According to Odaily Planet Daily, Mark Spitznagel, founder and chief investment officer of the "Black Swan Fund" Universa Investments, stated that the multi-year upward trend in US stocks is far from over—at least for now. In a recent letter to investors, Spitznagel wrote that the market will continue to operate in the "Goldilocks zone" over the next year—inflation and interest rates are declining, the economy is slowing but not excessively, market sentiment is turning to euphoria—and the stock market will continue to climb and end in a surge. However, he added that "the biggest bubble in human history" is now in its final stages. Spitznagel's hedge fund has been operating for nearly two decades, focusing on tail risk hedging, i.e., protecting investors' portfolios from the next major crash. He stated that as long as the economy remains resilient, the stock market will continue to rise—a view he has maintained since the end of 2022. In an interview, he said that market euphoria could push the S&P 500 to 8,000 points or even higher—followed by a sharp reversal. The worrying aspect is that if the Federal Reserve maintains current interest rates for an extended period, businesses will begin to struggle to raise capital. Spitznagel stated that while the economy appears resilient, monetary policy has a lagging effect, and the Federal Reserve's excessive focus on lagging indicators such as inflation has become outdated. "The Fed is currently holding back, and as the economy gradually deteriorates, the market will expect more easing measures," he said. In this context, the stock market will climb on expectations of further rate cuts, followed by a rapid decline when the economy slows. "At some point, the Fed will be powerless to reverse the situation, exactly as happened in 2007 and 2008."

Odaily Planet Daily reports that on February 18th local time, in the first round of voting in the Japanese House of Representatives prime ministerial nomination election, Liberal Democratic Party President Sanae Takaichi won with a majority of votes, securing victory. The House of Councillors election will follow. Because the Japanese Constitution stipulates that the House of Representatives election results have "priority," it is certain that Sanae Takaichi will be elected Prime Minister of Japan. (CCTV)

Odaily Planet Daily reports that DeFi lending protocol Moonwell suffered approximately $1.78 million in bad debt due to an oracle misconfiguration. After enabling Chainlink's OEV wrapper contract via governance proposal MIP-X43 on February 15th, Moonwell experienced a serious misconfiguration of its cbETH price oracle, at one point valuing the token at only $1. On-chain trading bots and liquidators acted swiftly, seizing cbETH collateral by repaying approximately $1 of debt. This misconfiguration resulted in the liquidation of 1096.317 cbETH, wiping out the vast majority of collateral for many borrowers and leaving the protocol with a large amount of bad debt. The Moonwell team immediately reduced the cbETH borrowing and supply caps to 0.01 after discovering the problem to limit further losses, but the official team has declined to comment further on the source of the error or details of the vulnerability.

Huoxun Finance News, February 18th - According to Reuters, AI agent startup Temporal announced the completion of a $300 million Series D funding round, valuing the company at $5 billion. The round was led by a16z, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures, and Sequoia Capital. The company stated that this funding round was not to "chase a hot trend in artificial intelligence," but rather to build a platform to address the reliability challenges commonly faced by AI agents in complex, long-running processes. Current users include AI companies like OpenAI, Snap, Netflix, and JPMorgan Chase.

According to Huoxun Finance on February 18th, OnchainLens monitoring shows that Huang Licheng (aka "Maji Dage") has continued to increase his long positions. However, due to market volatility, his overall positions are currently showing a floating loss of over $27.8 million, specifically as follows: ETH 25x leveraged long position worth $13 million, opening price $2,004.87; BTC 40x leveraged long position worth $1.7 million, opening price $68,625; HYPE 10x leveraged long position worth $1.3 million, opening price $31; VVV 3x leveraged long position worth $40,000, opening price $4.