What's going on everyone? Sam here with the late sports guard serving 21-22 Pineda Flawless basketball hobby one box break number two rin left side serial numbers. So look again at your results as always you can find those on the websites under the results tab as well as the link in chat. Good luck here everybody. Let me sort these really quick. Bye column B. Here we go. My first box of Flawless this year. Let's see how rich missed on this triple logo man or about this logo man. My god. This stuff is nasty. Oh good lord. All right here we go. It's got a cool six to 20 game use Russell Westbrook for the Lakers six to 20. You're going to Simon S at the six spot. There we go Simon. Let's go buddy. Nice one there my friend Russ. It's going to be a six of ten. That is a three card RPA Luca Garza. It's going to be the Iowa legend right there. It's going to the sixth spot again. Simon all of a sudden with two cards. Six of ten. Luca Garza on the RPA. It's kind of nasty for the Pistons. Simon all of a sudden now with three cards that's going to be a six of ten. Usman Garuba. Nice one there on the rookie gold auto momentous signatures. There you go Simon. This one's kind of freaking cool dude. This one's kind of freaking cool. That's going to be a 23 of 25 drew holiday on the draft gem signatures as a Philadelphia 76er from what 2009. That is again 23 is going to Sam A. There you go Sam. True holiday draft gem signatures as a Philadelphia 76er. Part of that New Orleans Noel draft day trade in 2013. Send him to Philly. Send him to New Orleans. Send Noel up to Philly. It's kind of nuts. We've got a three of ten this time. That's going to Nate N. Gary Payton. The glove three of ten for the Sonics. Nice one there congrats on that to that spot and this tiered rakes are flying bro. Understand why this is kind of nasty going to three spot again Nate's three of five. We've got Io DeSoonmu. Nice one there on the rookie Emerald momentous auto. Nice Io. Yeah Payton's a dog. Gary Payton was a dog for sure. Usman Hymn, Camp, Xavier McKinney, Sigma. Well Sigma probably was a little before that but I love me some X man. This one's pretty cool too. Going to the four spot Oren W. How about a Halligod? Tyrese Halliburton four of ten. One of his first high end Pacers autos. That's sick. Brats on that one. Four of ten Tyrese Halliburton for Oren W. Part of what we have to say is probably the most win-win trade in recent memory with Sabonis going to Sacramento and then being a three seed and then now Halliburton kind of leading the rebuild over in Indiana. And last one here you can mag this one. That's going to be 18 of 25 going to Ken K. Frans Wagner rookie excellence auto. That's awesome dude. That's such a clean looking card. Good God. Congrats on that one Ken. Let's go Ken. Frans Wagner. All right we've got our outer. That's going to be 10 of 10. Going to Marvin N. Marvin N at the 10. Bam out of bio on the gold. Brats on that gold diamond authenticity guarantee. 10 of 10. Bam out of bio for Marvin. Just wait for this next one. Have you seen, did you see it? Just wait dude. Just wait. Just wait dude. This thing's, this is just, this is, this is insanity bro. Oh my God bro. Just look at this thing going up three spot. I didn't even see that. Yep. That is it. Steph Curry three of five. Three colored K Muse patch auto. Going to Nate N at the three spot. Come on man.   That's insane. Can you just purposely give Rich the non-stealth briefcase? Yeah, oh absolutely. You knew I was going to jump in. That's why you did that. Game worn. Yeah, I got you. Steph and chef. Goodness gracious. Chefing it up in here this morning. That's a large card. That's a large card. You got that? Nate N. Nate N. Wait, go Nate. Go Nate. That's a large card. Get insurance from the website. Yeah, absolutely. That is a big cut. That is it guys. Empty briefcase. That was pretty, pretty good way to end the case number one right there. Thanks again. We got box number three coming up now.


