Weekend Reading #351
This is the three-hundredth-and-fifty-first weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 14th February 2026.
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What we're thinking.
It’s amazing how quickly themes in the market get names. This past week to two has already been coined the "software apocalypse". We are old enough to remember the day Amazon bought Whole Foods and competitor stocks collapsed with prognosticators calling for the end of food retail as we know it. It didn’t quite work out that way. Does that mean this will be the same? Absolutely not. We know that some stocks have been sold down way more than they should have been and some have been sold down nearly enough. But environments like these are where we earn our stripes. And remember life is just way more fun when you are capable of shorting properly. The question on our minds still is whether this is a rotation or whether it is a correlation 1 selloff event. It’s getting tricky to be honest. Not a time to take enormous risk or to be too confident on any outcome. Volatility is rising and one really doesn’t know where the next bullet is coming from. And President Trump hasn’t even gone into Iran yet. It’s hard to justify anything at present as the places in the market we want to own have gone up a lot and the places we want to short have gone down a lot.
What we're reading and doing.
With all the fuss around Claude Code, this article got quite a lot of attention this week. The author, Matt Shumer, believes that we are in an important market moment when the common knowledge around the impact of AI is changing and impacting the market. To this I say, "No shit Sherlock!". Market influencer and narrative builder, Citrini also came out with a note this week about how markets want atoms not bits. And so, the narrative du jour is definitely forming before our eyes. Funnily enough before these events, Stephen McBride, a friend and chief optimist of the Rational Optimist Society, messaged me to say he had built a new website from scratch using Claude Code and when he sent me the link I was impressed! Now Stephen is younger and more tech savvy than me, so I thought why don't I try do a new website for Three Body Capital with Claude Code and see how far I get. And so, I did. One hour of my time and I had a brilliant new website drafted with code ready to deploy. I couldn't believe that I actually did it which just shows how easy it is! Our new website isn't live yet (and yes, we know we need a new one!)
Often, we are advised we must try new tools in order to understand for ourselves what the impact of something really is and I can tell you for sure that in this case it is true! Buckle up folks. The only attributes that matter are going to be ENTERPRISE and ADAPTABILITY because everyone's jobs are going to change. Never mind jobs, but everything. My immediate thought was holy crap what do I do now with my kids. There is clearly a balance to be struck between the negative effect of screens (and particularly social media) in general and the astonishing use cases of even today’s level of AI. But wow the education system as it stands is almost certainly now simply not fit for purpose anymore given what is unfolding before our eyes. DC
Going further down the AI rabbit hole, we get to the question of what AI does to people who are currently in employment, who have sufficient skill and experience to properly harness what these LLMs can do. They’re not the juniors whose training opportunities are being wiped out from cost savings, but at the same time, they’re not at the top of the food chain. At first glance, one would think that a productivity boom is underway – and indeed it is. People can do more in less time, AI agents and processes run in the background while we have a drink or get lunch. No more waiting. But there’s a growing flipside to that: no more natural breaktimes, workloads increasing as more spare capacity that would have been recovery time gets optimised into doing just one more extra prompt. After all, it’s only going to take 10 more minutes and the job’s done, isn’t it? The outcome according to one software engineer: AI fatigue, overworked employees and more burnout. EL
What we're listening to.
There is a chap on the podcast circuit named Tavi Costa. Kudos to him indeed as he called for this commodity bull market some time ago and seemingly put his money where his mouth is. Here he once again outlines the outlook for the commodity complex and believes that despite the big moves in price we are still only in the early innings. He is obviously talking his book, but he has earned that right! Very timely listen given the biggest question facing us at the moment is whether we are in a new investment regime of commodities, emerging markets and currencies or whether it’s just a flash in the pan which will revert back to US dominance.
Elsewhere was an excellent interview with CZ of Binance fame, who only recently came out of prison. Somewhat obscurely the interviewer was Chamath. Really strange combination on the face of it but not once you get into the interview. CZ to his credit has always been consistent since I first heard him speak some 8 years ago. Same guy, pretty level-headed and despite him actually going to jail he comes across as he puts it, is "a normal dude". In fact, he was pardoned by President Trump! He claims he didn't know much about why and goes as deep as he can without jeopardizing his ongoing legal discussions with the US authorities. It is very interesting to hear his perspective on what has unfolded across the Biden and then Trump governments with respect to attitudes toward crypto and indeed him in particular. DC