22V Research Webinar: AI Macro Nexus — Digital Scarcity and Trading Setup (April 22, 2026)

All right, we're waiting for people to come in so I'll start in a couple minutes You You All right, I'll I'll get started looks like we've gotten to critical mass And just so you know the webinar will go up on the subscriber website Later today, so I Want to make sure because I've gotten a lot of questions on this and I'm actually doing a bunch of presentations Around the country and I've shown this slide a bunch and it tends to freak people out But I'm gonna keep emphasizing that this is where we are on the right hand side here despite the fact that Everyone gets excited when the S&P hits new all-time highs and everything goes on I keep saying every week and I'll keep saying it I'm sure all year We're in a version of the 1970s for the digital economy We've got shortages showing up everywhere the shortages lead to more geopolitical risk in terms of Horting and gathering things which we're absolutely gonna see with more conflicts That is the view that I have and it's all around the fight for Artificial intelligence and there are more shortages picking up every day So if you really spend time on this slide pause it go through it All of it to me is going to be happening because artificial intelligence is the most disruptive force we have seen There's ways to invest in it That's what I'm trying to get you guys on the subscriber list to be able to pick the names that show up But I just want to continue to emphasize that it's gonna be a pendulum shift of volatility So I wanted to just show Things move so fast that the white line here is where I sent out The piece where my turbulence model was shaking and that was because even during this time sitting there all-time highs We were getting a lot of break in correlations between things we were getting kind of a breath shakedown and Then we went into this period From early Feb into the end of Feb so basically for the entire month into March Just a lot of turbulence it showed up in in returns of anything that was long short We just saw a lot of back-and-forth and a lot of Risk and then all of a sudden with the S&P down close to 10% for the year right here The pendulum move the other way all on the back of some news on the straight But basically right here is before we had anything on the straight So I just want to make sure that as you guys see this you're gonna kind of go through the field These are daily returns on the S&P That we're gonna continue to see these shakes now since the Lowe's on March 30th This is what has happened. Semis are up 28% the S&P's up 11 So this has been driven again by AI and by the semi side You also have tech hardware and then you have kind of the bounces from you know the the names in the matter the hyperscalers Oracle the banks in terms of the private equity side and the software names But again led by the AI trade and to just put it into Context if you believe that the reason that the market is rallied into some degree. I think this is is the truth. It's because earnings estimates were actually taken up over the course of This year so despite the war and I think what's interesting is the fact that it's been three areas materials energy and tech so obviously energy and materials are directly related to the supply shortages and the issue in Iran But when you take it further tech is semis Micron is responsible for 51% of the entire earnings revision for the S&P When you add on add in Broadcom you're dealing with 60% alone is coming. You've got SanDisk at 3 So again, this is cap-weighted. This just shows how much of this is Actually happen relative to the semi trade if you want to take it further Let's just go through the earnings for Q1 in terms of year over year and what you have is the mag 7x Nvidia this is the mag 7. This is the 493 But if you take out Nvidia so basically what you're dealing with is these are the returns you actually have the 493 outperforming The mag 7x Nvidia which includes the hyperscalers if you go through the top contributors to the earnings growth This is not the revisions This is just the year-over-year growth and you can see SanDisk, Micron, Eli, Lilly, Broadcom and Nvidia These four are all part of my thematic basket. SanDisk is not only because it's too correlated to memory for me Here the hyperscalers relative to the S&P. So we're we're back Made back a lot of the losses, but as you see as we go through the hyperscalers relative to the S&P Is unchanged since 2020 and I think still it is a good Prox or a good way to be have something on the short side Relative to the thematic basket I have I'll show some of those Semis are now 16% of the S&P 500 Software is only 9% now I just want to make sure people realize that of the S&P 500 16% is semis But three names make up 75% of that 16% those three names are Nvidia Broadcom and Micron So you're dealing with three companies that make up the largest level two GIC of the S&P 500 This is starting to look a little bit like the 1970s like I said in terms of the digital economy And if you think that this is not something new here's where software was on a market cap basis uh relative to semis so when we came out of Kind of the fall we were at four trillion for software We were just above two trillion. This was kind of in the peak bubble point of 2021 For software. This is where the private credit guys and Bitcoin and everything was making their highs before the fed started raising rates Now what's happened is semis are up to almost 10 trillion dollars while software is back to five People continue to try to take the other side of this via smh versus IGV I think this is the very early stages still and I'll go through why it's not because of necessarily Nvidia But it is because of a lot of the other seminames in the broadening out that's been happening My thematic basket with the names since the lows is up 24 percent while the S&P is up 11.35 Again, I'm bringing this up just to highlight The types of names that are driving this are