Thin Membrane's Sunday Night Orientation

Week of February 15, 2026

Each Sunday night, we capture a small number of working themes grounded in real events, current discourse, and observable shifts from the last week. These are lenses, not predictions.

Here's your orientation for the week ahead.

Market Snapshot

Leading Sectors (W/W)

Lagging Sectors (W/W)

Economy / Markets

"Investors are selling first, asking questions later as fears grow that AI could disrupt white-collar industries like insurance and wealth management."
— @gregory_wafeed

NAAIM Exposure Index dropped from 97.7 on Jan 7 to 80.6 on Feb 11, signaling institutions are leery. Meanwhile: "Retail investors bought a record $48b in equities in the 21-day period ending last week… Never in history have mom-and-pop investors rushed to buy so intensively." — @GlobalMktObserv

US Midterms

Democrats and Republicans with powerful defense of traditional norms signal a different tone into Midterms.

In Munich, Secretary Rubio:
"We in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West's managed decline."

Barack Obama:
"We should recognize that the average person doesn't want to have to navigate around a tent city in the middle of downtown."

Hillary Clinton said that open borders "went too far," calling it "disruptive and destabilizing," and calling for "secure borders."

Claude News

X was abuzz with articles on Claude coding. Claude bots. Claude for design. Claude AI Chief of Staff. Claude for outbound. Claude for SEO. Claude AI Boardroom.

Commentary: The era of Peak Productivity is thankfully coming to a close, as pace of work multiplication will be a commodity within the year. Once everyone can accelerate their output, advantage moves to judgment, taste, and selection. The bottleneck stops being "can we ship," and becomes "can we decide what is worth shipping," "can we see what customers actually tolerate," and "can we hold a coherent product line when the cost of building approaches zero."

Quote Shelf

My fave tweet this week, by @andruyeung:
"Best advice I've seen on writing for social media in 2026: Write like you're texting a friend."

@johnheyerdal wrote a very timely article for the upcoming era:
"The true divide is between those whose internal systems can bear complexity, pressure, and responsibility, and those whose cognition collapses under it."
x.com/johnheyerdal/status/2021552966117851283

Follow @pratjoey on X.

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