Mama Udeme: “Oga, buy from my market.”

Buyer: “How much is your corn?”

Mama Udeme: “200 naira.”

In that simple exchange lies a profound philosophical construct in the Igbo worldview; the fusion of product and market. To Mama Udeme, her product is her market. Her corn is not just an item for sale; it is an economy, a platform, a universe of value. In her framing, “market” and “product” are not separate; they are one.

Among the Igbos, the market transcends a physical location. It is an existential metaphor. We say, “uwa b? ah?a”,  the world is a marketplace. Literally, it speaks of buying and selling. But philosophically, it speaks of life itself.

A market where we arrive,

transact our existence,

and depart.

Like Oriendu Ovim, like Eke Amiyi

the open gates open at dawn,

voices rise in exchange,

and by dusk, silence returns.

Markets open.

Markets close.

Life begins.

Life ends.

Our ancestors encoded deep truths in the symbols people understood; they used trade, exchange, and markets to pass messages. Aros like Arochukwu were great merchants, diplomats, and system architects, and they built networks across regions, exporting systems of commerce and enterprise. They understood something fundamental: everywhere is a market, and everything can become a market if properly structured.

Long before platforms and ecosystems like Polymarket, NASDAQ, or NGX emerged, the Igbo had already conceptualized the foundational ideas of markets, where events, value, and exchange converge. In that worldview, everything could be framed as a tradable construct, reflecting an early understanding that life itself is organized through systems of exchange, what we now recognize as the essence of capital markets.

At its core, the world runs on market systems, from power to prosperity, from governance to geopolitics. Today, platforms like prediction markets are built on this same logic: that every event can be priced, modeled, and traded as a market of probabilities.

So when Mama Udeme calls her corn a “market,” she is not mistaken. Under a simple logical construct:

If product = market

And market = world

Then product = world

Her corn is her world.

And if your product is your world, you do not treat it casually. You refine it. You improve it. You protect it. You innovate because innovation sustains your world. You differentiate because your survival depends on it. You keep moving because stagnation is extinction.

That is the message for entrepreneurs:

Whatever you sell is your world.

Build it.

Refine it.

Elevate it.

Beginning June 8 at Tekedia Mini-MBA, I will open our academic sessions by exploring how entrepreneurs and business owners, from Mama Udeme to global category-defining companies, build, nurture, and transform their “markets” through innovation and execution.

Reserve your seat.

When OpenAI quietly signaled last week that it was “saying goodbye” to its video-generation app Sora, the brevity of the announcement masked a deeper reality: one of the most hyped products in generative AI had become too expensive to sustain.

Behind the decision lies a hard constraint now shaping the industry — compute. Running Sora, by multiple estimates, was costing the ChatGPT maker close to $1 million a day, a figure that appears to have tipped the internal balance against the product as the company sharpens its focus ahead of a potential public listing.

Unlike text-based systems such as ChatGPT, video generation operates at the extreme end of compute intensity. Each prompt requires the model to generate sequences of frames, maintain temporal consistency, simulate motion physics, and, in many cases, synchronize audio. The result is an exponential increase in GPU usage per query.

At scale, that becomes unsustainable.

Sora’s early trajectory suggested a breakout success. Within weeks of its September debut, it climbed to the top of app store rankings, amassing millions of downloads and dominating online discourse. Yet the initial surge proved difficult to maintain. By early 2026, download momentum had slowed sharply, even as the cost of serving each user session remained high.

That mismatch, declining marginal growth against persistently high operating costs, appears to have been decisive.

Internally, the calculation is increasingly about compute allocation efficiency. Every GPU cycle spent rendering video is a cycle not used to train or serve higher-margin products. For a company competing at the frontier of AI, where training next-generation models can cost billions of dollars, such trade-offs are no longer theoretical. They have become existential.

OpenAI’s subsequent exclamation points in that direction. The company said it would redirect the Sora team toward world simulation research, a domain tied to robotics and embodied AI. That shift underlines reprioritization: moving away from consumer-facing novelty applications toward foundational systems with clearer long-term commercial pathways.

The decision comes at a crucial time in the ChatGPT maker’s history. As OpenAI edges closer to a possible IPO, investors are likely to scrutinize not just growth metrics but cost discipline. High-burn, low-monetization products such as Sora complicate that narrative. In contrast, enterprise-facing tools, coding assistants, workflow agents, and API services offer more predictable revenue streams and better alignment with compute spending.

The company’s evolving product decisions reinforce that shift. Features such as instant checkout and more experimental consumer-facing modes have been scaled back, while development has intensified around integrated “superapp”-style functionality designed for workplace productivity.

In that sense, Sora’s shutdown is less an isolated move than part of a broader restructuring of priorities.

There is also a competitive layer. Rivals are increasingly focusing on enterprise deployment, where reliability, latency, and cost-per-query matter more than viral appeal. In that environment, a product that consumes vast compute resources without a commensurate revenue model becomes difficult to justify.

Sora faced pressure on another front as well: governance. Video generation tools sit at the middle of ongoing concerns around deepfakes, intellectual property, and misinformation. Efforts to impose safeguards tend to increase operational complexity and, in some cases, reduce user engagement — further weakening the business case.

The convergence of these factors left Sora exposed.

The underlying technology, however, is unlikely to disappear. By shifting resources into world simulation, OpenAI is effectively repositioning video generation as an enabling layer for robotics and physical AI systems rather than a standalone consumer product. Models capable of simulating environments, motion, and object interaction are critical to training machines that can operate in the real world.

That reframing suggests Sora’s demise is not about technical failure, but about economic prioritization.

