Howie Town

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…

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

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

Onward…

How about them markets!!!!

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

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 ( ▲ 0.97% ) 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 ( ▼ 0.14% ) 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 ( ▼ 0.14% ) and $MSFT ( ▲ 2.54% ) 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 ( ▼ 0.14% ) and $MSFT ( ▲ 2.54% ) 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

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…

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.

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 ( ▲ 0.31% ) ) 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 ( ▼ 0.11% ) 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 ( ▲ 1.55% ) 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 ( ▼ 0.58% ) ) 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…

Eli Lilly ( $LLY ( ▲ 1.89% ) , 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…

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 ( ▼ 1.24% ) Post-Earnings Selloff
Hyperscaler Capex Concerns and $GOOGL ( ▼ 1.29% ) Pressure
$QQQ ( ▼ 0.37% ) 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 ( ▼ 1.24% ) Post-Earnings Selloff (3:25)
Hyperscaler Capex Concerns and $GOOGL ( ▼ 1.29% ) Pressure (6:01)
$QQQ ( ▼ 0.37% ) 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 ( ▲ 6.14% ) & $TSLA ( ▼ 0.63% ) Valuation Friction
Big Tech Performance: $AAPL ( ▲ 0.45% ) vs. $GOOGL ( ▼ 1.29% ) vs. Semiconductors
The AI Correction (Quantum, Data Centers, Space) & $NVDA ( ▼ 0.11% ) Holding
Broadening AI Benefits into Small Caps & Real Efficiency Gains
Forgotten IPOs & New Setups ($CART ( ▼ 0.71% ) , Travel, Biotech)
Cyber Security Leadership & The Memory ETF ($DRAM ( ▼ 4.28% ) )

In This Episode, We Cover:

$SPCX ( ▲ 6.14% ) & $TSLA ( ▼ 0.63% ) Valuation Friction (0:00)
Big Tech Performance: $AAPL ( ▲ 0.45% ) vs. $GOOGL ( ▼ 1.29% ) vs. Semiconductors (3:02)
The AI Correction (Quantum, Data Centers, Space) & $NVDA ( ▼ 0.11% ) Holding (4:41)
Broadening AI Benefits into Small Caps & Real Efficiency Gains (8:24)
Forgotten IPOs & New Setups ($CART ( ▼ 0.71% ) , Travel, Biotech) (11:12)
Cyber Security Leadership & The Memory ETF ($DRAM ( ▼ 4.28% ) ) (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 ( ▲ 6.14% ) ), 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 ( ▲ 6.14% ) ) 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 ( ▲ 0.45% ) ) has quietly closed at all-time highs this week and the second largest company in the world behind $NVDA ( ▼ 0.11% ) . 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 ( ▲ 1.89% ) ) 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.

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 ( ▼ 2.53% ) (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 ( ▲ 3.54% ) …

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 ( ▲ 0.45% ) (Apple) raising prices. My friend (ex head of Goldman Research) Michael Parekh calls this memory war RAMageddon

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:

And here are the charts discussed:

Brokerage 2.0 Is Here...The Opportunity and TAM is Ginormous

Howard Lindzon — Sun, 05 Jul 2026 15:28:48 +0000

Come for the Alpha - sign up here

Good morning…

I hope everyone had a fun 4th of July.

We are in Coronado, which is always a special place to be on July 4th weekend.

I moved to The Unites States (Arizona) for business graduate school back in 1989 and have been lucky to be an American since (green card 1997). I am so grateful.

I say here often that one of the greatest American freedoms is the capital markets.

I mean what other place could you be President and skim $2.2 billion from your token drops and be gifted a Qatari 747 for ‘nothing’ in return. Also where else could I so freely (fingers crossed) call the miserable man out so freely.

Even assuming, as I do, that the markets are rigged, our capital markets are second to none in their, breadth, depth and liquidity.

For the last 30 plus years I have been fascinated by and invested in our capital markets. For the last 20, I have been making seed investments in financial service and fintech startups. Seed investments have included Wallstrip, Lifelock, Stocktwits, Y Charts, ChartIQ, Etoro, Robinhood, Alpaca and GoTrade.

I am going to call this era - which has probably peaked in 2026 - ‘Brokerage 1.0’.

I say peaked because we have entered what I called last week the ‘perp wars’… an era of almost infinite small and large dollar degenerate choices (trading, betting and investing).

In the United States, Robinhood is the dominant 1.0 brokerage, but Kalshi, Polymarket, Coinbase and a few others are vying for all that dribble down money coming from us old farts holding our assets at Schwab, Fidelity, Morgan Stanley et al.

My friend Mo, the founder of FREC.com (a Social Leverage fund 4 investment) really got me thinking about peak brokerage 1.0 with his coining of the term ‘Brokerage 2.0’. Have a read below…

While we may be at peak ‘Brokerage 1.0’, in terms of choices and the winners and losers, the TAM is still growing at a rapid rate as the world is onboarded to US capital markets. Brokerage 1.0 is thriving.

