Mag7 are not “losers” from AI, they simply priced in their gains earlier than others. They’re also now fighting flows — eventually this will revert. Matter of time. Not interested here but as memory / mag7 ratio continues to break open there will be a time

Last wk S&P/Nas/Mag7 +1.0%/+1.6%/+4.7%. The forced asset sale by Situational Awareness helped drive a sharp rally on 7/30. On 7/29, I wrote, “From a technical standpoint, I believe forced liquidations and margin calls in both retail accounts and hedge funds that typically run with leverage over the past couple of weeks is leading to a technical bottom… In summary, my view is that we could have seen at least a short-term bottom today with a strong rally ahead of us in the sectors most caught in the latest speedbump.” On Thursday 7/30, the Morgan Stanley TMT (Tech Media and Telecom) Momentum Index rebounded a record 19% on Thursday and added another 1% on Friday. This followed a decline of 54% from 6/22-7/29. It is now down 44% from 6/22. This is why I focus on avoiding “speed bumps” as I warned about on my 6/20 post. It is hard to predict how bad they will be and down 50% requires a 100% gain to get back to even. I feel like the near-term low on the current speedbump was seen on 7/29. Looking at Mag7 results this earnings season, stock reaction to earnings results mostly came down to two factors: 1) did estimates go up for CQ3 if capex went up and 2) did you report results before or after the Situational Awareness (SA) forced sale. $MSFT results strengthened my recent view that co-Pilot could be a winner in enterprise AI longer-term. As I wrote in my earnings preview. “It operates natively within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem where enterprise work already happens.” There are ~450M M365 paid seats but only ~30M Co-Pilot. Microsoft guided above consensus for CQ3 while capex remained unchanged. Azure also saw growth improve sequentially from 39% to 43% y/y with guidance to 45% for CQ3. Helped by the SA forced sale, the stock saw the 5th highest one day percentage stock move in history at +16% on Thursday. $META unfortunately had both revs & operating income go down for Q3 while revising up capex & opex. They also did not announce any definitive plans around a public cloud offering or API for their foundational models to monetize this spend. The stock declined 8% in reaction on Thursday which likely would have been worse if not for the SA forced sale. $AMZN while guiding both revs & operating income below consensus for Q3 and increasing capex, had AWS rev growth accelerate from 28% in Q1 to 37% in Q2 which was the highest growth rate since Covid in Q4:2021. AWS normalized operating margins expanded 1% sequentially. The stock rallied 15% on Friday in reaction to earnings following a 4% rally on Thursday as investors continued to regross in the AI names. But this brings me to $GOOGL which remains my long-term winner in consumer AI with the complete AI stack. Google like Amazon guided capex higher while implied revs & operating income declined for Q3. But Google Cloud Platform performance crushed AWS performance. GCP saw revs accelerate from 63% in CQ1 to 82% in CQ2 while operating margins expanded 3% sequentially. But Google unfortunately reported a week prior to the SA forced sale and saw their stock decline 7% in reaction the next day. $AAPL was the anti-AI trade leading up to their results and their stock hit an all-time high intra-day on Wednesday. The stock as a result declined 1% on Thursday as investors regrossed AI names on the SA forced sale and fell 7% on Friday in reaction to revenue & gross margin guidance that was below consensus. Big picture, I think the severe drawdown in the AI favorites from 6/22-7/29 was good for the market. It reminded investors of the need to be vigilant and the perils of excessive leverage/risk taking. Long-term bond yields hitting new 20 year highs last week and the unresolved Iran war are factors I am monitoring. In summary, out of the mega-cap earnings the past two weeks and the forced SA sale, my favorites are $GOOGL, $AMZN and $MSFT. I increasingly view value as shifting from the model layer which is increasingly getting commoditized to the infrastructure layer which includes the public clouds. I think the short-term bottom in the current speed bump was on 7/29. Best of luck in the week ahead.