All right, how's it going everybody? Forced here, we're gonna do the final, the final, I guess, a distribution of our top trim silver packs for breaks that we have already done. These are the mats on the fly breaks. I think we did everything else on Monday night. So that was during on the live stream before we did personals Monday night. That break is uploaded. The results are also posted to the site. We're gonna do the same thing here. We have seven mats on the fly breaks. So there were a few hobby four box breaks and a few jumbo two box breaks. All the on the flies or random divisions that he did. So yeah, I'll kind of show you here. So obviously AL Central is gonna have two spots in each. So it's just by the players and the teams that were affected by the extended base short prints not being there. So that's gonna be AL Central Torkelson, AL Central Witt, AL West J-Rod, CJ Abrams and NL Central Hunter Green. So I have the name of the breakup here. So this is top scrum hobby four box number one divisions. And then it'll say what happens. So then the top four we each get one pack. And again, it is one pack per box, whether it is hobby or jumbo. That is what top sent us. So that'll kind of show you there. And then what I'm gonna do is I think I have it here. Yeah, so I'm gonna just put it all together on one. It's all gonna be done on one video here and then all posts it as one post. So it's gonna be easy to find. And then it'll also have like gets one package or top four to one pack, top two get one pack. So that'll kind of hopefully answer a lot of questions already. And again, if you purchased a personal a before we got the silver packs, I'm pretty sure we've already shipped them out to you. So let's go ahead and roll the dice. And then we got the seven randoms to do. Two to one shot. A six, not bad, not bad. Better than a nine, which I rolled the other day when I did two one T randoms. All right, six on everything. So again, this is top scrum hobby four box, number one divisions. So these are all on the fly. So I'll just skip that part. Top scrum hobby four box, number one random divisions. Top four get one package. One, two, three, four, five and six. So AL central, AL West, NL central, NL West. So everybody gets at least one there. That's good. So this is top scrum hobby four box, number two. Again, same thing, top four get one package. One, two, three, four, five and six. NL West, AL central, NL central, AL central. This is top scrum hobby four box, number three. Once again, top four get one package. Once again, top four get one package. One, two, three, four, five and six. AL West, AL central, twice in NL West. Now we're on to the jumbo two boxers. So again, top two are gonna get one package on these. Top two get one package. One, two, three, four, five and six. NL West, AL central. Top scrum jumbo two box. Top two get one, two box number two. Top two get one package, a lot of twos, sorry guys. One, two, three, four, five, six. NL and AL central. Jumbo two box number three. One, two, three, four, five and six. NL central and AL West. And then this should be the last one here. Jumbo two box number four. One, two, three, four, five and six. AL central and AL West. All right guys, give me a second. I'm gonna get all of those copied over and then we'll go right back through it honestly. There's all it's copy over. Wait, did I not finish one of those? I did one wrong. Let me see. I only did one five times, hang on guys. Not completed, how do I complete it?  I have no idea. Do you think by just clicking on it? Just one sec. So the two box number one random divisions I did not complete it, you can see it here. I only did it five times, six rounds. So I did it five times, one sec. I'm trying to figure out how to. I'm thinking I might just do that, yeah. Why won't it let like? Because you can go back. That's really weird. I'm just gonna copy it just like that guys and put it into the randomizer again. Sorry about that. So again, I'll even let you look at the multi-round giveaways here once I close everything out. So you can see here it's not complete. Everything else has a completed time. That's the top strome two box number one divisions. I just didn't click it enough times. And I don't know how to get back into it honestly. So we're just gonna put it one back into the randomizer and do it one more time. Copied all of that, just have numbers next to it. We got the title. Okay, so just one more time. So there's your order right there. I'll do one more time, at least two rounds. Okay, I'll put two in here. We're gonna do it once. And then we're gonna take the results just like that. There you go. AOS and AL central there. I'm gonna copy that over real quick. All right, give me a second. Sorry about that. Top strome jumbo two box number one. Paste that and let me take away all the extra curricular numbers there. Sorry about that guys. Okay, way to go forest. All right, four box number one. Hobby four box number one. Hobby four box number two, number three. Jumbo two box number two, we'll go here. Jumbo two box number three. And jumbo two box number four. All right, cool. Make these bold. We'll scroll through it one more time over here. All right, so here you go guys again. Top four on this one. Hobby four box number one. Top four, hobby four box number two. And again, I'm gonna post these in a second. Anyway, top four on hobby four box number three there. And then top two on the rest. Two box number one. Two box number two. These are the jumbos. Two box number three. Two box number four. All right, I am going to copy that, post it, get this video uploaded and get the results link in chat. And then we will get to our first random of the day for our first group break. Thanks everybody.


