Abdulrhman Alharbi

Sharing my insights of Global Markets both Macro and Micro environments.
Publishing business development insights that aim to help business founders thrive.

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

The purpose of creating this account:
I publish one thing: how companies and markets actually work . Not takes. Deep dives — global business growth strategies, macro, micro, and valuations.

Every piece names the real movers and drivers behind of the given topic, weighs how sustainable their advantage going forward, maps the challenges they face (macro shifts, micro dynamics, supply-chain exposure), and lays out how those challenges get solved.

What you'll get here:

📊 Macro (top-down) — weekly and monthly reads on major economies. What the leading indicators say, and what it means for positioning.

🏢 Micro (bottom-up) — company and sector deep dives across global markets. What drives the business, what it's worth, where it breaks and what are the potential solutions.

📌 Key events — covered as they land.

The real mission: bridging the global economical perspectives with how they translate to the success of local business — and building the judgment to understand both.

Follow along and DM if you have any topics in mind to explore.

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

@pmitu Dividing the challenges into incremental wins keeps me moving forward when the actual vision feels difficult to deal with. Small steps, sustained momentum.

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

@zerohedge The whipsaw between tariff chaos and AI safety concerns really captures where we are right now markets can rally while the underlying policy framework remains completely unsettled.

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

AI capex: the market started charging for proof

The four biggest AI spenders guided to roughly $725B of 2026 capex, up about 77% in a year. The market did not punish the number. It punished the ones who could not show the return.

Microsoft added about $450B of market value in a single session, on Azure up 43% and a $678B contracted book
Amazon rose 10%, with AWS operating margin up 520 basis points year on year excluding a one-off
Meta fell about 10%, with $31.1B of quarterly capex against $784M of free cash flow

Same spending story. Opposite outcomes, inside 48 hours.

That is the repricing. For two years capex was read as conviction, and the whole sector traded together on it. This quarter it was read as a claim that has to be settled in the margin line, and three of the four settled it.

The chain runs on from there. $725B of spend becomes depreciation on a five to six year schedule, and that lands on reported earnings in 2027 and 2028 whether or not utilization holds. The physical constraint is not chips. It is power, HBM memory and advanced packaging. Amazon said as much when it moved its guide from $200B to $220B and named the cost of memory.

So the question the next two quarters answer is not how much they spend. It is whether the margin proof keeps arriving on the schedule the depreciation already runs on.

Source: Company Q2 2026 results and guidance (reported 22-30 July 2026); Epoch AI hyperscaler capex tracker

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

@BullTheoryio This basically turns the yield curve into a policy tool without needing Fed approval, though it only works until those bills need to be rolled over in a higher rate environment.

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

@ekwufinance The irony of having record export capacity but choosing to keep it stagnant because of policy uncertainty really captures where we are right now.

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

@GlobalMktObserv https://t.co/SUm2WAv0uq

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

A national stock index is now more volatile than Bitcoin.

KOSPI year-to-date return volatility: 63%. Bitcoin: 48%. The next country on the list is Pakistan at 35%.

Every institutional risk model treats a developed-market equity index as the low-volatility bucket and crypto as the high one. Korea inverted that, and models reprice with a lag.

The mechanism is structural and boring. Samsung and SK Hynix are more than half the index, so the KOSPI is not a country. It is two AI memory stocks with a flag on it.

The Korea Exchange has tripped its market-wide circuit breaker nine times this year. Last year it tripped zero.

Concentration does not raise your return. It raises your variance and calls it conviction.

Source: Bloomberg, data as of July 31 2026; Korea Exchange.

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

@ekwufinance Market participants with capital at risk consistently reveal the underlying reality, while futures traders arbitrage headlines and sentiment. Shipowners price what's materially unfolding in the strait, not what might be announced tomorrow.

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

@stats_feed Honestly, it sounds like they've just figured out corporate culture before we did.

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

@LynAldenContact The real signal to noise problem is that fear gets more engagement than nuance, so we're stuck in an endless loop of recycled panic about accounting entries.

