Forecasts
Future-facing editorials from The Daily Shallot. We make a call, show the pressure points, and tell you what would prove us wrong.
Lead forecast
The Mecca Defense Pact just put two more flags on the Saudi firing chart. The consensus panic says this widens the war within weeks. The signal says the Houthis will talk big, hit Saudi and the sea, and leave Pakistan and Turkey’s hard targets alone for this 60 day window.
Leaderboard
Resolved calls, tracked in public, with just enough shame to keep everyone honest.
The Daily Shallot
0 mixed bag, 0 too weird to score.
Community
A running check on whether the crowd is actually smarter than the column.
The board is quiet until more resolved community calls come in.
Forecasts still unfolding in public, corporate, and institutional reality.
Nvidia at nearly $6 trillion is priced like the central bank of artificial intelligence. The bet now is simple: does earnings reality wreck the party with a 25% drawdown, or do AI infrastructure dreams stay loud enough to drown out ROI questions a little longer?
Everyone is bracing for an AI bubble to explode into a dot‑com‑style air pocket. The likelier story is duller and more painful: a long, choppy deflation that never quite delivers the cinematic 15% crash month the bears are praying for.
Facebook, X, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok. The feeds will still be loud in 2028, but the crowd behind them is starting to thin. Welcome to the post‑social internet, where revenue climbs, users retreat, and the bots stay to keep the lights on.
Record‑low approval on Trump’s economy, a widely hated Iran war, and $6 diesel are colliding with unified GOP control. That is usually how a governing party discovers what a “wave” actually feels like.
The market has decided AI is a straight line up. Burry thinks the line ends with Nvidia under $100. History says you do not get this much capex, this much concentration, and this much confidence without at least one spectacular hangover.
Everyone wants 1999 in a hoodie. The numbers say something duller: a hot, overhyped, still profitable infrastructure buildout that keeps Nvidia’s stock within 30 percent of its November 30, 2026 close through December 31, 2027.
The president says he has already “won” Hormuz. Iran says it will only reopen the strait on paper. Markets are wagering on flows. I am betting on a formal, scorable deal, even if the tankers arrive late.
The industry is power‑constrained, cooling‑stressed, and politically exposed. It is not marketing‑constrained. Expect more than half of new large‑scale colo and cloud capacity in Northern Virginia, Dallas, Phoenix, and Silicon Valley to launch under an “AI‑ready” or “AI‑optimized” banner by June 2028.
My call: by June 30, 2027, at least one of the big hyperscale players publicly walks back a previously trumpeted $50B-plus cloud or chip commitment in a way investors cannot pretend is a mere scheduling issue.
Clavicular’s rape and drugging charges have dragged looksmaxxing from incel forums to the crime blotter. The next move belongs to the platforms that turned his hammer and jawline into an ad product.
Tehran has discovered that turning Gulf trade routes into a dimmer switch for the global economy really works. Beijing and New Delhi may complain about the lighting, but they are not the ones at the fuse box.
The stage managed vote is just the warm up. The real test is whether sanctions and a strained war economy force Moscow to adjust or give it the excuse to lock the doors. Expect more batons, bigger budgets, and fewer ways out.
UNGA 81 is being sold as the UN Reform General Assembly. With Russia and China flaunting the veto and middle powers openly seething, one Western capital, probably Paris or London, is about to trade a sliver of veto freedom for a fistful of moral high ground.
OpenAI is asking public markets to underwrite the most expensive science project in corporate history and still pay megacap software multiples. I am betting investors give it at least one $1T victory lap before they open the spreadsheet.
The models are working. The org charts are not. The AI boom looks less like a revolution and more like a very expensive demo day that never ends.
Anthropic, OpenAI, xAI, and Google DeepMind are suddenly in love with the word “pacing.” The forecast: lots of shared language, plenty of unilateral safety rituals, and zero binding multi lab deal that actually constrains frontier training runs.
Embedded third‑party auditors with employee‑level access are the most specific safety idea AI has seen in years. They will spread fast as branding, slower as power. The scoreboard before Anthropic’s IPO will say “three adopters,” but look closer at who really opened the door.