will be able to take unpopular steps, if needed, to keep a grip on inflation.

But he faces a delicate path to get there. Tillis implied on Friday that Pirro’s decision to appeal could delay his confirmation. Warsh could initially face a challenge demonstrating enough independence to ease doubts among lawmakers and investors that he will set policy on the merits without provoking a president who just this week demanded the Fed cut rates immediately—something officials are unlikely to do at their meeting next week.

The danger for the Fed is that the very steps it took to defend itself could make it harder to stay above the fray. The unsealed filings revealed the central bank making its most forceful case ever against a sitting president. In its reply brief, the central bank’s outside lawyers cataloged 100 public statements by Trump and his allies attacking Powell between 2018 and this year.

The Fed argued that this record led to only one conclusion, that the subpoenas were designed to help Trump “seize for himself a power specifically denied to him by federal law.” Pirro, in a press conference Friday, said the judge’s decision wrongly allowed Powell to be “bathed in immunity” from investigation.

Judges and lawmakers have drawn a line around the Fed for now. Whether that line holds once Powell leaves and the next chair takes the job will test whether independence defended by court orders can prove as durable as independence once defended by custom.

A gas station in Los Angeles on March 2: Rising oil prices are the economic manifestation of the Iran offensive. (Patrick T. Fallon / AFP via Getty Images)

When bad things happen to stocks, good things can happen for options investors.

When the market’s directional trend is hijacked by forces that marginalize financial metrics like corporate earnings growth and profit margins, it’s more significant than merely investor sentiment souring.

Such is the consequence of a pre-emptive war with Iran that has sent oil prices sharply higher and roiled stocks. The war initially caused a surge in options volatility, as evident in the rise in the Cboe Volatility Index, or VIX. The so-called fear gauge is now around 25.5, indicating demand for put options, which increase in value when stocks decline. And that offers long-term investors an opportunity.

Too bad changes in the market have rendered the VIX a less reliable trading signal.

For decades, investors have used the VIX to time stock purchases and identify the end of stock declines. It’s a simple indicator: When the VIX is sharply above its long-term average of about 19, it has signaled the end of stock selling and a good time to buy stocks.

It has even inspired an options market ditty: When the VIX is high, it’s time to buy; when it’s low, it’s time to go.

The VIX’s usefulness is animated by a simple fact. Investors are always either too fearful or greedy. Taking the opposite side of the expressed emotion telegraphed by the VIX has often been prescient. When the VIX peaked around 90 during the 2008-09 financial crisis, telegraphing extreme fear that the financial system might collapse, stock buyers were rewarded.

But changes in how investors use options have weakened the VIX’s signals.

As many investors confront retirement, options-selling exchange-traded funds, such as JPMorgan Equity Premium Income, have become popular investments for generating income. The funds sell S&P 500 index options to make money, which does something few people realize—it suppresses the VIX, whose value is derived from S&P 500 put and call options.

On Monday, for instance, the VIX was at 31, which seemed subdued compared with an almost 100-point decline in S&P 500 futures. Perhaps this was because many investors were selling index options. By day’s end, the VIX declined and stocks recovered after President Donald Trump announced that the Iran offensive was almost over.

To make the VIX great again, as it were, investors must offset the impact of options selling with complementary data.

Since rising oil prices are the economic manifestation of the Iran offensive, investors might monitor AAA gasoline surveys.

Should national gas prices rise to, say, $5 or even $6 a gallon—ignore California, where prices are always high—retail investors might really panic.

That would whack stocks, as nonprofessional investors have reliably bought every dip because they have been conditioned to believe stocks always rise.

If small-balance-sheet investors complain about the cost to fill up vehicles, it could mean less money for groceries, let alone stock trading. Such a scenario is unappreciated.

Rather than trying to buy stocks at the apex of fear based off VIX signals, consider integrating gas prices into your decision-making.

If you want 1,500 shares, buy three lots of 500 each when gas prices hit, say, $4.50, $5, and $5.50. Our preferred approach remains getting paid by the options market to buy stocks by selling puts with strike prices just below the stock price with one-month or less expiration dates.

This VIX strategy, buttressed with gas price data, is intended to capture more fear data. Options remain the best way to monetize investor irrationality and emotional dysregulation.

Copper has pulled back on Iran concerns, creating a buying opportunity for Freeport-McMoRan stock.

Key Points

Worries about the Iran war have rocked financial markets, raising concerns that higher oil prices will lead to a global economic slowdown. Copper, one of the more highly cyclical metals, has pulled back as a result—as have shares of Freeport-McMoRan, the largest copper miner in the U.S.