Brokerage 2.0 though is in its infancy.

For some context in how early this trend is, AQR, the leader in long-short direct indexing company has $200 plus billion under management. They have done this for only very high net worth clients ($3 million minimums). FREC has focused on democratizing this category with $20,000 minimums and has just passed $1 billion in assets.

Below is a demo/snapshot of a FREC account holding a long-short Russell 1000 position (a position I also hold). If you click here you can tour the page and click on all the key features highlighted in yellow…

Brokerage 2.0 has incredible tailwinds coming from demographics, AI, and the global fintech rails built out with Stablecoins and companies like Alpaca.markets (fund 3).

Since 2018, our firm Social Leverage has invested in many ‘wealthtech’ companies including Secfi.com, Frec.com, Fiscal.ai, 11th.com, Syntheticfi.com, Useseeds.com, Lea Technologies, Archive Intel and Seeds. Now that Mo has gotten ‘brokerage 2.0’ in my head, I have started to think about this crop of investments differently. They all fit into a brokerage 2.0 world.

All our founders from this crop talk to each other regularly because their customers are so dispersed and share so much in common.

Robinhood and their competitors will come for Brokerage 2.0 as well, but it will not be easy offering and selling these products to a base of young customers used to ‘the degenerate economy’ interfaces. In addition, the average size of a Robinhood account today is probably under $5,000 and for FREC in the hundreds of thousands.

My guess is we will converge, but there is so much opportunity in the meantime.

If you have a ‘Brokerage 2.0’ (Wealthtech) product, please do reach out to me anytime.

Momentum Monday - The Bull Market Now Includes Biotechs, Healthcare and Financials, Not Just AI and Semiconductors

Howard Lindzon — Tue, 30 Jun 2026 15:03:22 +0000

Good morning…

I am a day late posting the show, but if you subscribe to the YouTube channel you get an alert when the show goes live. We may start streaming the show live and taking questions in the weeks ahead.

Last week Monday was a nasty day for AI and semiconductor stocks on what I titled ‘Unconditional Surrender’.

The ‘surrender ‘this week seems to be a TACO once again by Trump (and the lunatics at the IRGC) so not only are semiconductor and AI stocks back in the groove, but new areas of strength are breaking out.

In a few weeks the Stocktwits MCP will be live and I can share a link here that will give everyone a summary of how I was thinking in real-time on the Stocktwits stream as the week unfolded.

Last week and in today’s show we cover the smaller banks, the biotechs and the healthcare stocks that have been participating in this latest part of the bull market. I shared some fresh ideas as well.

I hope you enjoy…and Ivanhoff’s thoughts are as always below the video as well…

Welcome back to Momentum Monday!

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

Intramarket Volatility and Semiconductor Rotation
The Biotech and Healthcare Breakout ($XBI ( ▲ 0.97% ) vs. $XLV ( ▲ 0.18% ) )
Fresh Ideas: Sensors, Circuit Trends, and Cybersecurity
Macro Trends: Dollar Strength, Crypto, and $CBOE ( ▲ 1.55% ) Disruption
Robin Hood's Prediction Market Edge and Trump Accounts
Tax-Loss Harvesting Strategies and Volatility Management

In This Episode, We Cover:

Intramarket Volatility and Semiconductor Rotation (0:00)
The Biotech and Healthcare Breakout ($XBI ( ▲ 0.97% ) vs. $XLV ( ▲ 0.18% ) ) (3:15)
Fresh Ideas: Sensors, Circuit Trends, and Cybersecurity (6:26)
Macro Trends: Dollar Strength, Crypto, and $CBOE ( ▲ 1.55% ) Disruption (10:01)
Robin Hood's Prediction Market Edge and Trump Accounts (13:55)
Tax-Loss Harvesting Strategies and Volatility Management (16:09)

Here are Ivanhoff’s thoughts:

And here are the charts discussed:

Memory Wars and Perp Wars...Inflation and Deflation In The Degenerate Economy.... and Speculation Is a Gateway Drug to Investing

Howard Lindzon — Sun, 28 Jun 2026 18:59:02 +0000

Good morning…

I hope to see you at Stocktoberfest in NYC this year on October 5-7.

I took a few days off in New York to golf to play some incredible rounds of golf with my friend Paul Traub and our sons. Our friend Michael Silver organized the highlight of the trip…a round at Pine Valley.

We drove down to Pine Valley from Manhattan for the day and we were treated to a special day of golf on what is considered THE best golf course in the world.

