Howie Town

The Degenerate Economy Global Roadtrip...Starting In Muskoka

Howard Lindzon — Sun, 06 Sep 2026 14:40:15 +0000

Happy Sunday and labor day long weekend.

Before I get started…

STOCKTOBERFEST is almost sold out with 300 plus traders, investors, degenerate economy leaders together for three days in New York to network and discuss the degenerate economy, agentic trading, the markets, brokerage 2.0 and predictions. Come join us as we have one day tickets for the 7th (one day of fireside chats and discussions).

I am on the road for the next three months around the globe catching up on all things degenerate economy. Ellen joins along for much of it but also sprinkles in her sister hiking trips around the globe they have been doing the last 10 years.

Onward..

The degenerate economy had another blistering week. Hyperliquid is trading at all-time highs at $90 as I write. You can track all my commentary on Hyperliquid on my $HYPE ( ▼ 0.13% ) Stocktwits stream. I started buying Hyperliquid back in the 30’s and shared it as I always do when I buy and sell. Stocktwits search now easily allows you to look back at any and all of my thoughts (right and wrong) on all tickers over the last 17 years. Last week I took 4 pitches from great founders building on Hyperliquid. As I should have done with Bitcoin and Apple each time I either heard a Bitcoin pitch or bought an Apple product, and just bought Bitcoin and Apple, I have done with Hyperliquid this year. So far so good.

Elsewhere in the degenerate economy…

Just this week Lebron James became a spokesman for Polymarket and Polymarket announced perps with 20x leverage so you can lose the family ‘nest egg’ if you take a pee at the wrong time during a meaningless mid season NFL football game (bad degeneracy). The states will be fighting back (they will get their tax billions) with New York leading the charge suing Kalshi. The degenerate economy will have many tollbooths.

Next up…

I was in New York all last week for a Stocktwits team offsite as we plan the rest of 2026 and our roadmap for 2027.

We are doing quarterly team offsites in New York right now this year because the markets are evolving and also growing (products and global TAM) so quickly. Our ‘Stocktwits Everywhere’, Cashtag API and Investor Relations growth products and business has been growing so fast we have had to adjust our roadmap multiple times in 2026. I expect 2027 will be just as frenzied as we roll out our own predictions markets (focused on community and peer to peer bragging rights).

Let me give you another example of this from our Social Leverage portfolio.

Our portfolio company Alpaca, a global brokerage and API developer now has a headquarter and growing team in New York. The current customers/product offerings are listed just below. Late last year I was talking to Yoshi and Hitoshi about working prediction markets into their global roadmap. They told me the demand and growth for existing products meant predictions products were slated for 2027. Flash forward eight months and Alpaca has already gotten CFTC and NFA approval for predictions and last week partnered with Kalshi to deliver predictions to their hundreds of global customers.

I spent a few hours with Hitoshi last week (he is the Alpaca co-fouder and CTO, now based in Dubai) who leads 150 engineers around the world, and we discussed all the growth, the degeneracy and compared notes re the rapid changes in the US capital markets. Hitoshi and I are the only members of the NINE finger fintech club (although my right index finger has been reattached and healing pretty well).

I am very fortunate to be able to meet regularly with Yoshi and Hitoshi and their global business team led by Tarun and Alex, and sit as a board observer as the global degenerate economy has exploded.

Last year the Alpaca partner summit was in Kyoto and this year Ellen and I will be heading to Lisbon for the summit. If you love this part of fintech you should try and get yourself an invite.

This weekend, as I have done the last 5 years when I start my three months of global travel, I am at my best pals cottage in Muskoka for some off the grid relaxation. Rob and Jen host me every year at their place. Their dock is ground central for many of our best college and high school friends drop by.

I tried out their latest lake ‘toy’ which is an incredible first version of a ‘floating Peloton’ called the Schiller…

John and Deena two childhood time best friends gave me a tour of their new and spectacular Lake Rosseau cottage just a few cottages down from Rob and Jen. I am lucky to be able to freeload at will…

I was a fortunate kid as my parents owned a fantastic cottage (a six acre island) on Lake Muskoka. I introduced all my friends to Muskoka life as a teen in the 1980’s and am reaping the benefits now as a guest. Life on the lake has changed quite a bit since the 1980’s, but hosting is still a lot of work.

Have a great rest of the weekend.

Momentum Monday - Strong Software, Semiconductors Under Pressure.

Howard Lindzon — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 13:36:37 +0000

As a reminder, MarketSurge (by Investor’s Business Daily) is a sponsor of the weekly show. All the charts you have been seeing in the videos and will continue to see are from MarketSurge. They are offering my readers 2 months for $59.95 - save $239. That's 80% off the most powerful stock research platform for individual investors.

Good morning…

I wrote the below last week and the only thing that has changed is the general public is starting to worry about rising rates….

As for the markets themselves…
The US Treasury Markets and the White House are concerned about the bond market as rates continue to rise. They are calling for emergency pressers which I prefer they would not do, but nobody asks me. Mr. Trump believes yelling at it and threatening to bomb it and other nations that don’t help us lower rates is a solution. It is not.
Scott Bessent’s old trading buddy Stanley Druckenmiller took out an Op-Ed in the WSJ to text him out loud with how pathetic and dangerous this could get. In the meantime, the worry about interest rates and the $40 trillion in government debt has lit a new fire to Gold prices and Bitcoin.
The market also seems full up of ‘AI stocks’ whether it is memory or data centers or the ‘circular’ central bank type deals that $NVDA ( ▲ 1.49% ) is cutting with ‘customers’. Nvidia is an incredible company led by an incredible CEO, but the law of large numbers is a reality when it comes to great customers with the cash to back up the orders if all hell were to break loose. Jim Chanos is a legendary short seller and is doing the media circuit right now saying the accounting irregularities of the AI companies (including the data centers) is worse than the 1999 internet bubble. I think Jim is onto something, but timing when the market cares is something I don’t do well. What I have been doing if you follow me here has been selling semiconductor stocks (June) and adding small caps.

Today on Stocktwits for example, the S&P and Nasdaq 100 are ‘trending’ - which they rarely do - and it is because of treasury concerns.

No matter the macro, degeneracy and speculation continue to rage. Hyperliquid, the blockchain that is powering much of this new excitement and which I have been talking about here for months, continues to trend higher.

Biotech stocks are also the ecnter oif much spoeculation as people want to own the next ‘cancer’ stock post Moderna’s ( $MRNA ( ▲ 5.38% ) )announcement and stock spike.

Also - select software stocks that were considered ‘dinosaurs’ because of AI are roraring back being led by a whole group of cyber security stocks. The cyber stocks might be humanities last protection against AGI. At least that is the narrative. We discuss all this in today’s show below. I hope you enjoy.

Welcome back to Momentum Monday!

In today’s episode of Momentum Monday, Ivanhoff and I discuss the following:

Speculation has lost its mind ($SLS and the mRNA moment) (0:00)
Software is back and leading — cybersecurity out front ($PANW, $OKTA) (1:36)
Figma and GitLab — left for dead, now entrenched (3:18)
The year's two great trades — and waiting for the third (4:53)
Semiconductors under pressure — how much is already priced in? (7:22)
Nvidia's open-source pivot — the central bank of compute (8:34)
Ivanhoff's swing setups: $OKTA, $RBRK, $FROG, $CRSR (10:31)
The short side — distribution in AI-adjacent names (11:21)
Why Jim Chanos' warnings deserve a listen (12:58)
Hyperliquid and the pipes of degeneracy (13:46)
Healthcare via ETFs ($XBI, $XLV) and Hinge Health (14:36)
Crypto-adjacent strength: $HOOD, $COIN, $CRCL (15:22)

Here are Ivanhoff’s Thoughts

No one wanted to touch software stocks earlier in the year. The narrative was that AI would squeeze their margins as much cheaper competitors would be vibecoded. Fast-forward to today. Software is one of the strongest groups in the market. Many software stocks had two back-to-back bullish reactions to their earnings. Last week brought more of the same. CRM, OKTA, and CRWD sparked another rally in the group, lifting MSFT, NOW, FROG, among many others.
In the meantime, the bounces in AI stocks keep getting faded. Even a solid earnings report from NVDA, which this time rallied on it, was not enough to stop the selling. It seems the whole world is overleveraged on AI-related stocks, and every bounce is viewed as an opportunity to lighten up. The semiconductors ETF, SMH, is already 17% below its all-time highs. It made an attempt to retake its 50-day moving average two weeks ago, which failed spectacularly. SMH is looking vulnerable to lower prices.
Gold and crypto pulled back on Friday on the Fed Chair’s inflation comments. The belief is that now the odds for a September hike are higher. We all know that they are not likely to hike ahead of the Mid-term elections, but algos are programmed to react quickly to any short-term comment.
Either way, September is seasonally weak during mid-term election years, so it pays to remain cautious.
Ivanhoff, ivanhoff.com

And here are the charts discussed:

Cutting Out The Middleman In The Degenerate Economy Expands Into Wealth Tech...The Self-Clearing Boom

Howard Lindzon — Sun, 30 Aug 2026 14:37:22 +0000

Happy Sunday…

Before I get started…

I am in New York which means a lot of eating.

