Samuel Tong

[Samuel Tong @Samuel_404nf]

Probably analyst will start chasing $hims and we might see price action similar to $amd or $intc in May-June 2026, especially given the seasonality strength in healthcare

[Hims House @himshouse]

$HIMS ANALYST PRICE TARGETS

ONLY 2 ANALYSTS HAVE PTs HIGHER THAN THE CURRENT PRICE 🤯

High: $40 (Canaccord Genuity)
Low: $21 (Morgan Stanley)
Avg: $30

🟢 Buy: 5
🟡 Hold: 10
🔴 Sell: 0

[Samuel Tong @Samuel_404nf]

@YodaStockInvest Too bearish

[Samuel Tong @Samuel_404nf]

Another good catch! Most likely there are some smart money rotating into this one! $NOW is not going anywhere soon
Similar plays such as $MSFT, $IGV are showing the same patterns

[FUM Investors @FUM_Investors]

Potential Rotation Play - Service Now $NOW

Sharing a simple thesis on why we think $NOW looks quite attractive in a fundamental perspective

Back in March 26’ my original thesis was that investing in $NOW would be exposed to several risks not only based on a valuation perspective (at that time) but also given the AI disruption narrative that was ongoing would pressure valuations. However given the recent price action paired with the momentum shown from their strategic brand positioning in terms of their ‘AI Agent Operating Engine’ guidance, bullish revised revenue targets and strong momentum, it is hard to ignore the fact that the price decline (-33% YTD) is worth looking into again on a ‘stars are aligned’ basis.

Few things to take note on their positioning

- Strategic Positioning shows growth & stronger (temporary) moat:
Rather than positioning themselves as an ‘AI Agent Creator’ and competing with other foundational LLMs, their strategy pivots/focuses on acting as an AI "Control Tower," integrating various models to govern and automate enterprise operations across IT, HR, and CRM. Essentially they are an AI Agent Manager overlooking several AI Agents created from other businesses and managed by other IT personnel acting as a governance layer. *This is old news but when the wave of AI Agents gets reflected in the earnings especially towards FY26’ this core reason will remain relevant on why NOW may run.

- Leveraging off the AI Agent Hype with Actual fundamentals:
The adoption of AI Agents will be similar to how smartphones took over: strong hype in the beginning when everything was cool and flashy, but soon be commoditized and back to a red ocean landscape with low to no pricing power. But with a combination of a STRONG SOR (System of Record) + CMDB, retention and AI platform proposition that Service Now has, they are in a position of strength (at least for the time being) to leverage off the AI Agent hype at a B2B scale with offerings of an AI platform that is backed by strong foundation (know-how on complex business workflow optimization, industry/sector data, sticky products.)
AI Agents are here to stay: https://t.co/I478EFydwu
This also improves retention which NOW has an impressive 97% Renewal rate.

- Workflow MOAT and SOR:
The core enterprise process directory and years of SOR stored is essentially what defines Service Now making it incredibly difficult for standalone AI apps to replace them. This is why maintaining/growing partnerships with Azure, Nvidia, Claude and IBM is key to strengthening core moats. We also prefer this name compared to other SaaS players.

Strong Momentum from AI platform

- NOW Assist Scaling Momentum:
AI (ACV) 2026 revenue targets are guided to reach $1.5 billion (+50% more than their original target given), driven by a 70% YoY jump in multi-product AI deals showing strong momentum.

- Enterprise shift & Growing Backlog:
Projects $30B in subscription rev by 2030 (current rev $14B), customers are also increasingly moving from AI pilots to full production deployments across their organizations and are now investing in AI across multiple business functions. Remaining Performance Obligations (RPO) at $28 billion, growing 23.5% YoY in line with expansion trajectory.

- Guidance set in Q425’ will likely outperform:
When they set FY 2026 guidance in Q425’ they raised FY26’ rev guidance to 15.735B - 15.775B (+200M) with a 20% yoy growth. With strong traction from their AI Agent platform and cRPO ($12.64B) there’s a high chance that they would outperform this guidance.

