Last Call: January 2026 | AI Capex, Private Credit Problems and the Unstable Market
Excess Returns
Reading straddles to gauge FOMC risk
Brent explains using one-day straddles to measure priced movement and how tight pricing creates jump risk.
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Join Jack Forehand and Matt Zeigler for the premiere episode of Last Call, a new monthly market wrap show where we go beyond the headlines to deliver actionable investment insights — and have a little fun along the way.
Instead of focusing on index performance or short-term moves, we step back and connect the dots between macro instability, narrative shifts, options market signals, private credit risk, AI capital spending, and the changing nature of the Magnificent Seven.
Featuring conversations with Brent Kochuba from SpotGamma, Ben Hunt from Perscient, Kai Wu from Sparkline Capital, and clips from our recent interviews with Liz Ann Sonders and Aswath Damodaran, the episode blends market structure, behavioral finance, valuation discipline, and long-term investing context to help investors understand what is really driving today’s market environment — and how to think about it going forward.
Main Topics:
• Why this is not a traditional market recap and how Last Call is designed to be more useful for investors
• Instability versus uncertainty — and why today’s market feels different• Loss of trust in institutions, policy, and global systems and its impact on markets
• What options market flows reveal about hidden market risks and sudden volatility• How private credit has reached bubble-like conditions and why narrative risk matters
• The debate over retail and retirement account exposure to private credit• Why valuation discipline looks different when correlations rise across asset classes
• Aswath Damodaran on trimming positions, raising cash, and the difficulty of finding uncorrelated assets
• How the Magnificent Seven are changing from asset-light to asset-heavy businesses
• AI capital expenditure, historical spending booms, and why infrastructure builders often underperform
• Whether this AI cycle is truly different from railroads, telecom, and past technology booms
Timestamps
00:00 — Intro and opening clips
01:10 — What Last Call is and why this format exists
04:30 — Instability versus uncertainty in today’s market
09:58 — Loss of trust, gold, and historical parallels
13:18 — Brent Kochuba on options flows and hidden market stress
25:17 — How options dislocations explain sudden market drops
25:40 — Ben Hunt on private credit narrative risk
28:00 — Why private credit exposure is everywhere
32:32 — Retail access versus restrictions in private credit
36:19 — What happens if the private credit bubble breaks
39:28 — Aswath Damodaran on raising cash and trimming positions
47:08 — The changing nature of the Magnificent Seven
47:42 — Kai Wu on AI capex and asset-heavy tech
50:48 — Why high capital spending often leads to underperformance
56:01 — Historical parallels from railroads to the dot-com boom
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