He was already there when I arrived. Staring out the window, one whiskey he wasn’t drinking. He looked like someone who had stopped sleeping regular hours sometime around the previous year and hadn’t found a reason to start again. Hygiene had suffered.

He said: you actually read the footnotes.

I said: all of them.

He nodded once. That was apparently sufficient.

He had been short the infrastructure trade for eighteen months. The position was underwater. The market had no fear and he had read every prospectus and he was still in it.

I asked him why.

He picked up the whiskey. Put it down without drinking.

He said: Anthropic is going public. Maybe OpenAI. The IPO window opens and everyone rushes through it and someone stumbles and the whole category reprices in a single afternoon. That’s one scenario.

I wrote that down.

He said: the other scenario is simpler. The assumption breaks before the IPO. The market figures out what I figured out eighteen months ago and the repricing happens without a catalyst. Just math, eventually becoming visible.

I asked him which scenario he was positioned for.

He looked at his whiskey.

Both, he said.

Note: He’s not a crank. That’s what I came to determine and that’s what I know now. He’s read everything I’ve read and more. He’s been sitting in this bar or one like it for eighteen months carrying a position the market has been punishing every week. He hasn’t moved. That’s either genius or ruin and from where I’m sitting I genuinely cannot tell which.

The Substack has four hundred and nineteen subscribers now. I checked before I came in.