Last night Rachel took Ellen and I to Chrissy’s pizza in Brooklyn. It was great. They only do pies and like anything ‘popular’ in the city it is expensive for a pie. I imagine LVMH or Hermes will open full pie pizza places in the city soon.

This morning we did Pop-Up Bagels and so I am debating a quick nap after posting the newsletter.

I am here for a Stocktwits team offsite this week. With an extermely busy earnings season behind us it is time to get set for the rest of 2026 and start planning the 2027 roadmap.

Next weekend is Muskoka to see friends.

Onward…

There was a HUGE acquisition in the wealthtech space this past week as Altruist was acquired by Vanguard for over $4 billion in cash. Vanguard is a much needed competitor in the RIA/wealth management space as Schwab and Fidelity pretty much control the market. Customers need choices. This battle of the old guard in ‘Brokerage 1.0’ further sets the stage for ‘Brokerage 2.0’ which I started writing about a few months back.

As my partner Matt Ober wrote this week, large wealthtech investments have been rare. With this massive Altruist acquisition, the stage is now set for that to change. Our firm Social Leverage has made many wealthtech investments since 2017 including - Secfi.com, Fiscal.ai, Koyfin.com, Alpaca.com, Useseeds.com, Leatechnologies.ai, Frec.com, Syntheticfi.com). We believed the wealth category of the world was exploding and would spread to the investing category. Our assumption was that the wealthy would need/want unique financial services at scale. The IPO’s of $SPCX ( ▲ 2.05% ) and soon Anthropic further prove that point as do the massive forever private companies like Stripe and Databricks.

When we (Social Leverage Fund 1 and 2) invested back in Robinhood in 2013 through 2015, Robinhood was NOT self-clearing. They did not go self clearing until 2018 and so Apex clearing made most of the money from transactions on the Robinhood platform. In 2018, going self-clearing was considered a bold move. Self-clearing is expensive and brings extra risk with those added ‘margins’ to be gained from each transaction.

Venture Capitalists say they want companies to ‘go fast and break things’. Uber did. AirbnB did. The difference was those companies were not dealing with The SEC. Going fast and breaking things is frowned upon by The SEC (until The Trump administration has put an end ‘wink wink’ ).

Bakertilly, a large consulting and tax firm, detailed the growing trend in self-clearing that accelerated back in 2024. The gist:

Why are firms making the push to become self-clearing?
The decision for a firm to transition to self-clearing or to outsource its operations elsewhere is influenced by various factors. Two significant considerations are gaining enhanced control and efficiency throughout the entire trading process and striving to boost profit margins by eliminating fees paid to clearing firms for their services, such as commission fees and market rebates.
One of the more prominent factors that influence a firm’s decision is the control over the trading process, which might not be attainable if they used an external third party. Having in-house trade clearing allows the firm to have start to finish control over any trades executed, which in the rare case of a trade execution error (such as an incorrect buy amount input) this allows the firm to quickly mitigate the issue since there is no need to go through the process of contacting the clearing firm to resolve the issue, saving time and effort. Without relying on an external third party providing these services, communication is streamlined, which allows the firm to provide quick and direct answers to their clients, or vice versa, for greater efficiency.
While these benefits may suggest that transitioning to self-clearing is the obvious choice, there are certain attributes a firm must possess to successfully transition, as self-clearing may not be the most logical choice for all brokers. While a broker will need sufficient capital and industry expertise to undergo this change, the most critical requirement for success is a highly competent operations team within the firm that is capable of effectively implementing the necessary back-office technologies, as well as conforming with industry regulations and standards that come with a clearing firm function. If a firm cannot do this, the push to self-clearing may not be the right move.

Alpaca ( Social Leverage Fund 3) went self-clearing back in 2024. The company is growing faster than ever as the 1,000 Robinhood’s around the world need Alpaca’s clearing services much like Robinhood needed Apex back until 2018. What is likely different for Alpaca versus Apex, is that most of these ‘Robinhood’s around the world ‘ will never be large enough or sophisticated enough to go full US self-clearing.

I was in San Francisco this week brainstorming with Mo the founder of the very fast growing Frec (Social Leverage Fund 4), which clears on Apex, discussing this very topic. The founder of Altruist is a Frec investor himself.

The ever expanding global degenerate economy combined with the path trailblazed by Robinhood has created a unique environment where ‘cutting out the middlemen’ is possible. As Jeff Bezos famously says…’your margin is my opportunity’.

Of course crypto/blockchains look to go around all of the middlemen including ‘self clearing’ with tokenization which Alpaca and Robinhood are both leading the way. It is why $HYPE ( ▼ 0.13% ) is in my degenerate economy index as well.

Fasten your seat belts.

To Slop or Not To Slop...

Howard Lindzon — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 14:58:07 +0000

Good morning.

I am in San Francisco for the day. I am doing a presentation about the ‘state of the degenerate economy’ later this afternoon…

I am looking forward to seeing some founders and investors as well. I have not been up to San Francisco in years.

Onward…

A pretty big ‘slop’ controversy arose the last few days after Stanley Druckenmiller admitted to using AI for his WSJ op-ed that criticized Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent.

I do not use AI in my writing of my newsletter or podcast or for my presentation decks, but I understand that I am already in the minority.

Stanley knows the subject of which he is writing to criticize so I imagine he read what he submitted as did the editors of the WSJ. How the editors did not know Stanley’s writing was all AI seems to be more of the question (for me) as well as their standards and policies for this work are things that should matter.

I don’t read any of the newspapers because I stopped trusting the content and opinions years ago. Show me prices and I can figure most things out myself - which is why prediction markets are so popular as people’s front pages of news and information.

Knowing you can slip the slop by the editors at The WSJ just makes me more wary of anything I would ever read.

My friend Ted Merz (long-time Bloomberg news person) had a good piece on the whole kerfuffle with some of his thoughts.

Have a great day.

Momentum Monday - AI Adjacent...Biotechs, Schwab and Instacart

Howard Lindzon — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 15:21:27 +0000

Good morning…

There is so much happening in the public markets. Let me start with a few ideas I have been sharing in real tiume the last month on Stocktwits (and are in my degenerate economy index), The first is a bitech ETF and the second is Instacart. Biotech has for nowbecome a huge beneficiary of the AI narrative trend. Eli Lilly crossing $1 trillion does not hurt, nor does the fact that Moderna announced a huge breakthrough in cancer. All of this is really tied to the fact that people just want to live longer. I am personally immersed in this trend and amazed at the personal results, how many videos I watch and products I have been trying Here is the chart of $XBI ( ▼ 0.4% ) :

Aniother AI adjacent trend is a single stock I have been buying…Instacart $CART ( ▲ 3.15% ) . I also added it to my degenerate economy index. The quick take is here…

One last interesting breakout is Charles Schwab ( $SCHW ( ▼ 0.08% ) ). Months back AI was a nemesis to the stock. Traders sold it off as Robinhood announced AI initiatives. Now AI is a tailwond and positive narrative for the stock even though Schwab has done little to lean into AI. They probably don’t need to do much having 12 trillion under management. They likely just need tyo say AI will help them retire 50 percent of the workforce over the next 5 years and the stock would double.

As for the markets themselves…

The US Treasury Markets and the White House are concerned about the bond market as rates continue to rise. They are calling for emergency pressers which I prefer they would not do, but nobody asks me. Mr. Trump believes yelling at it and threatening to bomb it and other nations that don’t help us lower rates is a solution. It is not.

Scott Bessent’s old trading buddy Stanley Druckenmiller took out an Op-Ed in the WSJ to text him out loud with how pathetic and dangerous this could get. In the meantime, the worry about interest rates and the $40 trillion in government debt has lit a new fire to Gold prices and Bitcoin.

The market also seems full up of ‘AI stocks’ whether it is memory or data centers or the ‘circular’ central bank type deals that $NVDA ( ▼ 0.03% ) is cutting with ‘customers’. Nvidia is an incredible company led by an incredible CEO, but the law of large numbers is a reality when it comes to great customers with the cash to back up the orders if all hell were to break loose. Jim Chanos is a legendary short seller and is doing the media circuit right now saying the accounting irregularities of the AI companies (including the data centers) is worse than the 1999 internet bubble. I think Jim is onto something, but timing when the market cares is something I don’t do well. What I have been doing if you follow me here has been selling semiconductor stocks (June) and adding small caps.

Ivanhoff did this weeks show alone as I travel and did a great job. His thoughts/summaries also below. Enjoy.

Welcome back to Momentum Monday!

