One retail account, one frontier-tech thesis, documented in public. The best quarter since 2020 is in the books. As I start the second half, the AI trade is quietly moving down the stack — from the chips to the electricity that runs them.
The first half ended with the best market quarter since 2020 — the S&P up 14%, the Nasdaq up 20% — and my little account up about 65% on capital in its first ninety-odd days. Then the last week did something more interesting than go up: it rotated. A soft jobs report cooled the Fed, the Dow hit a record, and semiconductors — the group that carried everything — sold off 4.5% as investors took profits in the most crowded winners. My Micron dropped 5.5% in a day.
Read the wrong way, that's scary. Read right, it's a map. Chips didn't break; they got repriced, while money hunted for the next leg of the same story. And the next leg was hiding in plain sight this week: on the hottest day of the summer, the largest U.S. grid operator braced for a record 166 gigawatts of demand, with data centers alone driving billions in new power costs. Hyperscalers are pouring $400-billion-plus into AI infrastructure this year — and a growing share of that isn't chips at all. It's power, grid, cooling, and the raw materials to build them.
That's the thesis evolving in real time. The AI trade isn't dying. It's descending the stack — from silicon to the electricity that makes silicon useful. And I already own the beachhead.
The map before the positions. ● firing ● mixed/watching ● next-wave seed ● headwind.
Q2 closed as the strongest quarter in years — S&P +14%, Nasdaq +20%. The last week's split (Dow record, Nasdaq down) is the tell for H2: leadership is broadening out of the crowded chip trade into the physical layer underneath it. Power demand hitting a record on the same week chips sold off isn't a coincidence. It's the story rotating one level down.
Reframed: BWXT, OKLO, and CENX from "nuclear/materials" to the front edge of a power thesis — the AI bottleneck moving to electricity. Standing order, Q3 job #1: right-size MU toward 17–18%, then reassess RKLB after the Iridium financing and integration picture is clearer; rebuild cash deliberately. Researching: grid equipment, transmission, cooling, and storage — the next layer of the same buildout. All marks are estimates pending a broker refresh.
"The AI trade isn't topping. It's descending the stack. First the chips, now the power that runs them — and eventually the dirt you dig to build the grid. Follow the electrons."
Every big technology wave gets priced in layers, top down. The market bid up the obvious layer first — the GPUs and the memory — until those names got crowded and started taking profits, which is exactly what happened this week. But the demand didn't evaporate. It moved to the constraint underneath. And right now the binding constraint on AI isn't chips. It's electricity. A grid operator just braced for record demand because data centers are eating power faster than anyone planned for, and hyperscalers are spending $400 billion-plus a year on infrastructure — a huge and growing slice of it on generation, transmission, and cooling.
That's why I'm not panicking about a chip pullback — I'm following the money one level down. I already own the beachhead: BWXT in nuclear, OKLO in next-gen reactors, CENX in the aluminum that builds the grid. The next research is the rest of the layer — transmission gear, cooling, storage, the unglamorous industrials that turn megawatts into uptime. The frontier people picture is a robot or a rocket. The frontier that actually gets built first is a substation. Own the electrons.
First, the number at the top of this issue — +65%, ~$8,672 — is an estimate. I mark my book off index moves and holding-level reads, not a live brokerage feed, and this week's chip drop plus the Iridium pop in my space names means the real figure could sit a few points either side of that. I'm labeling it as an estimate everywhere in this issue, and before I ever put a hard performance number on the public site, I reconcile it against the actual account. A newsletter that shows returns has exactly one job it can't fumble: the returns have to be real. So I'd rather tell you "about 65%, pending confirmation" than print a clean-looking number I haven't checked.
Second — the Micron trim. I've now flagged it for five straight issues, and this week even a second, independent pass at my whole book came back with the identical verdict: MU is ~21%, it's the main risk I can actually control, trim it toward 17–18%. When every read points the same way and I still haven't moved, that's not conviction — it's avoidance wearing conviction's jacket. The chip rout gave me a 5.5% preview of what an oversized position does on a bad day. Q3's first act, before any new pick, is to right-size it into this dovish, calm tape and rebuild the cash cushion from a too-thin 3%. Next issue reports whether I did it. No more jacket.
Ninety-three days, an estimated +65%, the best market quarter since 2020 behind me — and a clear map for what comes next. Chips cooled, the grid woke up, and the AI trade started doing what big trades always do: broadening out of the obvious winner into the layer underneath.
So H2 has a plan, not just a hope. Lean the power thesis up the board — nuclear, grid, cooling, materials — because electricity is becoming AI's binding constraint and I already own the beachhead. Right-size the known single-name risk, reassess the transformed Rocket Lab thesis, and rebuild the cash I've let run too thin. Respect the real referee, June CPI on the 14th, and the Warsh Fed at month-end. And keep every speculative seed small until it earns promotion with a milestone, not a price spike.
The first quarter was extraordinary and partly lucky — a war ending, a historic IPO, a memory blowout, a space consolidation, all breaking my way. The second half won't hand me that. What it'll reward is the boring stuff: sizing, cash, patience, and following the money down the stack instead of chasing it back up. The frontier is still the trade. The vessel just needs to be worthy of it.
See you next Sunday, buddy. — Alex
One concentrated frontier-tech portfolio, documented in public — chips, power, space, robots, asymmetric bets, and the discipline behind the chaos.
One sharp dispatch from the frontier: what changed, what matters, what I'm watching, what the evidence changed — and what the portfolio is doing about it.
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