*Analysts are expecting $16.2B for FY 26’ revenue on average with GAAP EPS of 1.99. This figure may be too low considering the above qualitative catalysts and they may break through 13-15% GAAP NI margins.

FY 2026 Guidance
Subscription Revenue: $15.735 billion to $15.775 billion

Subscription Gross Margin: 81.5%
Operating Margin: 31.5% (Non-GAAP) *lower than FY 25 guidance due to short term headwinds on Armis acquisition and friction.
Free Cash Flow Margin: 35%

- Hard to ignore:
$NOW is trading at $98, the same price they were trading at since May 23’ (roughly the same market cap) with $1.7B net income back then and much lower operating cash flows. With the Agentic AI Agent story in place, there should be a momentum for earnings growth to accelerate with improving margins however the ‘torque’ may not be as favorable given the market still favoring the AI story.

- Rotation in play:
We are now towards the 2H of a mid term election year which historically has been known to be very volatile paired with possibility of more profit taking in the AI space after parabolic run ups, there could be more tech sell off post July. Recent $MU earnings also proved that the AI story is still intact however there may be heavy profit taking over the short term similar to the ‘Nvidia effect’ when tech if not the whole market was carried by earnings results/expectations, this could be the same.

Should this happen rotation into other sectors such as healthcare, consumer defensives and others could be capitalized and the inverse ‘SaaSpocalypse’ play could be rotated back benefiting software names overall (AI down = SaaS names up).

- Key Risks:
1) We are not so keen on the valuation and wouldn’t peg them as a very undervalued play short term because potential FY27’ Net Income on a GAAP basis would price them at a 35x FPE

2) Don’t see profit margins expand too soon and are conservative to say that NI margins could reach a maximum of 16-18% FY27’ as S&M costs relative to net revenues are still high.

3) Software narrative could flip towards the downside easily as the AI story remains very strong.

4) Compute Margin Drag: Running continuous generative AI agents significantly spikes infrastructure and GPU compute costs, potentially dragging down its premium gross margins.

5) Short-Term Headwinds: The acquisition of Armis introduces short-term friction, including a 75 basis point headwind to 2026 operating margins

Technical Analysis: The critical structural levels to monitor are the immediate resistance cluster between the horizontal flip level at $100.87 and the 54 EMA at $102.74, major overhead resistance at $105.96, and the primary support floor at $83.33. Looking forward, a confirmed daily close above the $102.74 resistance zone would validate a short-term market structure breakout, opening the door to $105.96 and potentially the 150 EMA at $119.08. Conversely, if this bounce fails and the $83.33 major support breaks, it would imply the surge was a temporary fake-out, re-establishing the dominant macro downtrend toward the $80.00 psychological level.

In conclusion this thesis mainly revolves around a decent reward over risk play knowing that a local bottom may have already been formed since April. This paired with a hedge against temporary AI turbulence and that money flow would eventually rotate to higher premium software companies hence Service NOW be one of the better software rotation names with stronger SOR readings and win-win AI collaborations in place. We are happy to treat this as a swing trade with potential +20 to 30% reward over a -10 to 15% risk.

Technical Analysis: The critical structural levels to monitor are the immediate resistance cluster between the horizontal flip level at $100.87 and the 54 EMA at $102.74, major overhead resistance at $105.96, and the primary support floor at $83.33. Looking forward, a confirmed daily close above the $102.74 resistance zone would validate a short-term market structure breakout, opening the door to $105.96 and potentially the 150 EMA at $119.08. Conversely, if this bounce fails and the $83.33 major support breaks, it would imply the surge was a temporary fake-out, re-establishing the dominant macro downtrend toward the $80.00 psychological level.

*We are still long in our AI names

[Samuel Tong @Samuel_404nf]

The Verdict 🎯
$SLNH is an asymmetrical bet in the public market

The Floor: Backed by 100% owned, newly consolidated green power assets like Project Dorothy.