related all to the AI and the agentic rollout Which is what all of my names are Are based on If you're looking for what is going to cause the next pendulum shift the other direction We're going to have a pullback in the market and the question is what's going to be driving it We'll be earning slowing. We'll be recession fears. We'll be rising rate fears. We'll be inflation fears. We'll be AI risks But we're definitely going to have things that go on So i'm going to go through some of the ones that seem the most obvious from a growth perspective and earnings perspective This is a little bit alarming. Um, this is the city surprise index for the g10 So again, people are focused on how us growth is doing which is fine but if the If the g10 as a whole and in particular asia from an export perspective runs into problems from the shortages In iran or anything that goes on from the cost basis It will impact earnings for the non Tech companies at this point. So I would just pay attention. This is the s&p over that city surprise index over the course of the last two years You've got a huge disconnect that's come on the growth is slowing around the globe And yet the s&p's gone higher. So whenever you get those kind of alligator draws I think it's important to pay attention, especially if the straight remains closed From the inflation basis still not getting enough attention. We are going to have a we have a forecast right now on the cleveland fed now cast for basically point five for the monthly cpi number. We just got Uh, a 1% number. You've got the April, uh, that would take april year over year to 3.6 from 3.3 And core pce would go up to 3.2. So again, you're running into where if you get surprises on the upside You're probably at this point dealing with some risk from the inflation front and what that's going to mean for the market I'll go through a bunch of different issues of where this fits in. Here are the the one year inflation swaps So one thing I just want to bring up. They've gone up to here and they've just gone sideways So I think the market is waiting to see if we get a move higher The reason I care so much about this as I go through things is that we will be taking The cpi year over year above three month bills or fed funds rate and the question is will the fed and new chair remain Uh, let's say on the side of focusing more on the labor market Even though and I'm not going to show it this week The labor market has seen strength the last four weeks of the adp weekly Are kind of getting you to the point where we could see an upside surprise at least for a month on the non-farm payrolls if you start getting surprises on the non-farm payrolls and you have oil staying up at these levels and the inflation number is going higher and The question is how long can this stay so this is two year rates relative to oil Again, I think this is just a nice chart to look at. I'm not saying we should go up here on two year rates or that we will But I do think you have to put in perspective that despite the fact that oil Is not going to 150 and all of the doom gloom side from the oil Analyst it doesn't mean we're not going to have shortages and we won't have persistent inflation because there are disruptions and those disruptions are going to feed through We didn't get a big bounce in igv So this is another risk to the market is we haven't gotten rid of the ai is going to disrupt a lot of market cap And what's going to happen with that market cap when a lot of the public companies? And that's obviously what igv is on the software side Has impact on the private companies and a lot of those private companies are part of the private equity and private credit basket So I don't think the private credit side is out of the woods We're in a quiet period just because we don't get more redemptions that they have to deal with We'll see what happens on the next one, but I think igv has not Come back. We have seen financials bounce Not so much on the private equity side. Those names are still sitting close to the lows But when you look on a relative basis, no budge in financials relative to the s&p So down here is financials relative to the s&p. You did get above the two-in-a-day moving average in financials At least as of now just barely we'll see if that continues But I do think that the private credit in the financial side is going to show up again Here is where the bigger risk is I think I think everyone should spend some time given that this is the first time for a lot of Traders and tech people in retail on the concept of force majeure We're starting to get more and more signs and this came out last night You've had the helium situation that people have talked about but there seems to be at least for the near term Enough helium and helium in the u.s. That can deal with this This one's a little bit more difficult from the short period of time that I've gone through it And I think it's worth doing this is on the photo material supply chain. This gets into the chemicals For the bonding according to multiple industry sources on the 22nd major Japanese photo material suppliers have since the previous evening Either already communicator or scheduled to communicate the raw material sourcing disruptions These companies were notified yesterday evening holding internal meetings today and are scheduling to formally inform their customers tomorrow So the Japanese company is applying these materials to samsung sk high necks. Basically you could get to points where These companies won't be able to meet the production side And I think that's where things start to go when you have bottlenecks remember again from kovid Bottle necks Might lead to higher prices, but they might also lead to lower volumes if you can't produce anything Another potential risk Any day now deep seek is going to announce version 4 And the big question is if you got a chance to listen to the jensen yuang Dworkash interview he has warned that huawei chips could be The only ones used in the deep seek model So if deep seek