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The Soft Antichrist Of The AI Age: What Everyone Is Missing About The US-China Arms Race

Authored by Patrick Feeley via Substack,

I. The word

Peter Thiel spent the back half of last year giving private lectures on the Antichrist, and the word has been loose in the discourse ever since. His political reading is the old one. The Antichrist is not a cartoon devil. He is the figure who arrives offering peace and safety, and who uses the fear of catastrophe to install one universal order. In Thiel's telling that figure is a regulator. He stops technology in the name of survival. The price of the peace is stagnation.

I want the frame. I do not want his conclusion.

The more probable figure is not the one who promises safety. It is the one who promises growth. Most of the world does not lie awake about existential risk from machine intelligence. It lies awake about electricity, logistics, credit, tax collection, and a median citizen who is twenty four and needs work. To that world the universal offer is not a moratorium. It is a stack. Cheap. Financed. Hosted. Present. Already attached to the handsets, the ports, and the power.

That is the soft Antichrist. It does not arrive with a speech about ending history. It arrives as the only AI that can grow your GDP.

I am not writing theology. I am writing underwriting.

II. The comforting story

The market is telling itself a story. The AI race is a contest of models. America builds the best systems. China copies. Europe regulates. Capital therefore clusters around closed labs, chipmakers, and hyperscale cloud. The scoreboard is a benchmark table.

That story is not false. It is incomplete in a way that misprices power. It treats the richest customers as the only customers that matter. It treats evaluations as destiny. It treats national power as a software demo.

I disagree.

The race will be decided by who becomes the default operating system for the economies that still have the most growth left. Those economies will not adopt AI as a lifestyle product. They will adopt it as a growth tool. They will take the stack that is cheap, present, financed, and attached to what they already run. If that stack is Chinese, Beijing does not need to conquer anyone. It only needs to become expensive to leave.

III. Where the mass actually is

When Sargasso maps AI adoption across emerging GDP rather than across model releases, the picture is not the one the market is priced for.

Start with the denominator. On purchasing power terms, IMF projections for 2026 put China at about $44.3 trillion against $32.4 trillion for the United States. India is near $18.9 trillion. Indonesia clears $5.4 trillion and Brazil $5.2 trillion. Turkey is at $4.0 trillion, Mexico $3.6 trillion, Saudi Arabia $2.9 trillion, Egypt $2.6 trillion, Nigeria $2.4 trillion. Nominal dollars still flatter America, and by a wide margin. China's nominal print is about $20.9 trillion against the same $32.4 trillion for the United States. Both numbers are true. They answer different questions. Nominal tells you who can buy foreign assets. PPP tells you how much physical and administrative activity there is to automate. For an adoption thesis, the second number is the one that matters.

Ray Dalio has been describing the political consequence in plain terms. He calls it a tribute system. A hierarchical order in which leaders travel to Beijing to acknowledge relative power in exchange for access and stability. He ties it to a growing view abroad that American security guarantees will not be honored under stress. I take the framing seriously. I do not treat it as scripture. Ports and rail were the first set of rails. Models will be the next set.

IV. The evidence is already in the download data

This part of the argument is no longer speculative.

Over roughly four years, the American share of model downloads on Hugging Face fell from about sixty percent to the mid teens by late 2025, according to reporting in The Wire China. Hugging Face's own one year review of the DeepSeek moment is blunt on the composition shift. DeepSeek R1 became the most liked model on the platform in its history. The top of that list is no longer majority American. Baidu went from zero public Hugging Face releases in 2024 to more than one hundred in 2025. ByteDance and Tencent raised their release counts eight to nine fold. Of newly created models under a year old, downloads for Chinese models surpassed any other country, including the United States. Western startups and researchers now routinely fine tune Chinese base models because those are the largest open weights available.

The Wire China's Southeast Asia reporting puts the commercial logic in local language. A Jakarta lab head said developers will always pick the cheapest one. A Malaysian founder said he wants the biggest model and there is no Western open source offering at that size. Chinese cloud providers were running thirty seven availability zones across six Southeast Asian regions against thirty across four for the Western field.

