we've been seeing some interesting rotation out of overheated AI stocks, which includes opportunistic profit-taking on “good” earnings/news.

will the rotation stick for longer than a few weeks? TBD. for now, what we're seeing seems healthy and not super concerning to us. everyone had been dumping the Mag7, but now these stocks are positive month-to-date (GOOGL was at least earlier today, and ignore TSLA because it doesn’t count):

now look at the following chart showing:

the S&P 500 can be flat while semiconductor stocks get dumped, because rotation happening within the index’s walls (Mag7→the other 493→back to Mag7) won’t have an impact.

it’s like pouring water from one glass into another. you have the same amount of water, minus some splashing perhaps, but it’s sitting in different vessels.

the other piece of the puzzle is software trading horizontally while semiconductors bleed out.

and then here’s the same chart but with the DRAM memory ETF added in. the pressure inside the memory stock pressure cooker is being let out.

it’s worth noting that the two biggest MTD losers remain the biggest YTD winners of this bunch, and by a significant margin:

next week's hyperscaler earnings will do their best to sing an alluring siren song capable of luring more folks (including retail who has been hastily catching knives) back to their shores.

we’ll be watching, over the next few weeks, to see where the rotation happens. as long as there’s momentum somewhere in tech/AI/energy/space/etc/it’s-all-kinda-the-same-thing-anyway, we’re happy campers.

markets are not panicking. volatility is low. rotation is unfolding organically.

(retail is knife-catching and questioning their life decisions, but they should experience some relief soon enough!)

for this week's song, i was torn between picking Turn! Turn! Turn! or Mr. Tambourine Man—two songs performed by The Byrds (but written by others).

then i remembered…

the lyrics of both songs feel equally relevant. you have a "turn! turn! turn!" (rotation) of capital, and a multitude of investors pleading Mr. Tambourine Man for a distraction from their numb lives.

cycles come in all shapes & sizes, interleaved with other cycles happening in the foreground & background. cycles stacked on cycles, influencing cycles that influence other cycles.

the four seasons of the year are visibly distinct cycles, unless you live somewhere with two seasons, like California, where they have hot summer and warm summer.

human-generational cycles aren't too abstract either, if you zoom out far enough. the whole "hard times create strong men" and "weak men create hard times" thing exists as a saying for a reason. it’s framed in a way that paints some generations poorly, but it doesn’t have to. some generations are more individualistic, and that’s fine. some generations turn to community for validation & embrace the collective in a different manner. and everything in between. every generation plays a role keeping society on its toes, introducing new ideas & new chaos into humanity to prevent it from going stale.

there’s a constant process of societal annealing that arises from the interactions between various peoples & generations: a process that introduces disorder, but which ultimately leads to greater stability & fewer deformities.

and the speed of generational mindset turnover and intermingling of “different” generations seems to be accelerating, creating multiple centaur-like, blended generations. it's now tougher to know what to believe—and what others around you believe—but we're all going through this collective mid-life crisis together.

what is important? money? no. buying a house? no, not anymore. having kids? increasingly, no. health? yes, more than ever.

health & (mental) wellness—neglected for too long due to toxic societal trends & enshittificationmaxxing Big Tech—don't require large upfront monetary costs. (unless one is sick and needs to visit a doctor, but that's different than the longevity & optimization type of health i'm speaking of.)

libraries & the Internet offer lots of sage advice for free. socializing with others is free/cheap. many types of exercise (walking / running / bodyweight exercises) are free. sleeping, one of if not the most important wellness hack of all, is free. (but seemingly still hard to get enough... for some reason.) meditation & mindfulness is free.

the kids will be alright, because the best things in life are free, and that's basically all they can afford.

this photo is fascinating. a blurry, in-space selfie(?) taken by a NASA astronaut in 1966.

here's news from the last week or so that i found to be the most interesting:

we'll cover this more later perhaps, but the Internet is no longer (just) for humans.

the same infrastructure designed for use by humans is now being increasingly inhabited & used by silicon-based entities.

$FSLY ( ▲ 1.6% ), a company FAYE likes, deals with human & AI traffic. and during the first 5 months of 2026, requests from AI grew 6.5x faster than requests from humans.

machines talking to machines.

if the Information Superhighway described the Internet for humans, a more apt term is needed for the supercharged, more resource-intensive, higher-volume Internet for AI.

the Information Autobahn?

alternatively, what we thought was the Information Superhighway was actually the Information Cobblestone Roads this whole time.