I have not played Cypress or Augusta which would be on my bucket list, neither has my son Max, but after playing Pine Valley, I understand why it is number one. It was a spectacular golf experience. Our host Mark (the member) treated us like family and was an amazing host. For whatever reason he sensed that filming this impossible putt my son Max was trying to make on hole #2 was a good idea and lucky he did. Watch for yourself…

Onward…

Putting the Iran war, the Middle East war and the Russia/Ukraine war aside for the purpose of this post, there are two new wars brewing at home in the United States…the ‘perp war’ and the ‘memory war’.

The ‘memory war’ is underway (The DRAM war in particular) as a result of the AI war, the highest stake technology war being played out now across the world. The AI war is evolving fast as Open AI and Anthropic look to protect themselves from the ‘open source’ LLM’s. They are doing so by spending time at The White House looking to create a regulatory moat for themselves. There is much to be cynical about here. My friend Michael Parekh is covering it all daily as I have shared often times and you can follow him here. Ben Thompson at Stratechery also does a great job and I also check in daily at TechMeme to dig into the weeds of the big discussions.

The memory war is heating up because Micron is now a $1 trillion company from all the DRAM demand and Apple had to announce price raises across the board because of it. Micron (A US Company) has two large competitors in South Korea (Samsung and Sky Hynix) and they too have been insanely hot stocks and companies. Here are the charts up against Apple and Google just the last three years…

Micron (orange) and Samsung (blue) success causing inflation as Apple has had to raise prices and Google will not stand by either

For simple stuff like this I go to Google and just search ‘Is Apple a Micron customer’…

There are wars within the memory war, especially in the DRAM market. Again, I asked Google to explain…

In a world where Trump wants to take Greenland, I can imagine him threatening South Korea at any moment as Apple makes the inflation case at home.

Apple does not like having to raise prices. The stock dropped almost 10 percent ($400 billion) on that news. Tim Cook will be back in the White House talking about a new inflation running rampant across America and it is NOT oil.

The MOU with Iran is all about oil inflation, so expect this ‘memory war’ to be fought along those lines too.

To the next war…

The ‘perp war’ is shaping up to be a massive war as well.

What is a ‘perp’ (thanks Google Gemini again)

The CFTC and CME just filed a lawsuit over classification of perps as the CME is worried retail starts trading perpetual futures rather then them being classified as a swap. I am all for democratizing access to investment opportunities. Do we need perps for retail? Maybe yes maybe no. You can already trade offshore using $HYPE ( ▼ 1.4% ) (Hyperliquid) so why not make it legal in the US.

Why the war?

The price charts of all the major players tells the story…

Hyperliquid eating the old guard?

In just a few years Kalshi has rocketed to a private market valuation of $26 billion with rumors circling of a new $40 billion valuation. In just the last month, the CBOE has dropped 30 percent to a $26 billion valuation. Kalshi you can track on Stocktwits now because of our partnership with Nasdaq Private Markets.

The incumbents have spent decades building a regulation moat for their exchanges. The $CBOE ( ▲ 1.55% ) was founded in 1973 and The CME in 1898. No wonder The CME is suing. I imagine the CBOE is watching closely. The NYSE ( $ICE ( ▼ 0.06% ) ) is the largest investor in Polymarket so I imagine they are as confused as anyone as to why their stock price is going down.

The proliferation of degeneracy is deflationary as platforms battle for customers in this post SEC world. This deflation is definitely one reason that the stocks prices of the incumbents are falling. It is also likely deflationary for the economy as most people lose money betting, trading futures and perps. Instead of buying ‘stuff’ this degenerate economy blows themselves up. The last generation of entrepreneurs wanted to be Zuckerberg, but it sounds a lot easier to make your fortune with leverage and perps than starting a company to compete with the technology giants. Even Zuckerberg does not want to be Zuckerberg anymore as he has tasked a team at FaceMetaBook to build a prediction markets app for its own billions of users.

The Trumps are investors in both Kalshi and Polymarket and have their own Truth Social prediction market. I assume they are also long Hyperliquid and Solana which are the blockchains of choice for ‘perps’. I also assume Trump loves the word ‘perps’ and might claim that he invented the term very soon. I am excited to see how he spells it. I doubt the White House or Trump gets involved in this war right now because their horses are winning and the CFTC which governs all this, wants ‘perps’ to exist.

The government/CFTC free for all stance also explains why I have been getting pitched whats seems like 100 forms of perps and prediction market platforms at Social Leverage (which triggered my buying Hyperliquid in the first place). Just last week Fred Wilson (Union Square) invested $75 million in an app called FOMO. Fred was an early investor in crypto and Coinbase so he knows ‘degeneracy’. As Fred said this week on a podcast…’speculation is a gateway drug to investing’.

Fred makes ‘the’ important point here which is a constant and now growing hot debate. Is this speculation and now degeneracy ‘good’? Fred likens it as I said above to the gateway drug to investing… so ultimately an overall good.

So what could go wrong?

