Good afternoon. QQQs -85bps today in another frenzied session driven by animal spirits, just not the usual buy everything type. Instead, investors continued hunting for the less obvious winners and losers from the consumer agentic theme, shuffling or pressing positions and re-examining their priors. PMs are back in the early-2026 SaaSpocalypse workflow: panic, Claude, trade.
Today it was GOOGL’s -4% turn under the microscope after largely escaping the initial selling. Early in the day, Stratechery had a piece arguing that agents pose a more fundamental challenge to GOOGL than chatbots: chatbots still leave a human in the loop to advertise to, while agents are designed to take that human out of the process. His argument is that Google’s slow rollout is not just a product problem, but a business-model conflict: building the best agent potentially undermines the Search economics it is trying to protect. Search also lacks the physical-world anchor that helps protect platforms doing the actual fulfillment or booking work.
There was some similarly good discussion and points made in TMTB Slack here:
The discussion in TMTB Slack took that a step further than Ben: unlike the initial ChatGPT use cases, Muse goes directly after highly monetizable queries in travel, retail and insurance. The concern isn’t simply whether Google can launch a competing agent, but whether retaining the user would preserve anything like today’s Search economics in a much more competitive market. Bulls pushback that lower take rates aren’t a foregone conclusion, agents could turn previously direct/unpaid commerce into monetizable traffic, and adoption will take time. Investors know that Google can build this, but debate is how much it will earn on the other side, and how painful the transition could be. AnonCapital framed it nicely: I think that's the real narrative question regarding TPU/GCP complex v search. LT probably settled out ok, but air pocket in that transition is probable.
This debate all comes on the backdrop of mediocre 3p data (search inline, possible YT/networks miss) and a search set up that points to a likely search decel to low double digits. We called out this chart in our weekly Sunday showing the tougher comps ahead:
As we’ve written over the last couple weeks, this is one of many debates in Tech that likely won’t be settled soon. We’re still in the discovery and “re-rate the multiple shoot first, ask questions later” phase. Outside of GOOGL, perceived losers continued to underperform: OTAs -5-8%; AMZN -2%; CART -3%; DASH -1.5%.
The Consumer Agentic Winner vs. Loser spread was another +6% today and is now +35% since the Muse Launch on 9/8:
In macro land, yields surged 10-16bps across the curve as Fed expects moved in a hawkish direction with the market now pricing in closer to 80% chance of hike at the next meeting and 36bps worth of hikes this year (and 55bps in 27). The cause was a hotter than expected Sept flash PMI report, which the market took as “good is bad.” Brent was up 440bps.
OK, let’s get to the good stuff…