Dear Income traders,

For 20 years, the US dominated global markets because it won the digital economy. Thought work. Data. Apps. Workflows. The ability to turn an idea into a product without touching a single physical thing, that was the flex.

That era isn't over. But it's cracking.

Agentic AI is the great equalizer. The barriers that protected software companies (the code moats, the data moats, the "you need a team of engineers to build this" moats) are coming down fast. And when barriers come down, scarcity shifts.

Scarcity is now in the physical world. Power. Land. Glass. Copper. The stuff you can actually drop on your toe.

This week’s one name that benefits from where scarcity lives, and one where the disruption risk is more serious than the market currently prices in.

❤️ ONE TO LOVE: Coherent Corp (COHR)

I've been talking about the photonics trade for a while now. COHR is up 40 percent since I flagged it, LITE up 75%.. I still love the theme here.

Here's the thing about COHR that most people miss: this isn't a software story. This is glass and light. Fiber optic transceivers. Laser components. The physical plumbing that data centers run on.

Every AI model inference, every agent call, every token generated, it moves through optical components. And as data center buildout accelerates, the demand for high-speed interconnects inside those facilities is going parabolic. COHR makes the components that handle that.

You can't train an AI to replace a transceiver. This is real stuff.

The options angle:

COHR can be volatile, this thing moves $50 like it's nothing. That creates opportunity. I like using a slight pullback to the nine EMA as an entry trigger for a bull call spread or a cash-secured put at support. You're getting paid to wait for the physical AI buildout to keep compounding.

If IV is elevated after a move, selling a put spread below key support and using that premium to finance upside calls is clean. Define your risk, participate in the trend.

Bottom line: Real stuff. Real demand. Real scarcity. COHR is a pick-and-shovel play in a gold rush that's still in the first few miles.

💔 ONE TO LEAVE: Meta Platforms (META)

This one's a little more nuanced than my usual software shorts, and that's exactly why it's interesting.

META isn't getting disrupted the obvious way. Their ad machine still works. Their engagement numbers are still strong. The problem isn't today. It's the second-order question nobody's asking:

What happens to the attention economy when agents start doing the browsing?

Right now, META's entire business model is built on one thing: capturing your eyeballs and selling access to them. You go to Instagram. You scroll. You get served ads. That loop generates billions.

But agentic AI is starting to create an entirely new layer of connectivity. Instead of going to Facebook to find out what your network thinks about something, you ask your agent. Instead of scrolling for discovery, your agent curates. Instead of clicking through ads, your agent transacts directly.

META doesn't own that layer. They're on the wrong side of the interface.

This isn't a "extinction comet" play like pure SaaS. META will adapt, and they have the resources to fight. But the market is pricing META like the attention economy is structurally safe. I think that assumption is increasingly fragile.

Bottom line: It's not that META dies tomorrow. It's that the foundation of their empire (owning where humans pay attention) is being slowly undermined by a layer they don't control. That's a risk the multiple doesn't fully reflect yet.

Will Mark pick either one on Monday’s Ticker Highlight?

Join the Ticker Highlight show through Monday and pick the price you want to pay.

Have a great weekend.

Hans