The Ceiling: Uncapped if their upcoming 350MW AI campus (Project Kati 2) captures Big Tech's desperate energy demand.

[Samuel Tong @Samuel_404nf]

The biggest bottleneck in AI isn't chips. It’s POWER. ⚡️

Big Tech faces a 3-to-7 year backlog to hook new data centers to the grid. But a $225M micro-cap company found a way to completely skip the line: Soluna Holdings ($SLNH).

Here’s why it’s a massive asymmetric bet 👇

[Samuel Tong @Samuel_404nf]

Why is it so cheap? Dilution! To fund infrastructure, $SLNH prints shares aggressively.
Just this month, they cleaned up their capital structure by converting all Series B Preferred shares into 6.5M common shares. Good for transparency, but heavy near-term anchor on stock price

[Samuel Tong @Samuel_404nf]

@LarkDavis Joe is cooking Jeremy, that's some 3rd degree burns

[Rothmus 🏴 @Rothmus]

“We are going to have a multi-racial nation in Singapore. This is not a Malay nation. This is not a Chinese nation. This is not an Indian nation. Everybody will have his place here, equal: language, culture, religion.”
— Lee Kuan Yew, August 9, 1965

LKY’s quote echoes Aristotle’s account of the polis as the highest koinonia, or community, formed not by blood or mere aggregation but for the sake of eudaimonia, the good life, through justice as its binding principle and the cultivation of virtue among citizens.
A regime, or politeia, endures when it serves the common good rather than faction.

Lee took a vulnerable, divided entrepôt and deliberately constructed a modern polis.
He rejected ethnic clientelism, imposed equal rules under law, rewarded merit, and built habits of discipline and cohesion so citizens of every background could pursue security and rising prosperity together.
He treated nationhood as a fragile achievement that required constant defense against stasis.

Aristotle warned that when a politeia no longer aims at eudaimonia for the whole but instead manages competing interests and erodes the civic ethos, it decays into factional strife and eventual collapse.
And Lee showed what deliberate counter measures look like in practice.

America today is moving toward the condition Aristotle feared and Lee refused to accept.

Identity based claims increasingly displace equal rules, merit yields to group outcome, and trust in shared institutions frays.

Without a conscious recovery of the principles that once sustained our own politeia, namely justice applied without favor, habits of self-government, and a civic ethos oriented toward the flourishing of citizens as one people rather than rival tribes, America risks the very stasis and hollowing that have undone polities throughout history.

[Samuel Tong @Samuel_404nf]

@YodaStockInvest $sofi $now $duol sector rotation is starting

[Samuel Tong @Samuel_404nf]

@UTDKobi Blue lock is real!

[Samuel Tong @Samuel_404nf]

@CMDarnton0 Diamond hands!

[Steven Fiorillo @stevenfiorillo]

In my opinion, the Fed's nine hawks are dead wrong and their rate-hike push could quietly detonate the real recession risk no one is talking about. The inflation they're reacting to has already turned, the labor market they think is hot is frozen, and the one thing that could truly break this economy is a refinancing wall that higher rates would detonate. The Fed shouldn't be debating one hike versus two, it should be focused on when to start cutting rates and whether one or two cuts is appropriate in 2026.

The Fed held the funds rate at 3.5% to 3.75% and that part was fine. What wasn't fine was the dot plot. Nine of the eighteen officials who submitted projections now pencil in at least one rate hike before year-end. Of those nine officials, five of them believe we need 2 hikes in 2026 and one of them actually thinks we need three hikes this year. The median dot for year-end jumped to 3.8% from 3.4% back in March.

The market got the message. The 2-year Treasury yield ripped about 16 basis points higher to 4.21% which is its highest in over a year. The dollar had its best day in almost a year, gold fell more than 2%, and the Dow gave back 507 points. Traders now put the odds of a September hike near 49%, up from 27% the day before.

