Good morning. Retatrutide showed up on three of the indexes we track this week, which means the question in our inbox shifted overnight from "where can I find it" to "should I." Those are very different questions, and the gap between them is the whole point of this letter.

Availability is not evidence

A compound appearing on more vendor catalogs tells you about supply, not about safety or efficacy. Retatrutide has genuinely interesting trial data behind it — but "interesting trial data" and "well-understood in the way semaglutide now is" are years apart.

The market always moves faster than the evidence. Your job as a reader is to notice when it does.

When a compound gets easier to buy, the temptation is to read that as a green light. It isn't. It's a supply signal. The research timeline hasn't moved just because three more vendors decided to stock it.

What we'd actually watch

  • Whether the per-mg pricing stabilizes or stays volatile (volatile = thin, early supply)
  • Whether COA documentation shows up consistently across vendors
  • What the next peer-reviewed readouts say, not what the forums say

A reader letter

A reader in her early fifties wrote in about gut-targeted peptides and perimenopause, and asked a sharp question we didn't have a clean answer to. We're going to take that one to a longer piece rather than answer it badly in a sentence. More soon.

Until next Saturday.