actually meets the numbers that have been rumored and they get to opus 4.6 levels without using us chips That could be a deep seek moment too Hackings are going to happen this year guys, so This came out last night You've got more and more issues where Mythos and that's what this is related to Uh Distillation from that so I just think we've reached a point With the mythos situation with what's going on with the anthropic with all the chinese models being able to stay close That risk is starting to show up again, particularly if the open source models are able to deal with the issue that we have now So the reason that I keep saying that in the case of memory and cpus and gpus and Data centers and power that this is the very early stage You have to remember that it was only six months ago that investors were all worried about a capex bubble Where are we going to get the revenues in? All of these fears have been replaced since opus 4.5 and opus and open claw and that's only six months In six months of bringing this out to where the agent side is going and as someone who uses agents all day long We've reached An obvious place of compute shortage Anyone I talk to who I know is around the same age who who uses it the same way I do on the investment side Has reached the same point that you're getting stopped and timed out all the time on perplexity on claude This is a perpetual problem. The costs have gone higher on open claw. There are no Uh mac minis mac studios So even if I wanted to go take the latest kimmy k 2.6 model which is equivalent to opus 4.6 And save money and download it I got to go get more mac minis and more mac studios and there's just no way so I got to start looking into vps This is a reality from an investment standpoint We do not have enough compute and the agent side just started so there is no capex bubble There isn't enough supply. So just as you're going through this this build out is in the very early stages I think we're transitioning into this quadrant now I'm bringing this up partly because for the people on here who You know have joined because of bitcoin and because of crypto This is the quadrant where returns accelerate for bitcoin. We're seeing a mini breakout now I expect this to be the place where we're going to be for the rest of the year now for that to happen We need to have negative real rates and we need the fed to remain on hold Or ease That's when bitcoin has created basically all of its returns But for the mic man whenever it's on hold or easing it's good But negative real rates are better and negative real rates in this case are just measured by three month rates relative to you over your cpi Because of bottlenecks and shortages and a fed on hold and a need to continue to build out the ai side I find it unlikely that once cpi year over year gets above 4% that it's going to come down quickly Part of the trade outside of bitcoin is silver. So I've written about silver I just want to highlight the relationship between silver relative to gold and the semiconductors. So you've had a lag here Silver is a component as I've written about in everything related to ai everything related to semiconductors Everything related to defense spending everything. It's a critical mineral It is absolutely necessary. It is a pro is also part of the energy complex because of its solar needs And most importantly remember china Restricted exports in january at the turn of the year this went out this happened december 31st And last month was china the record imports of silver for china Both for solar demand and retail and again I think solar demand around the globe for energy dependence is going to increase Silver needs are going to go up And you've got in the us even A combination of republican states. This was out yesterday Proposed legislation to allow gold and silver to be used as legal tender Again, I think the inflation side particularly for the commodity stuff forget core inflation for a second You cannot get away from rising food prices. You cannot get away from rising gas prices So the issue comes in if you're if the ability of getting a house is lower slightly If services are lower slightly That doesn't help on this front So again, I think the issue that comes up is this difference between headline cpi and core cpi is a risk For the market, but in particular I think that puts us in that ai regime that I said at the beginning So the scary photo or image at the beginning This is the way in every single part of the thematics. I have the ai regime is defined by strong adoption That's what we're seeing clearly through uh Anthropic severe compute and power constraints. That is what we're feeling now The continued build out regardless because that's needed to satisfy this so cap x if anything just goes higher A rising focus on efficiency and that's what a lot of the points in the packaging side is and a lot of the things that I've mentioned From jensen yuang it favors power packaging optical cooling and full rack infrastructure Those are the thematic baskets that were created They were created because of my belief that adoption would increase because of the agentic world That's exactly what we've seen that was not commonplace. You are just starting to see the impact. Here is the visual This is the cloud side and I just want you to realize we are in a shortage now where we're focused on tokens per watt That's where this is behind it I'm just telling you the edge is coming So whatever you think and the reason I say it's the first inning we have to get through the ability of providing to the cloud But with hackings and with all the things that come with it We have to move more to the edge think mac mini o mac mini think uh mac studio think open source There is a tremendous amount of impacts that have to happen from the enterprise data. This is the reason why i'm so focused on palantir All of these themes fit this and here's what they look like These are the five thematic baskets the rack chemical moat optical package power all of them Correlated