In today’s episode of Momentum Monday, Ivanhoff and I discuss the following:

Dollar Weakness, Government Debt, and the Crypto Awakening
Gold and Copper Setups: Playing the Breakout via FCX
Moderna's Vaccine Trial Gap and Biotech Strength
Tempus AI ($TEM ( ▲ 0.46% ) ) Accumulation Surge
Persistent AI Stock Allergy and Citadel's Profit Taking
Semiconductor Vulnerability and Sector Rotations

In This Episode, We Cover:

Dollar Weakness, Government Debt, and the Crypto Awakening (0:00)
Gold and Copper Setups: Playing the Breakout via FCX (2:52)
Moderna's Vaccine Trial Gap and Biotech Strength (4:19)
Tempus AI ($TEM ( ▲ 0.46% ) ) Accumulation Surge (5:45)
Persistent AI Stock Allergy and Citadel's Profit Taking (6:33)
Semiconductor Vulnerability and Sector Rotations (9:08)

Here are Ivanhoff’s Thoughts

After many months of hibernation, crypto erupted and didn’t look back. Some say that the reason is the Clarity Act, which seems closer to reality. Others: the accelerated attempts of the Treasury to monetize government debt (buy long-dated Treasuries to reduce interest rates). What matters is that the narrative has changed and now anything crypto-related is likely to remain in play for the foreseeable few months. We approached via ETHU, which is 2x long Ethereum. There will be more to come.
Gold also had a sizable bounce for basically the same reasons as crypto. It already started to perk up two weeks ago. Other metals like silver and copper also rallied. We approached this theme via FCX, which broke out from a multi-month base.
In the meantime, the market remains allergic to almost anything AI-related. Semis tried to reclaim their 50-day moving average last week, only to be swiftly rejected. Some of the biggest downside movers came from the AI theme last week – NBIS, BE, AEHR, etc. The whole group has been very choppy lately. Most trending moves in the space only last a few days before a quick reversal in the other direction.

And here are the charts discussed:

The Degenerate Government and The Degenerate Economy - The Ponzi Stage

Howard Lindzon — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 14:15:33 +0000

Tickets for Stocktoberfest are here.

Good morning…

I am heading to San Francisco this week and will be doing a presentation at the Money Show (Wednesday) on Investing in The Degenerative Economy. From there it is three months on the road as I head east. I am going to mostly be New York with a few trips to Europe and Israel.

Yesterday, Ellen and I went to see Tony, the A24 movie about Anthony Bourdain. It was excellent. Speaking of A24, our Social Leverage founder and LP event this fall is at the A24 Cherry Lane Theatre in the West Village which I am very excited about.

Before I get started, here are some links relevant to today’s newsletter…

‘What Happens When The AI Boom Runs Out of Money’ - I read Ben Thompson daily so this podcast was a must listen for me.

‘Ways to think about token pricing’ - by Ben Evans

‘The S&P has a leadership problem’ - by Larry Thompson

‘Tech is not an asset class anymore. It is the economy.’ - by Stephen Messer and thanks to my friend JP for the link.

Onward…

It was a big week for ‘the degenerate economy’ trend.

For new readers…a bit of a backstory…

Back in April, I received the ‘trademark’ for The Degenerate Economy, something I started talking about back in 2021 during the Gamestop saga. I started a ‘degenerate economy index’ in 2023 to track the companies and industries that were part of this trend. It hit another all-time high this week and continues to crush technology indexes (no leverage). I have pinpointed the era here on my blog to the GFC in 2008 and the ‘bearish’ triple leveraged financial ETF ( $FAZ ( ▼ 1.81% ) ) that Stocktwits users talked about all day.

In Henry Fudges excellent essay ‘Degeneracy Is A Symptom’, the disease that has caused the symptom is costs (rent and simple math). ‘You cannot save your way to the life your parents had, because the life your parents had is now priced in a currency (asset wealth) that wages do not convert into.’

I loved this riff…

So why was this week such a big one in the era of degeneracy?

The US debt passed $40 trillion.

The good news for many that have money to invest is you can do what has paid when the debt crossed $5, $10, $20 and $30 trillion…buy stocks!

For everyone else, this up and to the right line of our national debt means rates are higher, stuff is more expensive and so the degeneracy trend amongst our ‘yoots’ accelerates (the ‘yoots’ are doing the simple math).

Our leaders snapped into action as the doom and gloom headlines appeared. Scott (‘You Rang’ ) Bessent hit the news channels with his ‘Bessent Put Strategy'. Trump made things stupider and said the USA can simply use the military to bring down rates. It’s like using ‘bleach to kill Covid’ I guess.

This had no immediate impact on rates, the dollar inched lower, stocks did what they have been doing (went up), but gold and crypto surged. Even with the huge weekly surge in gold and crypto, gold is 20 percent below all-time highs and crypto 40 percent. It will be interesting if their rally continues.

Crypto still 40 percent below all-time highs

I wish I had some deep insight into all of this debt and the growing negligence/stupidity/fraud from our leaders.

But, staring at prices all day is what I do and the prices continue to lie less than the commentary of our leaders and people reacting to them.

US stocks remain in demand. As I wrote here on August 11th…

The Degenerate Economy Meets The Capex Boom/Bubble

Howard Lindzon — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 14:34:52 +0000

Happy Sunday

Just a reminder that Stocktoberfest - in New York - is coming up October 5-7. Details here. I will be leading discussions about The Degenerate Economy, The Capex Boom (with Michael Parekh and Ted Seides), brokerage 2.0, the prediction markets and much more. Come join us.

Onward…

One of my favorite funny movies is ‘Let it Ride’ which covers degenerate gambler Jay Trott at the race track for one hell of a day of gambling and this hilarious climax scene…

One could argue that we are on a path of ‘pissing it all away’ as betting, leverage and degeneracy, explodes along with our debt.

We could argue over when the ‘degenerate economy’ really began, but no matter what day you choose we have come a long way since March, 2021 the day the world thought Robinhood’s confetti ‘gamified’ investing too much…

How far?

This week ‘Hockey’ ETF’s were blessed by the SEC…

Twitter tweet

Joining the degenerate economy this week are the institutions…pensions, hedge funds, banks and family offices as Nvidia ( $NVDA ( ▼ 0.03% ) ) engineers a new investable asset class (read Ben Thompson’s excellent piece on it here). Ben wrote about it here as well and Michael Parekh covered it well here.

Today, we have the government, silicon valley, the exchanges and real estate people all working together to get us more compute and more degeneracy while the government spends like a lunatic keeping rates rising. Not a cocktail that leads to the best decisions for the people.

I imagine that the SEC which has probably had it’s staff cut to three people by Trump and is soon to be sponsored by Budweiser, Kalshi and the NFL has a long list of fun degenerate etf’s in the pipeline at 4 times leverage.

I kid the SEC…but do not kid yourself. It is everyman for himself in 2026.

The piece of ‘art’ hangs above my desk at home. I bought it a few years ago because it felt so on point culturally for this era.

Not too long ago, in March 2025, Michael Saylor told his disciples to sell a kidney before they sell their Bitcoin. Today, Michael has both his kidney’s but has been selling his Bitcoin.

Jensen, Goldman and JP Morgan will not be telling you to sell your photonoic and memory stocks and your compute real estate and energy holdings at the top.

Stay alert…

As American Dynamism Explodes - Ribbon AI Helps With Hiring Infrastructure

Howard Lindzon — Thu, 13 Aug 2026 18:30:33 +0000

One of our fast growing companies in Social Leverage (Fund 4) is Ribbon.ai. Born during COVID and based in Toronto, Arsham and his partner Dave are building a very exciting AI business that is perfectly suited to the needs of all the aeropsace, defense, phsysical hardware like robotics, critical infrastructure and industrial re-shoring that is happening right now in the United States.

Over the last few years, the venture industry has invested hundreds of billions in what A16z calls ‘American Dynamism’, which cover all the industries I mentioned above.

What does Ribbon do?

Ribbon builds AI interviewers for companies building self-driving cars, humanoid robots, factories, energy infrastructure, and other complex physical systems. Its focus is high-volume hiring. Its customers do not have a shortage of applicants; they have a signal problem. They need to identify the right people from thousands of candidates, across many roles and locations, without overwhelming recruiters or slowing the business.

Ribbon conducts structured, voice-based interviews, then scores and ranks candidates so teams can quickly see who should move forward. Recruiters spend less time repeating first-round screens and more time on judgment, relationships, and closing candidates.

Tesla is the clearest example. Ribbon supports hiring across Tesla's FSD and Optimus programs, as well as its broader manufacturing footprint in America. Thousands of candidates interview through Ribbon each day. The platform has helped reduce Tesla's time-to-hire by roughly 30%, while candidates rate the experience 4.8 out of 5 on average.

The most exciting part of high-volume hiring sits inside American dynamism. These companies may be software-driven, but they win or lose by how quickly they can hire and deploy people in the physical world. For them, recruiting is part of the production system.

More than 400 companies use Ribbon. Extra Space Storage runs several hundred interviews through the platform each week. Agnico Eagle has reduced time-to-hire by approximately 40% while improving retention. Hiring faster is easy if a company lowers its standards; hiring faster while making better hires is the hard part.

Ribbon's Verification Signals also flags potential candidate fraud using location, email, and interview analysis, a growing problem as generative AI makes applications and interview performance easier to fabricate.

Ribbon expects AI to handle more repetitive screening and qualification while people focus on judgment, relationships, and closing. The company is building the hiring infrastructure for ambitious physical-world companies that need to find better people faster across thousands of roles and locations.

Hit me up if you want an intro to the team.

GetDynasty - If You Are A Founder or Investor...Plan 'As If' You Are Going To Have A Tax Problem Later

Howard Lindzon — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 23:40:00 +0000

Come join us Oct 5-7 in NYC at Stocktoberfest

At Social Leverage we have been making financial service and wealthtech seed investments now for 20 years. Occasionally we see an investment opportunity outside our seed scope and we will set up an SPV and share it with LP’s and friends.