The Japan Carry Trade at Risk and what that means for MAG7 borrowing To prop up the Yen, Japan (the world's largest holder of U.S. Treasuries) might need to sell its U.S. Treasuries If Japan dumps U.S. Treasuries into the market, it would drive bond yields up significantly, making U.S. refinancing much more expensive This could put a damper on companies like $GOOGL and $AMZN Amazon who are looking to borrow hundreds of billions to build out AI infrastructure. If the Bank of Japan is forced to aggressively raise rates to defend the Yen, it would break the carry trade via @YouTube

Last wk, S&P/Nas/Mag7 +0.4%/+0.1%/-0.8%. Cooler inflation (CPI, PPI) & economic data (consumer sentiment, retail sales) but +5% oil steepened the yield curve but lowered odds of a rate hike. Looking forward, I continue to believe the impact of Agentic AI with the advent of OpenClaw on January 30th has at least a year to run: 1) Token production has gone up roughly ~7.5x from the end of January more than offsetting the nearly 50% token cost reduction seen since open-weight model usage started to take off in May. 2) Combined annualized run-rate revenues for OpenAI and Anthropic which ended last year at $29B seems to be around $100B currently with Anthropic getting profitable in Q2. 3) Capex from the Big6 hyperscalers accelerated from 84% y/y/ in CQ1 to 92% in CQ2 with forecasts for nearly 100% in Q3. But this is being supported by cloud revenue growth at the 3 Big Public cloud vendors of $AMZN $MSFT $GOOGL accelerating from 23% y/y in Q1:25 to 35% in Q1:26 to 43% in Q2:26. Arguable more important is public cloud operating margins expanded from 34% to 37% and 39% during those time periods. 4) The $500B financing deal backstopped by up to $125B from $NVDA adds even more lower cost money to fund AI capex spend for the non-hyperscaler players. Nvidia gained 0.5% last week. 5) The liquidation of Situational Awareness and retail accounts during July cleared out some of the frothiness in the AI related names In terms of negatives: 1) The cost of money (yields on government bonds) remain near the highest levels for the 30 yr tenor at 5.3% since 2007. 2) Given large scale offensive US military actions are seemingly off the tablein favor of financial sanctions, probably driven by current election polls, I now believe Iran is likely to hold the Strait of Hormuz hostage until past the US mid-terms. This would be akin to them releasing the US hostages in 1981 (they were held for 444 days) just hours after President Reagan was sworn in replacing Carter. There were severe financial sanctions then also. 3) Since 1990, which happens to be the Gulf War, from the end of July through November 9th, which covers the reaction to all mid-term results, the performance is worse than non mid-term years. For mid-term years the median S&P500 gain from 7/31-11/9 is 0.9% with gains 56% of the time but the median peak loss from 7/31 is 6.2% (intra-period median peak loss of 9.9%.) For non mid-term years the median gain is 2.7% from 7/31-11/9 with gains 59% of the time and the median peak loss from 7/31 is 3.5% (intra-period median peak loss of 5.2%.) This year with the momentum seen by the Socialists which are not big business friendly, I see more risk than normal. 4) The easy money on the AI technical rebound from oversold levels on 7/29 due to the forced sale by Situation Awareness is probably over. There were negative stock reactions to headline beat and raise earnings on both revs & EPS for AI infrastructure winners $CSCO (-8% for the week but still up +45% YTD), $AMAT (-6%/+97%) and $COHR (-14%/+77%). While negatives can always be found, their biggest crime was arguably their recent bounce from 7/29-8/7 of 8%, 24% and 71% respectively and their market beating YTD gains. In summary, I remain bullish. Even from the end of July through November 9th during mid-term years since 1990, the S&P has an additional median gain of 4.2% to its peak before giving some of that back closer to the election. Given some of the negatives, especially the reaction to solid earnings data, I would add some hedges back on further market gains and get more selective. Consumer discretionary hedges should also make sense if oil is higher for longer. I believe value should continue to accrue to the infrastructure layer which includes 1) the public cloud vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft, Google and 2) the semiconductor companies. $INTC, my favorite semi company, still gained 0.8% last week despite: 1) a $20B equity offering which causes ~5% dilution and 2) being up 178% YTD. This clears the funding overhang. All the best in the week ahead.