to some degree. They've all gone now. The s&p has done this too. These are all the from the march one the leader here is uh Is optical uh fiber and then you have the rack now the rack includes things like hpe and del and a whole bunch of other names I just bring that up because these things are moving now if you think that's the end of the move This is my thematic basket relative to the s&p. This is a five-year chart This just broke out of a five-year top. This is not the end of something. This is the beginning of something So when you look at these names and go well, these are overdone. I can't get involved There are going to be violent pullbacks in this for sure any of the things I mentioned earlier are going to cause it to pull back But these are the types of names you're not going to see home builder charts look like this You're not going to see auto charts look like this. You're not going to see amazon look like that You're not going to see any of this stuff look like this these names are basically scarcity names And they're in the power play if you want to look at them rep the theme relative to the hyperscalers It's barely budged. Uh, it's moved up this year But you've still got an entry point if you want to use the hyperscalers as a hedge as a reminder again Here's the s&p up 11 and a half. Here's the thematic basket up 24 percent Here are the names the top 15 names since march 30th. All of these names are in The basket. I don't know how many calls I did on soy tech when people asked for Uh, a name that could double it's that was when it was in the 30s and it's now in 115 This was from in the january and february period when I talked about that one A lot of these names have broken out a lot of them are there marvell Obviously, I wrote a piece about not that long ago when it was around 90 bucks It's now up there. That was about three weeks ago I just want to use invidia as an example So if you believe that as i'm talking about that the end of last year was the end of the iq building The cloud building the pre-training building that invidia benefited the most This was the correlation from the launch of chat gbt from invidia to s&p. It looks like they've moved exactly the same You could have owned either one, but the reality is This is normalized from that date invidia relative to the s&p the difference 1300 percent So I bring that up because when you're looking at the thematic baskets I would expect a similar type out performance not of 1300 necessarily over the next four years But I think you want these things and think through where they are They're building in what's coming and that's why I did the visual in terms of the market cap This is my uh my uh clawed bot or my open claw And I just asked it right before I did this to do some calculations while I was putting together the video Give me the average market cap of the names of my thematic basket. It's 188. What's the median though? It's 50. This is heavily skewed because of broad common invidia being in there Even though it's an equal weight basket. I just wanted to bring up those two things one How I use open claw to do information for me as an assistant if you haven't set it up. You should set it up in number two The the fact that the thematic basket is so geared towards medium size companies not big ones Okay, here's the relative performance of the thematic basket to the s&p And I wanted to do two things it was outperforming before iran Took a little bit of a hit when iran started then it started to go higher Part of the reason it did go back higher is because you have the power component in there too If you want to weight the power component higher you can do that And that's the reason why I gave you guys access to more information Over the course of the weekend So you got the technical dashboard the technical dashboard gives you all of the names broken out by thematics gives you Which ones are in a bullish trend? Which ones are an embarrassed trend? By the theme so that way you can do it. I gave you a video this week that went out april 20th to tell you how to upload that uh, that basket Uh, or the the xl file and then showed in this video how you can go and basically do your own analysis on it So you have the basket you have all the technicals with it. You can watch that video and go through how to do it I gave you the thematic spotlight for this week on two new names cadence and synopsis These are not new names in the basket. They were in there But I wrote a paper to highlight why this was important now because of what jensen uong sent but also When i'm going through the worst performers over three months So these are the names sorted by in the thematic basket that are basically down over the three months About a quarter of the names are down over the three months And you can see which ones they are the battery names in particular have been hit They've rallied dramatically over the course of the last month or at least eos has I think batteries are going to be a major story coming out of the iran situation lithium as well I would highly recommend people spending time on batteries Bitcoin obviously is a bitcoin starting to pick up palantir starting to pick up I did a video on oracle last week where I mentioned palantir as a uh a bounce trade but also Synopsis which I talked about last week which has rallied in the last week and also cadence design So those two parts were part of the thematic uh Spotlight for this week I also sent you over the weekend this video podcast summary now for those of you watching who have said it doesn't work It does work. I've had equal amount of people that does I gave you the instructions on what to do Please take the time Put it into claude ask it. How does how to do it? You don't have to go and ask me just ask it how to do it and trust me all you're doing is saying I got this skill. I want to replicate it. How do I do it? And then I gave you this what I would do is I wrote the spotlight piece Take this link go get the transcript if you can't find the