The next 5, 10 and 20 years

Signal to watch: High-NA EUV moves into production at Intel 14A and at TSMC's A14P or Samsung's equivalent node, not only pilot lines; the trend stops if TSMC carries High-NA past the A14 family on low-NA multipatterning.

Signal to watch: AP1000 units financed under the conditional DOE long-lead commitment (up to 10 reactors) reach construction with Westinghouse as fuel and services supplier; the trend stops if that financing lapses without a single US AP1000 construction start.

Signal to watch: Independence ships GM's roughly 1,000 t a year from Q4 2026 and Apple's recycled-magnet supply starts in 2027, putting MP magnets into qualified motor designs; the trend stops if GM or Apple qualifies a second magnet source for the same programmes.

Signal to watch: Anthropic is trading discounted token rates for multi-year minimum-spend contracts. The trend is confirmed if remaining performance obligations grow faster than revenue for four quarters after the $10.8B of June 2026; it stops if RPO stays below one quarter of revenue.

Signal to watch: Operations Center keeps adding monthly active users and engaged acres beyond the >450K MAU and >520M acres on file, and AGCO and CNH precision hardware keeps feeding it as the default record; the trend stops if MAU stalls or growers move records to FieldView or CNH FieldOps.

Signal to watch: NexGen keeps adding long-term utility sales agreements as Rook I construction advances, taking the 10M lbs committed (2M lbs a year over the first five years) toward a majority of planned early output; the trend stops if the contract book stays near 10M lbs into first production.

Signal to watch: More defence programmes of record move onto Maven after the first one, and the Army's NGC2 data layer on Foundry spreads under the enterprise agreement worth up to $10B over 10 years; the trend stops if Maven stays at a single programme of record and NGC2 does not extend past the Army.

Signal to watch: VMware workloads keep moving off vCenter to Nutanix, OpenShift, Hyper-V and the public clouds, as Gartner forecasts for more than a third of workloads by 2028; the trend stops if VMware ARR keeps growing at double digits (17% YoY now) without customer-count attrition.

Signal to watch: NVIDIA's share of AI accelerator spend (roughly 80% or more today) keeps falling as Google TPU, Amazon Trainium and Broadcom-built custom XPUs take inference volume; the trend stops if that share holds near 80% through the Rubin generation.

Signal to watch: Cursor's share of AI-coding spend keeps sliding against Claude Code and GitHub Copilot; the trend stops if Cursor's paid seats grow faster than the category for a full year.

Signal to watch: Waymo opens its own app in Austin and Atlanta from January 2028 and Tesla keeps scaling its own Texas ride-hailing network, so Uber's densest robotaxi routes are served off-platform; the trend stops if those operators keep supplying through Uber and autonomous trips on Uber keep growing from about 300K a week across 30+ partners.

Signal to watch: SK hynix's HBM revenue share (about 56% in Q1 2026, IDC) keeps falling toward Samsung and Micron as both ramp HBM4, as TrendForce's call for the bit lead to narrow from 59% to roughly 50% in 2026 implies; the trend stops if it holds above half of HBM revenue through the HBM4E generation at NVIDIA.

Signal to watch: Chinese RV makers led by Zhejiang Shuanghuan Driveline and Ningbo Zhongda Leader keep taking RV sockets on robot lines built in China and start qualifying on FANUC, Yaskawa, ABB or KUKA arms outside China; the trend stops if Nabtesco holds RV price and precision-gear order growth through the robot recovery.

Signal to watch: Creative Cloud price increases stay deferred while Canva and Figma keep adding paid seats inside Creative Cloud customers; the trend stops when Adobe lands a price increase without a rise in churn.

Signal to watch: EPA turns its 2025-26 data-centre relief (the January 2026 turbine NSPS subcategory for temporary units and the proposal to let construction start before air permits) into final rules and gas turbine lead times fall from about three years; the trend stops if those proposals are withdrawn or struck down and Bloom keeps winning sites on permitting speed.

Signal to watch: Online Marketing revenue keeps falling year on year (−19% in Q2 2026); the trend stops if it returns to growth, or if Apollo's ride network grows large enough to rate on its own.

Signal to watch: ETF sponsors keep adding second custodians beside Coinbase (BlackRock added Anchorage to IBIT in April 2025; Morgan Stanley's proposed Bitcoin Trust names BNY with Coinbase; Grayscale's amended Hyperliquid filing replaced Coinbase with Anchorage); the trend completes if a top-three US spot BTC or ETH ETF moves primary custody off Coinbase, and stops if Coinbase still holds primary custody of most US spot crypto ETF assets in 2028.

