Is Inflation About to Derail the Rally? with Andreas Steno | Macro Mondays - Oct. 19, 2026

Andreas Steno (0:00)

New Week.

Mikkel Rosenvold (1:08)

Welcome to Macro Mondays. My name is Mikkel Rosemal, I'm joined, as usual, by Andreas Steno. And if I'm not sure if you can see it in the caption of Andreas here, but we are joined by your son Andreas as well in the studio. Yeah, we have a live audience today, so here we go. It's going to be wonderful, wonderful, great to see you, Andreas. And Andreas, quite an eventful afternoon European time, morning US time we've had here. So we both have interesting news out of Iran. The break off of WhatsApp negotiations apparently between US and Iran. We have brand new ISM numbers, so we have a lot to unwrap and we obviously entered a new month. So we're going to try to unwrap what we see coming in June, both from a macroeconomical standpoint, but also throwing a few trade ideas maybe.

Maybe if we have time for it, we're just going to touch upon Bitcoin that you also wrote a bit about in your Steno Sickles report address. Speaking of your Steno Sickles reports, it's out this afternoon or later today. That's one of the three paid articles that we publish every week on Real Vision. That's for the Pro Chair.

If you're not interested in the Pro Chair, you can always watch Macro Mondays. That's for free every Monday. But we do urge you to look at some of the options at Real Vision. If you opt for the Pro Chair, you can also catch Andreas' monthly State of the Union show this Wednesday. What can people expect there, Andreas?

Andreas Steno (2:35)

Well, it's early days, but it seems like we have more or less flatlining inflation momentum in the US, especially since the first week of May, which is a big surprise in many ways, given that we don't have a resolution to the straight of a moose. And given what happened 45 minutes ago, it looks even further away, that resolution, to be honest.

So a lot of surprises still in the macro landscape, in my opinion. And remember that roughly two months ago, everyone was caught in a very doom and gloom like storytelling around the Iran war and how it would impact global supply chains growth and all of that. And we stayed with a very positive view on the economy due to our now casting. It basically looked a lot better than what was portrayed in many financial media outlets, etc. And it allowed us to capture this massive rally that we've seen over the past two months.

And my main conclusion in the editorial today is that we're currently high-fiving each other right, left, and center around our abilities to find the next bottleneck trade in AI and the next bottleneck trade in electricity. But remember that macro is basically the driver, right? And therefore, macro is everything. And it will be everything in that show on Wednesday.

Mikkel Rosenvold (4:00)

Absolutely. Looking forward to that, Andreas. Remember, guys, as you alluded to a little bit here, over the past two months, things have been mostly good. But remember that our trade ideas, while actionable and well researched, might be... Sometimes it may be good, sometimes it may be shit.

That's always important also to mention even when things are going okay, Andreas. Okay, Andreas, let's maybe start on the ISM that just came out. Very, very strong number, surprisingly strong, from what I saw. What's your initial reaction here?

Andreas Steno (4:34)

So again, it rhymes very well with what we're seeing in our costs.

We're talking about a US economy that is mostly accelerating in manufacturing terms, not as much in services terms. And I actually think this is what you should expect for the upcoming couple of quarters as well, since the whole AI build out is very manufacturing heavy, not least due to the hardware trade that we've talked a lot about over the past couple of months, but obviously also due to the on-ground capex that follows such a build out of data centers, etc. So very satisfied to see that the manufacturing sector is basically growing at a faster pace than it did pre-war. Big surprise to many, but it was well flagged in our now costs.

So the new orders index is rising as well. So it looks good for the next couple of months here. Again, this has caught many by surprise. But if you follow the data on ground on a day-to-day basis, it shouldn't really surprise you, to be honest.

Mikkel Rosenvold (5:36)

Absolutely, Andreas. We're going to get back to the inflation part of it, obviously. Let's just touch upon Iran a little bit before moving on to what we see happening in June and some of the bottleneck traits we've been looking at. Andreas, you mentioned it 45 minutes ago, we had the news that Iran has broken off.