The Inflation They're Fighting Is Mostly Oil, and Oil Just Collapsed

The hawks are anchoring on a 4.2% CPI print which is the highest since April 2023. Yes, this is double their 2% target but that number is a lagging photograph of a fire that's already being put out. Truflation which rebuilds the CPI basket every day from more than 30 real-time data sources and tends to lead the official print by roughly 45 days has a YoY inflation print at 1.81%. The real-time read is 1.81% and the official read is 4.2% which is a gap of 2.39% and the real-time number is the one pointing where we're headed.

The main reason for the gap is oil. The entire inflation scare of the last few months was built on the Iran war and the threat to the Strait of Hormuz. WTI crude ran up more than 45% during the conflict and that fed straight into gasoline, freight, and the broad goods basket. Now look at what oil is doing. WTI is below $76 a barrel which is a three month low and down nearly 40% from its conflict peak. The US and Iran are set to sign an interim deal Friday in Switzerland, the Strait is reopening, Iranian barrels are coming back online, and more than 100 ships carrying crude are about to be released into the market. The IEA is now warning about a glut rather than a shortage with 2027 supply set to grow roughly four times faster than demand.

Here's the part the hawks are missing, and Warsh said it himself in the room. The Fed can't do much about the price of oil or a dozen eggs and a move in those prices does not have first order consequences for what the Fed is doing according to him. The Fed's job is to stop a supply shock from broadening into second and third round effects. The whole question is whether the oil spike is leaking into everything else. Truflation at 1.81% is the answer and the answer is no. You don't raise rates to fight a supply shock that's already reversing. That's the textbook policy error.

A Strong Jobs Report With Calm Wages Isn't Inflationary

The bears want to use 172,000 jobs as a reason to fear inflation and that chain breaks at the second link. Jobs don’t show up in prices, labor costs do and labor costs are quiet. The report itself was was strong as 172,000 jobs were added in May against the consensus of 80,000. March and April were revised up by a combined 93,000 and that was the strongest three month stretch of hiring in over two years. Unemployment held steady at 4.3%.

Here's what the bears skip over. Wages are the bridge between jobs and prices and wages are behaving. Average hourly earnings rose 0.3% on the month and just 3.4% over the year. With CPI at 4.2% real wages are slightly negative which means workers are losing ground not bidding pay up faster than prices. That last point is the one that matters since rising real wages are the single ingredient a wage-price spiral can't do without.

The whole bear case leans on the Phillips curve and that foundation has been cracking for decades. The idea that low unemployment has to produce inflation keeps getting disproven. In the late 1990s unemployment was under 4% while inflation fell. 2019 hit a 50-year low near 3.5% with core inflation under 2%. The thread running through every one of those low-inflation booms is productivity and we've got it again.

Services turn the argument inside out because two-thirds of consumer spending goes to services. When it comes down to it services prices are mostly just labor costs passed through. Every new hire adds a unit of supply at the same moment it adds a paycheck of demand. Inflation only shows up when demand exceeds supply and a jobs report like this one grows both sides at once.

On top of that pricing power is gone. Frito-Lay has cut some prices by as much as 15% and Walmart and Costco have been absorbing input costs through automation instead of passing them along. Core PPI has run hotter than core CPI for months and that gap is the tell. Companies are eating the cost in their margins rather than handing it to the consumer.

I want to be clear about one soft spot since it cuts the opposite way from what the hawks assume. The long-term unemployed are up 524,000 over the past year and now make up 27.5% of everyone out of work and financial-sector payrolls are down 107,000 since last May. The labor market is solid but it's fraying at the edges. That isn't an argument for a hike its an argument that there's room to cut.

Productivity Is Rising, and Jobs Don't Show Up in CPI

This is the structural reason the old models are continuously wrong. Output per hour is climbing so the same wage growth produces less price pressure than it used to. Unit labor costs are the only labor number that actually feeds prices and they're tiny. Unit labor costs rose just 0.5% over the last four quarters. That's wage growth net of productivity and it's one of the lowest-pressure labor-cost backdrops in decades. The entire labor-cost pressure in this economy right now is half a percent.

