Ideas
Rates and long-end yields should fall.
He expects inflation to stay benign or drift lower and AI to be deflationary, so most rate moves over the next two years should be lower; the Fed should not hike into an oil shock, the long end can ease, and once the yield curve steepens banks become natural buyers of Treasuries.
Dollar weakness is being orchestrated.
Bessent is acting as the world’s biggest bond salesman and orchestrating swap lines and liquidity; Japan, Korea, China, and the US all want a weaker dollar, and a weaker dollar grows the world and helps bring liquidity back into risk assets.
Amazon leads robot-driven productivity gains.
Amazon invested heavily in warehouse robotization and technology from roughly 2015-2019, and those investments are now lifting productivity, margins, and earnings; it is a lead test case for what AI and robots can do to broader economic productivity.
Semis lead the AI business cycle.
Semiconductor sales are the first part of the new intelligence-driven business cycle: AI requires semis to create intelligence, then data-center capex scales, then intelligence compounds and drives more chip demand.
Crypto and tech beat debasement.
The debt-refinancing and debasement cycle creates a roughly 8% debasement rate plus inflation, about an 11% annual hurdle, and only crypto and technology are the two asset classes that outperform that hurdle over the long term.
Own crypto infrastructure via layer-one tokens.
As the AI and machine economy scales, blockchains are the infrastructure layer for the digital economy, and owning layer-one tokens is the accessible, fractional way to capture value as network usage and value transacted rise.
Ethereum dominates value storage and tokenization.
Ethereum is the proven, Lindy, ultra-decentralized L1 with dominant stablecoin, DeFi, and high-end NFT/digital-art value; if it were switched off it would destroy trillions in expected value, but its market value is far below that, and it remains the likely base for bank tokenization and EVM real-world assets.
Solana is a proven fast layer one.
Solana has proven itself as fast, cheap, and efficient, enabling high-throughput use cases like memecoins and instant capital formation; it is one of only two truly proven L1s and is seeing agent flows ramp.
Sui is undervalued machine-economy infrastructure.
Sui is faster, cheaper, and more efficient than prior L1s, with programmable transaction blocks that allow 1,024 actions per slot and enable intelligence-dense agent transactions; it is built for the machine economy, free stablecoin transactions reduce friction, it has better economic density than Solana despite fewer users, and he is overweight because the token is not priced for being one of the eventual top L1 aggregators.
Zcash benefits from institutional privacy demand.
Institutions need privacy, and Bitcoin-style public transparency is unacceptable; Zcash is becoming important as a privacy asset, and he holds it and added more about three months ago.
Hold Bitcoin in minimum-regret portfolio.
Bitcoin is a different asset from layer ones, but he still holds it in a minimum-regret portfolio and accepts volatility and drawdowns for long-term upside.
Digital art offers double convexity.
Most of his ETH is held in NFTs and digital art because digital art offers double convexity: art can appreciate in ETH terms while ETH appreciates in dollar terms, and digital art is a new, already-proven long-term store of value.
This Milk Road Macro video, published September 15, 2026,
features Raoul Pal
discussing TLT, USD, AMZN, SMH, XLK, Layer 1 tokens, ETH, SOL, SUI, ZEC, BTC, Digital art / NFTs.
12 trade ideas extracted by AI with direction and confidence scoring.
Speakers:
Raoul Pal
· Tickers:
TLT,
USD,
AMZN,
SMH,
XLK,
Layer 1 tokens,
ETH,
SOL,
SUI,
ZEC,
BTC,
Digital art / NFTs