“yellow gallows" here refers to streetlights, the technological bane of many a historical pedestrian (apparently).

while reading a book about the cultural/historical background of the periodic table of elements, the section about sodium streetlamps fascinated me.

sodium lamps were cheaper & more efficient than the more "white" gas lamps that preceded them.

however, they were also yellow/orange!

the beautiful & nostalgic (IMO) warm hue of sodium streetlamps received so much hate at the time, including from artists & poets. John Betjeman referred to these lamps as “gallows overhead / Bathed in the yellow vomit.”

Betjeman & the gas lamp people hated sodium. we hate LED. every generation romanticizes the street lamps they grew up under and despise the ones that replaced them. the “problem” is change, not technology.

preference for street lamp colors—a seemingly benign technology, yet so pervasive in our lives—depends when & where one was born!

as with many technology "upgrades" & changes.

sometimes the past shrieks for attention in a blatant appeal to familiarity & the inescapable conservatism seeded within humans as they "mature." but sometimes the past is crying out to get your attention—like the bright colouring of a poisonous frog—to prick your consciousness about a potential threat.

same as it ever was.

we were flat on PLTR + aren’t sure how next ~week will unfold + wanted more cash, so we offloaded it! we’ll look to re-add in the future.

$ASPI ( ▼ 13.87% )

$AIP ( ▼ 5.05% )

$RDW ( ▼ 9.72% )

$IONQ ( ▼ 6.43% )

$KYIV ( ▼ 4.11% )

where were we? oh, cycles!

market cycles sit somewhere in between nature's cycles & societal cycles. it's (relatively) easy to observe capital rotation out of one sector and into another and long term trends. look at AI stocks over the last few years. the charts all go up and to the right. crypto over the same period went down and to the right. biotech, recently, started going up and to the right while AI has been flat. nuclear stocks went down for years, then up with AI, then down with AI, and i expect they'll go up again in the future (with or without the current AI front-runners sharing the spotlight).

all these interrelated-but-also-distinct trends operate on cycles of attention, of technological progress, of capital flows, of geopolitical trends.

we invest in long-term tech trends, so we pay the most attention to monthly & yearly changes.

the market's daily ebbs and flows reveal (then hide) a coastline we have zero intention of measuring. we ain't looking at the coastline. we're looking at the horizon. 🚢

(volatility depends on perception. basically, if you check your portfolio once per month, your perception of volatility will be different than the day traders hoping their position doesn't get nuked by a tweet from the president of the USA.)

let's abruptly shift focus now to Mr. Tambourine Man, our other song of the week.

we feel the same way. even as we/markets sit here, directionless but not tired enough to rest, we must be entertained! everyone who sold in May and went away doesn't demand entertainment from markets. those people are snoozing. to them, volatility doesn't exist. they're comfortable in their beds. but us? we need Mr. Markets Man to play a song for us, goddamit.

of Mr. Tambourine Man, we/markets demand a distraction from the world's chaotic slew of tariff & war TACOs, global & domestic terrorism, affordability crises, diarrhea lettuce outbreaks, authoritarian feature creep, &c. to all those things we are numb.

(brief aside while we're talking outbreaks, the soundtrack to Contamination, created by legendary Italian progrock group Goblin, is worth a listen.)

the means of entertainment matters less than the entertainment's utility as an effective distraction.

the distraction from markets—in an ideal world—is life.

somehow, self-education, self-betterment, philanthropy, health & wellness, & who knows what else have taken a backseat to the invisible hand of markets.

with all this talk of cycles & rotation, it's important to acknowledge the underappreciated role emotions play in all of this. markets are, to a greater degree than many would like to believe, rationalized emotion held together by belief that the system that is and once was will continue to be.

we added a bit to $RDW ( ▼ 9.72% ), $ASPI ( ▼ 13.87% ), $KYIV ( ▼ 4.11% ). we have already learned we were too early on those, but that's fine. it was worth a gamble to us. if the current AI losers can stabilize or recover before the weekend, we won’t have been too far from the local minimum.

we’re keeping the majority of our cash on standby until late July / early August.

if $AIP ( ▼ 5.05% ) starts showing strength in early August, we'll look to start buying that one again. we did a touch of mechanical rebalancing a week or two ago, since it quickly became too large compared to the rest of our portfolio. but it remains one of our highest-conviction holdings.

we’re considering adding to $FSLY ( ▲ 1.6% ) in the coming weeks too. it’s holding up better here. maybe we can add to our position closer to $17/$18.

we still see turbulence in the days/weeks ahead, and are mainly watching how stocks/sectors/traders handle the turbulence, rather than how they fare in absolute terms, if that makes sense.

(we found an interesting rabbit hole we’ve just begun exploring… more to come next week. 🕳️🐰)

see you next time.

AURUM NOSTRUM NON EST AURUM VULGI 🪱

no categorized news this week, sorry!

still figuring a bunch of workflow & newsletter things out.