This dip creates a compelling buying opportunity for a stock that has a lot going for it. Freeport is down more than 10% from its 52-week high. That still leaves it up by about 20% this year—and more than 75% over the past 12 months. Much of these gains come from expectations for demand tied to the need for copper wiring in data centers. But the stock is more than a proxy for copper prices, which even after the Iran dip are still up about 4.5% this year and more than 25% since March 2025.

Wall Street’s consensus price target for the stock is $68.62, according to FactSet. That’s about 10% higher than current levels. It could prove to be too conservative.

For one, copper’s rally likely has room to run. The artificial-intelligence buildout is one reason why analysts at Bank of America said in a March report that copper is a “future facing” commodity that “everybody seems to want.” BofA argues that longer-term energy transition trends, including demand for AI and data centers as well as increased electrification, should be a positive for Freeport and other leading copper miners. It forecasts that copper will hit $7.26 a pound by the second half of next year, almost 25% higher than current prices.

Kevin Smith, chief investment officer of Crescat Capital, tells Barron’s that this is just the beginning of a new long-term bull market for copper. He argues that the recent pullback due to worries about Iran and higher oil prices are temporary and an overreaction. Crescat runs a hedge fund focusing on precious and base metals miners and owns Freeport shares.

“It’s a buying opportunity for Freeport-McMoRan and other copper miners,” Smith says, adding that he wouldn’t be surprised to see copper prices rise another 20% to 25% from current levels.

Any increase in prices for the metal should quickly flow to the company’s bottom line. Wall Street is currently forecasting a profit of $2.85 a share this year, up more than 60% from 2025. Analysts predict earnings will rise another 30% in 2027, to $3.71 a share. It’s no wonder that 20 of the 25 analysts who cover Freeport have rated the stock Buy or Outperform.

Freeport is also cheap compared with many competitors. BofA says the stock now “stands out as relatively inexpensive…compared to large-cap copper peers.” It trades at about 21 times 2026 earnings estimates, while Southern Copper clocks in at a forward price/earnings ratio of about 29. Freeport is valued at around 7.5 times enterprise value to earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, or Ebitda, for the next 12 months. Rivals such as Chile’s Antofagasta and Canada’s Lundin Mining and Ivanhoe Mines trade at enterprise-value-to-Ebitda multiples of 8.5 to 10.

One reason for the discount is a fatal mudslide accident at Freeport’s Grasberg mine in Indonesia last September. Beyond the human tragedy, the event has led to concerns about production. The BofA team says the market is “potentially taking a ‘wait and see’ approach on operational recovery.” The market may be making too much of this.

Other analysts argue that the worries about the Indonesian operations are overdone. Daniel Major, an analyst at UBS, said in January following the company’s latest earnings report that visibility on the ramping up of the Grasberg mine is improving. As such, he boosted his price target from $60 a share to $70, which is about 13% higher than the current price. Major said the $70 target values the stock at 9.5 times Ebitda, which is roughly in line with its three-year average multiple.

Jefferies analyst Christopher LaFemina is also bullish, calling Freeport one of his top picks in the mining sector. He recently lifted his price target to $76 a share, writing in a report that he expects “a recovery in Grasberg production alongside a structurally higher copper price over time to drive meaningful upside” to the stock.

LaFemina does concede that “there is of course some risk to the timing of recovery to full production” and that the Grasberg mine won’t be back to 100% capacity until the end of 2027. But he also notes that the company’s own production guidance figures are “beatable.”

Investors also shouldn’t underestimate the possibility of stimulus from the U.S. government for Freeport and other domestic copper miners. President Donald Trump has made it no secret that his administration views copper as a “critical mineral.” Freeport-McMoRan CEO Kathleen Quirk addressed the question of funding from Washington at a BMO Capital Markets conference in February, saying that “the government has made it clear that they would like to facilitate the U.S. copper industry.” She added that although the company has “access to more conventional types of financing…we’ll look at all the opportunities there.”

The good news is that as long as copper prices remain stable, or creep higher, the company isn’t actually in need of federal assistance. After all, Freeport has more than $4 billion in cash, and its long-term-debt-to-capital ratio of 34% is below its five-year average. The balance sheet is healthy.

There are some risks. If the company isn’t able to get the Grasberg mine operational as quickly as it expects, production could take a hit. And copper prices may pull back again if the situation with Iran intensifies further and oil prices spike once more.

So, yes, copper prices may remain volatile in the short term, but Freeport should be able to withstand that given the strong demand for copper overall. The eventual full reopening of the Grasberg mine will give the company some additional juice, meaning that the valuation gap between it and its peers should steadily narrow. There’s lots of green ahead for the red metal—and Freeport-McMoRan stock.

