The cracks beginning to show as we are flying blind on state of US labor market.

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Today’s links

Stratechery.com on how to think about Figma, also as an AI play now that it has IPO’ed.

A great conversation on The Final Phase of the Debt Supercycle on the Hidden Forces podcast with Edward Chancellor, author of the widely praised book The Price of Time on the “real” history of interest rates. It is behind a (arguably low and reasonable) paywall, but may become publicly available like other episodes of the Grant Williams / Hidden Forces collabs.

Forbes: ChatGPT is coming for Excel. One of the most profitable monopolies of all time is Microsoft’s office package. Could AI be its undoing?

On rare earths, we’ve talked about MP Materials before, but this name I have never heard of cropped up - Ramaco - a company that is looking to extract rare earths associated with coal deposits.

Finally, also behind paywall, FT article on the AI job cuts accelerating.

Today’s chart: Apple 

I changed my mind on what to include today - decided to go with a weekly Apple chart after Friday’s ugly sell-off after Thursday’s earnings report, likewise generating an ugly weekly candlestick for the stock. Perhaps worth noting here that Apple stock only closed below its 200-week moving average (the dark rising MA on the chart) once since 2009, in a two-week episode in 2016 (at a split-adjusted price near 22.50 then - revenues for 2026 are only expected to be about twice 2016 revenues, by the way, and the company shows little growth now relative to then…it’s nearly all riding on hopes for growth in the services side of the business).