Latest Interviews

The Real Edge in Production AI | Retainna Lin, Bitdeer AI | RAISE Summit 2026

Retainna Lin, Ritana

Leading AI firms are pivoting from renting cloud resources to constructing proprietary infrastructure to secure economic viability and control the critical "cost per outcome." This strategy addresses the financial leakage inherent in fragmented multi-vendor stacks by prioritizing ownership of power, land, and compute to ensure accountability across the entire value chain. Bitdeer exemplifies this approach as an NVIDIA preferred partner offering a fully integrated solution from secure facilities to serverless AI agents, enabling enterprises to maximize gross margins in a market where success depends on optimizing P&L rather than simply accumulating hardware.

Ship the Next: Agentic Cloud for AI Innovation | Alibaba Cloud | RAISE Summit 2026

Alex Chen

Alibaba Cloud unveiled its Qwen 3.7 series and comprehensive "Qwen Cloud" ecosystem, integrating over 80 models into a scalable infrastructure capable of supporting 10,000 isolated agent sandboxes per minute. This launch is paired with significant productivity tools like Coder Work, which has attracted 10,000 organizations through spec-driven development, while the company advances its hardware strategy by designing custom GPUs and expanding global data center capacity. By offering predictive billing and memory-optimized hibernation for agents, the strategy aims to cut hosting costs by 70% and prepare enterprises for future agent-to-human operational ratios of 80:1.

Signals & Noise: Our case for 3 rate hikes this year

Aditya Bhave

PFA Securities forecasts three cumulative 75 basis point Federal Reserve rate hikes in late 2026 to correct a policy stance that analysts deem 75 basis points too accommodative relative to flat unemployment and rising core PCE inflation. While some clients dispute the severity of inflation or the Fed Chair's hawkish intent, the firm argues that a 2.5% underlying inflation rate necessitates restrictive measures to prevent long-term credibility loss and yield curve steepening. Consequently, the analysts predict that if the Fed moves, the initial adjustment will likely be a single 50 basis point hike to align financial conditions with mid-cycle norms.

Global Rates & FX Views: Japan’s GPIF, Fed and ECB

Ralf Preusser, Sphia Salim, Meghan Swiber, Shusuke Yamada, Megan Zweiber, Sia Saleem

Speculation regarding Finance Minister Katayama's support for the GPIF to increase Japanese financial asset holdings has sparked market anticipation of a potential 5% reallocation from foreign to domestic bonds, which could inject roughly 21 trillion yen into the JGB market. This hypothetical shift is projected to exert significant pressure on European government bonds, particularly in France, Spain, and Italy, by triggering an estimated €37 billion in sales that could alter relative value dynamics. Concurrently, the event analysis suggests that while this reallocation presents a modest headwind for US Treasury demand, global central bank strategies remain focused on anticipated September rate hikes for the Fed and ECB before a projected cycle of meaningful cuts begins in 2027.

How Falling Launch Costs and AI Are Driving the Space Economy

Michael Tarulli, Erik Sparks, Alison Nathan

Driven by a 95% cost reduction through rocket reusability, the global space economy has shifted from government dominance to an 80% commercial model currently valued at $625 billion. Key technological transitions to Low Earth Orbit constellations and AI integration are fueling growth toward a projected trillion-dollar market by 2040, though investors still prioritize order backlogs over profitability amidst high launch failure risks. While geopolitical tensions and collision cascade threats challenge sustainability, the sector is rapidly evolving toward autonomous manufacturing, commercial stations, and eventual off-world resource extraction as a universal utility by 2050.

The Presentations You've Been Waiting For

Anton Creel

Scheduled for September 12, the ITPM London Super Conference brings together founder Anton Creel and six senior mentors to guide retail traders toward long-term consistency through a business model framework and specific strategies for market conditions in 2026 and 2027. Featuring high-level performance records ranging from 360% to 900% returns, the curriculum includes exclusive sessions on macroeconomic outlooks, AI-driven trade generation, and the habit formation required to build wealth from zero. Admission to this all-inclusive event, which offers a VIP breakfast with Creel and detailed trade ideas, is positioned as a critical opportunity for traders seeking to replace speculation with structured, winning methodologies.

Will Hyperscalers Justify AI Spend?

Mark Wilson, Rich Privorotsky

Recent market analysis highlights an unsustainable U.S. equity equilibrium driven by AI spending for 70–80% of incremental GDP, creating a concentration risk where hyperscalers underperform against beneficiaries while credit markets face $250 billion in issuance stress. With Q2 earnings priced for 23–24% growth and retail positioning heavily leveraged in semi-hardware, the primary risk involves a failure to validate ROI that could disrupt the current AI capital expenditure cycle. Concurrently, a structural divergence between U.S. tech dominance and European industrial headwinds presents a potential trade where equities may drive macro expectations rather than traditional macro factors.