• Jan 2024: ~$41–$44 range, gap down Jan 16–17 (China fears), gap up Jan 25 (Q4'23 earnings beat) ✓
• Apr 2024: Q1'24 earnings Apr 23 (~$41 close → gap up to ~$44–45 zone)
• May 2024: highs ~$54.86 on May 20
• Jul–Aug 2024: major selloff back to ~$37–38 (China demand fears, LME copper crash)
• Sep–Oct 2024: China stimulus gap UP ~$37 → $42–43; Q3'24 earnings gap UP Oct 22 (beat)
• Jan 2025: Q4'24 earnings miss → gap DOWN ~12% (~$44 → ~$39)
• Apr 2025: Q1'25 results
• Sep 2025: 17% crash in one day (mudflow/Grasberg) from ~$44 to ~$37
• Oct 2025: Q3'25 big beat gap UP; stock ripped to $48+
• Jan 2026: Q4'25 earnings on Jan 22 — gap UP strongly (beat, ~$50s → $56+)
• Feb 2026: ATH $69.75, then Grasberg deal selloff ~5.5%
• Mar 15, 2026: ~$57.50Standing disclaimer: exact pip-level gap boundaries need Bloomberg OHLC verification — the levels above are from memory/training data and the search results I could pull. Use this as a structural roadmap and tighten with your terminal.

Anyone remember Venezuela?

The more chaos rages in the Persian Gulf, the better Donald Trump’s last foreign target—and its world-beating oil reserves—looks.

“Any rise in Middle East risk premium makes political change in Venezuela seem more valuable for global oil markets,” says Luisa Palacios, a former chairwoman of Citgo Petroleum now at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy.

Venezuela’s progress since U.S. forces seized President Nicolás Maduro on Jan. 3 has exceeded skeptics’ expectations. Vice President Delcy Rodriguez steered through an overhaul of the Hydrocarbons Law, swapping state control for more normal production-sharing and royalty structures. An amnesty statute freed more than 3,000 political prisoners, according to the government.

“At the end of last year, 80% of Venezuelans were pessimistic about the future,” says Angel Alvarado, a former opposition lawmaker now at the University of Pennsylvania. “Now, 80% are optimistic. Many of my friends have been released from prison.”

Expanding Venezuela’s current oil production of around one million barrels a day to 1.5 million is “completely doable,” Palacios assesses. The multinationals who have stuck it out in Venezuela—U.S.-based Chevron, Italy’s Eni, and Spain’s Repsol —will lead the charge.

That’s still a long way from the 3.5 million barrels the country pumped in the late 1990s, before Maduro mentor Hugo Chávez took power promising a “Bolivarian Revolution.” Caracas needs deeper structural change to get back on that track, says Benjamin Gedan, director of the Stimson Center’s Latin America program. “There is no rule of law, no court system,” he says.

Chance handed post-Maduro power to Rodriguez, a former economics minister with a reputation as a pragmatist, says Angela Pachon, special adviser to University of Pennsylvania’s Kleinman Center for Energy Policy. “Delcy was previously close to Chevron,” she says.

A more sinister figure lurks behind Rodriguez in interior and justice minister Diosdado Cabello, Pachon notes. He has been under U.S. indictment since 2020 for cocaine trafficking and conspiracy to commit narcoterrorism.

Maria Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize winner, threw an X factor into the country’s politics, announcing on March 1 that she would return home “in a few weeks” to abet an “unstoppable transition to democracy.” Cabello countered that the government would prepare a “surprise” for her.

Also on tenuous ground is Washington’s ad hoc control of Venezuela’s oil revenue, which should rise to $6 billion over “the next few months,” U.S. Energy Secretary Chris Wright said on a visit to the country last month. The U.S. will hold the cash “until a representative government is stood up in Venezuela,” he added.

The Trump administration has been less than forthcoming with further details, Gedan says. “This structure is super nontransparent,” he says. “This is Iran-Contra territory, the executive branch controlling a slush fund.”

Then there is the estimated $130 billion-plus in Venezuelan sovereign debt, in default since 2017. Benchmark bonds took a jump from 31 cents to 45 cents on the dollar following Maduro’s capture, then flatlined for the past six weeks with restructuring talks beyond a far horizon. “I don’t think you will see large-scale investment without settling debt issues,” says Rachel Lyngaas, a senior policy researcher at RAND.

Further disruptions on the other side of the world could offset a lot of misgivings about Venezuela, though. “There’s a completely different equation at $120 a barrel than at $60,” Palacios says.

Ackman has had a great record over the past seven years. Now he’s making it easier for U.S. investors to buy in. They should be wary.