And I'll be talking about how we deploy Shopify. Just a little bit about me. I'm a developer at Shopify. And actually, today is my one-year anniversary there, which is kind of cool. Yeah, so I started one year ago today as an intern, and now I'm speaking to all of you at RailsConf, so that seems kind of crazy to me, but I'm really excited. So on with the talk. A little bit about Shopify, if you don't know. Our mission is to make commerce better for everyone, and that includes anywhere. So Shopify powers online stores, but it also has a point of sale system, lets you put buy buttons anywhere on the internet, and basically is just trying to make commerce better for everyone. Over 275,000 people have Shopify stores, and in total they run over $17 billion worth in sales. So that's a lot of people and a lot of money going through the Shopify platform. As a platform, we're able to do 25,000 requests a second, which is super important for all these stores and all this money. We have some pretty famous people that are on Shopify that run a lot of flash sales that create a lot of traffic, some of those people being like Kanye West, Kylie Jenner, and the like. Shopify as a Rails app is one of the largest Rails apps in the world and has been around for over 10 years. So that's a lot of code and a lot of code that we deploy daily. And what we used to deploy Shopify is a little something called Ship It. Ship It's actually open source, so if you go to github.com slash Shopify slash ship it dash engine, you can see it there. And what it allows us to do is on GitHub, when you make your PR and you merge it to master, it shows up here in Ship It. It has some checks there that like the container build is successful and so on. And once all those checks pass, you can then deploy your commit. And when you deploy it, you get a screen that looks a little something like this. So on the side, you have like a visual representation of the deploy. And then in the middle, you have the whole record of the deploy and what's happening. So on the side, you'll see there's little boxes labeled SB and a number. And those are our servers and the SB just simply stands for Shopify Borg. There's about 200 of them and the five dots in each server represent a container. So the green dot is the container has deployed the new revision and the blue dot is that it's currently switching revisions and the gray ones we haven't got to yet. So you can track your whole deploy here visually. And at the bottom, you'll get a nice message when it says that your deploy has succeeded or you'll get another message if it hasn't. And we'll talk about all those messages today. So a couple fun facts, we deploy Shopify on average 30 times each day. The highest we've ever done it was 41 deploys in one day. So that's a lot of deploying. Also, because we use Shipit, basically anybody who makes a change and makes a PR can deploy Shopify, not just developers. So we have lots of people deploying Shopify every day. And it takes about four minutes to get through the whole deploy and have your code be out in production. Which is fast and exciting but also really terrifying.  But also what happens when people make requests during deploy and anything like that that can happen. So back to that little blue button. So deploying Shopify, all it really is is pressing that blue button and monitoring how things go. But what's actually happening is that deploy button triggers a Capistrano deploy script which then runs. And that script, the first thing that it does is it takes the new revision shot and puts it onto that host server. So I think I already explained it, but SB1 is the Shopify Borg and that whole box drawn there is the host and the server. So once the new revision is into that revision file, the supervisor daemons are then started. And their first thing that they do is they take the new shot written in that revision file and start all the containers. So the containers, each one has five containers. I'll explain why in a bit. But each container started one at a time. So the first container started first and once it completes, we go to the second container and so on. So the little green outline in the solid arrow is just like my way of noting that a deploy has finished on that container. Whereas a dashed arrow is we're switching revisions on that container. Another responsibility that they have is to check the exit status of the deploy. So there'll be three different statuses on the deploy. And those statuses each mean a thing. So we'll go into them now. So one is you can get a success exit code and that's a successful status. And if there's no more remaining containers, your entire deploy is successful. And things are good to go. You can also get a successful exit code on that container. But if there are more containers, you just continue through the process of the supervisor daemons restarting the containers that still require that new shot and repeating until each container has switched to the new revision, successfully, and there are no more containers. Or unfortunately, what if your deploy fails? That'll be a different exit code. And there's two options for deploy failing, so that the revision is flapping or that the deploy simply failed. So what does it really mean that a deploy is flapping? It's just kind of a term that I don't know. It's hard to figure out what it would mean. So what it really means is that here's an example of a server and it started with revision A. So all five containers had revision A and then we deployed revision B. So container one successfully got the new revision and everything looks great. But then on container two, we tried to change the new revision and that deploy failed. So now we have three containers that are running revision A, the old one. One container that's running revision B, the new one. And the second container that we have no idea what it's doing because it simply failed. So that's what it means when a deploy is flapping. But it's running multiple revisions at the same time. And that is not something that's desirable at all. And the solution for this, and what we do is we just restart the application. So similar to a deploy, but different. And we can just do it by pressing a button in ship it. And what it does is it restarts all the containers. But I'll go into more detail in a bit. So what happens if a deploy failed? So what if we deploy and it just like simply fails? It never switches revision. Now we have one mysterious container and the rest with the previous revision. That can happen if the container is just simply down. Like if we can't reach the container for whatever reason it's down, we can't restart it, it won't start up, then a deploy will fail. You can do the same thing to just restart your application. And this will restart all the containers and try again. So I mentioned a bit earlier that Shopify runs and has a lot of very big and successful merchants. And why that's important to deploy is that these merchants drive a lot of traffic to the platform. So whether it's a flash sale with a new product or just all the shops having Black Friday, Cyber Monday sales, a lot of traffic gets to Shopify. And one of our biggest Shopify plus merchants is Kylie Jenner. She's the one third, third in, and she sells lipsticks. And she sells them online with Shopify. She first started, she only had three lip kits in three different colors. And that's what she sold, but she drove so much traffic for everybody trying to get them. Now she sells multiple different types of lipstick, lip gloss, and different colors. And so you can imagine every time she has a sale, she just drives so much traffic. And that's, that can affect deploys. So we'll talk about that. So when somebody wants their lipstick from Kylie Jenner, they make a request. And you guys all laugh, but a lot of people want these lipsticks. Like head over to the internet, look up hashtag Kylie Lip Kit, you can see how it goes down. And so they all want these lipsticks. They make a request, it goes to the internet. The request gets routed by the load balancers to a server. And then that request, once it gets there, will be sent to a container. So if that container is switching revisions during a deploy, that container will not accept that request. And that request will have one retry and be sent to another container. And if that container is free, so not switching revisions, it doesn't matter if it's running the previous or the old revision, that container will serve that request. If a container is serving a request and then the deploy tries to switch its revision, that container will lock. It'll serve all the requests it's currently gotten. And then once it's finished, it will switch revisions. And any requests that are sent to that container in the meantime, will be sent to another one. So each request only has one retry. So if it gets denied, like if that container says no, then it gets one retry to go to another container.  