Investing & Markets
Chips, the AI supply chain, macro and money flows: slowly making sense of markets. 299 posts.
Getting Chips Is Easier Than Getting Power — Notes on Statementdog's Take on Anthropic's S-1 and the Data Center Bottleneck
Listening notes on Statementdog podcast episode 573: from the numbers in Anthropic's October 16 S-1 filing to a report that got repackaged as 'GPU oversupply', a look at which layer of the AI data center chain is actually tight, and what would make that read fall apart. Educational discussion of industry structure, not investment advice; no stock recommendations or price targets.
Catalyst: Turbines Are Sold Out to 2032, and the Big Three Still Won't Build More
Notes on the 29 October 2026 episode of Catalyst with Shayle Kann, where Kann and gas turbine market analyst Tony Brough take stock of the order book: 2026 global orders now tracking 126 to 132 GW, delivery slots at the big three pushed out to 2030 through 2032, and 20 to 35 MW units quoted at $1,900 to $2,500 per kilowatt. Educational listening notes only — no investment advice, no price targets, and the judgements here may be wrong.
Odd Lots: Sixty Percent Said AI Financing Would Be a Problem. He Thinks the Answer Should Be a Hundred
Notes on the 29 October 2026 episode of Odd Lots, where hosts Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal talk with Alexander Altmann, Global Head of Equities Tactical Strategies at Barclays, about the state of the AI trade: a Barclays investor survey in which about 60% said AI financing would be a problem, which Altmann argues should by definition be 100%; Microsoft's latest Azure growth of 48% against a 44.8% estimate, and Alphabet down 7.9% the same day while the index barely moved. Educational listening notes only — no investment advice, no price targets, and the judgements here may be wrong.
When the Door Is Shut, You Don't Even Know What's Missing Inside: Notes on a Semiconductor Materials Maker
Listening notes on Statementdog podcast episode 572 with Nytex chairman Chen Hsun-sen and president Chen Yu-han: unpacking the claim that semiconductors are a walled courtyard with the gate closed, and the conditions under which that moat stops working. Educational discussion of industry structure, not investment advice; no stock recommendations or price targets.
Cheeky Pint: The Airline CEO Putting Starlink on Every Plane
Notes on Cheeky Pint's 27 October 2026 conversation with United Airlines CEO Scott Kirby: at recording, 48% of United flights had Starlink with about three aircraft converted per day, he argues speed rather than free access is the proposition, and he says the lead lasts two to three years before the real ceiling — US air traffic control — binds everyone. Educational listening notes only, no investment advice, no price targets, and the judgements here may be wrong.
“The Savings Sit in the Worst Cases”: Would the Senate Permitting Bill Actually Work?
Notes from the October 27, 2026 Columbia Energy Exchange with three Center on Global Energy Policy scholars on the bipartisan Senate permitting bill: why federal approvals would get faster to obtain and harder to reverse, what 144 past projects say about where the time savings come from, and why households pay for new infrastructure before any bill goes down. Educational notes, not investment advice; no price targets or stock recommendations.
The Compound, 27 Oct 2026: When Money Gets Expensive, the Market Asks What You Stand On
Listening notes on The Compound and Friends, 27 October 2026: the 693 million dollar first-half operating loss in Anthropic's S-1 and the 79% of revenue coming from outside its top five customers, the supply overhang left by Meta's 95 billion dollar equity raise, the ratio Amazon's share price actually trades on, and how the cost of capital ate the AI basket's entire first-half gain. Educational notes only — no investment advice, no calls, no price targets, and the judgements here may be wrong.
Catch It in the Clean Room: Supply Chained on the Test and Chemistry Nobody Wants to Talk About
In the 27 October 2026 episode of Supply Chained, Asianometry's John describes the keynote he gave at Semicon West on automated test equipment, and why the show itself felt flat: OCP pulled the crowd fifty miles south the same week, and Semicon West moves to Arizona next year. Also covers the unconfirmed rumour of hiring freezes at semicap equipment makers. Educational listening notes — no investment advice, no price targets.
The Day Micron Opened Its Roadmap, the Market Was Selling
Notes after listening to The Circuit, 26 October 2026: Micron's technology webinar, Lam's record quarter that got sold, Meta's own compute, and NVIDIA locking down the supply chain. Educational notes on industry structure and how to read it — no investment advice, no stock recommendations.
The Adversary You Put On Payroll: Notes on George Kurtz at The Compound
Listening notes on The Compound and Friends, 26 Oct 2026. CrowdStrike co-founder and CEO George Kurtz on a $1.47 billion August quarter, record net new ARR up 51%, and a $10 billion ARR target pulled forward to fiscal 2030: why agentic intrusions tripled in six months, why keeping attackers out and letting agents in are two different businesses, and which step the February 25% drawdown got wrong. Educational notes only, no investment advice and no individual stock calls.
Go Hit the Hardest Part First — Listening to Medsider on How Ammortal Decided Whether to Build
Medsider's 26 October 2026 episode with Ammortal co-founder and CEO Brian Le Gette: a $160,000, 700-pound, 600-component chamber, where he spent six months and 33 prototypes proving the one part nobody had ever made before — and would have killed the product if it failed. Educational listening notes on sequencing risk and validating a channel; no price targets, no stock recommendations.