Productivity is running well above the prior cycle. Output per hour is up 2.8% YoY and across the current cycle since late 2019 it's grown at a 2.1% annual pace versus 1.5% in the prior one. More output per worker means a given wage gain gets diluted across more production. Workers are also taking the smallest slice on record as labors share of output has fallen to about 54% which is the lowest since the series began in 1947. When labor can't capture its own productivity gains it has no leverage to drive a wage-price spiral. Those gains are flowing to margin and to owners not into a self-reinforcing pay loop.

Here's the CPI mechanism point the bears keep skipping. A strong jobs number isn't an input to the price index. CPI measures what consumers pay. The only path from jobs to prices runs through wages and then through unit labor costs and both of those are calm. The bears are reacting to a number that doesn't even feed the thing they're afraid of and a big reason is AI. The productivity increase correlates to AI tools getting embedded across business functions and it's also tempering wage demands because workers feel they have less leverage. Both of those push disinflation not inflation. This is the supply-side story Warsh was gesturing at and its showing up in the hard data.

Standing Still Is Already Tightening

This is the piece many individuals get backwards and Bill Ackman @BillAckman has been one of the clearest voices on it. What hits the economy isn't the nominal rate it's the real rate which is the nominal rate minus inflation. As inflation falls and the Fed holds nominal rates flat the real rate climbs all by itself. The Fed gets tighter while doing nothing. Here is the actual math behind it. The effective fed funds rate is about 3.63% and if you use the real-time inflation read of 1.81% the real fed funds rate is already running near 1.8% and it's rising as oil-driven inflation rolls off. That is a restrictive setting and it gets more restrictive every week the disinflation continues.

So the framing of “hold versus hike” is wrong from the start. Holding is a passive tightening. If the Fed wants policy to stay roughly where it is in real terms while inflation comes down it has to cut just to stand still. Two cuts in the back half don't really ease policy so much as keep it from grinding tighter into a slowing economy.

The Real Recession Risk Is the Refinancing Wall

A lot of debt was termed out at near-zero during the pandemic and now it has to be refinanced into a much higher rate. The wall is real and it's hitting now as roughly $1.35 trillion of non-financial corporate debt matures in 2026 and has to be refinanced. S&P counts about $7.3 trillion of rated corporate debt maturing over the next three years with close to $1.5 trillion of that speculative-grade which is the most exposed.

In todays environment the rate gap between where debt was issued and where it is refinanced at is brutal. Much of this paper was issued in the ultra-low window of 2020 and 2021. Refinancing it today means rolling low-coupon debt into 6% and higher. On the commercial real estate side loans struck at roughly 4.1% to 4.7% are refinancing near 6.5% and over $1.26 trillion of CRE debt matures through 2027.

Based on Goldmans math, for every extra dollar a company spends on interest as it refinances it tends to cut about 10 cents of capital spending and about 20 cents of labor costs. Goldman has framed forced refinancing at elevated rates as something that can run into thousands of job losses a month and it scales higher the longer rates stay up. Now follow the chain to the recession call because higher refi cost leads to cuts in capex and headcount which causes unemployment to increase and rising unemployment is the single most reliable leading indicator of recession. Recessions are what produce real bear markets so holding rates too high here isn't a neutral wait-and-see stance. It's actively loading risk onto the most leveraged third of corporate America.

The Consumer Is Tapped Out at Record Carrying Costs

The same rate that squeezes corporate refinancing lands directly on a household that's already stretched thin. Total credit card debt sits at $1.25 trillion and the average APR on cards carrying a balance is north of 21% which is roughly 500 basis points above where it was before COVID. Nearly half of cardholders carry a balance and 61% of the ones that carry debt have been stuck there for at least a year. Credit Card rates, auto loans near 7.5%%, and floating-rate consumer debt all move with the Fed. A hike pulls more money out of household budgets and hands it to interest payments which slows spending and feeds right back into the slowdown that's already underway. You don't tighten the screws on a consumer who's putting groceries on a 22% card to fight an oil spike that's already deflating.