I met the founder Alessandro of GetDynasty.com a few years back when he was starting the company during Covid. One of the funds in our Social Leverage emerging manager fund had invested. I was catching up with the fund manager about companies that he was excited about a few months back and he mentioned GetDynasty. The plan and product had evolved since and when I got the updated demo and pitch from Alessandro we loved what we saw and set up an SPV.

GetDynasty.com is simply a Trust Company for Startups.

Yesterday, GetDynasty announced a huge partnership with Carta.com

How does it work?

With Dynasty, founders and investors can create trusts for family members in minutes, allowing you to multiply your QSBS exemption while gifting to the people you love.

Each trust gets its own QSBS exemption. Create 4 trusts and you can get up to $60M TAX-FREE when you exit.

This type of estate planning used to cost 6 figures to set up. Now it's available to Carta customers for as little as $500 / year.

Founders can now create trusts in minutes, get a gift valuation, and get a QSBS attestation letter – all without leaving the Dynasty x Carta ecosystem.

Most importantly, founders can now afford to do it early.

Do it before you get your next term sheet. The earlier you set up your trusts, the less your shares are worth, the more taxes your family can save.

And if your shares are already worth $10m+, you should start thinking about trust planning immediately. Because if you wait too long, you might not be able to take advantage of it.

Here is Carta on why this partnership and product is important:

A huge mistake we see founders make is to push tax and wealth planning like this off. Now, it is easy an inexpensive.

Tell your founder and investor friends about this.

Momentum Monday - The S&P Is At All-Time Highs And Nobody Is In The Mood To Celebrate Which Is Bullish !

Howard Lindzon — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 04:25:45 +0000

Good evening…

Let me catch you up on what is in today’s episode below:

I shared a bunch of new ideas that are AI adjacent/infused (financials, Instacart, Airbnb, genetics, biotech).

I am all for and focused on AI infused businesses going forward. The direct AI mania is very crowded and complicated.

As for the long confusing story…

Global warming …bullish (not for the Italian parmesan cheese market)

Communism in America….bullish

Hunter Biden and Tucker Carlson best pals…bullish

Interest rates creeping higher…bullish

Strait of Hormuz closed…bullish

South Koreans implode themselves with leverage…bullish

Tariffs …bullish

New World Order…bullish

Trump gains 50 more pounds grifts $2 billion…bullish

The headlines - and a lot of awful people hoarding the attention of the people writing the headlines - have created a misery that has masked the fundamentals of an S&P 500 posting record earnings and operating margins.

Of course, tops happen from all-time highs of course, but most often we get more all-time highs. The ‘top’ argument would go something like this…’in a healthy capitalist society, these high profits and margins would be something startups would be gunning for and also that these record profits and margins in general are just going to be hard to match going forward’.

I hope you enjoy the episode…

Welcome back to Momentum Monday!

In today’s episode of Momentum Monday, Ivanhoff and I discuss the following:

Market Overview: Earnings Growth vs. AI Selloffs
Gold and Hard Assets Bounce Back
Rotating Beyond Tech: Financials, Genomics, and Biotech
Under-the-Radar Trends: Consumer Brands, Travel, and Storage
Boring Businesses, Energy, and Macro Observations
Breakout Spotlight: Revolution Medicines ($RVMD ( ▲ 0.21% ) )

In This Episode, We Cover:

Market Overview: Earnings Growth vs. AI Selloffs (0:00)
Gold and Hard Assets Bounce Back (4:39)
Rotating Beyond Tech: Financials, Genomics, and Biotech (6:00)
Under-the-Radar Trends: Consumer Brands, Travel, and Storage (8:17)
Boring Businesses, Energy, and Macro Observations (12:28)
Breakout Spotlight: Revolution Medicines ($RVMD ( ▲ 0.21% ) ) (16:20)

Here are Ivanhoff’s Thoughts

The SP500 followed through and made new all-time highs last week. The reason is not that the Fed hasn’t increased interest rates in the face of high and rising inflation. It is not that there might be another peace agreement in the Middle East – the last one lasted only a couple of weeks. Almost 90% of the S&P 500 have already reported, and the index is on track to more than 50% year-over-year earnings growth. The question is how much of that is already priced in?
Not everything was roses and rainbows last week. Memory leaders WDC and SNDK absolutely crushed earnings estimates and still sold off harshly, reminding us that the sentiment in some AI areas is still sour. One of the cybersecurity leaders, DDOG, also beat estimates and declined 20%. In all of those cases, the market had already priced in the good news. The true earnings surprises are reflected in the market reaction. CRSR gained 35% and finished near its daily highs. SHOP and TWLO gapped up 20% and finished near their weekly highs. The same with PLTR and TEAM.
The jobs report came well below estimates -23k vs expected 85k. Counterintuitively, this might be good news for the stock market because it reduces the chances of a rate hike later this year. The Fed had a dual mandate – under 2% inflation and full employment. The latter is more important, especially in an election year. Maybe this is why we finally saw metals to wake up. The week was strong for gold, silver, copper, and steel, which benefited from the latest sector rotation.
From a 10,000-foot view, the indexes just had a high-volume range expansion followed by a few days of sideways consolidation. People are looking for more risk – stocks in highly speculative areas like space, nuclear, solar, AI applications, rare earth metals, etc., are bouncing.

And here are the charts discussed:

Trends With No Friends and Trends With Too Many Friends...The Degenerate Economy, Berkshire, Leopold, AI, Prediction Markets, South Korea and Shame

Howard Lindzon — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 15:25:30 +0000

Happy Sunday..

I am back in Coronado and it feels good.

It has been an intense couple of weeks of travel, work, cycling and reading (I will share a few links as we go today). Of course, I only fell further behind in everything. AI only intensifies this feeling because my two jobs are intertwined with the AI trend.

I am learning to be at peace with falling behind at everything. I have no choice as I near 61 years if age next month. I just can’t keep up.

I find myself saying ‘two things can be true’ more than ever as the world around me seems to be spinning out of control. For example…I am a never Trumper, but also might be a never Democrat based on the DSA popularity. Trump handed these asshats a playbook which has created a runaway trend in shamelessness. Trump said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and get away with it. The DSA believe that the American Trump talks about shooting had it coming and hopes he/she is jewish. Here is the stupid, shameless, simp co-chair of the DSA in her and their own words.

I am hoping we get a hold of ourselves and can reverse this trend.

Up next, Leopold again, who can both be a very smart 25 year old, and also a complete putz…

Leopold Aschenbrenner’s fund, Situational Awareness LP (SALP) started in late 2024 when he was 23. He raised $225mm and, through the use of leverage and being right as hell, rode a legendary heater with assets at peak over $25B about a month ago.
His portfolio concentrated heavily on hardware and chip shares of CoreWeave, Nebius, Bloom Energy, Iris Energy, Micron and the Korean company SK Hynix, as well as a sizable private stake in Anthropic. Meanwhile, he was shorting traditional software companies. You only need to pull up the charts of his longs and shorts to explain how his returns had been so stellar.
Many of his longs peaked in late June. On July 24th, he sent a memo to investors stating that the fund "has not been immune” to recent market volatility. He invited existing investors to commit fresh capital effective Aug 1, citing the most attractive opportunity set since early 2025.
Within the week, SALP would proceed to lose 2/3 of its assets and liquidate its public portfolio to Citadel.

(Do read the full piece ‘The Sound of Inevitability’ which is a great essay on risk, leverage, concentration and a reminder that nobody is bigger than the market.)

In AI it is 50 things, not just two things that can be true. I use AI more and more everyday, but I am more and more skeptical of it as well. I say this often, but most of it feels like a magic trick to me. I stumbled onto this AI essay by Terry Bollinger shared by a Stocktwits user after posting the essay above which confirmed my ‘more magic’ feeling about AI. In it, Terry points out the obvious and the reality of AI so far. First the obvious…’Stop trying to squeeze milk from the picture of a cow. It doesn’t work, no matter how much you hyperscale the picture’.

Second, which relates to the reason more and more people think AI is a bubble…the reality…

So, Where is Real AI?
Finally, here’s an incredibly simple point that keeps getting lost in discussions like this one in the All-In podcast: Real intelligence, as performed by biological brains, is unbelievably energy-efficient. A Portia spider with a brain the size of a pinhead can come up with complex and devious hunting strategies better and faster than an entire field of nuclear-powered LLM server farms.
For investors, ultra-low-power is your real AI future. That’s the path that admits that LLM server farms can never be anything more than an unbelievably inefficient way to take a database snapshot of human knowledge as it currently exists.

In South Korea, if I am to believe what I have read on the internet, ONE MILLION people were liquidated (because of leverage and concentration in theAI/ ‘memory trade’). The South Koreans learned that this trend had ‘too many friends’ all doing the same thing (leverage and concentration).

I study trends all day and while I prefer to ride ‘trends with NO friends’, I find myself riding ‘trends with TOO MANY friends’ like everyone else. The job is to NOT overstay your welcome. Because most investors are indexed to the S&P which is just a form of momentum investing based on market capitalization, we are all overstaying our welcome. The concentration from the S&P index risk is not the same as what South Koreans just experienced, but leverage will still crush you if you rely on it.