None of this shows up cleanly in a frontier benchmark table. All of it shows up in switching costs three years from now.

V. The institutional layer

Beijing is not leaving the volume layer to price alone. In July 2026 it stood up the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization in Shanghai, with twenty nine founding members. Public reporting names Russia, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Indonesia, Brazil, and a broader set spanning Africa and Latin America among the signatories. The five year commitments attached to the body, as reported by Caixin and The Diplomat, are unglamorous and therefore serious. Training placements. Joint application centers with regional blocs. A weather early warning system deployed into dozens of countries.

Read that list as an underwriter. Training placements create the administrators who will write the next procurement. Application centers create the reference deployments. Weather systems create dependency inside a ministry that cannot afford an outage. Standards get set that way. Not with a better model. With a bureaucracy that has already learned one.

VI. America is running the right play against the wrong clock

Washington understands the problem. Executive Order 14320, signed July 23, 2025, created the American AI Exports Program to push full stack packages abroad. Chips, models, applications, cybersecurity, cloud, and data centers sold together. Analysis from the Institute for Progress argues the contested emerging markets that should sit at the center of that effort include Brazil, Egypt, Indonesia, Nigeria, Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, and Bangladesh. That is the correct map. It is essentially the map in this piece.

The tension is that the same government running an export promotion program is running an export control program, and the second one moves faster than the first. The UAE's status was upgraded only in July 2026, and even then chip access was scoped to approved entities. Meanwhile Huawei has been shopping Ascend parts into the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Thailand, and courting Egypt directly. Beijing has published a self sufficiency ambition on a near term horizon and is moving to expand domestic AI chip output.

Set aside whether the controls are correct on the merits. Underwrite the second order effect. Capability still flows outward through commercial relationships and distillation. American open efforts start constrained at home. The result is a one way street into the volume layer of the world economy, at exactly the moment when the volume layer is where the standard gets set.

Western discourse is spending its attention elsewhere. Alignment theater. Synthetic media. White collar displacement in rich cities. Those are real problems. They are also rich country problems. The quieter failure is dependency. Once an emerging state's logistics, credit, schools, and revenue collection run on foreign models, switching stops being a procurement decision. It becomes a sovereignty decision. Sovereignty decisions do not get made on price.

VII. The map I would force into any serious strategy memo

When we screen a country the way we screen a company, we are not asking which model it admires. We are asking what it has already installed, who financed the installation, and what it would cost to rip out.

Asia. India, Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Kazakhstan, Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka.

Middle East and Gulf. Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, Turkey, Iran.

Africa. Nigeria, Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa, Angola, Ghana.

Latin America. Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, Chile, Colombia.

These are not equivalent cases. India can build its own. The Gulf can simply buy, and is buying from both sides. Vietnam and Indonesia industrialize and will take whatever shortens the industrialization. Nigeria and Ethiopia need administration and power far more than they need chat interfaces. Brazil and Mexico live between Western finance and Chinese trade and will hedge accordingly. Pakistan and Kazakhstan sit on corridors Beijing already financed once.

The common variable is growth urgency. Growth urgency selects the stack that shows up, and it selects it quickly.

VIII. The throat

Compute is the oil of this cycle, and the supply chain has a throat. Counterpoint Research put TSMC at seventy three percent of the pure play foundry market in the second quarter of 2026. Its position at the leading nodes is more concentrated than that headline suggests.

You do not need an invasion scenario to price the leverage. You need governments that come to believe only one counterpart can reliably keep the chips, the cloud, the handsets, and the financing flowing. That belief is cheaper to create than a fab and harder to reverse than a tariff.

IX. Two futures

In the first, America wins the cathedral. Benchmarks stay American. Safety papers multiply. Closed models remain impressive and expensive. Emerging economies still buy the stack attached to Chinese devices, Chinese capital, and turnkey Chinese infrastructure. Global token volume follows global GDP, which is to say it follows the parish. The United States keeps the prestige and loses the installed base.

