And welcome back to Street Tweets from The Street Sheet!

They say there’s no crystal balls on Wall Street. But turns out, even if you do predict the future, capitalizing on it is another story.

Leopold Aschenbrenner is the former OpenAI researcher who published a 165-page essay in 2024 titled Situational Awareness, predicting trillion-dollar investments in AI computing, enormous new data centers, and governments elbowing their way into the race to build powerful AI systems. He was right about nearly all of it.

So, naturally, he built a hedge fund around being right. The portfolio was concentrated in memory-chip makers, AI infrastructure, and cloud businesses. And it returned 439% in the first half of this year, per the Financial Times.

But he did it with borrowed money. When Korean memory-chip stocks sold off in June, the lenders behind those loans wanted cash back. That triggered a margin call, forcing the fund to sell its holdings at the price on the screen, regardless of whether the underlying thesis still holds.

Selling like that feeds on itself, and by this past week, Aschenbrenner needed someone to take the whole pile off his hands. Ken Griffin’s Citadel obliged, buying a portion of the fund’s public stock portfolio.

Traders have a phrase for the wrong end of that transaction: getting your face ripped off. They also have hot takes, ranging from “This is why you never give a 24-year-old billions to invest” to “Griffin triggered the South Korea sell-off and planned this all along.” We compiled a few below.

But the best (read: worst) part? Once the market saw the fund had finished dumping shares, many of those same AI names bounced, with momentum stocks having one of their best days in history on Friday. Even if you can see the future, timing is still everything.

— Brooks & The Street Sheet Team

The Federal Reserve delivered what Wall Street has come to expect (but also, increasingly, doubt) by holding interest rates steady. So investors were free to focus on Big Tech earnings instead. That was enough to push all three major indexes to a winning week, though only the DJIA remained up on the month.

The spotlight shifts back to the labor market next week, with Friday's jobs report taking center stage. After months of conflicting employment data, investors will be watching closely to see whether hiring finally confirms the labor market is strengthening, or if another surprise is in store.

Humanoid robots can now backflip, fence, and peel grapes. Forecasts see the robotics sector roughly tripling to $218.5B within a few years, and after upending white-collar work, the disruption is coming for blue-collar jobs next.

But the surer play may be the component inside every machine. Morgan Stanley says robotic bearings, the ligaments inside every robot joint and motor, could grow 300x through 2050. Just six manufacturers control over half of global supply, and robots simply do not work without them.

This week's Research names one specialist quietly positioned at the center of it all, before robots go mainstream.

Backed by a 90-day money-back guarantee.

Of course, “fastest pace in history” comes with an important caveat. Vanda only has 1,757 sessions on file.

History, in this case, starts in 2019.

Microsoft (MSFT) sells much of the AI writing the posts. Now it’s shipping the button to report them.

Vertical integration?

The four firms cited ran $165B through CapEx last quarter, up 87% in a year. Three years ago all four combined spent less in a quarter than Amazon (AMZN) now spends on its own. Nobody wants to be the one who blinks first.

The robotics wave is early, but the bearings specialist in this week's Research is not waiting around for 2050. Its latest quarter, reported July 31, already reads like a growth story.

The full report breaks down the thesis, and the name.

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Aschenbrenner must have suppressed his Joker laugh in front of clients. Hard to believe investors entrusted billions to a guy who sounds like he just broke out of Arkham.

Even if he didn’t engineer a nation’s economic downfall just to buy a rival’s book…

We gotta imagine Ken Griffin feels pretty smug in his ivory Citadel.