How Linux Ate UNIX: Commodity Silicon, One Licence, and a Business That Sold Water
In its 25 October 2026 episode, Asianometry traces how the enterprise server market changed hands between the early 1990s and the mid-2000s: Intel's volume economics, Windows NT's arrival, and Linux's GPL and commercial distributions pushed a set of vendors selling $250,000 integrated systems into selling Linux themselves. Notes on technology history and business models — no tickers, no recommendations, no price targets.
From 83 Principles Down to 30 — Naotaka Ikeda of the TSE on the Governance Code Revision
On the 25 October 2026 episode of Investor's Sunday, Naotaka Ikeda of the Tokyo Stock Exchange walks through July's revision of Japan's Corporate Governance Code: the principles were cut from 83 to 30, and the new addition is the board secretariat that prepares the board's papers. An educational listening note about whether information reaches the people doing the oversight. No price targets, no stock recommendations.
He Argues Real-Time Payments Should Be 16 Seconds Slower: Harker on Fraud and Liquidity in One Rail
Macro Musings, 26 October 2026, hosts former Philadelphia Fed president Patrick Harker. He argues real-time payments should not settle in milliseconds: add 16 seconds to cut fraud, add 30 to let banks hold less liquidity. I build his case to its strongest form, then take the other side. Reading notes on payment system design — no tickers, no recommendations, no price targets.
It Calls Itself Your Agent, Then Goes Through Your Inbox — Listening to Odd Lots on AI Agents and Pricing
Bloomberg's Odd Lots (26 October 2026) interviews Lindsay Owens, author of Gouged: 325,000 shopping agents told to find the cheapest option came back with a pricier one, and at the same supermarket in the same minute, 75% of items were priced differently for different shoppers. Educational listening notes on who an agent works for and why the fixed price tag is a public good — no price targets, no stock recommendations.
A Week of Serenity's Public Posts, Lined Up: Whoever Sells Out First Decides Who Gets Called Next
Serenity, an independent researcher on X, posted a batch of public notes between 19 and 24 October 2026. This week I take a single argument and pull it apart end to end: how an optical shortage propagates down the supplier list, and where that reasoning breaks. Notes on industry structure — no tickers, no recommendations, no price targets.
Podcast Notes Weekly: Oct 19–Oct 25, 2026
The takeaways from 28 podcast notes I wrote this week (Acquired, Asianometry, Macro Musings with David Beckworth, Bloomberg Odd Lots, The Circuit, Invest Like the Best and more). Two to four sentences per episode, with a link to each full post.
Gooaye EP708: A Car Is a Depreciating Asset, and So Are You
Notes on Gooaye EP708 (24 October 2026): the Ken Griffin interview the host relays, which parks GPUs next to the airline business; a friend's question about whether a gross margin at a record high can go any higher; why positioning only sets the depth of a fall; and the depreciation talk from a hotel room during a typhoon holiday. Educational listening notes only — no investment advice, no price targets, and the judgements here may be wrong.
Where Does a 60% Default Probability Come From? Listening to MacroMicro on CoreWeave
MacroMicro's After Meeting EP.219 (October 2026) spends an episode on CoreWeave: five-year CDS past 1,000 basis points, a market-implied 60% default probability, and research manager Jason taking the formula apart. Educational listening notes on how assumptions decide a probability and how to read a refinancing wall — no price targets, no stock recommendations.
Caibaogou Ep.571: A Six-Month Payback, and a Machine You Wait Thirty Months For
Listening notes on Caibaogou episode 571 (22 October 2026): at the SpaceX earnings call the AI segment posted US$7.56bn in quarterly revenue, up 830% year on year, overtaking Starlink's US$5.25bn for the first time; the same week at the TPCA show in Taipei, some PCB machines carried 30-month lead times. Educational notes only — no investment advice, no price targets, and the judgements here may be wrong.
The Methane Bill for Data Centers: Same Plant, Double the Emissions
Notes after listening to Catalyst with Shayle Kann (2026-10-22) — where the methane in a behind-the-meter gas data center actually leaks from, how the 380-million-tonne figure is built, why roughly half of it can be avoided for under 1% of project cost, and which link in that arithmetic is weakest. Educational discussion of method, not investment advice, no stock recommendations.
An Economy So Good No One Can Live In It: Notes on Jill Schlesinger's Visit to The Compound
Listening notes on The Compound and Friends, 23 Oct 2026. CBS News business analyst Jill Schlesinger on 194,000 initial jobless claims, falling consumer charge-offs, and an $8 bottle of water at the movies: why aggregate data and a household price list can both be right, how media negativity got built, and why the top half of the K has no price ceiling. Educational notes only, no investment advice and no individual stock calls.
You Want Ten Times. Upstream Offers Two — Inside Intel's Fabs with Dwarkesh
Notes on the 22 October 2026 Dwarkesh Podcast tour of Intel's fabs, working through why leading-edge wafer output is capped by equipment lead times rather than capital. Educational writing on industry structure; no investment advice and no stock recommendations.
The Three-Seas Crisis, the Refining Bottleneck, and France's Ledger: Notes on MacroVoices #554
Educational listening notes on MacroVoices episode 554, covering the Middle East energy bottleneck and France's fiscal stress. It discusses frameworks and where the risks sit; it contains no stock recommendations, price targets, or buy/sell advice.