A move in mortgage rates from ~6% to ~5.6% doesn’t sound dramatic.

But Morgan Stanley now estimates that shift alone expands mortgage originations from ~$2.4T to nearly $3T.

That is a ~25% volume shock hiding inside a 40bp move. Here’s the key stat most investors gloss over:

Every ~50bps drop in mortgage rates pulls ~$1T of mortgages back “in-the-money.”

That’s not theory. That’s millions of households crossing an affordability threshold.

Yesterday the US government quietly changed the rules of the housing market.

Mortgage rates are no longer just “the market.”
They are now a policy lever.

That matters more than today’s price action. When Donald Trump announces $200B of mortgage bond buying, that is not stimulus theater.

That is an admission that housing liquidity is systemically important.

Most people think credibility comes from branding, credentials, or being loud.
It doesn’t.

Credibility is a lagging indicator of visible asymmetric outcomes. One undeniable win changes how the world treats you. (Ask Mark Cuban or Kevin O'Leary.)
Ten explanations never will.

Markets don’t reward effort.
They reward resolved results.

Everyone heard NVIDIA’s CES keynote.

Very few understood what it confirmed.

We are no longer in an “AI training cycle.”

We’ve entered the AI factory era. The bottleneck is no longer intelligence. Open models are good enough.

The bottlenecks now are: – inference – uptime – throughput – power – memory – networking

That’s infrastructure, not software.

Goldman quietly made an important point this week:
2026 upside may be real — but leadership is fragmented, so convexity matters more than conviction.

That’s a condition.

Rising Dynasty supplies the response. Most people hear “buy calls” and do the wrong thing:

• short-dated options
• oversized bets
• gambling disguised as confidence

That’s not asymmetry. That’s liquidation risk.

Why the NVIDIA CES + JPM conversations quietly changed the outlook for AI power stocks

Most people watched NVIDIA’s CES keynote and heard “faster chips.”
That wasn’t the message.
The real takeaway was this:
AI factories are now being planned years in advance — at the land, power, and shell level. At JPM’s CES fireside, NVIDIA confirmed something important:
Customers are already planning 2027+ data centers around Rubin-era systems. Not next quarter. Not next year. Multiple years out.

That’s not a bubble signal. That’s infrastructure planning.

There’s a predictable pattern every time real geopolitics collides with ideology.

Over the weekend, the same voices erupted in outrage over Venezuela, anchored to two familiar complaints:
1.“International law”
2.“This was just about oil” First: international law.

What exactly is “international law” in practice?

Who enforces it?
Who has ever changed a consequential geopolitical decision because of it?

Mark Carney, like Justin Trudeau before him, likes to say “Canada is an AI superpower.”

Saying it does not make it true.
Systems do. Let’s start with the uncomfortable fact pattern.

Some of the most important minds in modern AI are Canadian by training and lineage.
They all chose to build elsewhere.

That choice is the signal.

People are missing what just happened in Venezuela because they are thinking geopolitics like it is 1975, not like capital allocation in 2026.

This was not chaos.
This was a takeover. In markets, when an asset-rich company trades below cash because management is incompetent, corrupt, or ideologically captured, the most humane outcome is often a control change.

Not stagnation.
Not decay.
Replacement.

Every Fourth Turning produces the same con.
Collectivism gets rebranded as warm, humane, moral.
History gets memory-holed.
Force gets renamed “care.”

This is not new. It’s just better marketed. They tell you:
– “Rugged individualism is selfish”
– “The system should take care of everyone”
– “Equality matters more than excellence”

What they never explain is who decides, who enforces, and who pays.

We are deep into a Fourth Turning.
Not a “cycle.”
Not a “pullback.”
A civilizational reset.

Most people don’t understand what that means—so they misprice everything. In a Fourth Turning, the rules that governed the last 30–40 years stop working.

Institutions fail.
Trust collapses.
Money gets questioned.
Narratives flip.

That’s not bearish.
That’s fertile ground.

People keep saying:
“This market is only being held up by the Mag 7.”

They say it like it’s a warning sign.

It’s not.
It’s how markets have always worked. Markets don’t move because everything goes up.

They move because capital concentrates.

Leadership is not a flaw.
It’s the mechanism.

Every system pretends it runs on belief.
Until stress arrives.
Then you see what it really runs on. That thing is collateral.

Everyone wanted the throne.
Almost no one prepared for winter. That’s why they lost it.

The Fourth Turning & Vision 2041

Most people hear “Fourth Turning” and think:

collapse
recession
doom

That’s a misunderstanding.

A Fourth Turning isn’t the end of progress.

It’s when progress changes form. History doesn’t move in straight lines.
It moves in long cycles.

Every ~80–100 years, societies hit a crisis phase where:
•old systems stop working
•trust collapses
•patchwork fixes fail
•new rules must be written

That’s the Fourth Turning.

Most people see a broad commodity rally and think:

“System collapse.”

They’re wrong.

What we’re actually seeing is the global economy crossing the chasm. Geoff Moore’s Crossing the Chasm explains why most people miss power-law moments.

Early adopters buy ideas.
Mainstream pragmatists buy systems.

The chasm is when belief turns into necessity.

Most financial advice isn’t designed to make you rich.

It’s designed to make the advisor unfireable.

That distinction explains almost everything. Index hugging isn’t a strategy.
It’s career insurance.

If everyone owns the same thing, no one gets blamed.

That’s great for institutions.
Terrible for individuals.

In a power-law world, a small number of outcomes drive most results.

Upside is the visible part.
Survivability is the hidden one. Power laws don’t reward the smartest ideas.

They reward the ideas and the people
who can stay alive long enough
for the distribution to reveal itself.

That’s a very different skill.

A lot of people are asking the wrong question about NVIDIA buying Groq.

The question isn’t “why now?”
It’s what weakness this quietly covers — and why Groq agreed to it.

Here’s the real explanation. Start with NVIDIA’s uncomfortable truth.

GPUs dominate training.
Inference is different.

Inference is:
• margin-sensitive
• power-constrained
• long-duration
• optimized ruthlessly by buyers

That’s exactly where GPUs are least defensible.

Credit to @FransBakker9812 — his February “fake data center” take aged well.

But NVIDIA buying Groq adds an important new dimension that changes how I think about IREN, CIFR, and HUT.

Here’s the distinction most people are missing. The NVIDIA–Groq deal doesn’t reward “more megawatts.”

It rewards optionality across compute regimes.

Training.
Inference.
GPU.
LPU / ASIC.
Hybrid.

The winners are the operators who can reconfigure, not just host.

Most people think conviction means confidence.

It doesn’t.

Confidence is how you feel when you’re being proven right.
Conviction is what you rely on when you’re being proven wrong. I learned this the hard way in 2021 and 2022.

I was wrong.
Early.
Publicly.
And for longer than felt reasonable.

Those years didn’t test my ideas.
They tested my stamina.