Investing FAQ

Through May 29 the portfolio returned +5.2% in CHF on a time-weighted basis, roughly matching a fairly-constructed global 60/40 benchmark (+5.4%) and trailing the S&P 500 total return in CHF (+9.0%). That is after a drawdown of nearly 4% in late March, when a Middle East conflict and a threat to the Strait of Hormuz sent oil sharply higher.

Three of four rotation calls paid through May 29 in CHF: Emerging Markets +20.7%, US Small Cap +13.2%, Japan +13.1%. The fourth, the Europe overweight, returned only +4.8%, behind US large-cap (+9.9%) and well behind the other three rotations. The clean miss was on rates: the bond sleeves came in flat to slightly negative because the Fed did not cut. Emerging markets won via Korean and Taiwanese chip names rather than the Chinese tech the December thesis leaned on.

By the Shiller CAPE measure, yes, and more than at the end of 2025. The CAPE rose from 39.8 in December to about 42.7 in late May 2026, near the December 1999 dot-com peak of 44.2 and well above the long-run mean of about 17.3. Top-10 concentration sits at 39.1% of the index, with NVIDIA alone at 8.17%, up from 7.2% in December.

No. Through late May the Fed had not cut at all, holding through every meeting as a February-March oil spike from the Middle East conflict pushed US inflation back toward 4%. The December thesis assumed two to three cuts; by spring the market was pricing the ECB to move before the Fed.

It depends on the carry. With the SNB at 0%, hedging the yen on a Japan sleeve costs almost nothing because Japanese rates are also low, while removing a real drag: the yen handed back most of Japan's local-currency gain this year. Hedging the dollar is expensive, a roughly 4% rate differential, for a small spot move, so I left the US Treasury sleeve unhedged and kept the carry.

Three things. Gold went from 5% to 6%, funded with new cash, because it remains the book's one genuine diversifier. Crypto went from 4.5% to 3.5% by drift, because it fell 19% with equities instead of hedging them. And the Japan sleeve switched from an unhedged share class to a CHF-hedged one. Two single-name holdings were also folded into the diversified ETFs that cover those sleeves.

On 18 November 2025 the European Supervisory Authorities (EBA, EIOPA, ESMA) published the first official list of Critical ICT Third-Party Providers under the Digital Operational Resilience Act (Regulation (EU) 2022/2554, applicable from 17 January 2025). The list contains 19 designations, including AWS, Microsoft, Google Cloud, IBM, Bloomberg, LSEG, TCS, and Orange. Each designated provider sits under direct EU-level oversight by Lead Overseers under Articles 31–44 of DORA, with fines up to 1% of average daily global turnover applied per day for up to six months. Article 28 mandates contractual exit strategies, Article 30 specifies critical-function contract terms.

The CLOUD Act (18 U.S.C. § 2713, enacted March 2018) compels US-headquartered providers to disclose data "regardless of whether such communication, record, or other information is located within or outside of the United States." Microsoft's H2 2024 transparency report shows 5,587 US law-enforcement demands for consumer data, 115 of them warrants for content stored outside the US. In late 2024 Microsoft France told the French Senate it cannot guarantee EU-hosted data won't be transferred to US authorities under a CLOUD Act order. For an EU bank, this creates a structural conflict with the EU Data Act Article 32 requirement to resist third-country governmental access to non-personal data, and with DORA-mandated audit rights enforceable in the host jurisdiction.

Legally unresolved as of mid-2026. AWS European Sovereign Cloud is operated by EU-incorporated entities with EU-resident staff and dedicated infrastructure (first region eusc-de-east-1, Brandenburg, launching January 2026, €7.8B investment through 2040). A legal opinion commissioned by AWS argues the structure escapes CLOUD Act reach. A Dutch Ministry of Justice memo (February 2025) noted that the parent ownership is ultimately Amazon.com, Inc., and the CLOUD Act applies to providers with "possession, custody, or control" — corporate parent control plausibly satisfies that test. The question will only be settled by the first contested CLOUD Act warrant against an EU-resident hyperscaler subsidiary, which has not yet occurred.

Announced by Brad Smith at the Atlantic Council Brussels on 30 April 2025 and embedded as a contractual "European Digital Resilience Commitment" with EU national governments and the Commission, Microsoft pledges to challenge in court any government order to suspend operations in Europe and to escrow source code in Switzerland if it loses. Counter-evidence: Microsoft France's French Senate admission that it cannot guarantee non-transfer under a lawful CLOUD Act order, and the Microsoft / Karim Khan episode in which the ICC lost access to its chief prosecutor's Outlook account after EO 14203 sanctioned him. Microsoft denies actively cutting Khan off; the ICC migrated to openDesk anyway. The court-fight clause is a contractual commitment, not a statutory exemption.

Article 32(1) of Regulation (EU) 2023/2854 (applicable 12 September 2025) requires data-processing providers to take "all adequate technical, organisational and legal measures... to prevent international and third-country governmental access and transfer of non-personal data held in the Union where such transfer or access would create a conflict with Union law." Article 32(2) recognises a third-country court order only where it is based on an international agreement in force with the EU or relevant Member State. No EU–US CLOUD Act executive agreement exists, so a US warrant served on Frankfurt-hosted non-personal data is a statutory conflict the provider must resist. Most bank transactional metadata is non-personal under EU law and therefore falls inside Article 32's scope.