transcript just hit more on the youtube underneath the description It'll give you the transcript copy that transcript Put it into claude like I did here and then type this Ren run the hedge fund analyst tool on this interview transcript in particular focus on what jensen yuwang says about cadence design systems And synopsis and their importance to ai. I am interested specifically in these as potential investments and want you to give me a report on those companies And then it will give you this so the reason I gave you this is so that you can have this What ended up being a 13 page report? using what jensen said and what I wrote and combining them the two of them to basically get the details but also To get all of the things you would want the bottlenecks and leverage points like what other names you can be looking at I do second and third order effects like a santa fe institute graduate Where I basically go through and say give me all the other places on chain one chain two the different places where you could find Other places to invest in outside of the eda analysis that I did There's more pages You know again it gets the 13 you can get into the risk analysis the due diligence questions And it gets into the specifics about each company. I highly recommend when I do these spotlight pieces that you get Bring it in compare it do analysis upload the technical piece as well. I'll the technical Worksheet will be every Friday. I will run it It will give you the latest updates that way if you want to create your own basket out of the names And you only want to do the names that are down year to date And have certain technical criteria that you want to run trust me you can do it that way If you want to make changes to the hedge fund tool, I just wanted to show you an example I want to make some changes to the hedge fund analyst tool. Let's work on it Prompt me with questions on how to make it fit my workflow better That's what I did if you want to change it because you're more of a short-term trader And you want to find some way to have these tools be for catalyst driven then just say you're catalyst driven I want to make it more actionable for now Uh an actionable thing for right now. This is out last night April 22nd I saw it this morning when I got up and video has reportedly visited korean power equipment companies and asked them to design data center infrastructure around an 800 volt class dc architecture according to korean media This is being interpreted as an effort to minimize power conversion losses in order to handle the growth So basically we are at the point where everything related to power you guys have to think about power power power That is where we're short and video is trying to find ways to get more power because We're probably going to have dark gpus this year if we don't get more power So the reason that's important is because this is on their blog. They've talked about this architecture He wants to make sure that he doesn't have dark gpus and that everything is being used now From my side This is directly related to the edge investment universe because on the power side of what he talked about You have to understand that we've got power semiconductors and conversion This is from my edge report that went up this past weekend that you guys have So the edge report has all these verticals as good investments related to the opportunity that's coming in edge And when I say the opportunity that is for autos that is for humanoids that is for On-premise demand that is for data centers built for the enterprises all of that side along with pcs and handsets now what I wanted to do was Do a cross-reference memo between the new news on the power stack which needs power semis And the edge investment and give me the places where they intersect so a 68 company one With the 12 vertical framework and the new news connected to it So you're going to get a report on that at some point With all of the names that benefit from both of those the reason that's important My favorite names to find and give are related to ones that have demand today So think the data center needs are today the power semis are ripping now on the back of the invidious situation, but As their earnings are growing and as they're being brought into it Behind that are the edge coming the humanoids the pc the autos that's not here yet But it's coming in a year in two years in three years. It's also a reason to look at qualcomm I'll probably be doing a spotlight piece on qualcomm next week. Finally last thing for this video I highly recommend spending time on this. I brought in That issue With the shortages from earlier in terms of the chemical companies out of japan Can us chemical suppliers due to having natural gas fill in the supply needs from the shortage that had gone through? It gives you an answer of not all of them, but it also gives you answers as to where it is I would spend the time because I do think us chemical companies Of which a lot of the ones on that list are some of them are japanese. You can go through the chemical moat story They're gonna have pricing power. They probably will have some shortages. The question is how they make it up I think looking for places where energy costs are different in the us first They are the world will lead to some benefits on some of the chemical names That's it for this webinar guys. Thanks for subscribing and there'll be more ideas popping out over the weekend and Some thematics coming out next week. But again, the point of this is there's going to be volatility We are in the violent regime here where we're going to have ups and downs And during the supply shortage thing you want to look for the laggards that are still on this list And right now my favorite things to be looking to reweight towards Are silver and the crypto space with bitcoin and ethereum as well as palantir and some of the other names that I mentioned like cadence Which is still around unchanged for the year in synopsis. That's it for this month. I'll see you guys next month