JT

[JT @InigoB26]

@SW_Help this is yet another day this week where trains have faults, major delays and cancellations. It’s literally an every day occurrence at the moment. You cannot expect people to pay your high prices for this level of service.

[JT @InigoB26]

@SW_Help You have had signalling problems along the line almost every day in the last two weeks. Let alone other cancellations and delayed services.

What is going wrong at SWR currently !!

[The All-In Podcast @theallinpod]

Marc Benioff to SaaS CEOs upset about AI hurting their valuations: Grow up, wipe your tears, focus on the customer

Chamath:

“ Let's say you were running a software company that was before the AI wave and you're private.

There's a bunch of these companies that were supposed to go public, (but) didn't go public.

What should they do? What do those boards do?”

Marc @Benioff:

“Here's some Kleenex for them for all their tears.

I mean, I talk to these CEOs, they're crying, "Look at my market cap, I'm not getting paid for my work."

Guys, grow up.

That's what I love about the public markets, they rationalize everything all the time. So great, be in the public markets.

You want to be in a private market? Your valuation is fantasyland until somebody's actually going to pay you.

So I just tell them, focus on your revenue, focus on your customers, focus on your cash flow, focus on your profitability, focus on your innovation.

How are you going to add value to your customers?

That's what's really, truly important.”

[JT @InigoB26]

@SW_Help You had a major signalling issues on Thursday, which delayed people for hours and same again today.

That’s two issues of significant magnitude over the course of less than a week. Do you intend on refunding all tickets while you resolve your technical issues! Not good enough!

[Daniel Foubert 🇵🇱🇫🇷 @d_foubert]

BREAKING: Iran says the strait is closed.
BREAKING: Trump says the strait is open.
BREAKING: Hegseth says the strait is open.
BREAKING: Bloomberg says 3 ships crossed.
BREAKING: Iran says those 3 ships are Iranian.
BREAKING: Maersk says it needs clarity.
BREAKING: The strait is a philosophical concept at this point.

BREAKING: A fourth ship attempts to cross.
BREAKING: The fourth ship turns around.
BREAKING: The fourth ship's captain says he "needed to think."
BREAKING: Insurance for the fourth ship is now $47M.
BREAKING: The fourth ship is still thinking.

BREAKING: Trump posts on Truth Social that Hormuz is "TOTALLY OPEN, BEAUTIFUL, LIKE YOU'VE NEVER SEEN."
BREAKING: 800 ships remain trapped in the Gulf.
BREAKING: Trump posts again that this is Biden's fault.

BREAKING: Iran announces tolls of $2M per ship.
BREAKING: Iran announces tolls must be paid in crypto.
BREAKING: Iran has not specified which crypto.
BREAKING: Someone on CT says it's XRP.
BREAKING: XRP is up 34%.
BREAKING: It is not XRP.

BREAKING: Russia and China veto the UN resolution on Hormuz.
BREAKING: Russia proposes an alternative resolution.
BREAKING: The alternative resolution does not mention Hormuz.
BREAKING: Nobody is surprised.

BREAKING: Israel bombs Lebanon.
BREAKING: Iran says this violates the ceasefire.
BREAKING: Trump says the ceasefire does not cover Lebanon.
BREAKING: Netanyahu says the ceasefire does not cover anything Netanyahu is currently doing.
BREAKING: Ceasefire is now 11 hours old.
BREAKING: Iran closes Hormuz again.
BREAKING: Hegseth says the strait is open.

BREAKING: Trump floats joint US-Iran toll venture to manage the strait.
BREAKING: The White House clarifies Trump was "just thinking out loud."
BREAKING: Iran says it will consider the proposal.
BREAKING: Trump says Iran's 10-point peace plan is "not good enough."
BREAKING: Trump says it is "a workable basis."
BREAKING: Both statements were made within the same hour.

BREAKING: 20,000 seafarers are still trapped on ships inside the Gulf.
BREAKING: The IMO says the priority is evacuation.
BREAKING: Iran says passage requires "coordination with armed forces."
BREAKING: Nobody has coordinated with the armed forces.
BREAKING: Hegseth says the strait is open.

BREAKING: The strait remains closed.
BREAKING: This is day 41.
BREAKING: We will keep you updated.

[Jim Bianco @biancoresearch]

I am not a military analyst. I'm a financial analyst focused on macroeconomic risk.

