Macro Notes
Contrarian investment theses on the macro shifts most investors are ignoring
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- #49
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- Subscribers
- 59K
- Paid subscribers
- 100+ paid
- Badge
- Bestseller 100
- Followers
- 60K
- Paid plan
- $60/mo
- Recommends
- 11
- Podcast
- Yes
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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: Five Investment Theses We’re Watching Closely · This Simple Rules-Based Strategy Keeps Outperforming the S&P 500
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 → 59K on Sep 30, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #49 today · #54 a week ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 21 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 10%
- Best rank seen
- #49
- Rank, 7 days
- +5 places
- Subscribers added
- −1.0K
- Followers added
- −387
- Posts
- 9
- Reactions per post
- 20
- Reactions tracked
- 341
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Sep 30, 2026
since tracking began
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 17 posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: The satellite internet thesis is up 258% — 32 reactions on Aug 5, 2026.
Recent posts
- 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…
- The $40 Billion Race to Stop the Cheap Drone Threat
I have covered defence quite a lot on Macro Notes over the past few years, European defence in particular. It is one of the easier themes for me to investigate because I spend a lot of time in Eastern Europe, not very far from the Ukrainian border. The consequences of what is happening in Ukraine are much more visible here than they are from London. But after the drone and missile attacks that reached Dubai earlier this year, there was another defence theme I started paying much more attention to: counter-drone defense. In March, drones reached the area around Dubai International Airport…
- The $5 Trillion Opportunity to Turn Intelligence Into Movement
When we think about AI, we think about ChatGPT, Claude, AI agents in CRMs, and all kinds of applications serving the virtual world. We might also think about film production, content creation, and so on. Today, let’s look at AI in the real world , because this is a macro trend that is booming right now, and the deployment of AI in robotics and autonomous systems is accelerating. Amazon celebrated its millionth robot in 2025. The IFR also recorded 542,000 industrial robot installations in 2024 , more than double the number ten years earlier. Industrial robotics has been growing for a long…
- Europe’s €800 Billion Rearmament Has a China Problem
The mission of Macro Notes and the platform we’re building, Altis.finance , is to help you discover compelling investment theses before they pass you by. For me, the most effective way to invest over the medium to long term has always been a global macro approach, combined with top-down stock picking. Put simply: identify a macro thesis — a structural change in a market, for example — then work your way down to the companies best positioned to benefit. Europe’s rearmament is a good example. European countries are responding to the Russian threat by increasing defense spending. Which companies…
- The $1.6 Trillion Asset Becoming Collateral
Bitcoin is one of the most liquid assets in crypto. It trades around the clock, seven days a week. As I write this, its market capitalization sits at roughly $1.57 trillion , with tens of billions of dollars changing hands on active trading days. Yet for most of Bitcoin’s history, a holder who needed liquidity faced a strangely simple choice: Sell Bitcoin. Need capital to fund a business? Sell Bitcoin. Need cash for a large purchase? Sell Bitcoin. Want to redeploy capital into another opportunity? Sell Bitcoin. And every sale solves the immediate liquidity problem by creating another one: you…
- The Strange Economics of the $200 Billion Tanker Market
Most macro analysts spend a lot of time trying to predict fluctuations in the price of oil. I’ve never really been that interested in it. There is obviously a lot of money to be made trading oil, but for me it’s too dependent on events, too short-term and too speculative. That’s not really how I like to invest. But the ships transporting that oil? That’s much more interesting. Tankers are a much more long-term and cyclical business. Ships get old. Regulations change. At some point, fleets need to be replaced. And because building new ships takes time, these cycles can become relatively…
- AI Is Creating a Memory Inflation Shock
For most of the AI boom, the bottleneck was easy to identify. GPUs. Companies wanted far more computing power than Nvidia and the semiconductor supply chain could provide. Prices rose, hyperscalers rushed to secure capacity, and investors focused almost entirely on the accelerator layer. But over the past year, another bottleneck has quietly become much more important. Memory. And the reason is structural. GPUs perform the calculations, but an AI system needs several additional layers around them to continuously feed, process and retain data. A simplified AI infrastructure stack looks like…
- The $600 Billion Sovereign AI Race - Macro Notes Podcast 001
Hello everyone, Here is the podcast version created with NotebookLM. The goal of this podcast is to provide additional insights and perspectives on the topics covered in our published editions. This first episode explores sovereign AI, the subject of this article. Feel free to read it before or after listening to the podcast. Read the post As a reminder, if you want to go beyond the analysis we share in the podcast and our publications, you can now explore more than 100 portfolios on the platform we launched a few days ago: Altis.finance/terminal . Altis Terminal brings together all our…
- The $202 Billion Precision Oncology Thesis
For the past several weeks, I have written extensively about AI infrastructure. Today, I want to step away from data centers and semiconductors to examine a different kind of infrastructure, one that could allow physicians to detect cancer when conventional scans still see nothing. We previously explored the investment thesis around GLP-1 drugs. It attracted enormous attention for a simple reason: obesity affects an exceptionally large population. Approximately 40.3% of American adults are living with obesity, and the commercial opportunity became large enough to help turn Eli Lilly into the…
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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: Sep 30, 2026.