Elizabeth Warren, AOC, Bernie and likely most Democrats are a huge risk to this trend if the Democrats take back the White House in a few years.

In the meantime, if you follow me here you know I added Hyperliquid to my ‘degenerate economy index’ which has been great, but I did not expect the massive drawdowns it has caused in the CBOE (adding more recently), the CME and ICE. I assumed the growing market was good for everyone. I also have invested in SPV’s to buy Kalshi and Polymarket and I own own $HYPE ( ▼ 1.4% ) Solana and $PURR ( ▼ 2.2% ) .

As the CEO of Stocktwits I am seeing all this at ground level and the growth is accelerating as new investors come to Stocktwits to learn. I do not trade options or perps myself nor do I make many bets. But, if I was young and/or a new investor, I know I would be 100 percent immersed in these products and markets, not just investing in the platforms via our firm Social Leverage. This behavior has convinced me of some changes we needed to make to the Stocktwits platform that will make Stocktwits even more accessible and easy to use for this era of traders and investors. Coming in short order (next 60 days) are the launch of the Stocktwits MCP, a ‘for you’ feed, a more intuitive search function to help surface, people and ideas and a reimagined message box. Of course AI is at the center of all these changes.

Have a great Sunday.

Om Malik, 1966 to 2026

Howard Lindzon — Fri, 26 Jun 2026 12:47:00 +0000

Om Malik passed away on June 24, 2026, at Stanford Hospital after a long health journey with his heart. He was surrounded by family and friends.

Om was a friend and a mentor the last 20 years. He called me about the markets and investing and I called him to explain technology trends. I don’t know if I gave him great advice, but he always thanked me. I know he always gave me great advice. He kept his heart battles very private.

I shared his writing here often and just last weekend again. When I started my ‘Panic With Friends’ podcast during Covid, I had Om on as an early guest to explain what would happen with technology. All his interviews with me are here. He wrote this after that first ‘panic’ podcast…

On Panic with Friends by Howard Lindzon

A few weeks ago, my good friend Howard Lindzon (blogger, investor, and maverick) invited me to be on his Panic with Friends¹ podcast. Howard is a skillful interviewer and as always have to watch out for his trick questions. However, we are old pals, so we laughed a lot, and I josh with him a little. We ended up talking about the old times, the present times and what the future might look like after this pandemic/panic is over.

We ended up talking about technology’s loss of innocence, when it happened and why. My argument is that from the early days of the Internet to today, everything is twenty times bigger, and technology touches everything, and this pandemic is showing us that reality.

If anything there’s panic is making us understand how pervasive technology companies really are, I told Howard. Whether it is the broadband connections, our iPhones, Netflix, YouTube, DoorDash, Amazon, Zoom, Google, Microsoft, Slack — we are dealing with the pandemic with technology on one end, and medical equipment that is so basic on the other. Just as the 2008 financial meltdown turned big banks into behemoths, the pandemic is increasing the grip of technology on us, and technology companies are going to come out bigger on the other end.

My prediction is that the current lockdown and isolation is just a beta-test for what is to come. While we are worried about the pandemic, in reality, we should be preparing for a reality that comes from extreme weather and rapid climate change. Inhuman temperatures, crazy windstorms, rising sea levels — life as we have known it isn’t going to be the same. Life will have to exist with those extremes, but the question is, how is it going to happen? What is the moral responsibility of the technology companies and their leaders?

If we are smart, we should listen to the lessons we are being taught at present. Needless to say, I enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you get a few minutes to check it out.

…..

There are many great stories circulating quickly.

Here is a nice tribute from Brian Sugar who had the pleasure of working with him.

Matt Mullenwag, the founder of Wordpress and his best friend wrote this.

RIP to a great human and kind soul who had a deep appreciation of ‘craft’.

Momentum Monday - Unconditional Surrender

Howard Lindzon — Tue, 23 Jun 2026 13:39:10 +0000

Oh boy…

The world is selling semiconductor and AI stocks this morning.

I shared a bunch of charts Sunday explaining why I sold semiconductor and technology stocks last week and it seems like everyone was looking at my newsletter or the same charts. Last night, the South Korean index was shut down after declining 10 percent. They are the poster child country for semiconductor stocks, ai stocks and leverage right now.

This morning, the memory stocks like Micron are donw 10 percent.

Not to panic, prices are back to just those seen a few weeks ago.

As always, Ivanhoff and I made the show Sunday evening, and if you subscribe on YouTube, you get alerted. But, I held my post back a day because of all the weird trading happening yesterday.

SpaceX alone has lost $900 billion in value the last few days, but is still above the $135 price that Elon set so don’t worry, only the people that Elon wanted to get away from to Mars have lost any money. It’s not like he did not warn you.