So sometimes we wonder, should we lock a deploy, lock deploys during a sale? And the reason we wonder this is when one of these five containers are switching revisions, we are down 20% in capacity. So one out of five, 20%, and that container can't take requests. So sometimes we think like, oh, if this sale is gonna be huge, or if we don't know what the sale is gonna be, maybe we can lock deploy, so we're at 100% capacity. Most of the time we don't, and we continuously deploy throughout the day and let people have their sales and everything is usually fine and dandy.  Like if we had more containers, could we then deploy with even more certainty that nothing would go down because we're losing capacity because we're switching revisions? We're not, so here we have one server that has five containers and another that has 10. So if we were to have 10 containers, so double our amount, we would then have to switch revisions and deploy in parallel. We'd have to do two containers at a time and doing two containers at a time. So two out of 10, we're still down one out of five, which is still 20%. So even though we increased more containers, we still have the same downtime in capacity, which is why we only have five containers. And the reason why we chose five containers and not less is because we're okay with being down 20% of the time, like Shopify can handle it during a deploy, but we're not okay with being down like 25% if we had only four containers. And the reason we don't go up to 10 is because it would just add more complexity. Now we're running these containers and switching their revisions in parallel and trying to keep track of everything while still doing a deploy.  Like you couldn't lose 20% in capacity, but you still had to deploy. One thing that you could do is only deploy on half of the servers. So this SV1 and SV2, we have 200 of them. Like let's say you only deploy to 100 of them. So you're only deploying on half. So you're down 20% but only on half of your servers. So that means you've only lost 10% capacity.  So these are some frequently asked questions we have about deploys. So as I mentioned before, sometimes the solution is to restart the application. And what does that do? So when you press deploy, the Capstrano script runs and it puts the new revision SHA into the revision file on the server that the supervisor demons then get and then they restart all the containers with that file or with that SHA. So when you do a restart, they already have the new SHA, so they know what to do. So all they do is they start at the step of restarting the containers. So they just restart all the containers that still require the new SHA and continue on with the deploy from there. So some things can get interesting. So because we use Shipit and we just have this UI with buttons and we let anyone deploy Shopify, in fact you do it in your first few days of onboarding, a few things can happen sometimes. So what if you deploy the current revision again? So this server has all containers that originally started with revision A and now we've deployed revision B and then halfway through the deploy, someone decided to restart. So they press restart, like what's going to happen. So what will happen is that second container is already switching revisions from the deploy, which is all great and fine, but now another container in this example, the fifth container is also now switching revisions because of the restart. So all that means is that now, instead of only losing 20% of capacity, we've now lost 40. So if a request came in at this point, it can only go to three of the containers as opposed to four or five if there was no deploy or restart going. Usually we don't stop that, we let that happen because our platform can handle it, but you are down 40%. So like maybe if there was a crazy huge flash sale and all of a sudden we got so much traffic, maybe Shopify would go down because we're already down 40% capacity. But even worse what can happen is if you deploy a new revision. So you've started with revision A, you deploy revision B and someone comes along and deploys revision C. So that's a third revision. So kind of what happened in the previous example, another container will start switching revisions, but now it'll switch to a completely new third one. So right now you can see in this server we have three containers running revision A, one running revision B and a third running revision C. So not only are you down 40% in capacity because you have two containers switching at a time, but you also have three different revisions going which is gonna result in a deploy being tagged as flopping. Yeah, and at worst you could have five new revisions. Like what if you just keep deploying before the deploy finishes? So you deploy once, deploy doesn't finish, you deploy a second time, a third time. Like you can get into a situation where your server is running A, B, C, D and E all at the same time. So I talked a little bit about restarting and deploys and I just wanna highlight the difference between them because they are very, very similar. So a deploy gets a new revision, whereas a restart is using that current revision. They both restart the supervisor demons and that's fine. They'll go to restart the containers with the revision that they have. But another difference is that the deploy downloads a new image whereas a restart already has the current image. So usually a deploy takes a little bit longer than a restart does just because of that simple fact. Now this slide requires a little bit more context. So at Shopify, we have two data centers. One that we keep passive and one that we keep active. So the active data center is the one where we send all our traffic due and we deploy to both of these at the same time always. And the reason that we do this is that we want the passive one to always be as up to date as it possibly can with the active one. So if we have to failover, we know what kind of state that other data center is and which revision of Shopify it's running. Like it would suck if we failed over and it was running Shopify from a week ago or even a day ago because so many changes go into Shopify. Like one day does make a big difference. So when you deploy, you're deploying to both data centers at the same time. And if it fails in the passive one, we almost rarely ever do anything. We just like let it go because we know there'll be a new deploy soon and that deploy will restart all the containers and bring it all up to the same revision. So even if containers were running different revisions in the passive data center because we're not sending traffic there, it's all right. In the active data center though, if a deploy fails or it's flapping or there's failure or anything like that, we do need to take action on that because that's where we're running all our traffic. And normally what we do is just restart the application and monitor that. Thanks, that's my talk on how we deploy Shopify.