So, what is an example of a ‘trend with NO friends’?

In the public markets I look for these all day. On Stocktwits we have a dedicated stream you can follow now that spits out ideas - ST Relative Strength. One stock that has been on the list that I follow but ignored is Revolution Medicine ( $RVMD ( ▲ 0.21% ) , now up nearly 400 percent since I first mentioned it in July 2024. It hit more all-time highs last week, has a market cap of $47 billion and still just 2,900 followers on Stocktwits. In comparison, the ‘triple leveraged’ South Korean ETF has more followers.

In 2026, we are all South Koreans and Leopold’s. This the ‘degenerate economy’ (now global degenerate economy) that we live in. If you have any remaining doubts about how ‘degenerate’ we have become here at home, read this excellent ‘state of the prediction economy’.

But, two things can be true even in this ‘degenerate economy’.

Last week we learned that Warren’s Berkshire Hathaway was BUYING stocks the last three months. Warren is no ‘degenerate’. Berkshire was raising cash the last three years as degeneracy exploded. Berskshire likes ‘fundamentals’. I imagine they like the fundamentals they are seeing in the financials which have been going up smoothly for months. The fact that Berkshire has been buying stocks likely explains the relatively smooth uptrend in financials. The fundamentals Berkshire is likely attracted too…banks borrowing at low rates and lending at high rates. Not too complicated.

We all know that the banks and bankers are all ‘degenerates’ and ‘South Koreans’, so mind your leverage and concentration as you follow Warren and Berkshire.

Enough for today…have a great Sunday.

The Stocktwits 'For You' Feed ...The Personal Idea Machine based On Your Watchlist, Your Follows and Market Events

Howard Lindzon — Thu, 06 Aug 2026 14:56:39 +0000

Last week we launched the Stocktwits MCP which is an amazing product to help users find alpha from the endless stream of people and ideas flowing through Stocktwits.

Today we rolled out a ‘for you’ feed in the apps and the website for those that love using the app to both surf and share ideas. The new ‘for you’ feed will give each user a constant stream of real-time ideas based on the stocks you watch, the people you folliw and the market-moving news and events that matter.

The markets are an incredible opportunity machine and my goal is to make Stocktwits your place to lean in and and/or lean back to get the most alpha and enjoyment from the machine.

Give it a whirl…

Twitter tweet

Momentum Monday - Leverage Remains Undefeated and The Leopold Bottom of 2026?

Howard Lindzon — Tue, 04 Aug 2026 18:04:07 +0000

Good afternoon…

I am headed back to New York after a great trip to The French Alps and Paris.

My friend Michael Kinsbergen who got me hooked on crazy cycling rides ten years ago, wanted to go ride the famous Alpe D' Huez right after The Tour de France finished passing through. The roads are fixed up so it will be pleasant ‘he said’….NOT!

Long story short, I passed NOBODY on the climb ( I was passed by hundreds of people of all ages, shapes and sizes) and as if I was standing still, a runner passed me. I had bike problems (rental) which messed with my head as well, but got though it.

I managed a smile as we stopped a few times on the descent…and yesterday took a hotel bike to ride around Paris (more dangerous than the Alps)…

Twitter tweet

Onward…

How about them markets!!!!

Last week I wrote the following on this newsletter as semiconductor stocks were crashing…

Yesterday, I actually waded back into the semiconductor index and added some back to my portfolio. If you follow me on Stocktwits you see these updates in real time.
How the semiconductors and AI stocks behave after the inevitable relief rally will be important. The era of Nvidia’s CEO Jensen moving markets with their ‘partner’ and investment announcements seems to be over.
If you own the S&P you don’t have a care in the word right now…

We found out a few days later that a 25 year old named Leopold - who graduated from Harvard when he was 11 or something - lost $30 plus billion leveraged to said semiconductors.

When I was in school at Arizona State University (The Harvard of The West), we had a term for these people…’putz’s!!

If you give a 25 year old $45 billion, what would you expect them to do other than to believe their own bullshit and implode.

When will we learn that getting a Harvard or Columbia degree is not as impressive as a Devry degree when it comes to investing.

While I had no idea why the markets were getting liquidated last week, I knew enoug to buy stocks while being passed and shamed while climbing Alpe D’Huez.

So now we have the relief rally …and as I said last week and reshared above, if you own the S&P you do not have a care in the world.

If you own AI stocks, today is a better day to panic.

There is just so many grifters, posers, leveraged ETF’s, perps and global retail newbies in the market right now that stocks like Microsoft, Google and Apple are swinging trillions of dollars a day. The Megacaps trade like Microcaps in this ‘degenerate economy’. The illusion of liquidity continues to be ‘bug’ as the law of large numbers and grift intertwine.

I am pleased to be indexed for the most part, riding out this insanity with some good trades around the edges as volatility shows itself. It feels almost too easy which keeps me on edge.

My ‘FREE’ ‘degenerate economy index’ is hitting all time highs today again and that is without ever using leverage, doubling the returns of the Nasdaq 100 the last three years since inception. You can follow along here. Today, I added the biotech ETF ( $XBI ( ▼ 0.4% ) to the index and last week added more semiconductor exposure and sold down some Philip Morris. I share these in real time on Stocktwits.

Leopold will be back in the hedge fund world (or straight to podcasting) because he is famous and the Citadel’s and Jane Street’s of the world love guys like this as much as Vegas casinos like a ‘mush’.

Leverage is undefeated unless you blow up spectacularly!

In the meantime, enjoy the all-time highs - which are thick right now across financials, biotech, select tech like $AMZN ( ▲ 1.94% ) and industrials. This weeks ‘Momentum Monday’ show is below (thanks Ivanhoff for going it alone while I was overseas)….

Welcome back to Momentum Monday!

In today’s episode of Momentum Monday, Ivanhoff and I discuss the following:

Hedge Fund Liquidation & AI Stocks Decimation
Fed Meeting, Inflation Targets, and Treasury Selloff
Earnings Rescues: $AMZN ( ▲ 1.94% ) and $MSFT ( ▲ 0.65% ) Shift Sentiment
Geopolitical Headlines and Impact on Crude Oil
Relative Strength in Software & Cyber Security
Leading Stocks Setup Analysis & Earnings Season Outlook

In This Episode, We Cover:

Hedge Fund Liquidation & AI Stocks Decimation (0:00)
Fed Meeting, Inflation Targets, and Treasury Selloff (2:54)
Earnings Rescues: $AMZN ( ▲ 1.94% ) and $MSFT ( ▲ 0.65% ) Shift Sentiment (5:02)
Geopolitical Headlines and Impact on Crude Oil (7:26)
Relative Strength in Software & Cyber Security (8:21)
Leading Stocks Setup Analysis & Earnings Season Outlook (10:05)

Here are Ivanhoff’s Thoughts

Last week brought plenty of action to the tape. First, one of the most prominent highly levered in AI hedge funds was basically liquidated, losing 85% in a month. Then Jim Cramer urged people who bought data center stocks on margin to “sell it all, no matter what”. This message came after most of those stocks were down 50%+ from their recent highs. It is not necessarily bad advice; people should always use some type of stops, but it is a reflection of extreme sentiment, and the market likes to mean-revert every time there’s too much optimism or pessimism. This is probably why we saw a big gap and rally on Thursday. A rip within a downtrend, many would say, but then again, we have seen too many quick V-shaped recoveries to dismiss it easily. We had a similar start to the rally back on March 31st. The difference is that back then, there were quite a few AI stocks that had beautiful, strong setups and were ready to break out. Right now, we have a few software stocks that are looking decent, but they don’t have the same powerful growth story behind them – CRWD, DDOG, SNOW, OKTA, etc. More volatility and choppiness is the more likely scenario in August.
The silver lining from last week was the reactions to MSFT and AMZN earnings. Both of the crushed earnings estimates, as they usually do. They did it by a huge margin, which means that either the analysts who follow them have no clue what they are doing, or that it is not that hard to manipulate their accounting and come up with almost any number they want. This is not the place to dive deeper into that. What matters to me as an active market participant is the positive reaction. Both MSFT and AMZN gapped up and finished strong. This is a clear shift in sentiment, as up until recently, any report related to AI has been punished with selling.

And here are the charts discussed:

The Front Page Of The Markets - Stocktwits Trending and The Stockwits MCP

Howard Lindzon — Sun, 02 Aug 2026 14:48:49 +0000

Happy Sunday…

I am excited to share the new Stocktwits MCP with the world. Get is here. The MCP allows you to turn Stocktwits inside/out and ask/prompt anything about who, what, when, where and why on Stocktwits. For those that want MORE IDEAS with less scrolling and social, a new era has arrived. Anyone that logs into Stocktwits can tap into what investors and traders are watching, saying and feeling…

Below are a few examples on how to use the MCP with your favorite chatbot/agent…

As the semiconductor stocks were imploding last week, we asked ‘who had the hottest hand the last month’:

You can ‘start each day with some long trade ideas based on the activity on the platform’…team Stocktwits (follow here) is sharing interesting ways to prompt…

Ask Stocktwits AI: "what are the top stocks to watch today for people who want to go long and make money given everything you know about our platform data?"

