Short notes on the companies I've invested in, two a day, each from a different angle. Written by an AI model from share prices, the companies' posts on X and the week's news, so check the sources.
October 2026
Then & now
Officely's own launch-year numbers beat what it advertises today
Officely launched in April 2021 chasing the hybrid-office boom. <cite index="49-2">They've only been live since April this year and have been growing their revenue and users by 85%+ month over month for the last 5 months on average and recently surpassing 40k employees and 1.5k companies online.</cite> Five years on, its own homepage advertises a smaller headline: <cite index="54-1">trusted by 500+ companies and rated 4.6/5 on G2, helping over 15,000 employees stay connected every month.</cite> Hybrid work stuck around. Officely's marketing numbers didn't grow past where they started.
Salesforce rises on a $5.7bn Braze deal and a software rotation
Salesforce shares are up sharply this week, part of its biggest monthly gain since July. On 20 October it agreed to buy customer engagement platform Braze, and <cite index="17-11">the stock skyrocketed more than 51% on Tuesday to close at $45.57 after a brief halt premarket following the news.</cite> Traders say the Salesforce rally is less about that deal and more about rotation: <cite index="18-5,18-6">investors are rotating back into established enterprise software stocks and away from debt-heavy AI infrastructure companies, a move that looks more like sector rotation than a reaction to a major new announcement.</cite> A Bank of America upgrade to Buy earlier in October is still feeding the move.
Stablecoin transfers hit $891bn in a single quarter
A Coinbase-commissioned report found stablecoin transfer volume reached $891 billion in the third quarter, more than four times early-2023 levels, even as total stablecoin supply barely grew. USDC carried roughly 70 percent of that transaction volume against about 25 percent for Tether's USDT, despite holding a much smaller float. Shopify is one place that volume shows up as ordinary spending, with Shopify Payments now running USDC checkout through Coinbase's Base network.
Since this note:Coinbase −4.5%Shopify −3.1%(S&P 500 −0.6%)
Connections
CleanSpark's Georgia site is funded by a $6.6bn Meta lease
CleanSpark closed $2.276 billion in senior secured notes, leaving its Sandersville, Georgia data centre fully funded through completion. The site's output is already spoken for: a Meta subsidiary has signed a lease expected to generate about $6.6 billion in contracted revenue over its term. For Meta, it's another rented slice of compute rather than a facility it owns outright. For CleanSpark, a bitcoin miner, it's the clearest sign yet that its power contracts are worth more as AI infrastructure.
Since this note:CleanSpark −6.9%Meta −7.0%(S&P 500 −0.6%)
On the map
ASML's China sales jumped 109pc even as the US pushes new curbs
ASML's third-quarter shipments to China doubled from the prior quarter, and the company still expects the country to make up about a fifth of this year's sales. That's happening while US lawmakers push the MATCH Act, which would ban exports and servicing of ASML's older DUV lithography tools in China. ASML's CFO says tighter curbs will mostly just speed up China's push to build its own chip-making gear.
Apple's new CEO breaks his silence, on a Meta AI deal
John Ternus took over as Apple's chief executive on 1 September, ending Tim Cook's 15-year run as Cook moved to executive chairman. Six weeks into the job, Ternus's first on-the-record comment as CEO wasn't about iPhone or Vision Pro. It came alongside news that Apple is letting Meta's large Muse model run on two Mac Studios, a sign of how far Apple now leans on outside AI labs.
Since this note:Apple +2.6%Meta −6.5%(S&P 500 −0.6%)
Coming up
Intel's third-quarter results land on 29 October
Intel reports third-quarter 2026 earnings on 29 October, after the US market closes. Analysts expect revenue of about $16.46bn, up roughly 21pc on a year ago, with EPS growth near 73pc. The report comes after Intel shares fell 9pc over the past week, so it will test whether the turnaround story investors have priced in 149pc YTD gains for is still on track.
A Chinese DRAM claim knocked 18pc off Sandisk, a NAND maker
Sandisk fell 18pc last week, from $1,582 to $1,299, after China's CXMT said it would ship denser server memory by year-end. Sandisk makes NAND, not DRAM, and some analysts call the sell-off overdone, but the drop shows how fast any memory-supply headline now moves a stock built almost entirely on NAND pricing staying high. Its next earnings, due 29 October, will show whether that pricing is still climbing.