The genius of his IPO was the speed to market once Elon decided. Elon wins either way now that the IPO is behind him. If the market craters from here his arch enemy Open AI will have a much harder time getting public and Sam Altman will not be able to bully the bankers as much as Elon. Same goes for Anthropic and good luck to ay other ‘space’ company thinking about competing.

While they play their games, the rest of us our suffering as the markets digest what an ‘unconditional surrender’ by the White House to the IRGC means for all of us here in the United States.

What has not been working for a while is getting uglier fast…

Software leaders of the past like Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft and Palantir and now even Facebook continue to get sold.

Netflix is a mess. I am not surprised as the content has been awful. Cheap content, cheap audience. Apple, HBO, YouTube and Amazon are where I go first at night. I won’t cancel my Netflix but they have lost my attention.

Another old consumer favorite whose stock is a mess is $LULU.

Eli Lilly continues to work but the restaurant stocks are being pummeled as America gets thin. EliLily and the AI tailwind (dropping research costs and increasing research speed) is leading the biotechs to a breakout here, so I am watching that closely.

Enjoy the show…

Welcome back to Momentum Monday!

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

Geopolitical Distractions and Markets Gapping Higher
AI Dominance vs. Gold's Post-News Correction
Risk-On Rotations: Financials and Biotech Breakouts
The Semiconductor Surge and 1999 Comparison
Consumer Setup: $BROS ( ▼ 18.79% ) vs. $SBUX ( ▼ 0.79% )
AI Data Centers, Tech Supply, and Long-Term Trends

In This Episode, We Cover:

Geopolitical Distractions and Markets Gapping Higher (0:00)
AI Dominance vs. Gold's Post-News Correction (1:45)
Risk-On Rotations: Financials and Biotech Breakouts (3:35)
The Semiconductor Surge and 1999 Comparison (4:42)
Consumer Setup: $BROS ( ▼ 18.79% ) vs. $SBUX ( ▼ 0.79% ) (6:59)
AI Data Centers, Tech Supply, and Long-Term Trends (7:46)

Here are Ivanhoff’s thoughts:

And here are the charts discussed:

$SMH ( ▲ 0.31% )

$QQQ ( ▼ 0.37% )

$XBI ( ▲ 0.97% )

My MOU with Semiconductors and AI...Don't Be A Hog

Howard Lindzon — Sun, 21 Jun 2026 14:25:41 +0000

First off…happy father’s day!

Onward…

What. A. Week.

I watched most of this week unfold from my desk in Phoenix because it was 115 degrees outside. Too hot man.

I watched way way way too much news this week. It feels like I put on 20 pounds on anger. I watched so much news that my well tuned YouTube TV algorithm of comedy and silliness got a makeover. When I was not watching news it was being texted to me.

Where does one start?

The Pakistan organized MOU, the Vance Peace Treaty signed by Trump (with a Sharpie) at Versailles, The UFC fight in the White House Lawn, the Reflecting Pool ‘algaegate’, Iran’s neighboring enemies will pay Iran $300 billion (the Middle East version of ‘the Mexican’s will pay for the wall), the JD Vance podcast book tour, the New York Knicks parade, oh and all the major US stock market indices - led by the incredible semiconductor index - closed at or very near all-time highs, despite the new fed chair Kevin deciding that rates should probably be raised…

Trump says he signed the MOU to keep stocks rising and to bring down oil prices. But, as you can see from this long-term chart, the Nasdaq 100 and the semiconductor index did not skip a beat during the four month Iran war. Since the Iran war started, the semiconductor index has climbed nearly 100 percent.

I celebrated Friday by selling down a big chunk of my semiconductor index. For me it is purely asset allocation as you will see from all the charts below.

The AI and semiconductor bubble argument continues, but I have no interest in the debate.

What I believe is demand for compute, AI tools and apps will continue to grow.

Why?

I have shared these Om articles before but here they are again…we are an upload nation and memory is the machine.

I am not a student of bubbles, but the AI boom seems bigger than the railroads because of the speed of proliferation. In 100 years, AI and Railroads may be the only thing left, he internet long gobbled up by AI.

Timing when and how the financing mismatches funding this boom come home to roost is something I am focused on managing with basic asset allocation.

So why take so many ‘chips’ (no pun intended’ off the table right now to be reallocated ?

Let’s go to some charts I gathered from around the web…

The weight…

The concentration risk of these large technology companies…

The leverage and degeneracy by investors chasing this trend…2 images below

The leverage and degeneracy by the largest companies trying to ‘win. We are no longer in ZIRP by the way and how will these copmpanies buy back their stock on the next big dip when that money may have to go to pay back interest and principal…

The scale/speed of the spending on the datacenters and infrastructure…

The sheer momentum seems dangerous…

While I have no idea if this is a bubble, there is some bubble ‘rhyming’ going on…

I hope this is helpful.