Key Points

After failing to pull off a U.S. fund offering in 2024, billionaire investor Bill Ackman is taking a little advice from Mary Poppins to help the medicine go down—he’s adding a little sugar via stock in his management company, Pershing Square Inc. While the terms are superior to what Ackman offered two years ago, investors may want to think twice before participating.

Here’s the deal: Both the fund and management company could come public in a rare twin initial public offering by the end of March. The closed-end fund, Pershing Square USA, could raise $5 billion to $10 billion, and Ackman already has lined up $2.8 billion from a group of investors, who will get a sweeter deal than public buyers.

Ackman plans to offer Pershing Square USA shares at $50 each, while Pershing Square Inc. will go public by distributing what could be 40 million shares to buyers of Pershing Square USA, in what amounts to a direct offering rather than a traditional IPO. For every 100 shares of Pershing Square USA purchased, a buyer will get 20 shares of Pershing Square Inc.

Barron’s estimates this could amount to a 10% bonus. Pershing Square Inc. could be valued at about $10 billion, in line with its valuation when Ackman sold a 10% stake privately to a group of investors in 2024. The management company should have about 400 million shares outstanding.

The environment isn’t great for bringing public both a new fund and an alternative asset manager. There has been a collapse in the stock price of marquee alt firms like Blackstone and KKR. Ackman, 59, isn’t deterred by the market turmoil, telling potential investors in a letter that “the greater the stock market disruption, the better for Pershing Square USA’s acquisition program.”

Pershing Square USA is a closed-end fund. That means it issues a fixed amount of shares, which then trade like stocks or exchange-traded funds. Investors cannot redeem their shares from Pershing Square. Their only liquidity is in the open market.

Closed-end funds can trade at a premium or discount to their net asset value. Unfortunately, U.S. equity closed-end funds usually trade at discounts ranging from 5% to more than 10%. The closed-end IPO market has been moribund, with minimal new issuance in two years, because investors don’t like the fund structure and the tendency of funds to trade at discounts. Ackman failed to take Pershing Square USA public in 2024 because buyers were worried the fund would immediately trade at a discount, resulting in losses on their investment.

Ackman vowed to resurrect the deal. His solution is to offer free shares of his management company as an incentive to buy Pershing Square USA so that investors are compensated for the risk that the closed-end fund moves to a discounted price. “We are giving you ‘bonus’ shares in PSI to thank you for your investment in PSUS, our first U.S.-listed investment fund, and because doing so makes good business sense,” he wrote.

Should investors take up Ackman’s offer on the new fund? The terms are certainly superior to what they were two years ago. Ackman also has had a great record over the past seven years. He plans to run a concentrated portfolio of 12 to 15 of what the prospectus calls undervalued “large-capitalization growth companies.” Ackman may also make macro bets involving bonds, currencies, or commodities. Based on Ackman’s existing investments, Pershing Square USA could contain Alphabe, Meta Platforms, Amazon.com, Uber Technologies, Brookfield, and Restaurant Brands International. It will be his first U.S.-listed fund and trade on the New York Stock Exchange.

Here are some of the problems. While Pershing Square USA could begin trading at a discount to its net asset value, shares of Ackman’s management company are supposed to offset those losses. The value of the bonus stock, however, is unclear. The fund will have a stiff annual fee of 2%, creating a hurdle for Ackman to beat the S&P 500 index and low-fee ETFs. Ackman’s management company is small relative to its many alt peers. It now runs about $16 billion in fee-paying fund assets. Even assuming a successful fund offering, the total would be $25 billion. Pershing Square might struggle to hold a $10 billion market value in that scenario, since that likely would be a big premium to peers based on revenue, earnings, and assets.

What’s more, investors have a ready alternative to the fund IPO. That comes in the form of Ackman’s main existing investment vehicle, Pershing Square Holdings, a $13 billion European-listed closed-end fund that trades in London and lightly in the U.S. under the ticker PSHZF. That fund is off to a tough start in 2026—it’s down 14% this year through March 10 based on its net asset value, against a drop of less than 1% for the S&P 500—after topping the benchmark index by about three percentage points in 2025. The fund has consistently traded at a 20%-plus discount to net asset value in recent years, and investors can buy it at a recent 23% discount to its NAV.

The European fund is taxed as a passive foreign investment company. Many U.S. investors avoid such funds because they see the tax treatment as onerous, says tax expert Robert Willens, but he doesn’t see it as a big negative. Investors buy master limited partnerships, and their tax treatment can be similar, he says.

Ultimately, the offering is a complex way for Ackman to reach U.S. investors and boost Pershing Square Inc.’s assets under management. Despite the bonus shares, investors are better off with the European shares—or simply waiting until the U.S. fund is trading at a potential discount before buying in.