Okay, you're all very welcome this afternoon to the Institute of International European Affairs. My name is Barry Andrews, I'm the Director General here at the Institute, and my job is to introduce the Chair this afternoon. But just to begin with, here in the IAA, we are embarked on a programme of study around the future of the European Union, and this event is part of that project with the support of the Department of Foreign Affairs. In that regard, our Chair, John O'Brennan, Professor from Manuth University, has prepared a paper on the Western Balkans and enlargement and the accession discussions that went on last week, in particular in the summit in Sofia. And his paper is very timely, of course, and was published naturally before the summit, and touches on many of the critical issues that were discussed at that summit meeting last week about the tension between widening and deepening, about the extent to which the transformative effect of membership can truly be documented, implementation fatigue, and also the very interesting issues that have emerged from the enlargements over the last decade or so. So it's very timely and fortunate for us to have with us today the Deputy Foreign Minister of Bulgaria. So I want to thank Professor O'Brennan for all of his fantastic work for us here at the Institute, and hand over to you now, John. Thank you. Thanks very much indeed, Barry. I think I'll stay seated if I may. It's a great pleasure to welcome to the Institute Minister Kraliva. She is a graduate of Sofia University. She has a Master's in History from that institution. She's also studied at the Klingendoll Institute in The Hague, the College of International and Security Studies in Germany, and she has had a stellar career over 30 years in diplomacy that has encompassed all kinds of different posts, including most recently when she served as ambassador between 2012 and 2016 to Greece, the ambassador of Bulgaria to Greece. Her current post is Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Bulgaria, but it encompasses an enormous range of important activity. She directed for political affairs, for European affairs, for European Union policy and CFSP, and we are particularly delighted to welcome her at this time. It's no exaggeration to say that the Bulgarian presidency has put in enormous work over the last year before its presidency began into the whole panoply of issues connected to the Western Balkans and tried to re-engage many of the Member States that had, for want of a better phrase, reduced the Western Balkans in importance when they looked at the future of the European Union. And last week's summit meeting in Sofia, I think, reflected the great degree of priority attached by the Bulgarian presidency to re-engaging with the Western Balkans as a region and making sure that the Commission's very interesting strategy paper produced in February and the country papers are followed through concretely at the June European Council. So I'm very much looking forward to what the Minister has to say about that and about the Bulgarian perspective on the future of Europe. So I'd now like to invite Minister Kraljeva to address us on that topic. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Sure. Yes, indeed. Wherever you're comfortable, I would say. It's up to you. Probably. Okay. Can you hear me? Okay. Dear guests, dear colleagues, I would like also to greet Professor John Brennan and Mr. Andrews, Barry Andrews, who is Director General, but also all other colleagues from the Institute. And I would like really to thank you for being here and coming to listen to what I have to say. Please feel free to ask also questions when I finish because I don't think I can really guess everything that is really of interest of you as a public, but I'll try my best to present whatever is important for us for the moment as a presidency. So I'll start by saying that the future of EU 27 is a topic that have been discussed since 2016, and by this sentence, I would like to get into the subject of the whole series of lectures that were presented here in this Institute about the future of Europe. So in light of the growing Euro skepticism in the context and even also before the Brexit, it started to loom around. Curious enough, Bulgaria and Ireland are among the Euro optimists in the Union, which is really, we are firm believers in the future of the European integration project. And that is why I believe it's very topical that we discussed this issue today, particularly from the perspective of those who actually cherish the European integration and remember its significance for the peace, democracy and prosperity in Europe. Well in 1948, as a historian I will start, just say a few words, I will not make big historian retrospectives, but just to mention that we have to remember that in 1948 the integration project helped establish lasting peace in Europe. In late 80s and the beginning of 90s, it unified the continent, making it possible for the Central and Eastern European states to rejoin the European family, embracing the values of the European Union. And here I also include our, my country too, because we were part of this group of countries that joined at that time and you probably vividly remember this moment. For us was really a moment in time to get into the European Union. It was probably the most important thing that happened in our history during the modern history of Bulgaria. We consider it like that. So this is why on this 11th year of accession of the European Union, Bulgaria is proud to hold the rotating presidency of the Council of the Union, striving to contribute even more to the European integration through three main dimensions I will mention. First when handling the many difficult issues and files in the legislative program of decommission, we aim to have unity and to restore the relevance of the Union for all. For example, we introduce a new approach to the discussions on certain divisive topics like migration and social matters, trying to identify those elements that are common for all and hence conductive to building consensus, at least on certain issues in those very difficult packages. And to be more concrete in the debates on migration, we introduced a new scale for measuring crisis situations and applying automatic response so that both frontline countries and countries of final destinations are able to show common