PS - While there is an MOU, the war is not over. My good friend Moshe texted me last night that his 21 year old nephew was killed in a drone attack. The markets are the last reason to care about this awful war.

SpaceX Mindshare and Math

Howard Lindzon — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 14:57:05 +0000

Join me…tickets here

The scale of which SpaceX has hit the public markets is amazing to see.

I read this long essay by Marc Andreessen on the company and Elon and it is hard to to be impressed or excited about the company, the origin and the vision. Have a read.

Here is what the ticker looks like on Stocktwits (mobile iOS) below. Notice the one big green bar in the week of it’s IPO. The ticker already has 74,000 followers, which is a speed record on Stocktwits watchlist uptake. But still investors may not be taking this serious enough considering it is now the FOURTH largest market cap in the world right now trailing only $NVDA ( ▼ 0.11% ) , $AAPL ( ▲ 0.45% ) and $GOOG ( ▼ 0.98% ) . Tesla has over 1 million followers on Stocktwits so I imagine this sporead narrows fast.

The how rich is Elon memes are coming fast and furious. My favorite yesterday…

Elon somehow still finds time to engage all day on his platform Twitter, yesterday joining in on a popular Stocktwits meme that worries Jim Cramer is jinxing his stock…

Elon is now the founder and CEO of two of the largest companies in the world and seed funded Open AI. I doubt nothing would make him happier than to see Open AI fail and lose all his money.

As an American, I am glad the US has a space lead.

While I am not an Elon fanboy, I wonder what he would look like in the public eye if he was embraced by the government and the public like an athlete/olympian rather than an entrepreneur that has to battle everyone all day, everyday.

The mindshare he is taking up in AOC, Bernie and Liz Warren’s heads makes me smile.

I have a lot of friends that have made a lot of money betting on SpaceX so congrats to everyone that had the foresight to ride this.

Have a great day.

Momentum Monday - Space, Memory, AI, Data, Biotech...Are People Just Too Bearish?

Howard Lindzon — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 22:29:05 +0000

Good afternoon…

There is ‘peace’ according to Trump (no details of course) and the self congratulating was good enough for traders and investors.

I wanted to wait until the market closed to share today’s Momentum Monday. If you want to watch the show Sunday evenings or early am Monday before the market just subscribe to the YouTube channel below.

My gut last night was the ‘peace’ deal could lead to a ‘sell the news’ type of event. It was not that way at all and the markets closed at or near-all time highs.

Regional banks are breaking out, biotech is on verge of breaking out, midcap stocks are breaking out and small cap stocks are breaking out. That is on top of massive trends of money flowing into defense, space, ai, gambling, and memory chips.

Just today, SpaceX ( $SPCX ( ▲ 6.14% ) ) gained $400 billion in value which is ten Twitter’s (Elon paid $40 billion for Twitter now tucked into SpaceX.

Math is out the window because as Elon says ‘when you are a trillionaire you can just grab Goldman’s Sack and Jamie Demon by the pu$$y. They let you do it.’

God bless us/those not timing the market.

I cannot imagine the pain right now for ‘professionals’ underinvested.

I will not be the one to stand in the way of this tidal wave. The ten percent one day crash in the semiconductor index was gobbled up by traders and investors.

Only software stocks continue to underperform and nobody really cares at the moment.

I hope you enjoy the show…

Welcome back to Momentum Monday!

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

$SPCX ( ▲ 6.14% ) Trillion-Dollar IPO and Valuation Math
Peace Deal, Market Surge, and Small-Cap Leadership
Sector Rotation: Defensive Healthcare vs. Slower Tech Moves
The Big Software Slump: $MSFT ( ▲ 2.54% ) , $ADBE ( ▲ 0.36% ) , and AI Competition
Capital Raising Context: Trillion-Dollar Supply and Shrinking Markets
Crypto Lag vs. Oil Drop and Macro Trends

In This Episode, We Cover:

$SPCX ( ▲ 6.14% ) Trillion-Dollar IPO and Valuation Math (0:00)
Peace Deal, Market Surge, and Small-Cap Leadership (2:54)
Sector Rotation: Defensive Healthcare vs. Slower Tech Moves (5:05)
The Big Software Slump: $MSFT ( ▲ 2.54% ) , $ADBE ( ▲ 0.36% ) , and AI Competition (8:44)
Capital Raising Context: Trillion-Dollar Supply and Shrinking Markets (10:33)
Crypto Lag vs. Oil Drop and Macro Trends (12:13)

Here are Ivanhoff’s thoughts:

And here are the charts discussed:

What Makes A Brand ...

Howard Lindzon — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 16:08:31 +0000

Good morning…

I am fascinated by great brands. Here is a basic definition…

We all have brands that we lean towards when given a choice.