1. $AMZN, the standout long today
Up ~11.9% to ~263 after AWS delivered and management raised capex to $220B. Here's the tell that makes it the highest-quality name on the board: sentiment is 81.4% bull and the delta is essentially flat (-0.59), meaning the crowd's conviction is holding even after the gap up. That is very different from where it sat going into the print, where the delta was negative and cooling. Social volume is pegged extremely high (212K), 696K watchers, and the tape is openly gunning for $300. This is the cleanest earnings-backed momentum long, up big already so it's a buy-pullbacks name rather than chase-the-open, but the structure is the best on the board.

2. The AI-infrastructure lane, the read-through trade
This is where the real money-making theme is. With MSFT and now AMZN both confirming massive capex, the "AI spend is dead" fear is dead. One widely-shared post on our streams laid it out: hyperscaler backlog reportedly exploded from ~$806B to ~$2.3T year over year, and even old A100 GPU rental rates are up ~20% YTD. That validation is lifting the whole complex, APLD +8%, AXTI +41%, the semis (SOXS down 14% = semis ripping), and the data-center and power names. If you want beta on the confirmed AI-capex thesis, this group is the momentum lane, with the usual caveat that these are extended and better on dips.

3. $AAPL, the contrarian watch, not a chase
This is the mirror image. Down ~8.6% to ~304, slicing toward $300 on a disappointing print, and the data shows the crowd flipping: 53% bear now with a hard negative delta (-13.68) on the most-watched name on the platform (985K). The bull case has cracked ("PE too high for a company that isn't growing"). I would not call this a long here. The one thing to watch, flagged by a sharp poster, is the weekly 20-EMA around 296.61, which has been a durable floor. If it holds there and sentiment stops bleeding, that's a possible bounce setup for the faithful. Until then it's a falling knife, not a buy.
— Stocktwits (@Stocktwits)
1:33 PM • Jul 31, 2026

Everyone has their own unique way they look at the markets. But, if you sign up for Stocktwits, build a watchlist and follow the right people you will have an incredible new and lightweight way to get ideas and stay caught up. Last week we rolled out an update to our apps and website to help get you onboarded quickly with your watchlist and some favorite investors, traders, content and data streams. Here are the screenshots for iOS…

The Stocktwits MCP was built for the agentic world as well.

Vlad at Robinhood just announced that 100,0000 people have tried agentic trading. I know that hundreds of thousands more are connected to Alpaca.markets globally and the thousands of other global brokerages will be offering these services as well. Now these agents will be able to connect to the Stocktwits data and market intelligence as well.

Twitter tweet

I started Stocktwits back in 2007 at the dawn of Web 2.0, the cloud and the mobile/social web. I am glad I stuck around for this era of AI. I have never been more excited about the Stocktwits product, platform, community, and potential alpha.

If you have questions, you can always @ me on Stocktwits.

The Momentum Crash of 2026, The Bond Market Is Spooked and The Summer of Weed and Peptides

Howard Lindzon — Thu, 30 Jul 2026 14:57:37 +0000

Good morning from France.

I know, I know…I have been very quiet here on the newsletter.

The truth is I have been very busy with work and negative on the markets this summer. Back in June I shared all the reasons why I was ditching semiconductor and AI stocks. The Semiconductor Index ( $SMH ( ▲ 1.47% ) ) is down nearly 20 percent since and many of the stocks in that index are down 50 percent since.

Yesterday, I actually waded back into the semiconductor index and added some back to my portfolio. If you follow me on Stocktwits you see these updates in real time.

How the semiconductors and AI stocks behave after the inevitable relief rally will be important. The era of Nvidia’s CEO Jensen moving markets with their ‘partner’ and investment announcements seems to be over.

If you own the S&P you don’t have a care in the word right now as Apple is at all time highs and has surpassed $NVDA ( ▼ 0.03% ) as the most valuable company in the world (makes sense to me). Apple is being rewarded for making the hardware that people need to run their personal AI agents and for NOT investing in AI frontier models and data centers. Apple has also further entrenched themselves in the ‘degenerate economy’ partnering with Klarna to lease computers and iPhones. The ridiculous ‘Mandami generation’ will stiff you on their lease payment but knows better than to miss a payment on their iPhone or Macbook.

My Degenerate Economy Index has held up well because of Apple, Philip Morris (vaping is uncorrelated to the AI boom/bubble) and a big rally back in the $CBOE ( ▼ 2.24% ) which last month had crashed because people were assuming that prediction markets were putting it out of business.

If you are a momentum investor, the world turned against you in July.

It has been the worst July EVER for the Nasdaq 100.

The Goldman Sachs ‘Momentum Index’ has dropped 37 percent in July…it’s worst month EVER. How cute is it that Goldman got paid to distribute (puke) SpaceX on everyone in June which of course was ‘the top’ for said index.

One thing that stands out to me for all the selling in growth and momentum is the rise in interest rates. Yesterday, the ‘Treasury ETF’ ( $TLT ( ▲ 0.11% ) ) was trending on Stocktwits. Interest rates spiked after The FED held rates unchanged. That index has never trended (maybe way back in 2008 during the GFC). The bond market is spooked. The war, inflation, the grifting and the AI spending spree is weighing on the mood of the bond market.

Two trends that have caught my attention are weed and peptides. I am not a user of either though I am told to keep testing gummies to help with my sleep troubles and I am ready to test peptides when I don’t have to buy them out of someones trunk.

Look at the weed trend…

Twitter tweet

Eli Lilly ( $LLY ( ▼ 0.65% ) , which I own, is close to launching their GLP that will have peptides as well and I am ready to go when it gets approval.

My friends who have been early ‘users’ of peptides, swear by them.

I enjoyed this ‘take’ on peptides from Brian Sugar. The gist…

Let me be precise, because the sharpest readers will push here. GLP-1 is proven. Most of these peptides are not, not yet. So what matters is not any single molecule. It is that people have changed. Those tens of millions have agreed to manage their own biology, and they are not going back. Every one of them is a vote that health has become something you do on purpose, not something that merely happens to you. Whether today’s compounds earn their claims is an open question. That a willing market is waiting for the ones that do is not.
I am old enough to be cynical, and I am choosing to spend that cynicism elsewhere. For most of human history your body was a fate. You were handed a metabolism, an attention span, a slow decline, and you lived inside the verdict. That is the thing quietly ending. The body is becoming something you can edit.
We spent a century building smarter tools. We are about to spend one improving the toolmaker. This time the future is not happening to us. It is happening in us.
The children being born now will find it strange that we ever simply accepted the body we were handed. Tuning it will feel as ordinary to them as straightening their teeth. They will not call it a revolution. They will call it Tuesday.
That is how the biggest shifts arrive, not as headlines but as habits nobody thinks to question.

Have a great rest of the week.

Welcome back to Momentum Monday!

In today’s episode of Momentum Monday, Ivanhoff and I discuss the following:

Rangebound Choppiness and Mean Reversion
Software and Cyber Security Breakdowns
AI Dead Cat Bounces & $INTC ( ▲ 2.61% ) Post-Earnings Selloff
Hyperscaler Capex Concerns and $GOOGL ( ▲ 1.77% ) Pressure
$QQQ ( ▲ 0.87% ) Outlook & Midterm Election Seasonality
Defensive Sector Leadership and Trade Walkthroughs

In This Episode, We Cover:

Rangebound Choppiness and Mean Reversion (0:00)
Software and Cyber Security Breakdowns (1:59)
AI Dead Cat Bounces & $INTC ( ▲ 2.61% ) Post-Earnings Selloff (3:25)
Hyperscaler Capex Concerns and $GOOGL ( ▲ 1.77% ) Pressure (6:01)
$QQQ ( ▲ 0.87% ) Outlook & Midterm Election Seasonality (8:00)
Defensive Sector Leadership and Trade Walkthroughs (9:39)

And here are the charts discussed:

Momentum Monday - Not Easy Right Now As The AI Overlords Battle and Position and Kiss The Ring

Howard Lindzon — Wed, 22 Jul 2026 14:53:11 +0000

Good morning…

Ivanhoff has been under the weather so we dropped our show yesterday and shared a few new ideas.

The markets continue to digest a lot of chaos and stress as the Iran war gets more intense, oil gets back to $85, Trump goes off on Canada with more tariffs and the AI overlords seem to lose control of their technology and balance sheets.

The money is not coming out of the market as the allocators invent new narratives. Money is still flowing into small caps. There is no doubt that the AI war at the top could go 1,000 different ways, but the benefit to the companies using AI are starting to get priced in positively. Also, some broken IPO’s of the last year are back sniffing all-time highs. As for SpaceX it is still in the broken camp.

Hope you enjoy….

Welcome back to Momentum Monday!