That different lens might explain why I see something most military strategists and investors are missing.
---
The New Rules of Warfare—And Why We Can't Opt Out

For nearly a century, warfare belonged to whoever controlled the biggest defense budget. Aircraft carriers. Stealth bombers. Multibillion-dollar weapons systems.

That model is changing in ways many aren't appreciating.

Ukraine and Iran are showing the West what 21st-century conflict actually looks like: decentralized, highly iterative, fast-changing, unmanned, and cheap. Neither the US nor Russia—beginning in 2022—appears prepared.

We might now have no choice but to show we can fight and win such a war.

The Ukraine Approach

Faced with a small defense budget, a much smaller population, and a vastly outnumbered army, Ukraine had to get creative. They couldn't match Russia's industrial capacity or spending. So they abandoned that playbook entirely.

They developed an entirely new way to fight, highly decentralized, iterative, and most importantly, cheap.
They also created Brave1—a completely new way to conduct war.

Frontline commanders log into an iPad and bypass central command entirely. They spend digital points to purchase equipment directly from hundreds of (Ukrainian) manufacturers. When they encounter a new threat, they message the manufacturer directly and work with the engineers to find a solution, even if that means they visit to the front. The result is hardware or software upgrades that once took months now take days.

Here's the crucial part: hundreds of manufacturers compete fiercely for these dollars by offering the best possible product as fast as possible. This isn't centralized procurement. It's a market. Competition drives innovation at scale. Weapons evolve as the enemy evolves in real time.

Units are also awarded points for confirmed kills, uploaded from drone video—a powerfully eloquent way to grade effectiveness.

But the real innovation might be how they decentralized manufacturing itself. Instead of building weapons in massive, centralized factories that make perfect targets for Russian bombing, Ukraine distributed production across hundreds of small manufacturers—workshops, machine shops, garages, and yes, kitchens. Each produces components or complete systems. This approach serves two purposes: speed and survival.

You can bomb a tank factory. You destroy production for months. You cannot bomb ten thousand kitchens. If one workshop gets hit, ninety-nine others keep producing. The network regenerates faster than Russia can destroy it. This is why the manufacturing process includes actual kitchens—it's not a metaphor. It's a strategy.

The Metric That Defines a New Era

The result is staggering: at least 70% of battlefield casualties now come from drones. This is the first time in over a century that the primary cause of combat death is neither a bullet nor an artillery shell. Since World War I, industrial warfare meant industrial killing. Ukraine has broken that equation entirely.

As a result, Russia is now controlling less territory than at any point since 2022 and going backward. In March, Ukraine made gains while Russia recorded no gains for the first time in two and a half years, and Drone-led offensives recaptured 470 square kilometers while paralyzing 40% of Russian oil exports.

Ukraine has lowered the "cost per kill" to less than $1,000 per casualty—a 99.98% reduction from the millions of dollars that were common in the post-9/11 wars. This isn't an incremental improvement. This is a complete inversion of modern military economics.
Yet the Western defense establishment is not learning from this.

Rheinmetall CEO Armin Papperger mocked Ukraine's entire approach. In The Atlantic, he called Ukrainian manufacturers "housewives with 3D printers," dismissing their work as "playing with Legos." They are not studying this revolution. They are mocking it.

And the "housewives with 3D printers" are beating the Russian army!

Ukraine Is Now in the Middle East

The US Military and Gulf states face an eerily similar problem. Iran's Shahed drones threaten shipping in the Strait of Hormuz—a chokepoint that funnels 21% of global oil. They cannot fend off Iran by firing a $4 million Patriot missiles at $20,000 drones.

They need what Ukraine has discovered: a decentralized, rapidly adaptive defense network that doesn't require centralized industrial capacity.

That's why Ukraine just signed historic 10-year defense deals with Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the UAE.

Over 220 Ukrainian specialists are now on the front lines of the Persian Gulf—exporting not just weapons, but a completely new doctrine of how to fight.

The precedent is set. The model works. Everyone is watching.

Mosaic

On April 1st, Trump threatened to bomb Iran "back to the stone ages" if they don't reopen the Strait within weeks.

It's the classic 20th-century playbook: overwhelming offense force, massive bombardment, industrial-scale destruction.

The problem? That playbook doesn't work against distributed, cheap, rapid-iteration systems—especially when your enemy is organized under a mosaic structure.

Iran's "Mosaic Defense" doctrine is a decentralized command system where authority and capability are distributed across multiple geographic and organizational nodes.