Apple is probably the brand I see and use the most. Ever since the Apple Store and the iPod , I have been attached to the brand. Apple is one of those rare brands that if you just matched what you spent on products investing in the stock over the last 20 years, you could retire.

I am very picky and loyal when it comes to the brands I use. I am also a sucker for a great founder story so the brands I use the most have products whose founder I have met or invested in (I never met Steve Jobs, but did attend many keynotes at Mosconi center in the early 200’s and have held the stock for over 20 years)

One of my favorite brand pass along stories is Ressence watches. I was in San Francisco at a Robinhood meeting back in 2017 ish with Micky Malka who was also a Robinhood investor. After the meeting I asked Micky about the watch that he was wearing. I had been staring at it on and off for a couple of hours.

Mickey looked at me and said ‘you can’t afford it’!

I was not sure if Micky was joking or just being polite and deflecting me from an expensive Rabbit hole. Later that day I searched for the company and watch and when I saw the price, I pinged Micky and said he was right…I could not afford it!

After Robinhood went public four years later, I did treat myself to the watch. One of the first things I did was take a picture of the watch on my wrist and send it to Micky in the old email thread. Micky got right back to me with a laugh and congratulations.

I have since added a few more Ressense watches to my collection. One of my favorites is below…

I would say 80 percent of the time when I am sitting with someone, I will get asked about the watch and immediately tell the person ‘you can’t afford it’! I than tell the Micky Malka story and we all laugh.

My version of the story has led to at least 100 sales for the company. I have since met the founder, Benoit Mintiens, who lives in Belgium, who I have told the story about how his watches get marketed in my circle. If everything falls apart for me, I could at least go run sales at Ressence.

Another brand I am immersed in is Ari, a mens fashion brand with a longtime flagship store in SOHO on West Broadway. Over the years I have become good friends with Moshe, the founder and designer. I love to talk about the business with him, from design, to manufacturing to retail and ecommerce. Today, two of his daughters now work in the business. It is fun to see how his ideas have evolved over the last 20 years.

Last week my son Max and I met and had dinner with the founder of SWAG Golf. He has an incredible founder story that is worth listening too. I have been a small investor for a few years, but never got around to meeting Nick and had only read stories from the website. I had invested on the recommendation of my friend Jack Newhouse who knew him well and I loved the products.

Over that last 40 years I have had the good fortune of seed investing into a lot of great founders and products and companies. Great brands come in all shapes and sizes of companies.

When I made my first seed investment in The Gripp back in 1994 (a product still popular today), the internet did not exist.

In fact, in 1996 when it first dawned on me that we needed to own the domain name for ‘The Gripp’, it turned out a company selling a ‘penis extension’ product had beat us to it (no pun intended).

The founder, Mark Scatterday, was/is a brilliant product guy and has gone on to found and work at some other incredible product and brands.

As for some other brands I am loyal too today?

In cycling gear it is one of our portfolio companies DSTNC.com and two cycling gearbrands they carry - Giordana and Q36.5.

I have recently become a huge fan of Garrett Leight sunglasses. I stumbled across a pair in Tel Aviv many years ago and a few years back stumbled into their SOHO store. The founder Garrett is the son of Oliver Peoples, which makes for a great story on top of an already great product.

The last few years I have been wearing Veja shoes which seem to go well with almost anything I wear because I mostly dress very casually.

Two other great brands we seed invested in are Manscaped and Robinhood. They are both so different of course. Manscaped resonated with customers day one. Paul Trans the Manscaped founder understood the market and the customer mindset perfectly. I met Paul and was hooked. I think the product is great and of course matters, but the name, packaging and domain continue to carry a lot of weight in a crowded consumer. category.

Robinhood was the right product with the right design, the right strategy at the right time. It helped that customer acquisition on the web in 2014 and 2015 was the easiest in history. Trading and Robinhood was also counter to what was popular at the time - index investing. Few believed the world needed another broker. I would have invested in Vlad and Baiju and the product no matter what the name was. The product was so loved and grew so fast for so many years that the company - I believe - confused growth and success for brand. During the 2021 Gamestock crisis, I probably learned that most valuable lesson as I watched the brand and company and founders get pummelled by the users they thought loved the brand so much. They survived of course, but the brand will always be associated with Gamestock and the whole COVID, ZIRP, Reddit era.

Have a great Sunday.

The Space X IPO ...Huge Win for American Capital Markets, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan and the Money Multiplier

Howard Lindzon — Fri, 12 Jun 2026 19:55:18 +0000

Get details and tickets here

Happy Friday.

SpaceX is trading $SPCX ( ▲ 6.14% ) and I think I am the only person who does not own a share. The stock has opened up and shot past $2 trillion making Elon a trillionaire. Mamdani, AOC, Bernie or Liz Warren are licking their chops.