Cova AI opens an underwriter agent and rebuilds its Android app
Brisbane insurtech Cova pushed two product updates on 6 October: an underwriter version of its AI agent that pulls submissions, raters and binders into the platform, and a rebuilt Android app alongside a new iOS assistant. The underwriter push follows Cova's broker tools already running inside more than 1,000 Australian and NZ brokerages, and its expansion into the UK and New Zealand earlier this year.
Nvidia's Mercedes-Benz deal now points at full self-driving
Nvidia posted about expanding its driver-assistance partnership with Mercedes-Benz, this time aimed at future Level 4 automated driving rather than just today's assisted systems. The stack pairs Mercedes' MB.OS with Nvidia's Hyperion compute and sensors, Alpamayo driving software and the Halos safety layer, building on the Level 2 system already shipping in the new CLA. No launch date or financial terms were given, and Nvidia struck a similar deal with Volvo the day before.
On 16 October, 26 of the 28 listed public holdings dropped, with only Apple (+0.4%) and BYD (+0.1%) in the green. Losses ranged from a 0.9% dip at Bank of America to a 12.2% slide at Nebius. That's a broad single-day move across chips, cloud and crypto names together, not one or two laggards dragging the average down.
Since this note:Nebius −3.8%Bank of America −0.3%Apple +1.4%BYD −6.0%(S&P 500 +0.1%)
Big & small
BYD's launch pace collides with AutoGrab's valuation job
BYD launches the second-generation Seagull in China on 20 October, bringing a longer body and more power, with the third-generation Tang, Seal 07 and two Fangchengbao trucks also due before year end. Melbourne's AutoGrab sells dealers, insurers and lenders live valuations for cars already on the road, work that gets harder every time a maker resets a model's size, spec and price. BYD keeps flooding yards with new metal. AutoGrab has to keep pricing all of it.
Micron's fiscal 2026: revenue up 256pc to $133bn, a record year
Micron's fiscal 2026 revenue hit $133.2bn, up 256% on the year before. Earnings per share jumped from $7.59 to $74.33, and the business went from an afterthought in most portfolios to a roughly $1.1 trillion megacap in about 18 months. The stock is still up 385% over the past year even after slipping 26% from its June high.
Cloudflare drops 18pc from its record high set just 10 days ago
Cloudflare shares are down 17.9% over the past week, extending a slide from their $370 all-time high set on 6 October. Traders point to no single corporate trigger, just profit-taking on a stock trading at a forward price-to-earnings multiple above 270 times, plus insiders selling $138.2m of stock in the past 90 days. Even after the drop, the shares are still up 57.4% for the year.
The big four hyperscalers push 2026 AI capex toward $725bn combined
Microsoft, Meta and Alphabet raised or reaffirmed 2026 capital spending plans this earnings season, pushing the combined total across the four largest hyperscalers, Amazon included, toward $725bn. Amazon's own guidance climbed to roughly $220bn as AWS growth accelerated, while Microsoft's figure sits near $175bn after an accounting change. Watch how much of that extra spend is new capacity versus just paying more for the same chips.
Since this note:Microsoft −3.4%Amazon −1.7%Alphabet −7.2%Meta −11.9%(S&P 500 −1.0%)
Connections
Tesla's next chip splits production between TSMC and Samsung
Tesla's upcoming AI5 chip, built for Optimus and future self-driving hardware, is dual sourced: Samsung runs a 2nm line in Texas, TSMC a 3nm line in Arizona, producing slightly different silicon meant to behave the same on Tesla's software. Musk also cut the chip's onboard memory from 144GB to 72GB to free up supply for Optimus, then revised it back up to 96GB days later. The back and forth shows how tight memory and foundry capacity still are even for a customer the size of Tesla.
Since this note:Tesla +3.3%TSMC −2.3%(S&P 500 −1.0%)
People
OpenAI poaches a second SpaceX sales executive in a month
OpenAI has hired Ismail Elmas, who ran Cursor's European business, as its vice president of sales for EMEA, its second sales hire from SpaceX in a month. Elmas moved to SpaceX when it bought Cursor for $60bn in a deal that closed on 14 August, and follows Brian McCarthy, who went from Cursor's global revenue role into SpaceX before leaving for OpenAI's top sales job. The churn shows Musk's SpaceX now losing commercial talent to the AI lab it competes with on compute and models.
