Pre Market Thoughts 8 Jul 26
Yields inched 1-2bps higher across the curve. Overnight geopolitical risk is back with news of US and Iran love taps during market hours. While oil has rallied on the back of the that, it is also pricing in a "supposedly glut" for next year.
My thoughts on Oil after March 26? This is a market where even the so called experts get it wrong. Waddling here is probably deeply negative EV.
Next, asia markets took a huge beating. KOSPI is down 5.5%, NKY is down 1.6%. Today on NY close is the end of the subscription period of $SKHY. At this price point, the case is either you believe in the earnings and the non cyclical case for HBM and DRAM or you dont. $SKHY is now back to the friday/thursday lows. This has dragged down $MU and $SNDK in thin overnight markets. Again, levels where i believe there is good r/r is ($MU 800-850, $SNDK 1500s). The caveat to this is that while i expect the momentum puke to be over already, it is currently still on going. If you want to bid this, you must be ready to hold for a while.
In other news, semi analysis is writing about Anthropic and OAI not being able to serve their models because of a lack of compute. Also they estimate Anthropic's valuation to be at about 6trn at 20x 200b ARR in 2027. This is a gargantuan number and marks a massive payday for VCs. On the compute shortage, especially as OAI and Anthropic ramp up towards serving inference - this changes the risk in their business models. In AI usage, the power law distribution holds. AI is of tremendous value to some people (those with high agency - i strongly believe we will see the rise of billion dollar single man companies in the future) and of some value to most people.
Compute market currently still remains in short supply, especially with Anthropic and other players gobbling up supply. Even the short term rental markets have no supply for many of them. A100s (i just checked) are renting for $1/hr....this is something that was launched 6 years ago - This means that for the people renting out A100s, they would have made back everything in 2years (rental was ~2.5) Every year after that is pure profit.
Anthropic's 3Q26 profit was also leaked at 1B. The bear case for compute - that the frontier labs will collapse because of an inability to raise funding - that case is dead. The frontier labs are now profitable. To scale, they need more compute. Serving inference is a 70% gross margins business for them and the compute shortage will tighten even further as the labs jostle to get market share.
Personally, i have rotated all my plays into neoclouds. This remains the most mis understood business (2 year payback periods) and the core inflection point now is the frontier labs turning profitable.
NVDA providing credit support for neoclouds is extremely bullish for them because it reduces the interest cost in financing the build out.
TLDR - while this was meant to be a market update, i could not help but to put this down as the biggest play for 2H'26. IMO, we are still in the very early innings because people do not yet have a grasp of the economics of the trade. This market is like memory in October 2025 - some people are seeing the vast need for compute and the inflection point that the frontier labs being profitable mean - while others point to an outdated bear case that sounds sexy but fails to live up to scrutiny.
What neoclouds would i bid? $NBIS in my opinion remains the leader of the neoclouds in terms of execution. $CRWV is a strong contender, however 98% of its contracts are locked in and hence it will not be able to directly monetise on the spot shortage in compute. However, $CRWV has already been rumoured to hit its 30B ARR target exiting 2027. $IREN boasts power however, in terms of deal execution - this has been lacking.
For the super speculative play, i like $SHAZ. Again, this trades at ~2B market cap. It has 40,000 GB300s which when rented out will be able to fetch $6-11/hr which means an ARR of 2-4B. If we apply a 6x ARR multiple to this, this is 12b-24b. Also $SHAZ capital structure is relatively clean with a thick equity cushion and also NVDA credit support for its GPU purchases. I like this play for the massive risk reward it offers.
Now - does this mean that neoclouds will rerate upwards immediately? No. In a positioning wipe out, everything gets sold. However, cashflows and valuations will dominate in the longer run. For a generational trade like neoclouds (where i see at least a 3x rerating on $NBIS, $CRWV - because of Anthropic's profitability)
As always, i welcome thoughts on the matter, especially to see where i may have gotten it entirely wrong.
Good luck!
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"An evergreen recurring airdrop" 🤔
What Ansem is doing with his token probably reinvents how airdrops are done forever. In hindsight it was obvious, but the idea that you have an evergreen recurring airdrop is actually the way to do it and is the highest EV way to distribute tokens.
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$GRASS investor call today
Sell the news trade undefeated
Selling the news remains the undefeated trade in crypto
Like clockwork
$DYDX
Buying $MU or $SNDK at -30% feels scary like buying the first major dip of an 100x runner except this time there are gigantic earnings to back their valuations
$STRC should drift higher closer to par if BTC remains stable or up
i caught literally 0 from the best performers list🤝
Still a great month trading XRP and FARTCOIN
Goated
@thedefivillain substack as always, i cant think of any reason to not enjoy one of the few free and high quality crypto newsletters
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The Empire Strikes Back
Mag7 bounces vs QQQ right as the money rotates from semi stocks into Mag7/hyperscalers
Mag7 paired against QQQ looks like that in 2026
The capex spenders are underperforming
I thought that Saylor would enter a death spiral that would collapse the price of BTC to $30k but now that he sold 0.4% of his BTC stack, we are definitely out of the woods and BTC can go to $150k
Next BTC sale by Strategy should be $100M in one month if the mNAV doesn't go higher in the meantime
Very different reaction on BTC between the $220M sale by Strategy today and the $2.5M sale a month ago
The message is quite clear: They will sell BTC instead of MSTR shares to fund the dividends if the mNAV is low enough
Reminder that this would correspond to $1.8bn worth of sell pressure a year if they fund *all divs* with BTC instead of MSTR or even USD Reserve.
Also a reminder that it would be a nothingburger if he sold $200M worth of MSTR shares (he has done that like 30 times already), and it's frankly irrational to consider that it should be *dramatically different* when he sells that amount in BTC.
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MSTR sold just enough BTC to pay for all the dividend of the past month+quarter
Perfect, let's see the reaction on this
MSTR sold just enough BTC to pay for all the dividend of the past month+quarter
Perfect, let's see the reaction on this
Selling the news remains the undefeated trade in crypto
Like clockwork
$DYDX
Mag7 paired against QQQ looks like that in 2026
The capex spenders are underperforming
Full blown panic move on $STRC, around $85 is the dip to buy imo
As long as $STRC is not trading at exactly $100, Saylor is not raising a penny through the instrument.
You have probably noticed that the price got back to par earlier after the ex-div date in March and April.
I think the reason we're struggling this month is simply because almost $5bn have been raised through STRC during the past 2 months, and all these inflows need to be "digested".
The past month was a monster month, it's really not surprising that we're now taking more time to absorb the flows.
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Everyone being giga bullish on a project before its launch usually means that it won't be a great long trade.
I am thinking about stuff like Monad, EigenLayer, Berachain
The huge upside has been captured in the private market.
Then it launches at high valuation, and the only thing you can do is provide exit liquidity for all the people that got in on the private market.
Think about the highest ROI tokens we've had, ever.
They have never been giga hyped before launch, right ?
Then of course, this all depends on launch valuations. Hyped projects that launch in shitty conditions could become good longs ( $ZRO, $ZK ?). But a general rule for me is that overhyped projects won't give interesting upside.
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