About the letter
A reads-first weekend edition for curious people: markets and macro, AI and tech, business, science, long-form and culture.
Written without jargon. One edition per week, delivered Saturday morning.
The Weekend Spread
The arithmetic no longer allows the state to pay the street to go home.
Five hundred fifty thousand people in the street, a deficit of 5.1 percent of GDP, and a ten-year borrowing cost at its highest since 2002.
theweekendspread.com/tape/the-street-and-the-deficit/The market paid for growth and got more than expected.
Chip stocks are worth 6.4 times what they were the day ChatGPT launched. On the other side of the ledger, the price of a point of earnings growth has been falling all year, back to where it started.
theweekendspread.com/tape/six-times-bigger/Core inflation rose 0.3% in September against 0.2% expected, and the market threw the baby out with the bathwater.
Layoffs are near 50-year lows, hiring has stalled, and workers have stopped quitting.
Consumers say they feel miserable, yet spending keeps rising, and only one of those facts matters for earnings.
The Nasdaq 100 is at records, but most stocks are not participating, and two names explain three-quarters of the year’s gain.
Mortgage rates froze the housing market without crashing it, leaving prices almost untouched.
Nearly all long-run stock market wealth was created between the closing bell and the next morning’s open.
The Lab
What inflation is, who it quietly helps, how America measures it, and the century of promises, from Weimar to the Plano Real, that taught the world to fear it. A dollar from 1913 buys what about 3 cents buys today.
theweekendspread.com/inflation/From deep learning and transformers to AI systems that act, move, and improve the systems that build them.
How a nine-page electronic cash proposal became an asset institutions can buy through ordinary brokerage accounts.
A field guide to Bitcoin, digital asset networks, USDC, stablecoins, and the new dollar rails.
The market case for owning scarce art that does not move with the rest of a portfolio.
How calls and puts work, and the spread structure I use.
Why I Invested
Meta funds its AI buildout the old fashioned way: the ad business prints the cash. With 81% gross margins and $130 billion of trailing operating cash flow, the market may finally pay for the option Muse represents.
theweekendspread.com/meta/Memory is the leverage on every AI dollar, while the market still prices Micron like a cyclical commodity maker.
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