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

@SCapStrategist Market participants with capital at risk consistently reveal the underlying reality, while futures traders arbitrage headlines and sentiment. Shipowners price what's materially unfolding in the strait, not what might be announced tomorrow.

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

Every founder wants the beautiful product. That is exactly why the ugly one wins.

A coffee shop keeps you by being loved. A storage unit keeps you because leaving is annoying.

You win a boring customer once. https://t.co/FDaj7mfWem

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

@KobeissiLetter The gap between gas price concerns and AI worries really shows what's hitting people's wallets right now versus what's still mostly speculation about the future.

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

Crypto: liquidity left before price did

Everyone is watching crypto prices. The tape that matters is volume, and it has quietly collapsed.

Daily volume across the 44 spot exchanges Kaiko tracks: about $15 billion last week, the lowest of 2026
In February, two separate days cleared $100 billion
The average daily trend now sits near $20 billion, roughly half of where it was in December 2025

Thin volume is not a neutral state. It is the condition under which a normal-sized seller becomes a price event.

And what depth remains is concentrated. The six largest exchanges carry more than 60% of it.

Liquidity leaves before price does. It is the least dramatic warning a market gives, which is why it is the one that gets ignored.

Source: Kaiko.

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

@INArteCarloDoss https://t.co/31ix5FUIdL

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

Lets all remember that today it TACO Tuesday.

Frankly, now every day is TACO day.

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

Lets all remember that today it TACO Tuesday.

Frankly, now every day is TACO day.

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

@kurtsaltrichter https://t.co/RlPgrjzSjG

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

Big Tech used to fund AI with its own cash. Now it borrows.

2024: $17B
2025: $108B
2026 so far: $244B

AI notes has gone from ~1% of the investment-grade market to ~18% this year.

Debt-funded capex hands bondholders a vote. When that vote turns to "slow down," the spending that fuels the entire chip boom moderates with it.

The moment outside money funds the buildout is the moment it stops being the buyers' choice.

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

@SternDrewCrypto @yutokanzakireal Nothing says "free market" quite like two central banks coordinating to make sure nobody actually sells anything.

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

@BullTheoryio The chip sector carrying the entire market on its back today while everyone else just went along for the ride.

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

The round trip: record selling, then the biggest buy since 2022

Hedge funds sold US tech at the fastest pace in the history of Goldman's prime dataset. Then they bought it back in one week.

Through mid-July: net sellers of US tech in six of eight weeks, the largest retreat in a series running over a decade
Magnificent 7 weight in hedge fund US equity books: 21.5% in January, 14.5% by July
Week ending July 30: the largest weekly net buy of US tech since December 2022, with Mag 7 bought four days running

De-risking that reverses in five sessions was never a change of view. It was a change of exposure.

David Nicoski put the standing risk plainly this week: technology is around 42% of US market weight, and everything the crowd sold to fund the tech trade has been outperforming for four to five weeks.

Positioning that round-trips this fast is telling you how quickly it can leave again.

Source: Goldman Sachs prime brokerage data; David Nicoski (interview, Aug 2026).

[Abdulrhman Alharbi @InsightTogo]

The most leveraged stock on earth is a memory chipmaker

The most leveraged single stock on earth is not Nvidia or Tesla. It is SK Hynix.

SK Hynix: about $5.5 billion in global leveraged and inverse ETF assets, the most of any stock
Micron and Nvidia next, near $5.1 billion and $4.8 billion
Semiconductors in total: about $21 billion
Tesla, the largest non-chip name: about $3.7 billion

Leveraged funds rebalance daily to hold their exposure ratio. When the underlying falls they sell into the fall. Not because anyone changed their mind, but because the prospectus says so.

Korea already ran this experiment. Leveraged ETF assets there went from $5 billion to over $40 billion in six months, and leveraged funds plus two chip stocks became more than 70% of daily volume.

Price-insensitive selling does not care what a chip is worth. That is the entire point of it.

Source: Bloomberg.