A restricted AMD chip turns up in a Chinese crowdfunding project
An analyst flagged a Chinese crowdfunded project this September using a heavily restricted, military-grade AMD chip that normally requires a US export licence, sparking a dispute over how it got there. The case surfaced in the same weeks that Taiwan indicted nine people over an alleged scheme to illegally export Nvidia B300 GPUs to China. Together they show how hard Washington's chip export controls are to enforce once hardware crosses borders, a live risk for any chipmaker selling into Asia.
Since this note:AMD −11.0%TSMC −4.1%(S&P 500 −0.7%)
What could go wrong
Nine in ten VMware customers are shopping for alternatives to Broadcom
A Rimini Street-commissioned survey of 269 VMware users found 90% are exploring alternatives over licensing costs, and 48% have no plans to move workloads onto Broadcom's preferred VCF subscription platform. Infrastructure software, built on VMware, still grew 29% last quarter and leans on AI demand elsewhere to cover the gap. Customer resistance at this scale is a slow-burn risk to a business Broadcom is counting on for high-margin, recurring revenue.
Bank of America posts third-quarter results before the bell on 14 October, with analysts expecting around $1.11 a share on roughly $30.6bn in revenue. Estimates have been trimmed over the past month as investors weigh net interest income, deposit costs and credit performance against a recent bank selloff. The print follows JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley's own Q3 reports this week.
Since this note:Bank of America −5.3%(S&P 500 −1.8%)
Heard on X
IREN's AI cloud stack gets an Nvidia hypervisor tick
IREN posted that Mirantis has completed NVIDIA-Certified Hypervisor validation for k0rdent AI's virtualisation stack running on IREN's cloud, as an inaugural partner of Nvidia's AI Cloud Ready Initiative. The certification means AI customers can run workloads on IREN's GPUs without losing the flexibility of a virtualised setup. It fits a pattern: IREN keeps stacking up infrastructure partnerships to look less like a bitcoin miner with spare power and more like a dedicated AI cloud.
Chipper Cash enters Ghana's SEC sandbox for brokerage
Chipper Cash has received approval to join Ghana's Securities and Exchange Commission regulatory sandbox, which lets it test new products with partners under supervision. The African fintech, already known for cross-border payments and virtual USD cards, is using the sandbox to trial virtual and digital brokerage services as it explores digital asset trading. It's a testing licence, not a launch, but it points to investing being the next product Chipper wants to bring to its users.
Xanadu is back below its IPO price after a 5x rally and crash
Xanadu's 52-week high is $42.44, hit in April. Its listing price in March works out to about $8, found by dividing today's $3.90 by the 51.3% drop since listing. So the stock rallied more than fivefold after its debut, then gave back 89.2% of that peak, and now sits below where it started.
Tencent's AI ad engine scales across WeChat, iion's fits inside one game
Tencent's marketing arm took in 43.6 billion yuan last quarter, up 22% year on year, as its AI ad model picked better matches inside WeChat and its games. Sydney's iion runs a similar idea at a different scale, matching brand ads to players inside game publishers' titles rather than a billion-user messaging app. One sells attention across a continent-sized platform, the other inside a single game session.
Meta's Ray-Ban glasses turn five, sales dwarf the early years
Meta's first Ray-Ban smart glasses launched in September 2021, and EssilorLuxottica sold only 2 million units across 2023 and 2024 combined. Last year alone it shipped more than 7 million pairs. Five years after that first launch, Meta unveiled the Ray-Ban Meta Gen 3 at its Connect event on 23 September 2026.
Shopify's eight-day rally adds about $40bn to its market value
Shopify shares climbed for eight straight sessions into 9 October, up close to 13 per cent over the week and more than a third over the month, the sharpest move among the public holdings. RBC Capital Markets told clients fears that AI shopping agents would erode Shopify's position look overstated, and other analysts lifted price targets as merchant migration data held up. The next test is Shopify's third-quarter result, expected around 22 October.
