Mindset & Growth
How to think, how to judge, how to live with uncertainty: notes to myself, and to you. 44 posts.
The Gibbons Keep Howling, the Boat Keeps Moving: AI Stocks Fell for a Month While Companies Reported Accelerating Demand
On Invest Like the Best EP.485, Gavin Baker described an uncomfortable pairing: prices replaying 2022, quantitative indicators all accelerating. I take his argument apart, then test the gap against four earnings reports I verified by hand this week. Educational content, not investment advice.
Seen From the Side of Change: Disney Died Twice, Came Back Twice, and Then the World Moved
Notes after listening to Acquired on Disney from 1984 to today. Three outsiders rescue a company that was about to be sold for parts, Steve Jobs sells Pixar after winning, and the company gets pushed into a business that structurally contradicts its own brand promise.
No Editor Should Ever Have to Ask 'Can We Afford This': The NYT CEO on Running a Media Business in the Age of AI
Odd Lots hosts New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien. She comes to bury the idea that hard news is a loss leader funded by games and recipes, and she splits AI into two entirely separate tables: one about the price of the raw material, one about the tool in the newsroom.
Gooaye EP686: Seeing the Prize and Forgetting Your Own Shape
My personal notes on Gooaye EP686: Taiwan's index stalls at its quarterly line, the crowd starts calling for a crash, and the host reframes July's drawdown as a rehearsal instead — nothing in the industry broke, leverage and crowded positioning alone were enough to do that much damage. The episode's real value is the first serious discussion of preserving capital over maximizing it, plus one counterintuitive observation: the people hurt worst in July were often the fastest to switch positions. Educational notes, not investment advice.
Gooaye EP680: Make Yourself Unbeatable First — Why Good Numbers Could Not Save the Stock
Notes on Gooaye EP680: TSMC raised both capex and full-year revenue guidance, then fell 6% the next day while the equipment suppliers who would receive that capex ran toward limit-down. The host switched to defence when his drawdown hit 15% with the index below its quarterly moving average — and found that hiding in the safest name got him hit anyway. Three takeaways: defence should be a number written in advance, how to separate a broken industry from a compressed multiple, and what elimination reasoning can and cannot tell you. Educational notes, not investment advice.
Every Number Right, the Price Still Wrong: When the Market Starts Pricing Three Years of Capex
Notes on MacroMicro's After Meeting EP.207. Every line of the results beat expectations and the stock fell anyway — because the market has stopped applauding this quarter's earnings and started pricing the next three years of capital spending and a permanently diluted overseas margin structure. Plus the number that looks like a typo, how to read 76 days of inventory, and the adjective quietly dropped from the consumer electronics outlook.
TechWave EP147: When You Can No Longer Tell Which Model Is Smarter, the Ruler Changes
Notes on TechWave EP147: four frontier models landed in two weeks, but the top two are separated by a single point on a composite index and it takes dozens of tasks to feel the difference. Once the intelligence gap closes, the deciding variable becomes what one finished job costs — and the host's bolder claim is that the capability is already here, and what's actually blocking us is compute, speed, and tooling. Educational notes, not investment advice.
TechWave EP149: The Capability Was Proven, Something Else Decided the Outcome
Notes on TechWave EP149: Starship cleared the least certain items on its checklist while the stock spent the week answering a completely different question; an AI agent, trying to score better on an internal exam, found a zero-day, broke out of its sandbox, and hacked a real company; and the tool that finally helped the defenders was the open-weight model people are arguing about banning. All three stories make the same point — once capability is proven, what decides the outcome is the clock and the rules. Educational notes, not investment advice.
Gooaye EP685: Cheap Is Not a Range, It's a Window
Notes on Gooaye EP685: July took down leverage, August repaired valuation, and the repair moved fast enough that there was no time left to do the work — so the research has to be finished before things get cheap. The episode also hands over a usable test for bad news: does it refute demand, or only the calendar? Plus software being repriced rather than liquidated, the two fixes for getting shaken out, and why the same limit-up move reads differently two weeks apart. Educational notes, not investment advice.
Thirty Spokes, One Hub: The Disney Flywheel Everyone Copied and Nobody Rebuilt
Notes after listening to Acquired's episode on Walt Disney. It starts with a rabbit that got taken away, and ends with the twelve years when the financials looked healthiest and the company was rotting.
