Latest Interviews

The Consumer’s Summer Spending Surge

T.J. Thornton, David Tinsley

In June 2026, aggregate U.S. consumer spending surged 6.3% year-over-year as discretionary services and retail sectors outpaced necessities, coinciding with a 1.7% acceleration in job growth that narrowed the income spending gap between high- and lower-income households. While Bank of America data indicates this convergence was driven by a 4.1% rise in lower-income wages and a World Cup-induced spike in host city restaurant sales, the event's temporary boost is already fading. Consequently, the personal savings rate dropped to 2.7% as households prioritized consumption over savings, raising concerns about sustainability despite a robust labor market that currently supports further Federal Reserve rate hikes.

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.

From sports to pop culture: Prediction markets $1 trillion bet

Julie Hoover, TJ Thornton

By early July 2026, prediction market volume surged to $13 billion weekly as incumbents like DraftKings and FanDuel launched vertical exchanges while Kalshi captured 4 million new users during the FIFA World Cup. The sector now approaches parity with traditional U.S. sports betting handle, driven by institutional adoption of earnings hedges, retail crypto trading, and a strategic expansion into non-traditional demographics through pop culture markets. Despite these gains, the industry faces significant regulatory uncertainty with active lawsuits in multiple states and a anticipated U.S. Supreme Court ruling on sports event contracts expected by 2027.

Sector Rotation Has Flipped the Script | At The Desk Ep.1

Ben, Phil

Capital is rotating out of speculative AI data center stocks into defensive sectors as the Federal Reserve signals potential rate hikes amid cooling inflation and a divergence between crypto assets and equities. Mega-cap tech firms like Nvidia and Broadcom saw share price declines despite record revenues due to guidance missing elevated expectations, while hyperscalers face scrutiny over massive capital expenditure projections and diminishing profit margins. Consequently, investors are shifting toward diversified long-short strategies and non-tech industries as concerns mount regarding the long-term unit economics of unprofitable AI enterprises.

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.

Socialists Sweep NYC, China Catches Up in Coding, AI Memory Crunch, Micron's Blowout Quarter

Gavin Baker, Travis Kalanick, David Sacks

Socialist candidates secured three key New York primary victories by leveraging strong support from young, affluent voters to defeat establishment figures like Dan Goldman, driven largely by the Israel-Gaza conflict and internal Democratic fractures. Parallel to this political shift, the podcast analyzes the rapid advancement of China's open-source AI through the GLM-5.2 model trained on domestic chips and forecasts a semiconductor market constrained by record HBM demand that is reshaping data center economics. These sectors face a convergence of massive capital flows toward upcoming trillion-dollar AI IPOs and infrastructure challenges that may necessitate a pivot toward orbital compute solutions.

America at 250 – Innovation, Market Leadership and the Power of Compounding

Derek Harris, Jared Woodard

Presented on June 16, 2026, this analysis details the United States' 150-year economic dominance, driven by superior corporate earnings growth, a $1 trillion annual R&D investment, and the dollar's enduring role as the primary global reserve currency. The report challenges the traditional 60-40 portfolio strategy by demonstrating the historical lack of consistent negative correlation between U.S. equities and long-term Treasury bonds, which have often moved in tandem during recent market cycles. Ultimately, the discussion underscores structural advantages in governance and innovation efficiency that sustain U.S. outperformance despite the current challenges posed by an overvalued currency and global reindustrialization trends.

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.

We just launched Paxel!

Paxil is a locally executed tool that generates a five-dimensional builder profile analyzing how developers utilize AI coding agents like Cursor within their own Docker environments. Y Combinator encourages Startup School applicants to integrate this data into their submissions to identify high-potential "no-resume" talent by shifting evaluation focus from final outputs to specific building methodologies. Developed to aggregate global patterns on AI-assisted software creation, the service remains free for developers seeking actionable insights into their engineering workflows.

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.