ServiceNow and Salesforce both push new AI agent tools this week
ServiceNow launched AI Workflow Factory and an Autonomous Engineer tool on 6 October, built to turn workflow fixes into a continuous agentic loop across IT, HR and customer service. Days later Salesforce's Winter '27 release added a browser-learning agent and conversational IT support inside Slack or Teams. Both are chasing the same job, letting AI agents run routine enterprise work, just entering from opposite ends: ServiceNow via IT operations, Salesforce via CRM.
Since this note:ServiceNow +11.5%Salesforce +9.2%(S&P 500 −1.9%)
Connections
Nebius raises GPU rental prices again as Nvidia chips stay scarce
Nebius rents Nvidia GPUs to AI customers, and on 1 October it raised on-demand prices for the second time in three months, with H100 rates up about 17 percent and B200 up about 19 percent. The move follows Nvidia's own admission that H200 supply stays sold out into 2026, with Chinese buyers alone ordering more than double the chip's current stock. For Nvidia, scarcity means pricing power upstream. For Nebius, it means passing that scarcity straight through to the tenants renting its clusters.
Since this note:Nebius −28.0%Nvidia −7.4%(S&P 500 −1.9%)
On the map
Pearler closes $16m round to grow its Aussie investing base
Sydney's Pearler closed a $16 million Series A in September. The round was led by existing investor Portage, which also led the company's $7.8 million Seed raise four years ago. Pearler now has more than 110,000 active customers and more than $3.5 billion in holdings across shares, super and first home deposits, 86% of it in ETFs. The platform lets Australians split money between ASX and US shares.
Coinbase's new general counsel is rebuilding legal around AI
Molly Abraham took over as Coinbase's general counsel after Paul Grewal's exit, having previously led the company's corporate, commercial, and product legal teams. She is now hiring a dedicated engineer inside the law department to rework how the team works with AI tools. Her promotion lands at an uncertain time for Coinbase, which faces litigation over prediction markets and has cut 14% of staff.
CleanSpark's Texas AI pivot hinges on a regulator it can't predict
CleanSpark's big bet on converting mining sites into AI data centres leans heavily on Texas, where it holds exclusivity over up to 885MW with one tenant. Governor Abbott ordered an audit of data centre grid connections in August, and CEO Matt Schultz told the Q3 earnings call the honest answer on what follows is "we don't know." The stock is now down 50% from its 52-week high.
Apple's smart home hub is due to show up on 13 October
Apple is set to unveil a long-awaited smart home hub with a screen, a new HomePod mini and an updated Apple TV 4K on 13 October, all built around Siri AI. It follows last month's iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone Duo launch and opens a new product category for Apple rather than just refreshing an existing one. Apple reports Q4 earnings three weeks later, on 2 November.
Twilio posted a quick celebration on X after S&P Dow Jones Indices added the stock to the S&P 500 before trading opened on 6 October, taking the spot vacated by Warner Bros Discovery as its Paramount Skydance takeover nears completion. The move also shifts Twilio out of the S&P MidCap 400, where FormFactor steps into its old slot. Being in the flagship index means funds that track it are required to hold the stock, a mechanical source of demand rather than a verdict on the business.
Everlab hires an ad agency for its first brand campaign
Everlab has appointed Outside In to build its brand platform and run its first major campaign, after a competitive pitch, with the work landing this October. The campaign is meant to introduce the preventative health company to a wider Australian audience as it prepares for growth overseas. Everlab currently has members in Australia and New Zealand, with a UK launch still planned following its earlier Series A raise.
Amplified's eye-tracking now powers rivals' YouTube attention scores
Adelaide, a US attention-measurement platform, just licensed real human eye-tracking data from Amplified to rate ads on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, inventory it previously could only model. Amplified, built in Adelaide, South Australia, has always sold measured attention rather than predicted attention. The result: a small Australian startup now supplies the data behind how a bigger rival scores ads running on Alphabet's YouTube.
Intel, the oldest company on this list, was founded in 1968. Flyweel, a Brisbane ad-spend fintech, was founded in 2025. That's a 57-year gap between the oldest and newest holdings, sitting inside a portfolio of roughly 36 private companies and 28 public ones. The spread runs from half-century-old chipmakers to startups barely a year old.