Maximum Employment Matters More Than 2% Right Now

This is the philosophical core of my position and it's a dual-mandate argument not a dovish wish. The Fed is charged with both price stability and maximum employment. With underlying inflation near target and the labor market on the fragile side of the ledger employment is the binding constraint right now. The overshoot is also the wrong kind to fight with rates. Rate hikes work by crushing demand. They do nothing about a closed shipping strait or a war premium in crude. Holding rates punishingly high to offset an energy spike just destroys demand and jobs while doing nothing to the actual source of the price pressure which is already reversing on its own.

The asymmetry is the whole point. An energy spike self-corrects when supply returns and supply is returning. A cracked labor market does not self-correct. Once layoffs start and unemployment turns up it feeds on itself. The costlier mistake by far is staying too tight and letting the maturity wall push unemployment higher not easing a few months early into a supply shock that's fading.

Keep in mind that two percent is a target not a ceiling to defend at any cost. Underlying inflation by trimmed-mean PCE, the kind of core measure Warsh has favored is already running around 2.3%. Treating a temporary energy-driven headline number as a reason to risk the employment mandate gets the cost-benefit exactly backward. With pay up 3.4% and prices up more than that households are losing ground in real terms and the fastest way to ease that squeeze is to let energy roll over and stop tightening into a slowdown.

The Case for Two Cuts in the Back Half of 2026

When you put all of this together the path is obvious. As the oil shock rolls off and the real-time data confirms inflation running near or below 2% the real fed funds rate is climbing on its own. Two 25 basis point cuts in the back half which would take the funds rate to roughly 3.0% to 3.25% would do three things at once. They'd keep real policy from grinding tighter into a slowdown, take pressure off the refinancing wall before it forces layoffs, and give a labor market that's already cooling at the edges room to firm up instead of cracking.

This is insurance and the timing is the whole point. The Sahm-rule dynamic is brutal because once unemployment starts climbing it tends to climb fast. By the time the data confirms a recession it's too late to prevent it. You cut before the margin-to-layoffs chain starts not after. Waiting for the official CPI to prove disinflation means waiting 45 days past the point the real-time data already showed it and acting only once the jobs are already gone. There's also a tailwind that gives the Fed cover to ease and that's productivity. Warsh framed AI as American ingenuity and spent real time on the supply side today.

David Sacks @DavidSacks has been pounding the table that AI was 75% of GDP growth in the first quarter and that AI capex alone is a 2.5% tailwind to growth this year that is likely going to climb past 3% next year. This is before you even count the productivity gains downstream. A real productivity boom raises potential output and lowers the neutral rate which is exactly the 1990s setup where the Fed could run easier policy without lighting up inflation. Warsh said it himself: we don't face a cruel choice between jobs and prices. You can have strong growth, low inflation, and strong employment together. That's an argument for easing into the boom, not choking it.

Give Warsh Credit, This Was a Good for the Institution

I thought Warsh ran a strong first meeting and the direction he's taking the Fed is the right one. The single best thing he announced was the data task force. Warsh said out loud what people like me have been saying for years. Most of the data the Fed steers by comes from old-fashioned survey methods which is a national accounts picture that in his words looks very little like the U.S. economy in 2026 with response rates that have collapsed and questions written for a different era. He wants real contemporaneous data instead of what he called an echo of history. This is the entire ballgame because if the Fed had been looking at real-time inflation today they'd have seen 1.81% not reacted to a 4.2% echo. The fact that Truflation already publishes a Warsh trimmed mean index tells you the real-time world is ready for him.

