Investing & Markets
Chips, the AI supply chain, macro and money flows: slowly making sense of markets. 299 posts.
Availability Matters More Than Price — Seven Days of Upstream Posts, Laid Side by Side
An independent researcher covering AI infrastructure upstream left forty-odd public posts this week. Put them in order and what surfaces isn't a stock — it's five lines of reasoning about how bottlenecks move, how they get priced, and how they get misread.
Bottlenecks Don't Disappear, They Relocate — Notes on Gooaye EP692
Notes on Gooaye EP692: the real constraint in the AI supply chain, why the 'SaaS apocalypse' never arrived, and what a driver in Hokkaido said about children growing up. Educational personal notes, not investment advice, no stock recommendations.
When Uncertainty Itself Becomes a Price
Notes from MacroMicro's After Meeting EP.212: why long-end Treasury yields were driven entirely by term premium, why gold and bitcoin rallied together, and how AI hyperscaler bond issuance is competing for the same buyers as the US government. Educational commentary, not investment advice — no price targets, no stock recommendations.
When 'Overheating' No Longer Looks Like Low Unemployment
Notes on the Odd Lots interview with Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee: why the question 'is policy restrictive?' can't be answered directly, whether the AI build-out is sectoral heat or economy-wide heat, and the difference between a reaction function and forward guidance. Educational, not investment advice.
Bottlenecks Everywhere: NVIDIA's Call, Hot Chips, and a Ten-Year Packaging Bet
Notes after listening to the 2026-08-27 Caibaogou markets episode: NVIDIA underwriting compute with its own balance sheet, Hot Chips turning into a memory conference, and Powerchip's decade-old panel-level packaging finally landing orders. Distilled into one way to read 'capacity-constrained' versus 'demand-starved' growth. Educational only, not investment advice; no tickers recommended and no price targets.
How Much Longer Can the Dollar Be the World's Money? — Notes on MacroVoices #547
Reflections on the MacroVoices interview with Daniel Lacalle (2026-08-27). It unpacks the three limits that give government debt its credibility, why stablecoins may be the bridge between the old monetary system and the new, and why central banks buy gold but not crypto. Educational notes only — no investment advice, no tickers, no price calls.
One Man's Uprising: Why Things at the Top Don't Need a Reason to Fall
Notes on The Meb Faber Show episode 648 with Paul Kedrosky. Why AI may be the first moment where every ingredient of a historic bubble arrives at once: extrapolating the future from coding, the least representative starting point imaginable; data center financing flipping from cash flow to external debt; a commodity deflating 70-80% a year; and how failure at high valuations becomes a matter of probabilities adding up. Educational only, not investment advice, no stock recommendations.
Making Payments Boring, Making Disagreement Public: Odd Lots' First Conversation at Jackson Hole
Notes and reflections on Bloomberg's Odd Lots (Aug 27, 2026) with Kansas City Fed President Jeffrey Schmid: why instant settlement leads straight back to duration and liquidity, how to read the long end of the curve, how the AI data center buildout crowds out other industries, and what a dissent actually means. Educational commentary, not investment advice; no tickers, no price targets.
When a Carmaker Decides Not to Do What Everyone Else Is Doing: Caibaogou Episodes 546 and 547 on BMW's Neue Klasse
Notes on a two-part Taiwanese industry podcast (episodes 546 and 547) about BMW's Neue Klasse: what a pricing team actually does, why Taiwan's standard equipment list was shaped by its alleyways, where the EV gap between Europe and Taiwan comes from, how to tell a useful feature from a novelty, and how to tell whether a brand narrative carries information or merely a position. Educational only — not investment advice, no stock recommendations or price targets.
"Two Companies Will Own Most of the World's Compute" — Notes on Dylan Patel's 2028 Map
Listening notes on the Dwarkesh Podcast conversation with SemiAnalysis founder Dylan Patel: how compute is concentrating into two labs, why revenue-per-megawatt is the ruler that matters, and how $5 trillion of credit reaches every stock you own. Educational; not investment advice, no tickers, no price targets.
Fifty-Eight Years of Almost: When a Technology Finally Finds Its Buyer
Notes from an Asianometry episode on the solid state transformer's fifty-eight years of near-misses, and what it teaches about the gap between technically possible and commercially viable. Educational only — not investment advice, no tickers, no price targets.
