Passed Pawn's Perspective 1. I heard AGI arrived. I'm sticking with my evaluation of these models as high IQ stupid for now. Anyone who's used them extensively seems to agree with me. 2. LLMs are incredibly useful for certain tasks. We just have to be careful about extrapolating that to all tasks for all people, or even many tasks for many people. This has implications wrt valuations and commercial moats. 3. The bond battle continues. It's painted as Bessent vs the markets, but is that reality? The admin has been running inflationary policy since they took office and AI driven growth and debt financing have been powerful forces. Markets find clearing prices for risk, simple as that. 4. The only problem is the lack of understanding and messaging when our leaders are saying rates and inflation should be lower, for some legitimate and some absurd reasons, while driving them higher at every turn. 5. At the end of the day, the dollar will be the sacrificial lamb. Stocks, bonds and the economy will all come first. I’m positioning my portfolio accordingly. 6. I saw some debates about manufacturing jobs recently. Of course they are increasing, given the massive AI and defense related infrastructure needs and strategic reindustrialization. This is good for the US long term and no it's not because of blanket tariffs and made up reshoring lol. 7. The Fed is priced as more likely to hike than not this month. I expect they will, since markets are handing it to them, and Warsh wants to look like the committee is following through with his stated mission. It actually pairs well with Bessent's efforts as well. 8. Oil keeps climbing. Dec Brent is now above its peak in May. The short term disruption is being priced more accurately as a medium term disruption and I suspect it will continue higher from here. 9. I feel like a broken record, but there is no off ramp for the US. Iran has only two ways to establish deterrence and neither of them is signing a deal that can be broken any time. 10. Overall there are many challenges ahead, but in the near term its in everyone's best interest to keep the party going, especially through the IPOs and election. The capex machine isn't out of runway yet, but we should be looking out for second derivatives turning lower, exhaustion in funding markets, etc. -PP