The Big Short.
Not a bet against the market. An inventory of what the market is short of. The trade of the decade is that money leaves as investment, comes back as revenue, and both directions get booked as growth. Everyone is long. Below is what nobody has.
Position book · industry-wide · marked to story
| Side | Instrument | Size | Note | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Long | ||||
| LONG | Compute | ▲ max | Bought with borrowed money, depreciated on a schedule nobody believes. | |
| LONG | Capital expenditure | ▲ max | Spent, then booked by the seller as revenue, then booked by the buyer as growth. One dollar, two entries. | |
| LONG | Benchmarks | ▲ max | Rising every quarter. Nobody has ever paid rent with a benchmark. | |
| LONG | Subscriptions | ▲ heavy | Twenty dollars a month for everything, which is the price of nothing in particular. | |
| LONG | "Usefulness" | ▲ unlimited | The seller's stated return. A feeling. Marked at whatever the story needs. | |
| Short | ||||
| SHORT | A unit | ▼ 0 held | The thing you buy one of. Music found the song. This trade has not found its song. | |
| SHORT | A moment of purchase | ▼ 0 held | The instant a person decides, on purpose, to pay. Currently outsourced to a card on file that nobody remembers adding. | |
| SHORT | A price that survives the end of the subsidy | ▼ 0 held | Every quoted price is a promotional price. Ask what it costs to serve and the room goes quiet. | |
| SHORT | A receipt | ▼ 0 held | A piece of paper that says what was bought and what it cost. Not one exists for usefulness. | |
| SHORT | A customer who enjoys paying | ▼ 0 held | Not tolerates. Enjoys. The last industry that found one of these was music, in 2003, at ninety-nine cents. | |
Order entry
- Side
- SHORT
- Size
- unlimited
- Counterparty
- everyone
- Margin
- none required; the market posted it for you
- Settles
- whenever somebody finds the price
- Risk
What this is not
The fashionable diagnosis is bubble. The situation is simpler and stranger. A bubble is a real product priced wrong. Here the price is not wrong; it is absent. Nobody can say what the product costs to serve, nobody can say what a unit of it is, and the one number everybody can say, the capital expenditure, is the number being sold. That is not a bubble. That is a lap. Money runs out the door as investment and back in as revenue, and it is counted on both legs.
The technology is real. That is what makes the trade interesting rather than sad. The dot-com bubble was also real: it financed the fibre we are still using, and it still ended with a decade of people who could not say what the product cost. Real technology and a missing price can coexist for a long time. They cannot coexist forever.
The seller's answer
Asked what the return on investment is, the company that has sold the most shovels so far pointed to the usefulness of AI.
Useful is a feeling. Nobody has ever paid rent with one, and for usefulness there is no receipt. Every other row in the long column resolves, eventually, into that one row. Compute is bought for usefulness. Benchmarks measure usefulness. Subscriptions are usefulness at a flat rate. When the return is a feeling, the position book is a mood.
Why the session cannot close
The spending is the story and the story is the price. The moment the buildout slows, the story slows, and the market reprices in an afternoon. So it does not stop.
It runs past the point where anyone can find the customers it was meant to create, and each quarter the shortage in the book gets bigger while the longs get longer.
People use it. Some people are impressed by it. Very few would describe themselves as a fan of a thing they cannot name the price of. Music had fans. This has users.
Not with a bigger campaign. Music got out in 2003 when one person found the unit, the moment, and the price. Ninety-nine cents. Somebody finds that here, or the session runs until it cannot.
The long version, with the receipts: 99 cents. That's all it took.
Everyone is long the story.
Some things are worth building.
This message was brought to you by the Worth Building Institute. Nothing worth building is short a customer. All of it needs a person who wants to be there, and can say what it costs. Results obvious.
see what's worth building →this is not investment advice, mostly because there is nothing to invest in until somebody finds the unit. figures rounded; the capex pace is the current hyperscaler run rate, the demand gap is the number the sell side itself published. positions on this page are size unlimited and settle never, which makes them the most conservative instrument on the internet. the phrase "the world's largest marketing campaign" belongs to Ed Zitron. no film was watched in the making of this page; the title did the work.