When the Price of Money Starts Rising: Reading This Market Through the 10-Year
Notes from listening to The Compound and Friends, 2026-08-24. Decomposing long-term Treasury yields into inflation expectations and real rates, why the classic bond hedge stopped working, the growth term everyone forgets in the valuation formula, and the no-recession assumption this market is quietly built on. Educational only, not investment advice; no stock recommendations or price targets.
Moats Evaporate. The People Who Dig Them Don't — Notes on TechWave EP151, After CUDA
Personal reflections on TechWave EP151: why CUDA's porting-cost moat is loosening, what Jensen Huang is really trying to solve by turning AI factories into an asset class, and what the Moderna mRNA headline actually means. Educational notes only — no stock recommendations or price targets.
The Circuit EP 189: Analog's AI Moment, and the Day Chip Companies Started Borrowing
Personal notes after listening to The Circuit (Aug 23, 2026). From ADI's earnings and analog content per gigawatt, to why SAM beats TAM, to the misread Marvell–Google deal, to chip companies competing with their balance sheets. Educational reading notes focused on how to interpret, not on stock conclusions. Not investment advice.
Four Shocks That Didn't Break the U.S. Economy — Notes on Macro Musings with Ben Harris
Notes after listening to the 2026-08-24 Macro Musings episode with Ben Harris: why the expected recession never arrived, why the real oil bottleneck is refining rather than crude, and whether AI can grow the U.S. out of its fiscal hole. Educational only; no investment advice, no stock recommendations.
Lining Up One Week of Public Information: Upstream Is Now Pricing in Lead Times
Seven days of one independent researcher's public posts, organised into four threads: lead time replacing price as the unit of account, high-end capacity crowding out low-end, sold out not meaning rent collected, and the dissolving boundary between memory and optical interconnect. Structure only — no tickers.
Good at Buying, Hopeless at Selling? Use a Dumb Line — Notes on Gooaye EP690
Reflections on the 2026-08-22 episode of Gooaye: the Marvell–Google chip agreement and the shift toward customer-owned tooling, a market that quietly reset everyone's baseline, and why an unglamorous exit rule beats a brilliant one. Educational commentary only — not investment advice, and no individual stock recommendations.
Casino or Squid Game? What MacroMicro's Korea Episode Taught Me About Denominators
Notes on MacroMicro's After Meeting EP.211 covering South Korea's margin leverage, the memory cycle, and currency structure — plus a method for reading positioning data when two numbers disagree. Educational only, not investment advice; no stock picks or price targets.
China Built 700 Waste-to-Energy Plants in Six Years: A Business Priced by Policy
Notes from Asianometry's episode on China's incinerator boom — how to read a business whose revenue is set by subsidy, why utilization rates matter more than installed capacity, and how local opposition becomes a real line item on the schedule. Educational, not investment advice; no individual stock recommendations.
New Tricks in Memory, an Old Problem in Robotics: Everyone Is Routing Around the Same Bottleneck
Notes from listening to Statementdog podcast ep. 545: HBF questioned by a paper two weeks after launch, Intel's return to memory with XBM, the example Cathie Wood got backwards, and what the robotics industry actually lacks behind Unitree's IPO. Personal listening notes for educational discussion only; not investment advice, no stock recommendations.
Seventeen Cents on the Dollar: Darius Dale on Debt, Money Printing, and Who Actually Pays for Inflation
Notes after listening to MacroVoices 546. From the structural supply-demand imbalance in Treasuries, to yield curve control that is already here, to the Cantillon effect behind an economy where only seventeen cents of every federal dollar reaches the poor — plus one pessimistic worldview that does not imply a bearish position. Educational only; no investment advice, no tickers, no price targets.
Nobody's Against Data Centers. They're Against You.
Notes from Bloomberg's Odd Lots (2026-08-21) with independent writer Jasmine Sun on why the AI industry misjudged where the public backlash would ignite: not jobs, not doom, but the 700-acre construction site down the road — and what that says about reading the buildout cycle. Educational, not investment advice.
A Prediction Nailed to the Wall
We pinned a TAIEX options settlement call in public: claim, odds, criteria and grading date all stated up front, to be scored against the exchange's official settlement price on Aug 26. A methodology demo about verifiable predictions. Educational content, not investment advice.
Lining Up a Week of Public Posts: Where the Upstream Chain Breaks First
Seven days of one independent researcher's public posts. Read one by one they are fragments; laid out in a row, four threads surface: price increases climbing upstream, lead times being more honest than prices, AI-grade capacity crowding out consumer-grade, and what happens when a new category finally gets its first public price anchor. Structure only — no tickers.