Stocks for Thoughts
Margin the Foxfollows the money.
A running set of data-driven notes on the biggest trades in the market — what you actually own, the money behind it, and each scary narrative tested against the evidence. Verdict-neutral: the conclusion is downstream of the research, not upstream of it.
My model stepped out of India
On 17 September my India model moved to cash. It dodged about half of the latest leg, not the whole fall. What it was actually reacting to, and the three suspects underneath: oil, the rupee, and IT caught between AI and Washington.
Read the note →Wider than the war
Map the war and the Fed out to 2028 and the 10-year yield centres near 5.1%. History says the road around that middle is three points wide, and the story everyone is watching explains under a third of where in it yields end up. A calibrated probability tree for US yields, and why oil matters more than the Fed for the rest of the G7.
Read the note →Why didn't bonds catch this one?
Oil shocks usually send money into bonds. This one pushed bond prices down instead. Taking the 10-year yield apart: why the move looks like the price of money rather than inflation, what the emergency oil reserve really did, and how the election shapes the odds.
Read the note →Nobody taxes a machine
The market has priced twenty-five trillion dollars on AI taking a cut of the world's wages. Sixty-four per cent of federal revenue is already a tax on those same wages - and the code charges 25.5% to hire a person against 5% to buy the machine that replaces her.
Read the note →Books were never the market
Big Tech has signed $1.09 trillion of data-centre leases that have not started yet. Taking the price apart: what AI has to collect from the world's payroll to pay the rent, and why the Amazon-and-books comparison cuts both ways.
Read the note →The SpaceX Trade
What you actually own at a trillion and a half — three businesses with only one that works, an AI arm losing two dollars on every dollar, and a bet whose loudest branch turns on a single piece of physics: why a data centre in orbit is a server in a thermos. Five ways the price resolves, and the five tells that say which.
Read the note →The India Trade
The fastest-growing big economy, where the two stories everyone argues about — oil and AI — both land on one place: the consumer's wallet. The old IT-outsourcing engine winding down while the new AI-services engine spins up, the −2M vs +4M skilling race that decides the decade, and a live demand tracker for whether the job shock is being absorbed.
Read the note →The Korea Trade
Why the KOSPI is the most concentrated AI bet on Earth — two memory-chip giants at a record ~42% of the whole index, more concentrated than the entire AI theme is of the S&P. The HBM chokepoint behind the pricing power, and how the boom leaks downstream into wages, luxury receipts, and even the central bank's inflation outlook.
Read the note →The UK Trade
In Britain the bond market is the referee — it doesn’t just react to the government, it grades it. The map of the one number everything converges on, the link-by-link chain that turns a leadership rumour into your mortgage rate, and why the long end eased even as the credibility threat won: politics-calm, or an economy quietly stalling?
Read the note →The Canada Trade
What actually drove the TSX’s record year — gold, a bank re-rating, and a soft loonie, not economic strength — and whether the “soft landing” holds as the 2026 mortgage-renewal tail meets a softer labour market. Plus a transmission map of how the shock moves through renewals, jobs and arrears — and where it could resonate.
Read the note →The AI Trade
What you actually own when you own “AI,” the circular financing that makes it look like a scam, a quantified capex stress test, a four-way split of the market’s two-year gain — Mag 7, AI hardware, AI software, everything else — and a reproducible method for deciding what even counts as an AI stock.
Read the note →More notes as they publish. A framework for thinking, not a forecast, recommendation, or investment advice.