Bringing in outside experts is the right instinct also. Warsh was explicit that he isn't outsourcing decisions and he's widening the aperture starting from first principles and forcing what he called a family fight among smart people before the committee decides. That's how you fight groupthink and it's a sharp break from a Fed that too often moved as a herd. Dropping forward guidance and letting markets price off data is also correct even if traders hated it. Warsh's logic is right because when the markets just reflect the Fed's words back at the Fed the central bank binds itself to the single most valuable signal it has which is market prices reacting to the real economy. We need less hand holding and more information from industry experts.

I support his decision to decline submitting his own dot as dots create false precision and fake commitment. Warsh noted that everyone submitted them with pencils and big erasers while not hearing much conviction in the room. Treating the dots as low-conviction guesses rather than promises is honest and it quietly undercuts the nine hawks more than anything I could write. By the new Chair's own account those dots are pencil marks not commitments.

The Experts I'd Ask To Participate on These Task Forces

Jamie Dimon belongs on the data task force. Nobody on earth has better real-time economic data than JPMorgan. They see card spending, deposit flows, and loan demand across tens of millions of households and businesses as it happens. That's the actionable data Warsh keeps describing and Dimon has preached real-time data discipline for years. Dimon does lean hawkish on inflation. He's the one calling it the skunk at the party and warning that deficits and global remilitarization are structurally inflationary. You want a rigorous skeptic who stress-tests the optimistic case and you want his data pipes in the building. He's also been clear that chipping away at Fed independence backfires and pushes rates higher which is the right principle to have in the room.

Brad Jacobs belongs right next to Dimon on the data task force considering he spent spent his whole career building real-time read-throughs on the industrial economy, from United Rentals to XPO to GXO and now QXO in building-products distribution. Freight volumes, equipment rentals, and construction-materials demand are some of the cleanest leading indicators we have and they move weeks before the official series catch up. Jacobs is also one of the best capital allocators alive so he understands exactly how a rate move ripples through the cost of capital for real companies making real decisions. Put him where the Fed is hunting for faster, ground-level signals on activity.

David Friedberg @friedberg belongs on the data task force with them considering he is a data scientist at his core. He built The Climate Corporation by turning real-time weather and agricultural data into priced risk and then sold it for around a billion dollars. He thinks in predictive models and live data feeds not quarterly surveys which is precisely the upgrade Warsh is after. If the Fed wants new analytic methods and new sources Friedberg has spent his career building exactly that.

Bill Ackman @BillAckman belongs on the inflation frameworks task force. Ackman's real-rate insight is precisely the frame that group needs. As inflation falls and nominal rates hold, real rates are quietly rising so the framework has to think in real terms not nominal ones. He also called the oil-driven inflation correctly as a war-driven, weeks-not-months phenomenon, and he's been right that the back half sets up well on AI and infrastructure spending once the war resolves. He thinks about the rate that reaches the real economy which is what a modern inflation framework should be built around.

Mark Cuban @mcuban belongs on the inflation frameworks task force too and not for the reason people would guess. With Cost Plus Drugs he rebuilt drug pricing from the ground up by stripping out the middlemen and showing exactly how much opacity sits between a product's true cost and what Americans actually pay. Healthcare is one of the stickiest and hardest-to-model pieces of core services inflation and Cuban has hands-on knowledge of how those prices get built. Add the visibility he has into pricing and costs across hundreds of small businesses from his investing and he brings a view of inflation that no academic model captures.

Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath belongs on the inflation frameworks task force. For years he's hammered the same pointthat you can't talk about inflation without talking about the money supply and the liquidity the Fed pumps into the system. Whatever you make of his individual calls, that monetarist lens, where the money comes from and where it goes is exactly the first-principles question this task force is meant to wrestle with. He'll push the group to start at the plumbing instead of the symptoms.

David Sacks @DavidSacks belongs on the productivity and jobs task force. This one is almost too obvious because that task force is literally about AI's impact on output and employment. Sacks now co-chairs the President's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology after running AI policy for the administration. He's the sharpest voice on AI as a supply-side productivity force which is the same lens Warsh used when he called AI American ingenuity. Put him where the Fed is trying to figure out how a general purpose technology reshapes potential output and let him make the supply-side case in full.