Signal to watch: VantageScore keeps gaining GSE originations from 5.5% in September 2026 (KBW) as originators follow Rocket; the trend completes if a second top-10 originator defaults to VantageScore and its GSE share passes 20%, and stops if that share stays under 10% through the end of TransUnion's $0.99 pricing in 2028.

Signal to watch: Claude Design and Google's prompt-to-prototype tools keep taking zero-to-one work from the non-designers who were two-thirds of Figma's roughly 13 million monthly users at IPO; the trend stops if that non-designer share holds and net dollar retention stays above 130% (136% in Q2 2026).

Signal to watch: Chinese strain-wave makers led by Leaderdrive keep adding capacity and win reducer supply for volume humanoid and industrial-robot programmes, pushing reducer pricing down; the trend stops if Harmonic Drive's reducer pricing and share hold at those programmes as humanoid volumes ramp.

Signal to watch: Medtronic Hugo adds US general-surgery and gynecology clearances to its December 2025 urology clearance (510(k)s filed June 2026) and J&J Ottava expands from its July 2026 De Novo for upper-abdominal general surgery into hernia; the trend stops if those filings are not cleared by end-2027 or both stay in limited launch.

Signal to watch: Centrus stays the only NRC-licensed Western HALEU enricher; the trend completes if General Matter's Paducah plant (DOE $900M task order January 2026, NRC Part 70 application filed September 2026 with a HALEU amendment planned for 2027) or Urenco USA gains NRC authorisation above 10% enrichment and delivers HALEU, and it stops if no second producer holds a HALEU licence by 2031.

Signal to watch: Americas comparable sales keep declining (-12% in Q2 FY2026) through FY2027 while Alo and Vuori keep taking US premium athleisure share; the trend stops when Americas comps turn positive without deeper markdowns.

Signal to watch: MongoDB-compatible engines built on PostgreSQL, led by the Linux Foundation's DocumentDB project backed by AWS, Google and Microsoft, keep adding managed services and production MongoDB workloads; the trend stops if Atlas growth holds in the high 20s or better and no hyperscaler ships a migration path that runs MongoDB applications unchanged at scale.

Signal to watch: Salesforce Agentforce IT Service keeps adding accounts beyond the 180+ it had in February 2026 (against ServiceNow's 8,600 ITSM customers) and starts winning named ITSM replacements at large ServiceNow customers; the trend stops if ServiceNow's 98% renewal rate holds and Agentforce IT Service stays under a few percent of that base.

Signal to watch: Semaglutide's US compound protection runs out inside the decade (generic Ozempic expected around 2032 under Novo's confidential 2024 settlements) while no successor molecule is approved; the trend stops if amycretin or another Novo molecule with its own patent life carries most of Novo's US GLP-1 prescriptions before generic entry.

Signal to watch: Build, Roblox's prompt-to-game tab in the mobile app (limited alpha in New Zealand from 28 July 2026), rolls out to more countries and a growing share of newly published experiences start in Build rather than Studio; the trend stops if Build stays a prototyping tool and the top experiences keep being built by Studio and Luau creators.

Signal to watch: US DAUq turned negative in Q3 2026 (−2%) as Google search referrals fell, and Reddit warns of a low-double-digit DAUq decline in Q4. The narrowing is confirmed if US logged-in DAUq falls below 22.5M in a reported quarter; it stops if the logged-in-only test lifts US logged-in DAUq above 24M.

Signal to watch: Dupixent's US compound patent expires in March 2031 (Sanofi investor materials) and biosimilar dupilumab programmes file for US approval ahead of it; the trend stops if Sanofi's longer-interval Q4 formulation or follow-on patents convert most US Dupixent patients before 2031, as Eylea HD is doing for Eylea.

Signal to watch: North American daily users keep falling year on year (down 7% to 92M in Q2 2026) as the 13 to 34 cohort spends its time on Instagram and TikTok; the trend stops if North American DAU returns to flat or growth for two quarters running.

Signal to watch: Silver Institute photovoltaic silver demand keeps falling year on year (forecast down 19% to about 151 Moz in 2026, after 197.5 to 186.6 Moz in 2025) as cell makers thrift loadings and move to high-copper and copper-plated pastes while cell output grows; the trend stops if PV silver demand turns back up for two consecutive years.