In the second, America treats emerging GDP as the actual battlefield. Competitive open weights exist and are hostable by states that want an alternative to Beijing without becoming a tenant of a single American lab. Energy, chips, and cloud are treated as national goods rather than as line items. The public companies that can genuinely deploy AI into durable operations are valued above the ones that can only demonstrate it.

Markets are priced closer to the first future than the evidence supports. That gap is the part I care about.

X. This is the same thesis, widened

In Pilot Purgatory I argued that AI works and capital is available, and that the binding constraint is organizational. Companies cannot absorb what they have bought. Forty two S&P 500 companies captured 312 percent of the index's price return since ChatGPT while the other 458 captured 38 percent. Fifty eight percent of small and mid cap companies claim an AI strategy and under one percent describe implementation as mature.

That was a governance problem inside public companies. Widen the aperture by one order of magnitude and it is the same problem at the level of the state. Intelligence is being manufactured at declining cost. Absorption is the bottleneck. When Sargasso underwrites a company, the question is whether the organization can metabolize the technology it has already purchased. Run that question at the level of a country with weak administrative capacity and urgent growth targets, and the answer is worse. That is precisely why the party that clears the bottleneck earns something more durable than a product cycle. It writes the rails under the next order.

XI. What I would underwrite

If you underwrite AI as a feature race between rich country labs, you will be right about the models and wrong about the century.

Underwrite instead who owns the rails that India, Indonesia, Brazil, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Vietnam, Nigeria, Egypt, and Turkey will actually run. Underwrite who captures adoption where governance is thin and growth is urgent. Underwrite the closed labs and the national champions as though their real competitor is not the next chat interface, but a hierarchy that intends to make itself impossible to leave.

The AI race that matters is not who builds the smartest model in the richest city. It is who becomes the operating system for the economies that still have the most growth left in them.

This is not a recommendation. It is my map.

Sargasso Capital Management is a constructivist investment firm. This post is research and commentary. It is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or interest in any fund.

Sources

1. Fortune, "Peter Thiel is delivering 4 private sold-out lectures at a club in San Francisco, about the Antichrist," September 2, 2025. Link; Reason, "I listened to over 7 hours of Peter Thiel's leaked Antichrist lectures," October 14, 2025. Link
2. Visual Capitalist, "The World's Largest Economies in 2026, Nominal vs. PPP," using IMF World Economic Outlook projections. Link; IMF DataMapper, GDP based on PPP. Link
3. Fortune, "Ray Dalio says China's ascent ushers in era of 'tribute system,'" May 16, 2026. Link; Fortune, "Ray Dalio just finished a 10-day trip to China," June 24, 2026. Link
4. The Wire China, "Surrounding American AI from the South," June 21, 2026. Link
5. Hugging Face, "One Year Since the 'DeepSeek Moment,'" January 20, 2026. Link
6. Reuters, "Twenty-nine countries sign agreement to establish global AI cooperation body," July 16, 2026. Link; Caixin Global, "China Launches Shanghai-Based AI Governance Body With 29 Founding Nations," July 17, 2026. Link; The Diplomat, "With New AI Governance Organization, China Seeks to Formalize Its Global AI Influence," July 2026. Link
7. Executive Order 14320, "Promoting the Export of the American AI Technology Stack," July 23, 2025. Link; Institute for Progress, "America's AI Exports Program." Link
8. Morgan Lewis, "BIS Upgrades UAE Export Control Status, with AI Chip Access Limited to Approved Entities," July 2026. Link
9. South China Morning Post, "Huawei eyes export of AI chips to Middle East, Southeast Asia to rival Nvidia," July 12, 2025. Link
10. Bloomberg via Free Malaysia Today, "Huawei pitches AI chips to Egypt in test of US tech diplomacy," August 26, 2026. Link
11. RCR Wireless, "China aims to triple AI chip output," August 28, 2025. Link
12. Counterpoint Research, Global Pure Foundry Market Share, Q2 2026. Link
13. Sargasso Capital Management, Pilot Purgatory, May 6, 2026. Link