solidarity and responsibility. These are actually the two key words on this issue, solidarity and responsibility because certain countries think that we have to apply only one part of this, I would say, equal thing which has two sides, it's not only one or the other. The consensus is not there yet, I have to admit, but our approach in principle is accepted by all and at the end the leaders will decide how the Council should proceed further. Secondly, we have been trying to reach progress most inform us on those files that have direct impact on our citizens. For example, the regulation on geo-blocking is such an example, preventing any discrimination of customers, no matter which EU member state they live in. Another example is the debate which started last week in Sofia on the mechanism through which the EU should ensure equal standards of quality of all goods under one and the same trade mark sold in the single market. You probably don't know that there are certain goods that has been noticed on our market, partly Bulgaria too is also, but also in other countries from the former Eastern bloc so-called, that not produced of the same quality of the same standards that you can find the same label in other countries, so it's something that we should not tolerate anymore and we try to also to get this to a certain results and it is also very close to the everyday life of each and every citizen. So this is among the small doses but very important to us. Thirdly also, we continue to argue that the added value of convergence and cohesion of making our integration deeper and that is why Bulgaria hosted the meeting dedicated in particular to the enhanced cooperation in judiciary and the establishment of the office of the European prosecutor and we continue to ask for membership in Schengen and we plan to submit very soon our official application for ERM too and this is the first step to our membership in the Eurozone. This is among things that are also, we see as important for European integration. So it is our vision of the EU of 27, generally speaking, more united, stronger and with more democratic and relevant for the citizens union, a union where we apply solidarity and responsibility in all policy areas, not only in migration, but from migration and security to also the banking and monetary union and as far as the next common budget is concerned also. And referring more specifically to the later, we should be ready for a more ambitious budget if we want a more ambitious union, closer internally and stronger externally. And that is why we have been advocating for the principle to agree first on the policy priorities and then discuss specific sums and allocations when we speak about the multi-annual financial framework. As with Ireland, our accession to the European Union is not only an event of financial importance, it is a process of continuous reform and upgrading our institutions and behavior. And that is why our membership enjoys unanimous support among the citizens and across the political spectrum. Of course, this membership has a wider scope, it's not limited to our internal affairs. It's yet another proof of the vitality and the universality of the European project. And here side by side with the pressure to bring the union closer to its citizens goes our responsibility toward our neighborhood. And we think that populism and euros kept it in Europe are detrimental not only for European Union societies themselves, but they also project a very negative picture of the union abroad. They lower down the comparative strength of the European Union to export stability and security through a reliable European perspective for those countries in the neighborhood who want it and who embrace the values of the European Union and who carry out corresponding reforms. And here I come to a fourth element of our vision for Europe, which is the enlargement towards the Western Balkans region. We think that without the Western Balkans, European integration remains an incomplete project. At the same time, without this prospect, the region will remain unstable with direct impact for the stability and security of the European Union itself. And that is why we in Sofia were happy that five days or less ago the first European Union Western Balkans summit since 15 years confirmed the same message. This alone is not a small achievement considering the serious geopolitical, economic and social challenges both the EU and the whole world are facing today. And we can count here numerous issues like among them the trade dispute with the United States adherence to international law and in particular this joint comprehensive plan of action with Iran. All this coupled with the debate on the vision for the future of Europe, issues of security, migration, Brexit, climate change, et cetera. And coming back from the Balkans to the Emerald Island, I would like only to confirm the message I started with and which is embedded in the motto of the Bulgarian Presidency and it is united we stand strong. The Bulgarian Presidency is proud also that we maintain the unity of the EU member states in the difficult Brexit negotiations. Already in January, we succeeded in adopting negotiating directives, taking into account the commitments in the joint European Union-UK report on the exit issues. This was the basis for the draft withdrawal agreement with the Commission on the table in February and which is now agreed upon with the UK in 75%. This is also the basis for the guidelines for the future relations with the UK which the European Council adopted in March. In all these documents, the Union stands united behind Thailand on the very difficult topic of the border regime. We will continue to work tirelessly, side by side, to reach the progress required, but not least for the sustained peace process in Northern Ireland. And here, by the way, I would like to mention that I understood that today is actually kind of a celebration of 20 years since the good Friday agreement signed, adopted here in both sides of the island. So it is important really to continue on this path and I would like to express my support and my government support and generally speaking. As I said, the European Union, Commissioner Bernier was also involved in this negotiation very much and whatever he said in his recent visit, I think, in Ireland, in Ireland cities, is fully shared also by the Bulgarian