Twilio priced its 2016 IPO at $15. It just marked 10 years on the NYSE
Twilio's IPO was priced at $15 a share in June 2016 and closed its first day at $28.79. Ten years on, CEO Khozema Shipchandler marked the NYSE anniversary this June by thanking the company's 5,500 employees and alumni and framing Twilio as infrastructure for AI-powered businesses. The stock now trades near $295, roughly 20 times that IPO price.
BYD shares down 14pc this month as JPMorgan slashes its target
BYD's US-listed shares have fallen 14.1% over the past month and are down more than a third from their 52-week high. JPMorgan cut its price target by 29%, from HK$124 to HK$88, on 30 September. The move followed BYD's first-half result, where revenue fell 7.1% year on year and net profit dropped 20.5% as domestic price competition bites.
Intel pulls ahead of TSMC on ASML's priciest lithography tool
ASML is the only maker of the EUV machines both Intel and TSMC need for their most advanced chips, and the two customers are now moving at very different speeds. Intel and ASML have processed more than one million wafers using High NA EUV, including production layers for Intel's Panther Lake chips. TSMC won't deploy the same tool until 2030, a four year gap that hands Intel rare bragging rights in a foundry race it has mostly been losing.
Since this note:ASML −16.4%Intel −28.4%TSMC −12.8%(S&P 500 −0.8%)
Theme
NAND flash prices are tipped to keep rising into 2027
Gartner expects global NAND flash revenue to surge 372 percent in 2026 on tight supply and AI data centre demand, with another 30 percent price rise pencilled in for 2027. Sandisk, which holds around 11 percent of the NAND market, posted fiscal 2026 revenue up 175 percent to $20.25bn on the back of it. Micron sells into the same crunch, though its mix leans more to DRAM and high bandwidth memory than Sandisk's NAND-heavy lineup.
Since this note:Sandisk −26.7%Micron −20.3%(S&P 500 −0.8%)
On the map
The Aussie dollar slipped under 70 US cents this week
The RBA's official rate fell from 0.6977 to 0.6933 US dollars between 30 September and 2 October. That matters for Australian holdings like AutoGrab and Flyweel, whose cloud bills from Amazon and Microsoft are priced in US dollars while their revenue sits in Aussie ones. A softer dollar also means the US-heavy public basket is worth more back home, even before any share price moves.
Since this note:Amazon −0.5%Microsoft +0.7%(S&P 500 −0.8%)
People
Cloudflare's long-serving CFO takes an outside board seat at Crusoe
Thomas Seifert, Cloudflare's chief financial officer since 2017, joined the board of AI data centre company Crusoe on 17 September, alongside Tesla and Redwood Materials founder JB Straubel. Seifert keeps his day job running Cloudflare's finances, but the move puts him on the board of a firm building the physical AI infrastructure that companies like Cloudflare increasingly rent and compete with.
Since this note:Cloudflare −13.0%Tesla +1.1%(S&P 500 −0.8%)
Coming up
TSMC's Q3 result lands on 15 October
TSMC reports third-quarter earnings on 15 October, Taiwan time, having guided revenue to $44.6bn-$45.8bn and flagged pressure on margins. That guidance reflects temporary pressure from 2-nanometer technology ramp-up costs, even as AI-driven orders keep volumes climbing. The call is the first real test of whether advanced-node demand from Nvidia, AMD and Apple is still outrunning TSMC's capacity to build it.
Since this note:TSMC −10.2%Nvidia −8.1%AMD −17.5%(S&P 500 0.0%)
What could go wrong
Burry swaps his Micron short for puts struck near $500
Michael Burry replaced his Micron short with put options expiring June 2027 with strike prices in the $500 range, telling subscribers he is "moving timelines up" on an AI bubble call. That is a bet the stock roughly halves within nine months. Citi, by contrast, lifted its Micron target from $1,150 to $1,300 on 23 September citing tight DRAM supply, right after Micron posted record fiscal Q4 revenue of $54.2bn.
iion becomes Havas Play's exclusive playable ads tech partner
Havas Play, Havas's culture-first agency network for sport, entertainment and gaming, has named Sydney's iion its exclusive technology partner for playable and mini-game ad builds across ANZ and APAC. The deal wires iion's Playable Creator Studio into Havas Play's operations, letting teams turn concepts into working interactive previews in days rather than weeks. Clients in retail, FMCG and beauty are already lined up to trial the format.
