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The AI economy, daily.
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Critical minerals for the compute buildout.
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Institutional crypto, daily.
Retail & Luxury Fashion
High-end consumer spending & luxury.
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Tech controls, trade wars & policy.
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Labor markets, automation & reskilling.
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Electricity markets & the grid buildout.
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Markets, movers & macro, daily.
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Trend Indicators
Front-run the consensus. Three weekly signal drops tracking where attention, capital, and cultural leverage are pooling — before your timeline or Wall Street prices them in.
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AI and the Economy launching soon
Stop arguing about AGI. Track who's getting budget, who's getting restructured, and where the capex checks are actually clearing.
Anatomy of a signal · historical
The buildout announced itself in guidance footnotes before it ever hit the headlines. In May 2025, Meta raised its full-year capex guide to $64–72B on a single earnings call; by year-end the four hyperscalers were spending ~$320B combined, up from ~$230B in 2024. Meta's 2026 guide is now $115–135B.
Sources: Fierce Network (May 2025), Empower (2025), Sherwood News (2026)
Catch enterprise re-platforming cycles before earnings calls confirm them.
Social Media Contents launching soon
Ad auctions move faster than debt markets. We track where screen time actually converts to cash — and where it's stalling out.
Anatomy of a signal · historical
TikTok's 2025 shutdown scare froze advertiser budgets — CPMs fell 22% YoY in Q3. By Q4 spend crept back, but the money that diversified stayed diversified: Shorts took ~21% of YouTube video ad spend, and Alphabet disclosed Shorts earns more per watch hour than in-stream in the US. Platform risk is a media-buying signal.
Source: Tinuiti Digital Ads Benchmark Report (Q4 2025)
Front-run platform yield shifts before media buyers and aggregators reprice.
Retail & Fashion launching soon
Earnings calls tell you what happened three months ago. Resale spreads, return rates, and sold-out carts tell you what happens next week.
Anatomy of a signal · historical
While luxury wobbled, resale flashed the trade-down early. The RealReal closed 2025 with $2.13B in GMV (+16% YoY), 7% more active buyers, and its first-ever year of positive adjusted EBITDA in every quarter. The secondary market called the consumer before the earnings calls did.
Source: The RealReal SEC filings (Nov 2025 – Feb 2026)
Track real consumer liquidity through inventory velocity, not brand sentiment.
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The pilot dossier
AI and the Economy
The capex supercycle isn't slowing. Alphabet raised its 2026 capex guide to $195–205B (from $180–190B) on the Q2 call — $44.9B spent in the quarter alone, with more coming in 2027. Meta's Q2 capex hit $31.1B while free cash flow collapsed 91% to $784M: the buildout is eating the balance sheet. And BCG's September survey of 1,330 execs found corporate AI spending jumped from 1.7% to 3.3% of revenue in a year — over 80% of it now sitting outside IT budgets. Shadow AI is the budget line to watch.
Alphabet Q2 2026 earnings (Jul 22, 2026) · Meta Q2 2026 (Jul 30, 2026) · BCG Applied AI Index (Sep 30, 2026)
Social Media Contents
The attention market just rotated. YouTube ad revenue hit $11.1B in Q2 (+13% YoY), with Shorts now out-earning in-stream per watch hour in the US. Meta's ad machine printed $59.4B (+27%) — impressions up 14%, prices up 12%. And TikTok's US saga ended with a deal, not a ban: the USDS joint venture closed in January 2026, ~80% American-owned. Meanwhile creator tooling raised $1.39B across 12 deals in September alone. The infrastructure layer is quietly soaking up early-stage checks.
Alphabet 10-Q exhibit (Jul 22, 2026) · Meta Q2 2026 (Jul 29, 2026) · TechJournal (Jan 2026) · SocialDay (Sep 2026)
Retail & Fashion
The consumer is still spending — just differently. September marked the 12th straight month of retail sales growth (CNBC/NRF Retail Monitor, Oct 8): $560.8B ex-auto/gas, +4.05% YoY. ThredUp posted record Q2 revenue of $90.8M (+17%) with 1.77M active buyers (+21%) — then cut full-year guidance 2.1% and fell 15.5% on the print. Translation: the trade-down is real, but even resale can't outrun a cautious consumer. Census September data lands Oct 15 — that's the next confirmation.
CNBC/NRF Retail Monitor (Oct 8, 2026) · ThredUp Q2 2026 (Aug 5, 2026) · Census Bureau (Sep data due Oct 15)
Every figure above is sourced and dated. That's the standard for every drop.