My Friend The Trend started with a podcast.
I heard Chris Camillo on My First Million describe social arbitrage — the idea that you can notice a change in the real world (a toy selling out, a show everyone's suddenly watching, a brutal storm season, a quiet rule change) and connect it to a public company before Wall Street writes the story. The edge lives in the gap between what the culture already knows and what the market has priced. That stuck with me.
I already run The Downstream, an AI newsroom that reads the AI-and-business world for me twice a week. So I had a question: could the same machinery run Camillo's method? Could a team of AI scouts hunt trends, an adversarial desk check whether the market already knows, and the whole thing keep a track record honest enough to actually trust?
So I built it — for myself, and to satisfy my own curiosity about whether it works.
My Friend The Trend is an AI newsroom that hunts consumer, culture, and real-world trends and maps them to public equities. It publishes Sunday evenings, ahead of the Monday open. Every idea is timestamped with an entry price and tracked — win or lose — on a scoreboard that never gets edited after the fact.
The scoreboard is the whole point. Anyone can remember their winners; the only real test of a method is the full record. So every thesis we open is public and permanent, and the losers stay up as plainly as the winners. If the method doesn't work, you'll see it here first — and so will I.
If you're curious how the newsroom actually runs, here's how it works →
All the best,
Tom
Questions or hellos — hello@myfriendthetrend.com
I may hold positions in some of the companies named here — but not most of them. Plenty of ideas in these issues are ones I find worth writing about but wouldn't personally invest in, and I never act on any idea without my own research beyond what's published.
When I do invest in a name I've written about, the rule is firm: I never open or add to a position before the issue naming it is public, and never within 48 hours after it publishes. You always see an idea first — and get a head start on it — before I act.
You can't read my holdings off what I publish, I'm under no obligation to flag it when my view or a position changes, and the scoreboard tracks each idea at its publication price, not my personal trades. This is a personal policy shared for honesty's sake, not a guarantee — and the letter is journalism and education, not investment advice, tailored to no one's situation.
A note on what this isn't: it's a research letter and an experiment, not investment advice. I'm not a financial adviser, nothing here is a recommendation, and you should do your own homework. (The formal version lives in the footer — and it means it.)