My year-end base case of 800 and optimistic scenario of 830 remain intact, although the path there is unlikely to be smooth as we move through September so trail your positions, protect profits and don’t get greedy.

Seasonality is one reason for keeping risk contained because since 1928, September has been the only month in which the S&P 500 has fallen more often than it has risen, finishing lower 55% of the time. The average return has been 1.1%, while the typical intra-month selloff has been closer to 4.7%.

ALso, the weakness has usually arrived later in the month as second half of September has averaged a −0.91% return, making it historically the weakest two-week stretch of the year. This does not guarantee another selloff, but it supports being more selective rather than chasing every move higher.

Midterm election years have made this pattern even more with September averaging a about a1.5% return and a roughly 6% drawdown. The historical path tends to weaken into month-end before improving in October and accelerating around Election Day into year-end.

That is broadly how I am approaching the next several weeks as there is a tactical window for volatility and further weakness, but this would create a potentially much better setup in October.

I also wanted to share that orporate buyback demand is likely to peak around September 8 before gradually fading through the remainder of the month and means one of the market’s largest and most consistent sources of structural buying becomes progressively weaker just as the historically more difficult second half of September approaches.

Meta has officially taken Muse Code out of beta, introducing monthly subscription tiers starting at $5 alongside an SDK in developer preview.

Meta is also opening an SDK in developer preview, letting developers build their own agents on Muse Code, connect custom tools, stream progress and resume sessions later.

The new SDK allows developers to programmatically embed custom agents, hook up personalized tools, stream live progress, and resume prior command-line sessions.

The updated CLI environment now supports inter-session messaging (allowing independent agent sessions to share state directly) and structured workflows that split tasks across specialized subagent teams.

This morning, the market may be looking at AI from the wrong angle now. My concern is no longer whether AI demand is real. It clearly is. Nvidia is still guiding for very strong growth, hyperscalers keep spending, and companies like Anthropic are committing tens of billions into future compute capacity.

But all this infrastructure need capital.

Data centres, GPUs, power, networking, cooling, transmission, everything has to be financed. At same time governments are also issuing huge amount of debt. So both private AI investment and sovereign borrowing are competing for same pool of capital.

This matters more when US 10-year is moving towards 5% and oil is again above $90. At 2% yields, investors can wait 4-5 years for an AI project to generate cashflow. At nearly 5%, timing matter a lot more.

This is why I think market will start separating companies much more aggressively.

A company with “10GW future pipeline” is not same thing as company with signed customer, secured power and revenue starting next year.

We are already seeing something similar in data centres. Some utilities are finding that a large portion of proposed electricity demand is basically speculative or duplicated. So hundreds of GW of requested capacity doesn't mean all of it will actually get built.

For me, the next phase of AI trade looks more like:

Contracted demand > announced demand

Cash flow > huge TAM story

Energised capacity > proposed capacity

ROIC > capex headlines

I am still bullish on AI infrastructure overall. But I think the easy trade of buying anything connected to AI is probably ending.

Now the catalyst is: who actually gets paid, and how quickly?

Let’s see what others analyse this situation?

And surprisingly, it looks quite like what many Indian investors hold.

Pidilite Bajaj Finance Nestlé Asian Paints Titan HUL ICICI Bank. Infosys TCS ITC.

The interesting part to see 52% is in direct equities, while 46% is in mutual funds with the portfolio spread across FMCG, pharma, financials, IT, chemicals and consumer businesses.

How many of these stocks are sitting in your portfolio?

And whose portfolio should I decode next?