Last wk, S&P/Nas/Mag7 were +1.2%/+1.7%/+4.0% despite oil +4% & bond ylds +7bps on Iran flare-up. 2 days remain during this seasonally favorable time from the last 3 trading days of June through first 9 days of July. Earning season starts w/ big banks on Tuesday. As I first posted about on June 28th and reiterated on July 5th, the seasonality is historically very favorable from the last three trading days of June through the first nine trading days of July during which the S&P/Nasdaq have advanced 1.6%/2.5% and been up 78% of the time since 1985. The S&P/Nasdaq is up 3.0%/3.6% during the first 10 trading days of this time period in 2026 already. But for the heart of the AI trade, the Semiconductor (SOX) Index is down 7.0% during these last 10 trading days on fears of a “speed bump” that I have been posting about since 6/28. For the AI trade going forward, two separate thoughts with two different implications are beginning to coalesce in my mind. The first thought is that AI revenue growth for the leading LLM models is likely to hit a “speed bump” and slow in the September quarter. Last week, $SPCX and $META released new LLM models that both closed much of the gap with the leading edge models from OpenAI and Anthropic. But Meta plans to price their model at roughly 1/4th the cost of the two leaders with SpaceX aggressive as well. This is particularly relevant as companies switched from token maxing in March to token minimization in June. As an example, the CEO of Coinbase posted on June 26th, “How to keep AI spend flat while token usage grows exponentially... Putting this into practice has cut our AI spend nearly in half, while our token usage continues to grow.” Sam Altman on Thursday: “we have heard enterprises on their concerns about AI costs, and 5.6 sol is a huge step forward for dollars-per-task, as are terra and luna”. But on a positive note, two more public cloud providers have been recently added to the four that already existed of $AMZN, $GOOGL, $MSFT and $ORCL. SpaceX in the past month raised over $100B in equity plus debt and plans to spend hundreds of billions to attack the $28.5 trillion TAM they talked about in their IPO prospectus. News surrounding Meta last week seems to imply that they are launching a cloud offering not because they have excess compute but so 1) they can double their compute spend from 7 MegaWatts in 2026 to 14 MegaWatts in 2027 and 2) have capacity to sell their Muse Spark LLM. So in summary, with this seasonally favorable period of time for the overall market coming soon to a close, I believe cutting back excess exposure is prudent. Reaction by investors on Tuesday to bank earnings which should be strong, may give us a good tell as to the risk vs reward at current levels over the shorter-term. As for the AI trade, I believe selectivity is key as we work our way through the “speed bump” and the positive implications of 4 aggressive public cloud vendors now becoming six versus the negatives of token maxing in March turning to token minimization in June. All the best in the week ahead.

X feels noisier than ever. Many investors are deeply confused. Some of the biggest permabulls are suddenly going heavy into the Mag7, while many of the bears I talk to are now adding hypergrowth AI names. Feels like the world is upside down. To be honest if I listen to the reasoning it feels less like intentional, thoughtful diversification or risk management and more like people giving up on having an opinion. I sense that many people are simply exhausted from keeping up with a constantly changing narrative and volatility over the last two years, from trade wars to real wars to financing concerns. I feel this exhaustion strongly myself. I can't go on vacation for a week, or often even relax for a weekend, without waking up to a new policy or macro event that then gets amplified by the media news cycle as if it's the end of the world. But I think it's time people look at facts & data again. The visual below is the Nasdaq over the last 10 years. 2016 — Brexit 2018 — U.S.-China Trade War 2020 — COVID-19 Global Lockdowns 2022 — Russia Invades Ukraine 2022 — 40-Year-High Inflation + Aggressive Fed Hikes 2023 — SVB Collapse / Banking Crisis 2024 — Yen Carry Trade Unwind 2025 — DeepSeek AI Shock 2025 — “Liberation Day” Tariffs / Global Trade War Panic Result: QQQ is up about +545% since the start of 2016. The reality is that most of the time, the market just shrugs it off. Most "bad news" are completely meaningless in the face of massive economic growth that happens more silently but consistently, every single day across the global economy. The 2022 "crash" felt horrible at the time, especially if you worked at an early-stage startup that needed funding. But even that now looks like a tiny hiccup. What you really need to internalize is this: The market is designed to go up. Economic growth + inflation structurally push stock prices higher over time. And you're turning bearish now, at the dawn of AGI? After reading all of this, here's an old Chinese wisdom I want to bestow upon you: If you have a big shlong, you gotta stay long. And if you have tits, buy the dips.

Contrarian take, but Sam Altman / OpenAI is doing something right if he's pissing off every Mag7 like $AAPL. By building their own ecosystem instead of being sucked into another. It's been awhile since $GOOGL, Apple, Microsoft, and others had some genuine disruptors.