DACH bank supervision triangulates four layers. DORA (Regulation 2022/2554) applies EU-wide and creates direct supervision of the 19 Critical ICT Third-Party Providers. The ECB Guide on Outsourcing Cloud Services (16 July 2025) operationalises SSM expectations: concentration risk metrics, exit testing as a continuous obligation, audit rights as enforceable rather than contractual boilerplate. BaFin BAIT and MaRisk AT 9 (9th amendment, June 2024) align German national supervision with DORA; BaFin's March 2024 cloud guidance update adds specific German enforcement detail. FINMA Circular 2018/3 has been in force in Switzerland since 2018, is technology-neutral, and conditions outsourcing abroad on enforceable inspection rights in the host jurisdiction. The four converge on three operational requirements: a tested exit plan with a last-test date, jurisdictionally enforceable audit access, and a measurable concentration metric for ICT third-party providers.

DORA Article 28(8) requires exit plans to be comprehensive, documented, and sufficiently tested and reviewed periodically. In practice the supervisory standard is at least one tabletop exercise or partial migration every two years for any ICT third-party arrangement supporting a critical or important function. Tests must validate data portability, that alternative providers exist, and that the time-to-cutover is realistic. The ECB Cloud Outsourcing Guide of 16 July 2025 reinforces the point by treating exit testing as a continuous obligation; ticking the contractual box once is no longer enough.

Partially. By May 2026, eight of his dated technology and infrastructure predictions have confirmed (test-time compute, GPQA Diamond saturation, power as the binding constraint, Marcellus gas-for-AI, the Gulf chip pivot, AMD's compute TAM). Eight political-economy predictions have falsified (voluntary lab merger, Congressional trillions, a coalition of democracies, DPA invocation, tightening export controls). The technology and infrastructure record is roughly 8-of-10 confirmed; the political-economy record is roughly 8-of-10 falsified.

Aschenbrenner's window remains open but contested. Test-time compute paradigm shifts validated his framework in a register he did not himself emphasise. Pretraining scaling has slowed relative to RL post-training in ways that complicate the additive 5-OOM framing. Capability gains continued; whether the threshold he calls 'drop-in remote worker' is reached by 2027 is the open question his own LP is positioned around.

Aschenbrenner combines three positions normally held separately: a libertarian presumption against state action, a Burkean reverence for two-hundred-year-old institutions, and an empirical optimism about alignment tractability. The synthesis runs as a series circuit where each identity premises the next. He invokes Burke specifically to argue that AGI is a national-security-decisive technology that the existing constitutional architecture must absorb, which yields a Promethean prescription (a peacetime industrial nationalisation) defended on Burkean grounds.

Aschenbrenner was a member of OpenAI's Superalignment team. He has publicly stated, including in the Dwarkesh Patel interview, that he was dismissed in spring 2024, one to two weeks before his colleagues Ilya Sutskever and Jan Leike resigned. Per his own account, the factors discussed in his exit conversations included a security memo he had sent to the board, his decision not to sign the November 2023 employee letter supporting Sam Altman's reinstatement, and his views on AGI nationalisation. He has also publicly stated that he declined the company's non-disparagement NDA, forfeiting approximately one million dollars in vested equity. OpenAI has not commented publicly on the specifics. Within five weeks the Superalignment team was dissolved.

Situational Awareness LP is the San Francisco investment firm Aschenbrenner co-founded in mid-2024. Aschenbrenner has publicly named Patrick Collison, John Collison, Daniel Gross, and Nat Friedman as anchor investors in interviews. The fund's strategy, as Aschenbrenner has publicly described it, expresses the Situational Awareness framework in capital: long semiconductors, power utilities, behind-the-meter gas, and AGI-adjacent infrastructure; the 'big bond short' on real interest rates above 10% has not fired. None of the named LPs has independently confirmed specific position attribution; the descriptions are drawn entirely from Aschenbrenner's own public statements.

Aschenbrenner refuses probability distributions and instead 'tells the modal story', a vivid, dated, falsifiable narrative bet on what the decade looks like. The method's strength is that it is gradable: it produces dated claims that can be scored against reality. Its limitation is substrate-sensitivity: the method is durable on processes governed by empirical lawfulness (log-log scaling curves, capex aggregates, hyperscaler power draw) and brittle on processes governed by elections, executive turnover, and coalition politics.

Menlo's December 2025 State of Generative AI in the Enterprise report puts US enterprise GenAI spending at $37B, drawn from a survey of 495 buyers about their GenAI line items. The figure is US-only, GenAI-only (no traditional or predictive ML), and enterprise-only (no consumer subscriptions). Worldwide vendor-recognized AI revenue is materially larger because Menlo's perimeter excludes non-US revenue, non-GenAI AI SKUs, and the consulting and channel-margin layer.