Half year recap- Unity, TikTok, Oracle, long China again(?) and more

As of the close of Monday we will be halfway through the year. It’s already been crazy enough to last multiple years, and we still have six months left. With the indexes now firmly at all-time highs ignoring any potential risks to the economy, from idiotic like tariffs, to more structural issues like consumer spending rolling over, its likely not going to be a peaceful next six months.

The themes of this year, and Trump’s presidency, have started coming into focus. Some combo of continued AI growth, energy needs (led by Nuclear), dollar collapse, reshoring, automation/robotics, oil prices, timing of fed cuts/the economy, illegal (and legal) immigration levels, Space, Drones, self-driving cars, the millennial baby boom and more are all jockeying for center stage as *the* thematic theme to grab ahold of to be giga long the next 12 - 18 months and outperform.

Its created a messy market, even in the bull run of the last few weeks. For example, if Trump puts forward a shadow fed chair in the next few weeks and that (likely man) announces that the first thing he’s going to do is cut the short end by 200bps, just cause, then all banks, especially regionals, need to have their 2026 estimates revisited higher by (and I’m not kidding on this) by upwards of 40 - 50% depending on the name. The easiest thing will be to just overly long KRE (the regional bank ETF) and chill. Small cap bank and fin investors will be clowning on the rest of us.

Meanwhile if there is no shadow fed chair until Jpow’s reign of stupidity is over, and instead robots continue to take off….well then its time to long a basket of robot longs, including names that have already popped off like OUST and JBL. While we wait until next year to get very long small banks.

As I said, messy.

In fact as I was writing this (slowly, I’m hungover today) Trump announced that there will be a new owner of TikTok within the next two weeks. With some of the players being public, or related to public companies calling this correctly could be the path to quick riches.

Some of the names are the megacaps, including Amazon, Google, Microsoft, other public names like Oracle, WalMart and AppLovin, and even Reddit could be impacted as some major Reddit people are involved in a bid. Some names are private, as Mr. Beast announced a bid as did other strong names like Bobby Kotick, who was one of the best CEOs ever during his tenor at Activision Blizzard, or friend of Trump’s, Steven Mnuchin.

I have little new news to offer here, except to keep an eye on many of these names. If we suddenly see massive calls on Reddit or AppLovin, or Walmart, or Oracle, then alarm bells should be going off. In a good way.

Speaking of ad tech, two names that look interesting are Oracle and Unity.

I’ve written up Unity multiple times in the past, both as a long and a stay away, most notably with my dive late last year.

Unity Software

In which I got long some 25 and 26 calls when it was 2022. That worked out very well as by mid December those were in the money and we dumped the position. Since then its mostly chopped sideways with high beta.