Del Abbot

The vibes are turning against Dario. I expect this to accelerate until he changes his messaging Why? Because AI broke the social contract of the internet. For the last 20 years, people shared their data with tech companies as part of a *symbiotic* relationship. The services got better. Traffic went to your site. Network effects made transactions liquid and simple. AI broke that contract. AI sucked in the collective IP of civilization and paid out nothing for the inputs. And now Dario goes on TV every day to tell us he is going to break the economy and our children will be poor. But he did that. It’s economic gaslighting. Dario is the embodiment of the “We’re all trying to find the guy who did this” meme and people are not going to sit there and take it AI needs a better, more inclusive message. I expect he will realize this eventually. The question is whether he will realize it before it’s too late.

Getting another punch to the face on my max equity short. But not so bad given short CLZ6

Been watching picks and shovels eating software for a while. Just started a 25bp of AUM spread trade by legging one side of the trade. $SMH and $IGV and no you bottom picking maniacs I am not buying the dip in IGV yet! Thats where all the pain in leveraged funds is occuring. Short $SMH to eventually go long $IGV

In intensive talks at highest level in 47 years, Iran engaged with U.S in good faith to end war. But when just inches away from "Islamabad MoU", we encountered maximalism, shifting goalposts, and blockade. Zero lessons earned Good will begets good will. Enmity begets enmity.

AI is bad for software and good for web-based distributed services. I think the MSFT selloff fundamentals may be bc it’s a bad company with terrible software products that nobody actually enjoys using. Microsoft products have always been terrible but didn’t use to matter bc they captured enterprise users. Satya, who is a great investor, managed to acquire a bunch of strategic assets that further entrenched that enterprise user capture. Ultimately, I think Elon may be right that Claude will eat Microsoft alive once integrated with its office suite. AI uniquely benefits distributed web-based services, for which Google is native. The upshot is that I think Microsoft’s struggle to show benefits to its AI capex could be unique to Microsoft having terrible products and has little inferential value on the productivity gains of AI adoption in general or even on all other software companies specifically.

In on first lot of two CLZ6 as the spread boys puke

This is wild: Citrini sent a dude with $15,000 cash, recording sunglasses, and a pack of Cuban cigars to the Strait of Hormuz. What he found flips everything Wall Street thinks about the strait on its head. Every hedge fund, every macro desk, every retired general on CNBC is watching the same AIS shipping data to price Hormuz risk. The analyst signed a pledge at an Omani checkpoint promising not to gather information, then smuggled in a gimbal, a microphone kit, and a 150x zoom Leica camera past the border officer who inspected his bag. What he discovered on the ground: the AIS data everyone is trading on is missing roughly half of what's actually transiting the strait on any given day. Ships are going dark, spoofing destinations, broadcasting "CHINESE CREW OWNER" through transponder fields to avoid getting hit. Iran's ghost fleet is running 29+ laden tankers inside the Gulf with transponders off, moving an estimated $3B in crude to Malaysia since the war started. The entire market is pricing a "closed" strait off satellite imagery and transponder data that has a 50% blind spot. Every oil model, every supply forecast, every macro call built on AIS throughput numbers is working from a dataset that systematically overstates the disruption. When the signals deliberately go dark, the people staring at dashboards are the last to know what's happening. Citrini figured that out by putting a guy on a speedboat 18 miles from the Iranian coast while Shahed drones flew overhead. The gap between "what AIS says" and "what's actually transiting" is the most mispriced variable in energy right now.