Elon Musk @elonmusk belongs alongside Sacks on the productivity and jobs task force and he might be the single most important voice in the room for it. Nobody is pushing the frontier of automation, robotics, and applied AI harder from Tesla's factories to Optimus to xAI. If the Fed wants to understand how a general purpose technology actually reshapes output per worker and the demand for labor he's living it at industrial scale every single day. He also runs one of the largest real-time information networks on the planet in X, which the data task force could borrow from as well.

Peter Thiel @peterthiel belongs on the productivity and jobs task force. His entire intellectual project is whether technology is actually delivering progress or whether we've been stuck in stagnation dressed up as innovation and that is the productivity debate in a single sentence. Between Founders Fund and Palantir he's been funding and building the frontier of applied technology for two decades. Drop him in the room where the Fed is trying to decide whether AI is a real productivity break or just more capex and let him pressure-test the optimism.

Stanley Druckenmiller @standuquesne belongs on the balance sheet task force and frankly the Fed should have been listening to him for years. He's one of the greatest macro investors who ever lived. He reads the bond market and liquidity conditions better than almost anyone breathing and he's been blunt that the Fed misjudged both the easing and the tightening cycle. The balance sheet group is wrestling with the ample-reserves regime and how the Fed's footprint moves markets, and Druckenmiller has traded around exactly that plumbing his whole career. You want his read on what the balance sheet is doing to financial conditions.

Larry Fink belongs right next to Druck on the balance sheet task force. He runs BlackRock which is the largest asset manager on earth and the Fed's balance sheet is mostly Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities. These are the exact markets BlackRock lives in every day. When the Fed needed help running its asset purchases in 2020 it called BlackRock so none of this is theoretical for Fink. Add the real-time risk lens of the Aladdin platform and he brings both the market plumbing and the data this group needs.

Patrick Bet-David @patrickbetdavid belongs on the communications task force. Warsh kept circling back to the problem of reaching regular people, the person in the milk aisle watching prices climb faster than their paycheck, and that's exactly the gap PBD fills. He built one of the biggest finance and business media platforms in the country by explaining money in plain language and he came up through financial services so he knows the material cold. A central bank that wants to talk to households instead of only to bond traders should have someone in the room who knows how to do it.

That's a mixed bench by background and worldview and that's the point. Warsh said he wants task forces that can have a real family fight before the committee decides.

My Bottom Line

The Fed held rates in place which was fine. The nine officials reaching for hikes are making a classic late-cycle error. They're tightening into a supply shock that's already reversing, treating a strong jobs number as inflationary when unit labor costs are running at half a percent, and threatening to detonate the refinancing wall which is a recession risk. The real-time data says inflation is at 1.81%, oil is in free fall, wages are trailing prices, and real rates are rising on their own. The right move is to discuss when to cut rates and if one or two cuts is appropriate. Warsh got the big things right including the real-time data push, the outside experts, the honesty about forward guidance and the dots. Now he has to win the argument inside the room against nine people reading last quarter's oil prices off a lagging chart.

[Not Jerome Powell @alifarhat79]

Warren Buffett watching Elon Musk make his entire net worth in 3 hours

[Samuel Tong @Samuel_404nf]

Turns out he's the free money to others 😅

[⚡️The Traveling Trader⚡️ @ZTheTrader]

Someone bet $1,000,000 on Spain to make $86,000. Spain didn't win so he lost the $1,000,000.

If these retarded sports betters knew about options selling their minds would be blown.

[Samuel Tong @Samuel_404nf]

@joecarlsonshow $sofi, $duol

[Samuel Tong @Samuel_404nf]

@YodaStockInvest Bmnr, pypl

[Samuel Tong @Samuel_404nf]

@Tim_Sweeney_TAR Too bad $sofi is not available at my country, otherwise would have signed up immediately

[Samuel Tong @Samuel_404nf]

@adamkhootrader What about $sndk?