Each region operates semi-autonomously with overlapping chains of command and pre-planned contingencies. It's designed so that when you destroy the center, the edges keep fighting. You cannot decapitate a system with no head. You cannot out-bomb your way to victory when your enemy is not centralized; this was the solution for 20th-century industrial warfare.

Defense Wins Championships

21st-century asymmetrical threats require defensive shields, not aggressive offenses. Ukraine has built exactly that: rapid-iteration defenses, decentralized manufacturing, commanders empowered to buy solutions in real time and rewarded for success.

That same defensive model may hold the key to opening the Strait of Hormuz. Not through massive offense, but through the ability to adapt and defend quickly.

Why We're Stuck

Whether you viewed this as a war of choice or not, it has now become a war to keep global trade open. And that makes it inescapable.

This is precisely why the US cannot declare victory and walk away from the Strait of Hormuz— or TACO.

Every adversary on the planet will interpret American withdrawal as confirmation that cheap asymmetric systems work against powerful centralized platforms.

And these adversaries might have sent us a message last month. In mid-March 2026, an unauthorized drone swarm penetrated Barksdale Air Force Base in Louisiana, home to the U.S. Air Force's Global Strike Command.

The fact that this happened not overseas but in the United States, and that these tests occurred just weeks ago, underscores how close this threat is now.

They didn't attack. They announced their presence. Every adversary watching learned that cheap drone networks can reach into the US.

The Global Supply Chain Risk

If the US abandons the Gulf while Iran holds the Strait contested, markets will price this as validation that cheap systems can hold global trade hostage. The current market disruptions will become permanent.

Supply chains will have to pivot from "just-in-time" efficiency back to "just-in-case" redundancy. Inflation returns as safety costs money. Trade routes diversify away from vulnerable chokepoints. The global friction tax becomes permanent.

The Unavoidable Truth

Once you prove that cheap, asymmetric systems can hold global trade hostage, that knowledge spreads globally and irreversibly. Every adversary learns the same lesson: you don't need a $2 trillion Navy—you need $20 million in drones and the will to use them.

Withdrawing while the Strait remains contested would permanently validate this model. Supply chains shift to "just-in-case" redundancy. Insurance costs rise. The friction tax becomes structural—baked into every global transaction for decades.

The cost of staying is measured in months. The cost of leaving is measured in decades of economic drag.

We cannot leave unfinished business.

[JT @InigoB26]

@nicbstme Unroll @threadreaderapp

[JT @InigoB26]

@Rainmaker1973 @TyronneNel @grok what is the source of this study

[Evan @StockMKTNewz]

Here is what some of Wall Street thinks will happen in the stock market next year

JPMorgan
UBS
Goldman Sachs
Truist

(Credit to @WisemanCap for making these)

[JT @InigoB26]

@ManuInvests @threadreaderapp unroll

[Evan @StockMKTNewz]

Many famous investors including Warren Buffett, Bill Ackman and a bunch more just updated their portfolios

Here's what their portfolios looked like as of the end of Q2 (A thread🧵⬇️)

Warren Buffett: 🐐

[Bob Elliott @BobEUnlimited]

The UK economy looks to be at a turning point as their income-driven expansion fades.

After holding up for much longer than most expected, rapidly weakening labor markets are set to undermine continued decent growth with short-end pricing under discounting cuts needed.

Thread.

[Cillian Kelly @irishpeloton]

The Netflix documentary about *last* year’s Tour being released 2 days before *this* year’s Tour is stupid and shite.

Worst possible time for it to come out.

Release it now.

[JT @InigoB26]

@jon_cardinelli Multiple seasons of the same.

[JT @InigoB26]

@KrishanGopaul Hi Krishan,

Do you have something that considers net demand including non-ETF flows.

[Brad Setser @Brad_Setser]

Initial thoughts on the US-UK trade deal --

First, this is a very small deal. Most of the new US tariffs remain. Most of the restrictions on US exports to the UK (which are modest) remain. Not much changes ...

1/

[JT @InigoB26]

How disappointing is Gladiator 2? I mean it’s actually a shock how you can take a movie that transcends the ages and with all the modern directing tools, time and resources to make a sequel. Make something that average. Bleak.

[JT @InigoB26]

@EPBResearch @threadreaderapp unroll

[JT @InigoB26]

@EPBResearch @threadreaderapp unroll

[JT @InigoB26]

@EPBResearch @threadreaderapp