Macro Notes
Contrarian investment theses on the macro shifts most investors are ignoring
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- #33
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What they write about
Contrarian macro investment theses, each built around a large addressable market. Recurring subjects include physical applications of artificial intelligence, defence and European rearmament, shipping and tankers, memory and semiconductor supply, sovereign AI programmes, and oncology. Also runs a podcast.
- macro
- thematic investing
- defence
- shipping
- semiconductors
- biotech
Recent examples: The 5 Investment Theses We’re Working On Before Year-End · The $8 Trillion Longevity Economy - Healthcare Before You Get Sick
Written from Macro Notes’s own published post titles and openings in Sep 11, 2026. It describes the subjects the newsletter covers, not its views, and is not investment advice.
Growth history
Subscribers (thousands, nightly)
60K on Sep 10, 2026 → 66K on Oct 21, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #33 today · #45 a week ago · #55 a month ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 42 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 7%
- Best rank seen
- #33
- Rank, 7 days
- +12 places
- Rank, 30 days
- +22 places
- Subscribers added
- +6.0K
- Posts
- 12
- Reactions per post
- 24
- Reactions tracked
- 599
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Oct 21, 2026
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 25 posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: The $8 Trillion Longevity Economy - Healthcare Before You Get Sick — 60 reactions on Oct 15, 2026.
Recent posts
- The 5 Investment Theses We’re Working On Before Year-End
At Macro Notes, we invest with a global macro approach. That means we start from the macroeconomy to identify interesting market movements, then we build investment theses. Only then do we pick the companies exposed to those theses. It’s a top-down approach to stock picking. We don’t ask “does this company have interesting potential?” We study the economy at the macro level first, and then we ask whether a company exposed to the thesis we’ve built has interesting potential. For example, instead of asking “does GE Vernova have interesting potential?” and analyzing the company, we reason (to…
- The $8 Trillion Longevity Economy - Healthcare Before You Get Sick
There’s a trend you may have noticed recently. Perhaps through Netflix’s documentary about Bryan Johnson. Perhaps through the growing number of people online sharing their blood tests, sleep scores, and elaborate morning routines. Longevity. At one end, picture a billionaire having young plasma infused into his veins, hoping to negotiate a few more years with death. At the other end, someone is trying to stop smoking, sleep properly, and still be able to climb the stairs at eighty. One wants to rewrite the rules of human existence. The other would settle for keeping their knees. Both are…
- The $600 Billion AI Sovereignty Paradox
One of the things I look for when following an investment thesis is whether the market can expand beyond the customers that initially made it successful. An industry can grow because its existing customers spend more. But it can also grow because a new group of customers starts buying the same products for a different reason. The second mechanism is particularly interesting when those products are difficult to manufacture, essential to the customer, and supplied by a relatively small number of companies. I think this is an important part of the next phase of AI infrastructure. Much of the…
- The $518 Billion Infrastructure Bet Behind Claude
Recently, Reuters obtained the confidential prospectus Anthropic prepared for its initial public offering. The document contains some extraordinary numbers. A potential valuation of more than $2 trillion. A twelvefold increase in revenue in 2025. And roughly $42 billion in net losses. That last figure deserves an explanation. Around $34 billion represents an accounting charge related to financing that could eventually convert into shares. So Anthropic did not spend $42 billion running Claude. Its operating loss was still substantial, at more than $8 billion. The valuation, meanwhile, clearly…
- The Nuclear Fuel Sovereignty Race
Sometimes, a good way to build an investment thesis is to look at the direction history is taking, and then think a few steps ahead. That is what we are going to do today. Take Russia, the war in Ukraine, and the confrontation between Russia and the West, which has continued to spread into more areas of the economy. This has already caused some major changes. Europe has had to rearm. Russian oligarchs have had assets frozen. Governments and businesses have had to rethink supply chains they previously took for granted. One consequence runs through all of this: the West wants to reduce its…