Here I am posing with Elon (good use of AI as my skin and hair look fabulous)

We sent out a special edition Stocktwits newsletter this morning with all the IPO details. Hats off to our sponsor Trader ETF’s for quickly offering 2x leveraged SpaceX ETF’s and god bless the ‘degenerate economy’.

It is easy to be skeptical and cynical of this whole SpaceX IPO process, I am, but the reality is this is an important event that is great for the capital markets even if the stock were to crash 75 percent over the next year.

Why?

While some may take their money and go home, most of the liquidity will be put back into the system…the money multiplier in motion. We will see more innovation, more risk capital, more startups, more investing and more trading. The wealth gap is more real than ever, but I am no economist and am not going to stress out about that here. I am sure some great charity will be taking place as Americans are charitable.

Hats off to Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan who make out like bandits on this IPO and who hardly had to sell their souls to get this done. Quietly, Goldman’s stock has been hitting regular all-time highs and JP Morgan is right there too. I remember a time before Elon when our hate was focused on the banks. People just want to own a piece of Elon’s magic and all the old hucksters are drafting behind.

Culturally, the SpaceX IPO marks the continuation of a trend which I have been writing about on this blog/newsletter for a couple of decades…America’s capital markets are our greatest product, our most under appreciated export, and in this degenerate economy era…our bigger and better Disneyland (take a look at $DIS if you don’t believe me).

It is why I take such offense to the grift and abuse that seems to be on the rise. There is no guarantee that our leadership in this capital markets continues and we are not treating these markets with enough respect.

The Agentic Trading Boom ...What Does It Mean? Who Are The Winners?

Howard Lindzon — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 22:04:22 +0000

Good afternoon everyone…

If you have not heard of ‘Agentic Trading’ yet, you will be hearing it endlessly for the forseeable future.

I find myself in the center of this trend because Stocktwits of course and our seed investments in Alpaca (fund 3), Fiscal.ai (fund 4) and FREC.com (fund 4).

Etoro was one of the first brokerages to offer agentic trading. Today, Coinbase launched it.

Robinhood has also entered the ‘agentic trading’ business. They do a great job explaining it here.

One term you will hear along with agentic trading is MCP.

What’s an MCP?

Model Context Protocol (MCP) is an open standard that lets AI agents connect to external apps and services. Instead of just answering questions, an AI with MCP access can take actions on your behalf.

Why is it a perfect storm for this ‘agentic trading’ boom?

It starts with AI of course. Thanks Nvidia, Open AI, Google and Anthropic.
It helps that companies like Fiscal.ai now exist. Humans and agents need this modern financial data platform. It is trusted by the worlds leading public market investors. Fiscal.ai along with Chat GPT and Claude have commoditized almost all financial research. Just today, Fiscal shared 22 prompts to build your own AI analyst.
Of course the cost of transactions has dropped to near zero thanks to technology and companies like Robinhood and Alpaca.
Social networks…love them or hate them, they spread information and information is data and data equals trades.
Prediction markets are in their infancy.
Hyperliquid.
The SEC is in hibernation.
The Apple Mac Mini and I guess Dell.
Millions of investor and trader toolsets are being launched. One I mentioned a few days back is Portfolio Genius which was built by our Stocktwits CTO.
Trillions in capital about to be redistributed post SpaceX, Open AI and Anthropic IPO and these people are geeks and native to AI and degeneracy.

So where is the ‘Alpha’ in this agentic trading boom?

Oracle’s CEO Larry Ellison and Mark Cuban say the alpha and gold is in proprietary datasets. Not to toot our own horn but that means Stocktwits. I am not a quant so I could never truly explain all the value and alpha I was seeing flow through my feeds on Stocktwits. Our MCP (launching very soon) changes all that. The MCP will open up our platform, community and data to a much wider audience (humans and agents) seeking to interact with our unique data and sentiment.

Beyond proprietary datasets, I consider this boom an extension or hyper boost to my ‘degenerate economy’. My index is here. I continue to keep it simple and focus on the arms dealers and pipes. I believe we are in a massive TAM (total addressable market) expansion for trading and investing. For example…in 1999, Amazon went public at $438 million. The ‘retail’ investor market was tiny. We were huddled together on Etrade and Yahoo Finnace. Tomorrow SpaceX goes public at nearly $2 trillion. The ‘retail’ investor is still on Etrade ya (now Morgan Stanley) and Yahoo Finance still sure. But because of the internet, social networks, API’s, smartphones, AI and the cloud, the retail investor and their ‘agents’ are is in every corner of the earth.

On the private side you can follow along the on Alpaca’s Twitter stream for news of all the companies hooking themselves up to their API’s around the globe.

How do I get started with Agentic Trading in the meantime?

It is MUCH easier than you think.

Here is a simple search ‘Alpaca Agentic Trading’.

If you have a Robinhood account you will have already noticed the invite if you are a ‘gold’ member…

Have a great rest of the day.