Presidency. So we are there together. To sum up our vision for the year of 27 is, so Europe that continues to do well or it does best, fostering cohesion and convergence on the basis of our common values. This means also continued work on the building of the single market and on preparing our economies for the challenges of the future, including in technological terms. And Europe which protects free trade and powers small and medium enterprises in the new digital era as the basis for sustainable growth and global competitiveness. Europe which focuses more effectively on results relevant for our citizens, including in the social and educational field. And Europe which protects its borders without betraying its humanitarian principles. Ultimately, I would say Europe which is respected and strong international actor. And I would like also to touch upon the future of the integration in security and defence. This is a central issue in the wider debate on the vision of the European Union of the future. Here I would like to say also to use a bit of my background as CFSP coordinator for several years in our national policies. So it is really important that we support the steps that have been taken since the endorsement of the EU global strategy in 2016. And they are aimed to closer integration, more binding commitment to common security and defence. And that is why the Bulgarian presidency has been committed to the work on the permanent structure cooperation, the so-called PESCO. And we welcome the fact that during our presidency PESCO entered its practical phase. On 6th of March 2016, the council adopted not only the strategy for the western Balkans, but the council adopted, it was announced by the commission of course, but the council adopted recommendations on the roadmap for the implementation of PESCO. And also the initial list of 17 projects to be undertaken by PESCO, which is a very good start of this policy we think, and it was not an easy task, again. The council documents on sequencing the fulfilment of the more binding commitments and a common set of governance rules are in the pipeline with a view to be adopted in June 2018. Bulgaria shares the Irish view that realism and quality should be among the guiding principles in determining the sequence of implementation of PESCO commitments. The two countries would also be part of an important PESCO project on upgrade of maritime surveillance, and we are looking forward to working together on that track. Along with PESCO, the trial start of the coordinated annual review of defence, so-called CARD, and the establishment of the European Defence Fund, are essential steps towards deepening defence cooperation. Both enhance the efficiency and strengthen the European Union's development programme regulation as constituent part of the EDF with the link to PESCO. It is a priority and will provide further opportunities for European defence industries, which is very important to us too, so as I can. In this respect, the coherence of all CSDP instruments and initiatives is key. The real strength of European defence will become apparent once the three major initiatives, CARD, EDF and PESCO, are intrinsically linked and mutually reinforced. For Bulgaria, it is essential that the development of better integrated European defence contribute to the security of the EU citizens by completing, by complementing NATO's role in the security of Europe and not challenging it. And a comprehensive and mutually complementary cooperation is vital, especially in areas such as strategic communications, counter-terrorism, building resilience for our partners, particularly in the western Balkans, also in Georgia, Ukraine and Moldova, and confronting hybrid threats, cyber security issues and cross-border military mobility, which is also a very important project of the European Union, and maritime security. So by these issues, I will close my written speech and I'm really at your disposal to respond to any issues that might be posed, but also to speak more, if you are interested about western Balkans and Turkey and the other, I have not included so much about this because I was sure that it might be also of special interest, so I may add to these words that I have said, responding to questions. And thank you very much for your attention.


Welcome back, folks. We got the S&Ps right now. As we continue to inch higher right now, you get the S&Ps up 109 points. That's 2.2 percent to the upside Nasdaq 100. Now up 3.1 percent. We got the Dow up one and a quarter percent right now. And what a great day, man. We got a great interview coming up. We're going to jump over to our man, Ed Egelinsky, folks. Ed is a managing director with Direction, head of sales and distribution, head of alternative investments. To learn more about their products, you can always click on the Direction banner right on the front page at TFNN.com. And, Ed, good afternoon. Quite a day, man. Great to talk to you. Thanks for coming on the program. Bulls the light today for sure. Let's be here. Are we going to have enough to talk about, man? So I want to talk to you about the market, the big picture of the market. But, boy, we got to kick things off with the action today, just a blowout number. I was reading earlier, just in terms of ETFs and people plowing money in TFs. I know you guys have the SOXL. It's just dramatic. That was a reference in the article I was talking about on Bloomberg. But what do you think about this market, Ed? What do you think it's got some lay? What do you see in this market as we got quite the acceleration on the heels of those NVIDIA numbers last night? Yeah. As you know, most of our trading vehicles are leveraging inverse. We're agnostic in terms of the direction of the market. We let the traders decide that. Certainly, the bull camp is having its way today. As you mentioned, NVIDIA's blowout earnings last night. Monetizing AI has definitely seen the stock skyrocket to yet another all-time high. Bring the semiconductor space with it as well. As you mentioned, we have a triple-leverage bull and bear on the NISI semiconductor index, SOXL on the bull side, SOXS on the bear side. And the same thing with NVIDIA. We're seeing a lot of flows, pre- and post-earnings, not just in the one and a half times bull NVIDIA product we have, which is NVDU. But also on the bear side, some people may be trying to hedge some profits or think that the valuations are stretched. So we have a bear non-leverage for those traders as well. So we're seeing a lot of flows today in general. We have this year, but the preponderance of the move continues to be on the bullish side, particularly with the mega cap names. We're seeing a lot of flows in our leverage and inverse single stock ETFs, not just in NVIDIA, but we have six of the seven magnificent seven single stocks available, either if you think the bull market's going to continue one and a half times bull, or if you think that these individual stocks might slow down on the bear side, non-leverage bear. The only one we don't have is meta of the magnificent seven on the single stock. Okay. And I know investors have fallen in love with those single stock ETFs, especially with the exposure. I mean, reading about them today for NVIDIA, my goodness, the number is even, it's a record day, right? 