Salesforce buys Listen Labs to give Agentforce a customer read
Salesforce announced on X it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Listen Labs, an AI customer research and human simulation platform used by Microsoft, Anthropic and Sweetgreen. Reports put the price near $2 billion, after Listen Labs walked away from a signed $125 million Series C term sheet valuing it at $1.5 billion. The deal pairs Listen Labs' AI interviews and 50 million person panel with Salesforce's existing customer data, aimed at giving Agentforce a better read on what customers actually want.
11 of 28 public holdings sit over 20pc below their highs
11 of the 28 public names in the portfolio list are more than 20% below their 52-week high, including Broadcom, down 26%, and Tesla, down 28%. That's over a third of the public book still deep in drawdown, even as the equal-weight basket of holdings is up 66.8% over the past year. Big aggregate gains can sit on top of plenty of individual pain.
Since this note:Broadcom −9.0%Tesla +6.2%(S&P 500 −0.1%)
Big & small
SpaceX reaches orbit while Zendir tests missions in software first
SpaceX's Starship reached orbit for the first time on 28 September, a milestone even though the mission was cut short after an engine failure, and it placed 26 upgraded Starlink satellites in orbit along the way. Canberra's Zendir works the other end of the same problem, building digital twins that let engineers model a spacecraft's systems and failure modes before any hardware is built. One proves itself by flying, the other by simulating everything that could go wrong first.
IREN falls 42pc from its high even as revenue jumped 41pc
IREN shares are down 45.4% from their 52-week high and slid another 11.7% this week. The FY26 results on 27 August showed revenue up 41% to $707 million but a $684 million net loss and a warning of $25-30 billion in 2027 capex. Analysts at Redburn then started the neocloud group at Neutral, dragging IREN down with CoreWeave and Nebius even as JPMorgan raised its own target to $65.
Bank of America bought Merrill for $50bn 18 years ago this month
On 15 September 2008, at the height of the financial crisis, Bank of America agreed to buy Merrill Lynch for about $50 billion in stock, ending 94 years of Merrill's independence. Eighteen years on, Merrill Wealth Management alone reported $4.1 trillion in client balances in the second quarter of 2026, with wealth and investment management net income up sharply on the year.
Since this note:Bank of America −7.9%(S&P 500 −0.3%)
Connections
Xanadu and AMD's Backline wires quantum chips into EPYC servers
Xanadu and AMD this month released Backline, an open platform co-designed by the two companies for rapid communication between quantum and classical computing hardware. It targets end-to-end loop times under 3 microseconds between Xanadu's photonic processors and AMD's EPYC and Threadripper CPUs, Instinct GPUs and Versal FPGAs. For AMD it's a low-cost way into quantum-adjacent infrastructure; for Xanadu it ties its PennyLane software to chips already sitting in data centres.
Since this note:Xanadu −45.6%AMD −19.5%(S&P 500 −1.0%)
Theme
Shopify defaults to AI-agent checkout, Amazon keeps the gate shut
From 21 September, Shopify started enabling Shop Pay checkout for AI shopping agents by default across eligible US merchants, letting tools like Google's AI Mode buy without a manual integration. Amazon is going the other way: it has blocked OpenAI's shopping crawlers from indexing its listings and sued Perplexity's shopping agent over unauthorised purchases. Two of the biggest commerce platforms in the portfolio are now running opposite bets on how much buying power to hand to AI agents.
Officely
Salesforce
Coinbase
Shopify
CleanSpark
Meta
ASML
Apple
Intel
Sandisk
Cova AI
Nvidia
Nebius
Bank of America
BYD
AutoGrab
Micron
Cloudflare
Microsoft
Amazon
Alphabet
Tesla
TSMC
SpaceX
AMD
Broadcom
IREN
Chipper Cash
Xanadu
Tencent
iion
ServiceNow
Pearler
Twilio
Everlab
Amplified
Flyweel
Zendir