In today’s episode of Momentum Monday, Ivanhoff and I discuss the following:

$SPCX ( ▲ 2.05% ) & $TSLA ( ▲ 0.52% ) Valuation Friction
Big Tech Performance: $AAPL ( ▲ 1.75% ) vs. $GOOGL ( ▲ 1.77% ) vs. Semiconductors
The AI Correction (Quantum, Data Centers, Space) & $NVDA ( ▼ 0.03% ) Holding
Broadening AI Benefits into Small Caps & Real Efficiency Gains
Forgotten IPOs & New Setups ($CART ( ▲ 3.15% ) , Travel, Biotech)
Cyber Security Leadership & The Memory ETF ($DRAM ( ▲ 0.92% ) )

In This Episode, We Cover:

$SPCX ( ▲ 2.05% ) & $TSLA ( ▲ 0.52% ) Valuation Friction (0:00)
Big Tech Performance: $AAPL ( ▲ 1.75% ) vs. $GOOGL ( ▲ 1.77% ) vs. Semiconductors (3:02)
The AI Correction (Quantum, Data Centers, Space) & $NVDA ( ▼ 0.03% ) Holding (4:41)
Broadening AI Benefits into Small Caps & Real Efficiency Gains (8:24)
Forgotten IPOs & New Setups ($CART ( ▲ 3.15% ) , Travel, Biotech) (11:12)
Cyber Security Leadership & The Memory ETF ($DRAM ( ▲ 0.92% ) ) (13:30)

And here are the charts discussed:

Brokerage 2.0 - Alpaca Monster Capital Raise, Tokenization and The Stocktwits Idea Machine and Time Machine

Howard Lindzon — Sun, 19 Jul 2026 15:20:17 +0000

Good morning…

As a reminder, Stocktoberfest is in New York this year on October 5-7. The details are here. If you have questions or want to sponsor just hit me up. I hope you can attend. We will of course be discussing the topics below.

Before I get started…

This week was bananas in the markets. Earnings have started, the war is heating up, oil is back on the rise, The Democrats have the ‘wealth’ pitchforks out, and Trump wants to do weekly state of the unions I call ‘whinefests’. He also launched what I call a ‘grift API’ so that he can charge $100,000 to people that want to hear his inside information moments before he types them for the public. This is gross and maybe just a troll distraction from the White House, but it is the exact business model I pitched Jack and Ev at Twitter in the 2007 early days. As owner of the ‘pipe’ Twitter should have slowed down the feed by 20-60 seconds and just sold access to the banks and exchanges and funds that wanted ‘real-time’ access. I imagine Twitter would have been insanely profitable by 2010 and have less than a few hundred employees. Instead we have algo feeds, ads and an asset tucked into SpaceX.

Speaking of Space X ( $SPCX ( ▲ 2.05% ) ), the stock is now down in the 120’s, below the $135 IPO price set by Elon and down 40 percent since the hyped IPO peaked. I watched ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ this weekend and in hindsight the whole story is a tame version of what Elon and all of Wall Street unleashed on the public. We are witnessing the worst behavior of the ‘degenerate economy’ coming from Goldman, JP Morgan, CNBC, Elon and friends, Silicon Valley and The White House.

For months I wrote at length about why I was de-selecting SpaceX ( $SPCX ( ▲ 2.05% ) ) from my FREC.com direct indexing holdings and three weeks ago I detailed why I was selling down my semiconductor index position. Here is my post. Since sharing, the index has sold off hard and many of the stocks in the index are down over 40 percent.

In AI this week, the two big stories were New York State giving data centers ‘The Heisman’ and The Chinese open source model Kimi gaining traction and closing the gap between American and Chinese AI. It is a must read. Josh Wolfe calls this new worry in AI ‘consent constraint’…

OK…Onward to the important stuff…Brokerage 2.0

A few weeks ago I wrote about ‘Brokerage 2.0’ and the massive TAM that is developing as Brokerage 1.0 proliferates and evolves. You can read it here.

A leader in this trend is Alpaca (a portfolio company of ours) which we helped seed in 2017. It continues to lead the brokerage 1.0 and now 2.0 infrastructure build out. Alpaca has built the modern infrastructure stack for global investing. The latest raise was announced this week…

This Alpaca raise is on the heels of $150 million raise they closed at the beginning of 2026 and an additional $300 million of debt financing.

Alpaca is an API-native brokerage infrastructure that lets fintechs, exchanges, and financial institutions embed U.S. stocks and options trading directly into their products without building brokerage, clearing, or custody from scratch. Crucially, Alpaca is a self-clearing broker-dealer in the U.S. and Japan. That means it does not just route trades. It executes, clears, settles, and custodies assets end-to-end. It offers a full stacked brokerage-as-a-service solution to 300 companies across 40 countries, including SBI Securities and Kraken.

Most recently Alpaca participated in DTCC's landmark Tokenization Services launch by converting traditional equities into tokenized version and making them available to blockchain participants. Alpaca has quietly become the core infrastructure for tokenized U.S. stocks. It is the brokerage and clearing backbone behind tokenized stock platforms such as Ondo Finance, xStocks and Dinari. Of the $1.85B tokenized stocks on the market, it is responsible for providing the clearings, connectivity and custody services for $1.5B or 81% of the entire market.

So…

The pipes of Brokerage 2.0 are being laid and we know that people around the world want to invest, predict, bet and speculate. We also know that AI is an accelerant and multiplier of the enormous TAM.

What goes best with all the rails, AI and demand is ‘unique data’ and ‘ideas’.

Over the last year, we have been working at Stocktwits to take advantage of this massive opportunity. Today, hundreds of thousands of daily active contributors and users of Stocktwits are watching their screens and sharing ideas in real time. We are deploying AI as fast as possible to read the streams and organize them in the form of sentiment, ideas and summaries.

Our MCP is in beta and launching soon. The Stocktwits MCP plugs our real time feeds into the AI you already use - Claude, ChatGPT and Cursor. You can ask about any ticker and get back what investors are actually talking about in real-time. Plus your AI can access proprietary data sets - summarized ideas, message volume and investor sentiment.

I call our MCP a ‘time machine’. While it may not predict the future, it will allow investors to look back over years of ideas and sentiment to get a unique picture and feel for what the future might look like and find the people that might be the best at predicting it.

Stocktwits as an ‘idea machine’ is also coming into focus.

A few weeks back here I explained my favorite stock scan based on years of tracking which I call ‘social relative strength’. In order to help people follow along in real time and see stocks that surface from the scan, we created a stream to follow on Stocktwits. You can check in anytime or choose to get mobile notifications. In the coming months we will offer hundreds of unbundled scans like this in streams format you can easily follow.

Unbundling price and fundamental screens into streams you can easily follow is unique and cool, but pairing these streams with social context is a game changer.

For example…

‘I would like to be notified when Howard mentiones a stock at a 52 week high or a stock in the ‘social relative strength’ stream.’

Enough for today.

Have a great Sunday.

Where Are We In AI Boom? How About The GLP1 Boom? And Apple Wins Again

Howard Lindzon — Sun, 12 Jul 2026 15:53:46 +0000

Good morning

Stocktoberfest is now just 3 months away in New York City. I hope you can calendar and join me October 5-7. The big topics will include The AI boom, but also the degenerate economy, the GLP1 boom, perps, prediction markets and brokerage 2.0. We have an incredible golf outing planned as well as well as a night of comedy.

A couple of charts that I would be discussing if the event was this week, include the supply that Wall Street is creating for all this AI demand. Eventually Wall Street gives people and their FOMO what they ask for….

Another topic related to the ‘degenerate economy’ is all the ‘leveraged’ ETF’s being issued - now 33 percent of all ETF’s and 54 percent of all theses ETF’s use derivatives. I don’t think most investors fully understand what they own.

Onward…

Apple ( $AAPL ( ▲ 1.75% ) ) has quietly closed at all-time highs this week and the second largest company in the world behind $NVDA ( ▼ 0.03% ) . They have not been an AI ‘spender’ and I think the market is waking up to the idea that one way to win the AI game is NOT TO SPEND. In fact, being one of the biggest customers in the AI food chain has created an inflation ‘flash point’ as they were ‘forced’ to raise prices because of all the memory and chip shortages. Screw rising egg and meat prices, the iPhone is our ‘algo’ and ‘anger’ protein and in the face of Apple raising prices, South Korea woke up as did Micron and announced supersizing capacity plans. I am all for this as a customer and user of technology but as an investor we must pay attention to all this supply getting sped up.

Apple also announced a huge lawsuit against Open AI for stealing secrets. They dropped this Friday and it will send some shockwaves through the system. I would not touch Open AI with my enemies money and I do wonder how Sam Altman survives all this fresh drama.

My own ‘degenerate economy’ index continues to perform very well. Below are the holdings and performance charts. It has been free to copy since the beginning and has very little turnover. My big mistake over the last three years was not having a heavier weighting of semiconductors and not making cyber security a core holding. I have a high cash position right now and plan to rectify that as dips develop…

Next up…how about Eli Lilly ( $LLY ( ▼ 0.65% ) ) and the GLP 1 trend?

Software ate the world until AI started eating software and the internet. Now Eli Lilly is eating the food industry.

While I am sure Eli Lilly will benefit from AI, the stock has not needed AI to 10x the last 5 years. Eli Lilly has been the antidote to the poisonous American food industry and a new addition to my index. The chart below show their stock performance versus the fast food stocks the last 3 years.

Eli Lilly has perfected a direct to consumer model for their drug. I would not be surprised if Eli Lilly bought or launched their own food products that best suit customers taking GLP1’s.

Finally, let’s catch up on AI.