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 14:00

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Foldable iPhone Production Reportedly Limited Ahead Of Launch

Apple is expected to unveil its first, long-awaited foldable iPhone next Wednesday at its product event in Cupertino, California. Rumored to be called the iPhone Ultra, the device could start at more than $2,000, with MacRumors estimating that the new iPhone could cost as much as $2,499.

Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo expects the company to introduce the foldable alongside the iPhone 18 Pro lineup, although Nikkei Asia reports that manufacturing constraints could delay preorders.

Sources deep within Apple's supply chain told the Japanese outlet that production lines for the foldable iPhone are producing only a few hundred units per day as the company works to meet its extremely high quality-control standards.

"Apple has very high quality requirements and added an extra trial run in August ahead of actual production. However, production is ramping up slowly, with output currently at only a few hundred units a day in late August. That initial volume could be challenging to meet market demand," one supply-chain manager told the outlet.

The simple production math is absolutely brutal. Apple has reportedly targeted production of between 8 million and 10 million foldable iPhones this year. Even at 500 units per day, the current production rate would yield fewer than 200,000 phones over the course of a year.

The iPhone Ultra is now said to feature MagSafe charging after all.

Previous leaks suggested Apple was skipping this feature on their first foldable due to space constraints. pic.twitter.com/95EomHTV9c

— AppleTrack (@appltrack) September 2, 2026

Separately, Kuo expects manufacturing constraints to delay preorders until the fourth quarter. That would mirror the 2017 rollout of the iPhone X, which was unveiled in September but did not become available for preorder until late October.

Next week's unveiling will be the first major product showcase under CEO John Ternus, the longtime hardware chief who succeeded Tim Cook last Tuesday. Cook has moved into the executive chairman role after leading Apple for 15 years.

Late this week, Brandon Nispel, an equity research analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets, published a note to clients outlining what to expect at next week's launch event:

We think Apple's Sept. 9 iPhone launch event is likely a negative catalyst for shares where we likely learn the main unknown, iPhone pricing, neither of which we think hold positive implications. We think either: 1) a larger price increase can soften gross margin pressure, but likely will impact unit volumes and bring "sticker shock"; or 2) prices are raised more selectively, amplifying the focus on gross margins, and a possible need to raise prices again in the future; we don't think either is a great outcome. Apple's Sept. event is typically followed by modest negative reaction to shares.

What do we expect to be announced?

We expect 3 new iPhones: iPhone 18 Pro, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and the iPhone Fold/Ultra.

iPhone 18 Pro

The iPhone 18 Pro is expected to maintain the same 6.3 inch display as the iPhone 17 Pro, while moving to an A20 Pro processor, vs. the A19 Pro chip in the 17 Pro. The A20 Pro should provide better performance and power efficiency when compared to the iPhone 17 Pro, while Apple's C2 modem is expected to improve battery life when using cellular data and improve performance in congested coverage areas. The smartphone is also set to be equipped with an upgraded variable aperture camera allowing users to adjust the amount of light passes through the camera lens. Additionally, the iPhone will have a 4,288mAh battery vs. 4,252mAh in the iPhone 17 Pro.

iPhone 18 Pro Max

The iPhone 18 Pro Max is expected to maintain the same 6.9 inch display as the 17 Pro Max, similarly moving to the A20 Pro processor, and includes a 5,567mAh battery compared to the 5,088mAh battery in the 17 Pro Max, which may increase the thickness of the iPhone. The Pro Max is also expected to include the new variable aperture camera.

iPhone Fold/Ultra

Apple is expected to release its first ever foldable iPhone, which is expected to have a 5.5 inch display when closed and a 7.8 inch display when opened. The Ultra may include the A20 Pro processor, C2 modem, a titanium frame, and the Company will bring back Touch ID on the side of the device rather than having Face ID. It is anticipated to be Apple's thinnest iPhone yet at ~4.5mm, coming in roughly 1mm thinner than the iPhone Air, which was launched at last year's event. However, the phone is expected to come with a camera downgrade compared to the other models, with two rear cameras and no telephoto lens. The Fold/Ultra is also rumored to include two batteries, which could make it the largest battery capacity in an iPhone.

We expect 2 new Apple Watches: Apple Watch Series 12 and Watch Ultra 4.

We expect new AirPods.

We expect timing of iOS 27 launch timing to be solidified.

What's the typical reaction to the event?

We believe given Apple is one of the world's most well reported on companies, announcements at the event rarely are surprising to investors and it doesn't pay to be bullish going into the event. In the past 5 years, Apple's average stock performance the day the iPhone is announced is -0.72%, and T+5 day performance is -1.22%.

What's our view?

At this point, we expect iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max builds of 73M in F4Q26/F1Q27, which compares to our estimate of 67.7M in the prior year, so on a like-for-like basis, we expect a higher number of iPhone 18 Pro/Pro Max builds vs. the iPhone 17. However, when including the iPhone 18 Fold/Ultra and the iPhone 17 base model, we see total iPhone 18 builds of 80M, vs. ~91M in the prior year, where we see declining unit volumes due to the lack of iPhone 18 base model. We suspect the decline in unit volume of ~12% is made up for with higher pricing due to mix as well as higher unit ASPs. We are factoring in iPhone Pro price increases of $150 to $1,249 and iPhone Pro Max price increases of $200 to $1,399, and assume a $2,199 price for the iPhone Fold/Ultra

Apple shares are up 17.7% year to date as of Friday's close.

The average 12-month price target among analysts tracked by Bloomberg is $329.91, representing roughly 3% upside from current levels.

Also next week, Chinese smartphone rival Huawei will release the latest generation of its trifold smartphone on Monday, just ahead of Apple's launch event.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 13:25

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Thank You Rick Santelli, You Legend

Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance

It was announced this past week that Rick Santelli will be retiring next month.

So today I offer a tribute to perhaps the last man standing on CNBC with a functioning economics textbook, and one of the few figures in financial media who could simply tell you that one plus one equaled two without disappearing into an academic sounding, postmodern, jargon filled bullshit word salad that somehow ended with the conclusion that paying a quadrillion dollars a day in interest on the national debt while inflation ran at 10% was a sign of economic prosperity.

Santelli has been on CNBC for years, but his appearances, especially more recently, often seemed confined to a few precious minutes talking about Treasuries, yields, the Fed and the macro picture. But he never let the limited airtime limit the subject matter.

He used those short spots to shoehorn in a daily reminder that supply and demand had not been repealed, incentives still mattered, capital actually had a cost, debt was still debt, and governments had not discovered some previously unknown branch of mathematics in which borrowing and spending enormous amounts of money made everyone permanently richer.

What was supposed to be a quick update on the 10 year Treasury routinely became a five minute crash course in basic economics, usually delivered with the urgency of a man driving who desperately needs to piss and just learned the next rest stop is still 90 miles away.

That was what made him such a breath of fresh air. There was always a healthy Austrian school instinct underneath the commentary: skepticism toward central planning, respect for price signals, suspicion of artificially cheap money, and the old fashioned belief that markets contain information that policymakers might want to consider before deciding they know better.

None of this should have been particularly radical, but in modern financial media, suggesting that there might be consequences to borrowing trillions of dollars can occasionally make you sound like you arrived at the studio carrying a musket and a copy of The Road to Serfdom.

Santelli also had the irritating habit of asking what might happen after the thing everyone else was busy celebrating. If rates were going to stay at zero forever, perhaps there would be consequences. If Washington was going to spend another trillion dollars, perhaps somebody should ask where the trillion dollars came from. If the Fed was going to flood the system with liquidity, perhaps asset prices would cease to be entirely reliable indicators of underlying economic health. If inflation appeared after an extraordinary monetary and fiscal expansion, perhaps we didn’t need a team of PhDs to discover an entirely new explanation for it.

His real offense was refusing to participate in one of the great linguistic achievements of modern economics, where unpleasant concepts can apparently be eliminated simply by giving them nicer names. Debt became stimulus, government spending became investment, money printing became liquidity, bailouts became stabilization, intervention became support, and inflation became transitory.

Rick would sit there listening to all of this and eventually ask the embarrassingly unsophisticated question that everyone else had somehow managed to avoid: who is actually paying for all this shit?

You could almost feel the collective discomfort through the television. Somewhere a strategist had prepared seventeen slides explaining why an additional $2 trillion of government borrowing was bullish for equities, while Santelli was committing the social faux pas of wondering where the f*ck the money was actually coming from…

“Do you think I want to take a shower every hour? The last place I'm ever gonna live or work is D.C.” - Rick Santelli

That was the beauty of a Santelli segment. He could begin with the perfectly innocent observation that the 10 year yield had moved four basis points and, five minutes later, somehow be halfway through an impromptu seminar on central banking, fiscal policy, monetary debasement, moral hazard, government incentives, price discovery and the accumulated economic wisdom of several centuries…all while making a face like he was passing a bladder stone the size of a regulation size WNBA basketball.

And just as he was arriving at some crucial economic question upon whose answer the survival of free markets and Western civilization depended, someone would remind him that they had to go to commercial.

Most financial television can spend an hour producing five minutes of genuinely useful information. Santelli somehow had the opposite problem. He was perpetually trying to stuff an hour of economic common sense into the five minutes he had been allotted. You could practically sense the control room watching the clock while Rick attempted to explain why $30 trillion, then $32 trillion, then $34 trillion of debt might conceivably deserve more attention than whether the latest CPI print was one tenth above or below consensus.

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And whether you agreed with every Santelli rant was never really the point. I certainly don’t think you had to. What mattered was that somebody was willing to challenge the premise of the conversation rather than merely debate the approved range of conclusions. Maybe debt isn’t wealth. Maybe borrowing isn’t saving. Maybe government spending doesn’t become productive investment simply because somebody puts the word “investment” in the name of the bill. Maybe artificially suppressing the price of capital for years creates distortions. Maybe incentives matter more than intentions.

Most importantly, Santelli understood the concept that seems to disappear fastest whenever Washington or the Fed gets involved: tradeoffs. Every policy has a cost, every intervention changes incentives, every subsidy encourages something, every tax discourages something, every artificially cheap dollar of capital ends up somewhere, and every debt ultimately belongs to somebody.

There is no free lunch, even when Congress has renamed the lunch the American Prosperity and Strategic Lunch Affordability Act and the Congressional Budget Office has produced a chart showing that it pays for itself in 2047.

That perspective made Santelli unusual because financial media is generally very good at explaining what happened over the previous fifteen minutes. Rick was often more interested in what happens over the next fifteen years. He brought historical memory into conversations that sometimes seemed to assume economic history began at the previous Fed meeting, and he maintained an almost pathological attachment to the idea that economic principles continue to operate even when acknowledging them would be inconvenient.

A good Santelli rant was part economics lecture, part old school “go f*ck yourself” style Chicago trading floor, part ideological argument and part angry drunk uncle at Thanksgiving. Underneath the theatrics, though, the message was remarkably consistent. Markets matter because prices contain information. Incentives matter because people respond to them. Debt matters because eventually somebody has to service it. Interest rates matter because capital is not supposed to be free. Supply and demand matter because declaring something affordable does not create more of it.

Most of all, arithmetic matters because reality has an annoying habit of refusing to participate in whatever narrative happens to be fashionable at the moment.

Here’s some of my favorite Santelli rants for you to enjoy. His commentary on Obama’s mortgage plan:

Commenting on the US’s debt downgrade during Obama:

Destroying Steve Liesman on mortgages:

Laying bare that QE can never end:

Questioning why we can never get out of crisis mode:

And finally, Santelli taking Andrew Ross-Sorkin to task on restrictions when the debate had just started taking place during COVID:

Rick Santelli at his best was skeptical, argumentative, occasionally volcanic, frequently hilarious and stubbornly unwilling to pretend that changing the terminology changed the underlying economics. In a financial media culture that can sometimes confuse consensus with wisdom and complexity with sophistication, he remained attached to a handful of remarkably simple questions. What are the incentives? Where is the money coming from? What happens to prices? What are the unintended consequences? And, eventually, who pays?

The questions Rick asked weren’t especially glamorous, but they have survived every economic fad invented to avoid answering them. Just as Santelli’s legacy will do, no matter how many guest spots MSNBC gives to Elizabeth Warren, Paul Krugman, Jeremy Siegel and Zohran Mamdani in the future. Godspeed, Rick.

---

QTR’s Disclaimer: Please read my full legal disclaimer on my About page here. This post represents my opinions only. In addition, please understand I am an idiot and very often get things wrong and lose money. I may own or transact in any names mentioned in this piece at any time without warning, meaning if I’m long I could sell or if I’m short I could cover at any time.

Contributor posts, guest posts and curated posts have been hand selected by me, but have not been fact checked and are the opinions of their authors. They are either submitted to QTR by their author or reprinted under a Creative Commons license with my best effort to uphold what the license asks, or with the permission of the author.

I cannot guarantee the accuracy of any or all facts and figures included in this article though I made an effort to get them right. I have been wrong before and will be wrong again, and encourage you to always double check, do your own research and speak to a licensed financial professional, which I am not.

This is not a recommendation to buy or sell any stocks or securities, just my opinions. I often lose money on positions I trade/invest in. I may add any name mentioned in this article and sell any name mentioned in this piece at any time, without further warning. None of this is a solicitation to buy or sell securities. I may or may not own names I write about and are watching. Sometimes I’m bullish without owning things, sometimes I’m bearish and do own things I’m bearish on. Just assume my positions could be exactly the opposite of what you think they are just in case. If I’m long I could quickly be short and vice versa. I won’t update my positions.

Starting in 2026, I have been attempting to no longer actively trade as much as I once did (read my story here). My goal is for my investing/saving to be done by recurring contributions mostly to sector ETFs and a few select equities, trusted third parties who oversee my accounts, and advisors. Such advisors or funds, through individual equities, options, index funds, mutual funds, ETFs, or other securities, may have positions in, exposure to, or holdings of names mentioned herein that I know nothing about. It is possible I could own, have exposure to, or not own anything, at any point. In an attempt to lead a healthier lifestyle, I’ve also excluded myself from fantasy sports, sports betting, online and in-person casinos and prediction markets.

Any of my positions can change immediately as soon as I publish, with or without notice and at any point I can be long, short or neutral on any position. You are on your own. Do not make decisions based on my blog. I exist on the fringe. If you see numbers and calculations of any sort, assume they are wrong and double check them. I failed Algebra in 8th grade and topped off my high school math accolades by getting a D- in remedial Calculus my senior year, before becoming an English major in college so I could bullshit my way through things easier. Hence, why I am a writer.

The publisher does not guarantee the accuracy or completeness of the information provided in this page. These are not the opinions of any of my employers, partners, or associates. I did my best to be honest about my disclosures but can’t guarantee I am right; I write these posts after a couple beers sometimes. Many times I edit after my posts are published because I’m impatient and lazy, so if you see a typo, check back in a half hour.

Also, again I just straight up get shit wrong a lot. I mention it multiple times because it’s that important you understand.

Tyler Durden Sat, 09/05/2026 - 12:50