Has the AI boom entered a manic new phase? | The Economist

Henry Curr, Mike Bird, Josh Roberts

US equity markets have reached near-record capitalization levels driven primarily by massive AI-focused "giga IPOs" like SpaceX and anticipated offerings from Anthropic and OpenAI. This concentration, now comprising nearly 40% of the S&P 500, coincides with unusual retail participation and inverted options pricing that signal a shift toward speculative mania. Simultaneously, major technology firms have redirected capital expenditure toward infrastructure, causing a collapse in free cash flow and transforming the sector into a dominant force in global corporate debt markets.

Must Read Research: Shifting Econ Outlook; Concentration Bubble Risk; Semis; Prediction Mkts

TJ Thornton

The BofA Global Economics team projects a hawkish pivot with three rate hikes in 2026 driven by resilient inflation and labor growth, while equity markets show early signs of rotation away from concentrated AI valuations toward cyclical sectors. Concurrently, the semiconductor industry is securing long-term contracts to underwrite a projected $2.7 trillion market by 2030, even as DraftKings absorbs hundreds of millions in losses to compete for dominance in the rapidly expanding prediction market. These divergent trends highlight a complex economic environment where central bank policy shifts, sector-specific rotation, and intense corporate competition redefine growth strategies across global assets.

What does the next training paradigm look like?

Current AI labs are betting on scaling reinforcement learning to achieve AGI, though the field faces significant stagnation in "computer use" tasks due to the lack of deterministic, replayable web simulators. While proponents argue that extended context windows can substitute for weight updates, critics point to performance degradation in long-horizon scenarios and the inefficiency of discarding inference data without feedback loops. To overcome these barriers, researchers are exploring On-Policy Self-Distillation and simulated "dreaming" to accumulate tacit knowledge from real-world deployment, aiming to shift future progress from pre-training toward continuous, weight-based learning.

The data black hole at the center of AI

The event analyzes the prevailing AI paradigm where massive data volume and compute-intensive reinforcement learning drive progress rather than sample efficiency, creating a booming market for human expert labeling. This approach contrasts sharply with human learning capabilities, as current models require millions of times more data to master tasks like driving or robotics, yet still achieve rapid open-source convergence by leveraging public data. Looking ahead, the discussion projects that while white-collar roles will expand due to AI complementing human work, the ultimate path to solving efficiency bottlenecks may lie in automating the AI research process itself.

ITPM Flash Ep115 Defence against the Machine

Dieter Plas

Amidst a shifting AI landscape dominated by energy demands and a new agentic CPU era, a massive cybersecurity catalyst has emerged from Anthropic's internal Mythos model, which exposed thousands of critical global vulnerabilities without public release. Experts warn this creates a narrow defensive window before adversarial nations potentially replicate these capabilities, prompting a focused trade thesis on the Cyber First Trust Nasdaq Cyber Security ETF (CIBR). To capitalize on this thematic momentum, a structured options strategy involves buying 10 November $90 calls while selling 5 August $95 calls for a net debit of roughly $5,550, targeting a 3:1 return if the ETF rallies 29% by year-end.

Pick One Idea and Go Deep

Jon Xu, John

Founders must abandon the search for a theoretically perfect idea and instead commit fully to a single concept to generate reliable market data and achieve deep expertise. This approach demands a radical identity shift and a "burn the boats" mentality, ensuring leaders can run a customer's business with precision while targeting high-stakes sectors like regulated industries or hard tech. By operating at the frontier of AI capabilities and owning specific outcomes rather than just selling software, entrepreneurs validate their viability through real-world execution or acquire unambiguous failure data necessary for strategic pivots.

Signals & Noise: Why small & mid-caps are leading the 2026 market rally – and what’s next

Jill Hall

Bank of America economists project that U.S. small and mid-cap equities will outperform mega-caps in 2026 as earnings growth from manufacturing recovery and capital expenditure cycles drives returns, aided by a significant valuation gap where the Russell 2000 trades at 17 times forward earnings compared to the Russell 1000's 21 times. While these smaller indices face heightened sensitivity to Federal Reserve rate decisions due to greater leverage and refinancing risks, the firm anticipates steady rates through 2026 followed by cuts that could boost operating earnings by approximately 2% per quarter. Consequently, the investment strategy prioritizes less levered small-cap financials and energy stocks alongside maturing healthcare biotechs, focusing on companies positioned to benefit from reshoring trends and AI-driven efficiency gains.

Will European Equities Outperform the S&P?

Sharon Bell, Chris Hussey

European equities have surged to near all-time highs driven by a 6–7% average upgrade in earnings estimates within the commodity and financial sectors, supported by resilient economic growth and planned German fiscal spending. Goldman Sachs has raised its 12-month Euro Stoxx 600 forecast to 660, citing the region's broader market breadth and the underappreciated potential of heavy asset companies in defense, aerospace, and utilities that are benefiting from global infrastructure and defense spending. While analysts project high single-digit returns for Europe over the coming year, the market is expected to trail U.S. and Asian performance due to lower energy independence and the concentration of tech dominance in American hyperscalers.