250 billion added to market cap, never been done before. That's where we sit right now. They'll probably finish somewhere in that ballpark as you're up pretty dramatically to put it lightly. So we jump from that. Of course, we have the bigger picture of the Fed in focus to some degree. This economy just chugs on with earnings. We saw it last night. We saw it with some of the bigger tech companies out there in terms of just pretty decent beats across the board trading higher, even though the bar has been pretty high. But how do you look at the picture, Ed, going a little bit big picture when we talk about the CPI? We've had some hot inflation numbers. We now get the market accelerating even higher. How do you look at that for traders with the S&P sitting at 5,100 right now as we still are dealing with inflation in this market? We still have a Fed that's pretty tight right now. Now, that can be debatable, of course. But how do you look at that with traders potentially positioning themselves with the CPI inflation still out there as one of those variables in focus? Yes, certainly the CPI and the PPI last week gave some traders some pause in terms of the timing of the Fed deciding maybe to start cutting rates. If you look at the Fed fund futures based on the minutes yesterday, the Fed minutes, it seems like it's being pushed out further into the year in terms of potential rate cuts. What we're seeing is, again, from short-term traders, is trading the contrarian trade right now, which is TMF, which is our triple-leverage 20-plus-year treasury. For those of you familiar with TLT, we're triple-leverage using that ETF and what's called the swap on an ETF to get that bullish exposure. But the bears have won so far this year. We have TMV, which is the triple-leverage on the 20-plus-year treasury bear. So we're seeing contrarian inflows in terms of bucking the trend, thinking that rates will start coming down from a short-term perspective. We also have the seven to 10-year people-contrade as well, a little bit on the shorter end of the curve. But the pamphletease resistance right now looks like interest rates continuing to climb. I think a technical level around on the 10-year is probably around 4.5% could be our next stop. How does that affect equities? I don't have to tell anybody in your audience. Certainly, it's going to be less vulnerable to the MAG7 or the tech sector, which has more cash on their balance sheets, where probably, if rates continue to go up, might hit a little bit are the small-cap stocks that tend to need more cash and tend to borrow more. It's remarkable how often the market has gotten ahead of the Fed this go-around, and then it reprices, and then in the span of almost two or three weeks, we're having an entire different conversation somehow in this market. But boy, those MAG7, they just power through no matter what it seems like the interest rates are doing right now. You go from there, and of course, inflation is persistent, and then you take a look at, I was wondering if I could get your take maybe on how commodities as we go towards... Traders, of course, the dollar's had a lot of volatility recently. That, of course, on the heels of the yields like you're talking about. But for traders, we've got a bunch of traders, whether it's in gold, of course, but many different commodities in our trading room. For traders looking to take advantage of maybe those moves in commodities we're getting based off, whether it's the dollar, whether it's the commodities themselves, what are you seeing out there at? You seeing anything there? Well, it's interesting. The dollar's strengthening. Definitely, there's an inverse relationship between the commodity gold and the dollar, and you're seeing that this year. But what's interesting is that from a trader's perspective, when you look at gold mining stocks, some of you might be familiar with GDXJ or GDX, we have leveraged versions of that 2x bull and bear. And what's interesting is that the gold mining stocks have performed much worse than gold itself. So a lot of our traders are trading the gold mining stocks. They have a high beta associated with it. So traders love to trade something with high a beta associated with it. But the trend has been lower with the gold mining stocks. And I think part of the reason is that interest rate narrative climbing, they definitely are more capital driven, need infusion of capital, and also have a lot more in terms of debt on their balance sheets. So that's probably adversely affecting gold mining stocks even more than the metal itself. In regards to crude oil, it's been the opposite. Crude oil has risen. I think part of that has been the geopolitical risk, whether it's the Black Sea, the Red Sea. There's a lot of supply chain potential issues and the ongoing conflict, unfortunately, in the Middle East. So you're seeing crude oil rally a little bit this year relative to the energy stocks. But we are seeing both activity in our 2x bull and bear, the energy select sector index, ERX, ERY. Yeah, it's pretty wild, man. And that was a quick nine minute said, yeah, ERX, I got up here 59.23, that crude market sitting at 78. And this was great having you on, man. That was great information on quite a busy day in the market. And we look forward to having you on in the future as well. I know we're setting up those interviews. We look forward to it, man. Thank you so much. Hope to see you again soon. Take care. Have a good day. You as well. Are you ready to take your...