I continue to stay out of the ‘bubble’ discussion. It is a boom that will no doubt face many crisis of too much supply and confidence.

I am staying focused on what products help me, Stocktwits and our portfolio companies stay leaner, move faster, get to profitability sooner and ship better products.

Simon Taylor who writes Fintech Brainfood had a good piece posing the question how can it be a bubble when ‘the biggest capital boom ever measured has no unsold inventory’. Like me, he is not sure how big this boom or bubble gets.

While as Simon says ‘you can’t overbuild something that is sold out’, we are seeing an insane transfer in free cash flow taking place between the Facebooks, Googles and Amazon’s to the semiconductor companies…

As Grok points out on behalf of the CEO’s doing all the spending…this will pay off by 2029. Of course, nobody really knows it’s just a massive bet that we will find out soon as cards get flipped…

It is getting easier to find the AI ‘bearish’/‘bubble’ callers as 2026 progresses.

The pied piper of the AI bubble club is Ed Zitron who is having his 15 minutes of fame these days appearing on every podcast and business show. His latest essay is titled ‘Let AI Burn’. The world needs Ed Zitron’s, but standing in front of this tidal wave of cash has been a terrible strategy and timing the event that creates a full unwinding is too hard.

I found Ben Evans recent piece the most reasonable explanation of the game happening on the field right now as ‘open source LLM’s’ are capturing more market and mindshare over the frontier models like Open AI.

However, if one thread in everything I've written above is how much we don’t yet know, the other thread is that every path to foundation models having market dominance, strategic leverage, value capture, winner-takes-all effects, or anything else other than becoming commodity infrastructure, requires something to change.
Maybe frontier models will become less competitive - yet in the last six months, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk jumped from zero back onto the leaderboards. Maybe network effects will emerge. Maybe chatbots can grow into products and don’t need to be wrapped in software. Maybe one lab will start out-executing all the others and pull ahead on sheer product dynamism - Microsoft, Google, Facebook and Apple had to execute their way into a wining position before they had winner-takes-all efforts. Maybe something else will happen.
In particular, we have not one but two potential dei ex machina - Trump and China. China is reportedly considering regulating open source and some people close to Trump have floated this as well (though since Meta abandoned Llama the US has no leading open model), and export controls could expand and become systematic. Many people see the pleas for regulation from Anthropic and (sometimes) OpenAI as a front for regulatory capture, but either way, we can’t presume this will remain an entirely free market.
Even so, that brings me back to the same point: the current market dynamics point to a future in which, as today’s supply crunch eases, frontier models move towards becoming commodity infrastructure, with all of the value built on top, and for a different outcome, something needs to happen that we don’t see yet.

Have a great Sunday.

Social Relative Strength - My Favorite Indicator Spotting Future Ten Baggers in The Stock Market - Only On Stocktwits

Howard Lindzon — Wed, 08 Jul 2026 19:25:03 +0000

Good morning…

Nearly 10 years ago I coined the term ‘Social Relative Strength’. I am a fan of the original Investors Business Daily/Marketsurge.com which created the amazing ‘Price Relative Strength’ indicator. What I started to do once Stocktwits had enough data under our belts was to overlay price and social relative strength. What I found was that stocks with high price relative strength combined with low relative social strength tended to outperform my basic price momentum lists. I have found these trends to be less volatile as well.

For the last 10 plus years I have been manually building lists that track stocks at 52 week and all-time highs and tracking their social followings on Stocktwits. I used to share them here weekly under the title ‘Trends With NO Friends’. My strategy has been to buy stocks as they break out with relatively FEW ‘watchers’(followers).

Last week we started to share more Stocktwits $ Cashtag ‘watcher’ and ticker follower data on our charts. the term ‘social relative strength’ will be something you now here more and more from me and I hope across the investing landscape as our data proliferates. Our soon to be released improved ‘search’ and our MCP will open more and more of this data to retail and instituional traders. Both have beta’s if you want to try them.

On the $ANET ( ▲ 5.61% ) (Arista Networks) ticker (I bought a few shares this morning) ticker page you can see we track ‘watchers’ which is people that have added the ticker to their watchlist - 19,965 as of today.

One other from my screen today that I am researching further is $AMBQ ( ▲ 4.72% ) …

Coming soon as a ‘premium’ stream on Stocktwits you will be able to track them as I do.

As always, if you follow me on Stocktwits, I share all my ideas and actual trades and investments in real time.

In the meantime, we are sharing a list of these we call ‘Undiscovered Breakouts’ in the FREE Saturday email. You can sign up for the daily email here.

Have a great day.

Momentum Monday - Apple Raises Prices and Memory RAMageddon Is Upon Us...

Howard Lindzon — Mon, 06 Jul 2026 15:33:13 +0000

Good morning…

Back to work.

This year has flown by and I am hoping for a quiet summer. I stared at the markets way too much the first half of this year.

As always, Ivanhoff and I toured the markets and shared some fresh ideas. Genomics, biotech and healthcare continue to break out and show relative strength while the semiconductors and AI digest all their gains and the torrent of hype and negativity in a wave of high volatility. The biggest news of the second half for markets might just have to do with $AAPL ( ▲ 1.75% ) (Apple) raising prices. My friend (ex head of Goldman Research) Michael Parekh calls this memory war RAMageddon

MP TAKE: Despite general awareness and digestion of the big-company price increases by Apple, Microsoft, Sony and others, it’s still not appreciated at a mainstream level just how broad and deep the impact is on electronics of all types — far beyond PCs, smartphones and game consoles. And how existential it is for a whole host of devices mainstream audiences take for granted — CNBC frames the squeeze as an outright ‘existential crisis’ for the smaller players who can’t absorb or pass through the cost the way Apple and Microsoft can.
Think about the $20-30 gadgets, adapters and gizmos you buy on Amazon without a second thought — often made by companies of a dozen people, sourcing one or two components needing 8 or 16 gigs of DRAM. When memory goes from ~5% of the bill of materials to 40-60%, entire categories simply become unviable. Even a successful, well-funded outfit like Valve sees its Steam Machine console jump from a planned ~$500-600 to $1,100+ without the controller — and there’s nothing they can do, because they’re not even on the customer list of the three trillion-dollar memory makers (Micron, SK Hynix, Samsung), each sold out for four-to-five years at 85%+ gross margins.
The scale of the move is the part that hasn’t sunk in: Jefferies is warning memory prices surge ~50% in Q3 2026 and another ~40% in Q4 — with no relief until 2028. To widen the lens: we’ll only miss these products when they’re gone — and the forces driving toward that outcome are gathering strength, not easing. This is RAMageddon not just pushing, but shoving many smaller tech companies — with their plethora of electronic products — out of business. And that’s not yet understood in the market.

Hope you enjoy this episode/show and please subscribe on YouTube so you can watch the show as it drops Sunday evening. More details and Ivanhoff’s thoughts below the video…

Welcome back to Momentum Monday!

In today’s episode of Momentum Monday, Ivanhoff and I discuss the following:

AI Volatility and Market Fireworks
Sector Rotation: Financials and Healthcare Leadership
Biotech Breakouts and Oversold Bounces
Software and Cybersecurity Outperformance
The Micron/Memory Earnings Reaction and Risks
The Secular Shift: Public Markets vs. Venture Capital

In This Episode, We Cover:

AI Volatility and Market Fireworks (0:00)
Sector Rotation: Financials and Healthcare Leadership (3:15)
Biotech Breakouts and Oversold Bounces (4:49)
Software and Cybersecurity Outperformance (5:55)
The Micron/Memory Earnings Reaction and Risks (7:46)
The Secular Shift: Public Markets vs. Venture Capital (11:41)

Here are Ivanhoff’s thoughts:

The selling in AI-related stocks accelerated last week. We can’t really say that it was sudden and surprising because there were warning signs. First, volatility increased substantially over the past month. We saw stocks moving down 30% in a few days and then just as quickly bouncing back to new highs. Short-term volatility is the highest at turning points, when momentum is lost. Then, we saw an AI-related gap and fade after record earnings from Micron – going down on good news is bearish price action. Then, Meta came out with a cloud platform to sell excessive compute, and the selling accelerated. This correction in AI is not the first. The group has gone through multiple storms that questioned the narrative – anything from China is ahead in AI to there’s too much capacity to there’s too much debt and shady deals. Guess what, none of those things mattered. Every time there was a selloff, we saw a big new contract or strong earnings report that rekindled the momentum in the space. Corrections to rising 10 or 20-week moving averages are constructive and allow for new base building. Obviously, this does not mean to be complacent and buy blindly into any dip. It is just an understanding that at this point, the current government is also heavily invested in the success of AI, and if things get worse, I would not be surprised to see the government taking 5-10% stakes in AI leaders for fresh cash inflows. This is just speculation, but not too far from reality. It is always best to wait for confirmation – bullish reversal candles before we risk any money in the space.
In the meantime, there has been a rotation into other sectors; not only the typically defensive, healthcare and consumer staples, but also the worst-performing groups of the past few months – aerospace, software, and crypto. If you think about it, laggards starting to outperform is actually a defensive sign, because it is likely caused by short covering – people are cutting risk on the short side after getting stopped on their long positions (likely AI-related).

And here are the charts discussed: