Twenty-one calls, graded

The Scoreboard · Ins7ghts Daily, Friday 16 October 2026

What did we say, and were we right. Twenty-one forward calls went out in the last seven days. Here they are, graded. A verdict needs a URL, so anything a published event does not settle stays open, and the misses get printed first.

Tally: 21 calls: 2 right, 1 wrong, 4 not a real call, 14 still open

Wrong. "Proof of revenue becomes the price of entry" (14 October). We said that once Anthropic shared Q3 financials ahead of a possible listing, "show the revenue" would replace "show the benchmark" as the standard challenge, and that procurement teams would borrow the phrasing. Two days later Apollo and Blackstone put together a $35 billion private-credit vehicle to buy chips and lease them to Anthropic, and the paper priced at 6.2 percentage points against 6.1 for ordinary private credit. The biggest AI financing of the week asked for neither a revenue figure nor a benchmark. It asked for collateral. The call assumed the question gets asked somewhere; it got routed around instead.

Right. "Private marks become the only marks" (10 October). We said AI valuations would get set in rounds with no public order book, and that comparables would keep looking precise while going stale. Five days later Firmus asked roughly $30 billion in public and the float collapsed on a pension fund CIO saying the valuation was not compelling. The number that survives is the private one, from the $2 billion raise with Blackstone, Jane Street, Coatue and Nvidia in it, where no buyer had to justify a refusal in public.

Right. "The model stops being the product" (11 October). We said value was moving to whoever can prove what a system did, and that evidence layers and access controls were where the next margin sits. In the week since, three rounds landed on exactly that layer: Harbor's $10 million seed for agent liability insurance, Fragment's $12 million to stop agents spending company money badly, and Opsin's $21 million for the gate between an agent and the records it reaches for. None of them sell a model.