The decision highlights a defining feature of the current AI cycle: compute has become the industry’s scarcest resource. Companies are now forced to make explicit choices about where to deploy it, often at the expense of high-profile products.

In Sora’s case, the conclusion appears to be that the cost of running the platform, at scale, and without a sufficiently strong revenue engine, became too high to justify, even for one of the best-funded players in the field.

Gold prices edged higher on Tuesday morning but failed to alter what is shaping up to be the metal’s sharpest monthly decline since the depths of the 2008 global financial crisis.

The U.S.-Iran conflict, surging oil prices, and a stronger dollar continue to drive heavy liquidation across the bullion market.

Spot gold rose about 1 per cent in early trading to around $4,553.69 per ounce, while front-month futures climbed 0.6 per cent to roughly the same level. Even so, bullion remains firmly on course for its steepest monthly drop in nearly 17 years. Recent market data published by CNBC show gold is down between 11.8 per cent and 14.6 per cent for March, depending on the close, which would make it the worst monthly performance since October 2008.

The rebound comes amid continuing uncertainty over the war in the Middle East, now in its fifth week.

A report by The Wall Street Journal said President Donald Trump told aides he was prepared to halt military hostilities against Iran even if the Strait of Hormuz remained largely closed, a signal that briefly improved sentiment across markets.

Trump later wrote on Truth Social that Washington was “in serious discussions” with Iranian officials, while warning that if a deal was not reached quickly, U.S. forces would target electricity plants, oil wells, and the strategically critical Kharg Island.

The mixed messaging has left markets caught between hopes of de-escalation and the risk of a broader energy shock. That uncertainty was reinforced by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said in an interview that Washington’s objectives in Iran would take “weeks, not months” to achieve.

Reports that 2,500 U.S. Marines from the 82nd Airborne Division had arrived in the region over the weekend further underscored the risk that the conflict may yet intensify. Ordinarily, such geopolitical turmoil would strengthen gold’s appeal as a haven asset. Instead, the market has moved in the opposite direction.

The key reason is that the conflict’s economic transmission has come through energy markets rather than direct flight-to-safety buying.

The effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, a major conduit for global crude and gas flows, has sent oil prices nearly 50 per cent above pre-war levels, sharply lifting inflation expectations. That has forced investors to reprice the outlook for U.S. monetary policy.

Markets that had earlier expected multiple rate cuts this year are now leaning toward one or none, a shift that has pushed Treasury yields and the U.S. dollar higher, both of which traditionally weigh on non-yielding assets such as gold.

Wayne Nutland, investment manager at Shackleton Advisers, said the market has reverted to its pre-Ukraine-war behavior.

“Prior to the Ukraine war, the gold price tended to be inversely correlated to real bond yields and the US dollar, with the gold price rising when those metrics fell, and gold falling when those metrics rose,” he said.

“The period after the Ukraine war upended these relationships, in particular in 2025 and into early 2026 when gold rose very strongly, far in excess of the moves suggested by those historic relationships.”

He added that the Iran war has now restored those traditional correlations.

“Bond yields and the U.S. dollar have both moved higher, and against this backdrop gold has demonstrated its traditional inverse sensitivity to these metrics, falling as a result,” he said.

“Gold’s declines have perhaps also been exacerbated by the strength of the gold price going into 2026 and possibly a desire amongst investors to liquidate profitable positions.”

Gold entered the year from an exceptionally elevated base, having surged to a record high above $5,595 per ounce in late January after a powerful multi-year rally driven by central bank buying, geopolitical hedging, and reserve diversification away from the dollar.

This means part of the current sell-off is less about a collapse in the long-term investment thesis and more about profit-taking in an overcrowded trade.

Iain Barnes, chief investment officer at Netwealth, said recent price moves have been unusually violent.

“International central banks seeking to diversify their reserves away from U.S. dollars may have started gold’s bull market in the past few years, but in the end the market ran out of new financial buyers and instead saw widespread profit-taking as wider uncertainty hit markets and the dollar rebounded,” he said.

Barnes also drew parallels with the 2008 financial crisis.

“In the first half of 2008, investors doubled down on the emerging market growth story, fueling commodity price increases alongside dollar weakness even as western economies hit the buffers,” he said.

“As the global financial crisis spread wider, global risk appetite collapsed and gold was hit alongside more productive commodities such as oil and copper as the dollar surged.”

He added: “This year, the market has again found where investors are most exposed: excessive positioning in gold as it was seen as the last remaining safe haven asset.”

That comparison helps explain why gold is falling even during wartime. In periods of market stress, investors often liquidate profitable assets to raise cash or meet margin calls elsewhere, temporarily overwhelming traditional haven demand.

Goldman Sachs, however, remains constructive on the medium-term outlook.

In a note on Monday, the bank said: “[But] we continue to forecast gold prices reaching $5,400/toz by end-2026, as central bank diversification continues, currently low speculative positioning normalizes, and the Fed delivers the 50bp of cuts our economists expect.”

The bank added that while risks remain skewed to the downside in the near term, the broader structural drivers remain intact.

“Over the medium term, risks are skewed to the upside if the Iran episode — together with broader geopolitical developments (e.g., Greenland, Venezuela) — were to accelerate diversification into gold and to weigh on perceptions of Western fiscal sustainability,” it said.

In effect, the market is witnessing a clash between short-term macro pressure and long-term structural demand. This explains why higher yields, a stronger dollar, and forced liquidation are currently dominating price action.

But beneath the current sell-off, central bank accumulation and geopolitical reserve diversification continue to provide support for the longer-term bull case. That tension is what makes this one of the most dramatic reversals in gold since 2008.