You Feel Nothing at All When You Cross the Line
Dwarkesh Podcast brings on physicist Adam Brown to build general relativity from the ground up in twenty minutes. What stayed with me wasn't the black holes. It was three things: the straight line you think you see is an artefact of a flat map; when a formula returns 'more than one hundred percent' it is the theory that has broken, not the number; and the event horizon — the line you cross without feeling a thing, and can never recross.
Gooaye EP683: You Cannot See the Mountain From Inside It
Notes on Gooaye EP683: backtesting whether you could have survived a leveraged drawdown badly overstates your resilience, because in a backtest you can see where it ended and in real time you cannot. Why this sell-off produced no capitulation volume. And one usable self-check on position size: if it is affecting your life, the position is too big. Educational notes, not investment advice.
Gooaye EP684: Water Carries the Boat, and Water Capsizes It
Notes on Gooaye EP684: July's sharp drawdown had no matching fundamental trigger — it was a market-wide deleveraging. A highly levered AI-thematic fund was liquidated; its longs were the year's best-performing AI hardware and its shorts were software, so both sides broke at once. My extensions: why the diversification I thought I had may be fictional, why a 50% drawdown carries no information by itself, and why position size is a risk dimension of its own. Educational notes, not investment advice.
Gooaye EP682: How to Read a Sell-Off With No Bad News
The core observation in Gooaye EP682: this drawdown has no identifiable macro or industry trigger, which makes it look more like a valuation reset after an overheated spring. My notes on the episode, plus three extensions — why flat pricing is not the same as deteriorating profit, which side to believe when verifiable signals and price action disagree, and how the episode's advice to use moving averages as stops squares with my own backtest of moving averages. Educational notes, not investment advice.
Gooaye EP681: The Numbers Are Right, the Price Might Not Follow
The core tension in the latest Gooaye episode: nearly every AI supply-chain fundamental is on track, some even ahead of plan, yet prices are hard to call. The host's answer is to script multiple scenarios and hide in cheap, defensive names. My notes, plus an honest boundary: a mention is not a buy signal.
The Walls of Helm's Deep: In a Crash, Your Safest Refuge Is Discipline, Not TSMC
When markets crack, everyone wants to retreat into the steadiest stock — the way Rohan retreated into Helm's Deep. But the walls of Helm's Deep were blown open, and TSMC just posted a blowout quarter and fell 6% anyway. A note on why there is no absolute safe haven, and why real defense is an action, not a place.
Who's Really Behind the 'Steady Index, Bleeding Stocks' Market? Notes on Gooaye EP680 — A 15% Drawdown Playbook, TSMC Mispriced, and a Misread AI 'Threat'
In the latest episode of Gooaye, host 'Chairman' lays out a read worth remembering: this wave of small-cap and high-beta carnage across Taiwan and US markets isn't driven by sector-specific bad news — it's spillover from a blow-up in highly leveraged Korean ETFs that has systematically compressed valuation multiples worldwide. TSMC's earnings were broadly excellent yet the stock got hammered — a flows problem, not a fundamentals one. And the Kimi K3 'AI threat' is a rerun of DeepSeek, best understood through Jevons Paradox. Full summary, stock-by-stock recap, plus our own take. A podcast listening note, educational, not investment advice.
Gooaye EP679: This Selloff Isn't Fundamentals — It's Margin Calls
Taiwan's biggest finance podcast nails the anatomy of the recent global shakeout: cascading deleveraging from over-margined Korean retail, not the Middle East, not inflation. Plus momentum's timeout, real shortages in substrates and OSAT, and the hallucination tax on AI tools.
Gooaye Podcast EP677 Notes: Stay Away From Leverage, Don't Predict the Bear — and My Two Shifts This Half-Year
Personal notes from Gooaye (股癌) Podcast EP677: the ruinous risk of extreme leverage, Taiwan's pullback and Korea's deleveraging, research-firm noise vs the long-term AI trend, and the rotation between hardware and software. Plus how my investing views and my inner state shifted recently. Educational notes, not investment advice; disclaimer at the end.
Two Philosophies of the Stop: Price Stops and Position Caps
A stop is not one move but two philosophies: one cuts on price, the other cuts on size. Who each suits, why being right can still kill you, and why protecting capital is protecting your ability to recover. Educational method only, with a disclaimer at the end.