- The $5 Trillion Opportunity to Turn Intelligence Into Movement - Macro Podcast 002
Hi everyone, While virtual AI tools like ChatGPT scale effortlessly in software, bringing AI into the physical world is a completely different story. Real-world robotics faces tough physical constraints—weight, friction, and precise spatial handling. In today’s episode of Macro Notes Podcast (created with NotebookLM) , we look beyond the hype of individual robot makers and focus on the real engine behind this $5 trillion transition : the foundational hardware. We break down why component suppliers—making sensors, smart motors, and actuators —represent the ultimate “picks and shovels”…
- MacroNotes.com and what’s next
Today, I want to take you behind the scenes of Macro Notes—and share what I’m building next. I recently secured MacroNotes.com for $10,000 , and we’ve just launched our new website. It brings together our research approach, membership plans, and wider newsletter collection, including Public Markets , which, like Macro Notes, is a Substack Bestseller. You can explore it here (it’s a first version, with more to come) : Visit MacroNotes.com → The website is our new front door. The newsletter, subscriptions, and your existing membership remain on Substack. Investing more in the research you…
- Information Is No Longer Your Investing Edge
Twenty years ago, a meaningful part of an investor’s edge came from access to information. Then the internet democratized information. Then Substack, X, podcasts, and online communities democratized specialized analysis. And now LLMs are democratizing a large part of the analytical work itself: summarizing earnings, comparing companies, calculating multiples, explaining industries, reading filings, identifying competitors, and more. The result is almost paradoxical: We probably have access to more information and analytical capacity than any previous generation of investors, yet that does not…
- Five Investment Theses We’re Watching Closely
Over the past two years, we have explored several themes at Macro Notes: European rearmament, GLP-1 treatments, and the role of fiber optics in digital infrastructure. Some of these theses have led to very attractive opportunities. They shared a common starting point: a change was becoming visible in the economy, and we wanted to understand which companies could benefit. But past opportunities do not answer the question that matters to us today: where could the next ones come from? So I wanted to share five investment theses we will be following closely at Macro Notes. They are at different…
- This Simple Rules-Based Strategy Keeps Outperforming the S&P 500
Today’s edition is a guest post from MarketFighter, an investor who takes a very different approach from the thesis-driven research we usually publish at Macro Notes. Instead of trying to forecast where markets are heading, his strategy systematically reacts to what markets are already doing. I thought it was worth sharing because it offers a very different answer to a question every investor eventually faces: how much of investing should actually depend on our judgment? Outperforming the market in the long run is a goal many of us share. We have different strategies, different mindsets, and…
- Boom
I’ve recently become obsessed with a private company you may have already heard of: Boom Supersonic . And not because I suddenly became interested in aviation, but because a company whose mission is to bring commercial supersonic flights back has actually developed a very innovative solution to one of the biggest problems facing artificial intelligence infrastructure. And that’s what I want to talk about today. Something Elon Musk often says, and which is probably behind his ability to build such successful companies, is that the only laws that are truly real and impossible to change are the…
- A Quick Update on Macro Notes
I regularly share a quick update on how the newsletter is evolving, and today I wanted to give you the latest on where Macro Notes stands. Macro Notes is becoming one of the largest macro and finance newsletters on Substack. We’re now close to reaching 1,000 Premium subscribers and 100 Founding members — a milestone I expect us to hit by the end of the year, in line with the goals we set for 2026. On the readership side, we recently removed around 5,000 inactive accounts , which temporarily brought our subscriber count down to roughly 55,000. In just three months, we gained those 5,000…
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Data: Substack public leaderboards and publication archives, refreshed nightly, plus public beehiiv sitemaps and recommendation pages, refreshed weekly. Source for this page: Macro Notes. Subscriber counts are Substack’s own rounded public figures, so week-on-week changes move in steps. beehiiv audience sizes are self-reported by the publisher and are not verified. Last snapshot: Oct 21, 2026.