FROM: Dale Prokopow, Managing Director, Thematic Flows. TO: All desks; cc: Compliance (courtesy). RE: Standardisation of Huang Observation Protocols.
Colleagues: NVIDIA, a company valued above one trillion units of local currency, takes its direction from remarks made by one man. When Mr. Huang speaks, capital moves. When he is expected to speak and does not, capital also moves, though nobody signs for it. Several large investors have told the press, without visible discomfort, that the artificial intelligence trade now requires both his guidance and his continued generosity. Our desk is forty-one people whose morning depends on one primate's mood. We have stopped pretending otherwise and started scheduling around it.
Effective immediately, the Huang Interpretation Desk formalises practices previously informal. During earnings webcasts, analysts will log the executive's pauses, jacket changes, and optimism gradient at fifteen-second intervals. At minute nine of Tuesday's webcast, the chat column produced its fourth apology to the moderator for asking a question about revenue; by minute thirty-one, questions about revenue had been formally apologised out of existence. A duty roster now assigns one analyst to watch Mr. Huang's hands while another watches the sell-side. The sell-side watches the buy-side. Nobody watches the companies. Analyst Kwan has requested transfer away from hand-watching, citing Form ZH-7, Voluntary Surrender of Conviction, which she filed twice, once for each hand.
Clients on the premium waiting list will receive our insights twenty minutes early, so that they too may feel inside the process rather than measured by it. A client wrote to us: "We don't invest in chips, we invest in vibes, and the vibes have a wardrobe." She manages four hundred million. Compliance asks whether a market of this size should rest on one individual. The Desk responds that diversification exists precisely so that no single point of failure can fail. We have therefore diversified: our models now track Mr. Huang, his jacket, and his pause duration, which is three. One senior analyst confessed in her weekly log: "I no longer hear the numbers. I hear the pauses between them, and the pauses are up."
Field note, appended without authorisation: I counted the pauses. There were eleven. The room recorded all eleven as meaning something, and by the closing bell the Desk's mood had risen accordingly, on no guidance whatsoever. Forty-one mornings, restored by a primate who said nothing, wearing a coat bought when he was merely ambitious. The jacket is older than several of the funds reading it.
