A view taking shape.

AI cuts both ways

Lately my attention has moved from how to position around AI's build-out to what AI is doing to the economy that builds it. The labor effect looks asymmetric: it augments senior workers while eroding the bottom rung, and with hiring stagnant, the graduate pipeline thins — the rung you climb from is the one being removed. Some of the layoffs booked to "AI efficiency" read to me as cover for reallocating spend into R&D, or for balance sheets already under strain. And AI's own cost is starting to bite, which forces a fork: ration capped tools across a smaller headcount, drop to cheaper models, or pull back and rehire.

The part I find most telling is reflexive: as HR automates screening, applicants automate applying — each side escalating with the same tools — and a system built to improve matching quietly degrades it for both. I worry that this small coordination failure may be a preview of larger ones. Currently, I sit on both sides of it: AI is what lets me build the things on this site, and also what screens me out of the roles I built them for. That tension is what I'm actually thinking about now.

The structural expression is Asian

Where the framework points geographically: Southeast Asia, where Western growth capital remains under-allocated against digital leapfrogging and supply-chain rewiring, and the Singapore–Taiwan–Korea axis as the software-and-silicon layer of the AI supercycle. Two distinct theses — a capital-gap story and a supercycle story — rather than one.

Quantitative tightening deflates asymmetrically

The hypothesis behind my MSc thesis: balance-sheet reduction doesn't deflate asset classes evenly, with liquidity-sensitive assets responding first and hardest. The open questions — whether the asymmetry tracks the pace or the size of QT, whether it reverses on cessation, and whether it holds across the 2017–19 and 2022–24 episodes — are tested on FRED and Bloomberg credit data.

Gold as a real-asset signal

Gold is doing more than tracking real yields; it's reading a slow diversification away from dollar reserve assets against a noisier geopolitical backdrop. Carried as an active position and monitored as attribution against Fed policy, not a static hedge.

Copper is the second-order trade

Follow the infrastructure behind the headline: AI demand routes through data centers, data centers through copper, and new supply takes fifteen to twenty years to bring online. The predictable result is a structural supply crunch — already surfacing as miners buy reserves through M&A rather than build them.

The defining capital reallocation of the decade

Stepping back from any single name, electrification isn't a theme to trade at the edges — it's where an enormous share of capital is being structurally redirected. Top-down and bottom-up meet here: the macro current and the GE Vernova fundamentals are the same trade.

From the Strait of Hormuz to the Fed's dilemma

A shipping story that ends at the Fed: a Strait of Hormuz disruption lifts crude and the transport costs riding on it into broad inflation, which — against a labor market weaker than the headline suggests — raises the risk of stagflation and a genuine dual-mandate bind, since hiking would also choke the borrowing funding the AI build-out. I expressed the view through gold and managed the exit on the transitory-versus-Fed-timing question; a purely geopolitical headline tracing all the way to monetary policy and the future of AI capital is the interconnectedness I find most compelling.

Data-center power demand is structural, not a spike

The market kept fading the AI power-demand step-change as a spike, when it looks closer to a regime — independent power producers with nuclear and gas baseload gaining pricing power as grid constraints bind. The mispricing was in the durability, not the direction.

GE Vernova and the grid bottleneck

The electrification story was being told as a generation story, when the real chokepoint is the grid — transformers, turbines, transmission — where backlogs run for years and supply can't be willed into existence. GE Vernova sits on the scarce side of that equation: a contrarian committee call at the time, since borne out by the backlog data.