Presented without comment.
I'm really starting to worry about the memory LTAs. If the GPU:CPU ratio inverts, what's stopping memory companies from breaking them? This could be v bad for hyperscalers! 😜
My good friend Ed Hyman has often told me people think in "3s", so keep it to 3 bullets (i don't listen obvi). But good things do come in 3s... 1) neg cpi, 2) neg nfp, 3)....
Lower vol will set you free :)
Sunday Night Musings…
AI fundamentals are accelerating and the innovation to usage flywheel keeps speeding up. Hard to internalize that none of this existed three years ago, and that the capabilities I’m excited to use daily weren’t possible last August. Things are compounding crazily.
From a market perspective, we just had a legendary de-grossing in the market’s main theme and the indexes held. Success broadened into other sectors. Meh 7 became Mag again on the back of wildly impressive growth and some “new” ROI disclosure. We’ve even had a few “everything rallies”. With multiples undemanding, that bodes well for the opportunity set imho.
Meanwhile, information asymmetry (“edge”) in large, well covered stocks has never been higher. The paradox exists because a higher % of people trading them know very little, and against fast secular change that makes for ripe opportunity. Watching people learn their xyz-th version of Jevons, or plant a flag on zero sum, is genuinely encouraging if you’re on the other side.
And it looks like we can climb the macro wall of worry. The rates narrative can change as fast as it arrived (repeat after me: negative NFP) as wages lead and are consistently normalizing. We’re also starting to lap tariff impacts and, with a little luck, war effects can dissipate too. Ultimately, if the supposed hiking cycle turns out to be a never-was, it will do a lot for risk sentiment into year end. That said, the next two CPIs will be important.
Where am I worried? Data-center political football and equity supply.
The anti-AI narrative is short-term and bi-partisan convenient politically, but in the end I don’t think it engenders enough passion (faux hate?) to be substantive. I know it polls well, but as we’ve learned in 2016 / 20 / 24, polls have lost signal. It’s also simply too important to GDP at this point, and obvious solves exist (paying power bills etc). Push comes to shove some localities will extract their pound of flesh, same as it ever was.
On supply, recent IPO unlocks plus a likely Anthropic deal is potentially a lot of stock to digest. But if that supply arrives alongside accelerating ARRs and compute deals, and that information gets democratized (particularly among the less informed but large capital macro community) the negative can flip into a positive.
Interesting times to say the least. As always, godspeed :)
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I like to think about upcoming 'risk clusters', i.e. a confluence of important macro / micro events in a v short window. They can work for and against you. For ex, an upside EPS surprise can get an extra boost if it coincides w/ a favorable new macro tailwind (akin to a 'double jump', and it's often not priced appropriately in the vol mkt). Similarly, the fear of a 'bad parlay' across events often gives mkts anxiety in the approach. Like having two mid-terms in the same week. June had the latter issue (SPCX, cpi, Warsh + Seasonal momo fear).
This dynamic is why today's NFP is more important than it looks. A negative (!) number on the back of a negative CPI, aside from being evidence we live in a simulation 😜, helps soften an upcoming risk cluster: jackson hole => anthropic ipo? => "fed hikes in sept!".
And within the print, wages are the part that actually matters for that last leg. The hawkish case rests largely on inflation broadening into second-order effects, and wages are THE canonical second-order driver. AHE at a cycle-low 3.2% and still decelerating says that channel is going the right way. And that's with last year's cuts and the early '26 tax breaks already in the bloodstream! A Sept hike would now mean hiking into negative payrolls, 3.2% wage growth, a soft core PCE month, $77 oil and 2.2% breakevens. Good luck with that!
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hyperscaler bond deal today, $25Bn raised, 5x oversubscribed. What happened to all the people w/ the CDS charts?
I’ve been thinking about what the “AGI moment” might look like.
My best guess is that it’s when context management disappears.
Right now that layer is manual labor. For example, I’ve built an elaborate system around Claude and Codex that includes shared memory / source of truth, knowledge graphs, tagging systems, saving rules, learning loops, etc. (if by chance you don’t speak nerd, ask gpti). It’s materially better than using the apps, and more like working with a teammate (which is why I’ve recommended people spend the time to tinker with the coding version / co-work).
But I only get that experience because I’m doing active and intentional context management.
The end state though I think is that the models “just know.” They’ll know what matters, what changed, what’s current, what needs to get tossed. This will feel like intuition to the user. Under the hood it will take state coherence (shared memory / state, accessed and passed effortlessly between agents working toward a goal), facilitated by LOTS of upgrades to memory / gpus / networking. But nobody will ever experience it as context mgmt, it will just feel like intelligence.
Interestingly, power users are living on a slope, starting with Claude Code’s fall kaboom. Better models, harnesses, context systems, etc. Most people though still evaluate AI through a *mildly* stateful chatbot. I suspect they may end up skipping this ‘messy middle’ entirely and jump straight to persistent and intuitive agents, i.e. a slope for early adopters, a step function for the rest.
And of course it’s the step function that’s worth playing for.
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Crazy when you realize that Cursor sold higher than Electronic Arts.
What is the TAM on invite-only Physical AI dinners