Authored by Peter Tchir via Academy Securities,With weakness in chips and AI the prior week, that was a major topic of conversation, as was the escalation in Iran (please see Academy’s Geopolitical Analysis for the latest on Iran and geopolitics more broadly).Two key themes from last weekend’s From Trinkets to Compute seem to be playing out:Cheap Chinese ComputeMost importantly, the story of Cheap Chinese Compute is garnering staying power. While DeepSeek may have been a one-off, the story is increasingly about China delivering Cheap Compute. We have seen China flood/control markets in the past. I didn’t see it coming in compute (at least not yet), but it might be here?China doesn’t have to deal with NIMBY, but they do make a lot of chips (generally lower quality, but a lot), and have been ramping up all forms of electricity production and storage for years. The U.S. is finally getting on board with this ProSec™ theme, while the rest of the world is only starting to wake up to the need and potential opportunity that adopting a ProSec™ mindset delivers.On the less “savory” side are “allegations” (and I’m being polite here) that a lot of the Chinese compute trains by “distilling” from existing models (inundating existing models with requests, to somewhat “copy” their answers) rather than training their models from scratch. It is a big cost advantage and time saving mechanism.EarningsLess important was my flipping from “earnings will matter” to “earnings might not matter.”We don’t really spend a lot of time on single stock earnings. It isn’t our “thing” in general. But we do follow the earnings. What we can say so far on this front is that when the earnings and announcements hit the tape, they seem very strong. The instant reaction in the media (and social media) tends to support the strength of the results. Then the stocks seem to drift lower (in some cases worse than drift). The earnings bar seems to be set incredibly high, so far.This is concerning when trying to determine the direction of the next leg.BraggawattsI’m not sure how I missed the term Braggawatts, but it caught my attention when my friends at ZeroHedge sent out a tweet that used the term.The Next Phase Of Shrinkflation: Rolling Blackouts https://t.co/dYmR3d7Kn9