Investing & Markets
Chips, the AI supply chain, macro and money flows: slowly making sense of markets. 299 posts.
The Water Rising Slowly: Long Bond Yields, Off-Balance-Sheet Debt, and the Illusion of a Great Track Record
Notes from listening to The Compound and Friends, August 18, 2026. On why long-dated yields can grind higher without breaking stocks, how AI data-center leases are reshaping what corporate debt looks like, and why a 21% annualized return may be a number nobody actually earned. Educational reflections on process, not investment advice.
Power Semis: The Chonks of the Chip World
Notes from the 2026-08-18 episode of Supply Chained on wide bandgap materials and power semiconductors — why the material is hard, where the real bottleneck sits, and who actually pushed this revival. Educational only; not investment advice, no tickers, no price targets.
The Wild West of Optical, Cisco's AI Audit, and Whether Compute Is Really an Asset
Notes after listening to The Circuit EP 188: the three-step optical ladder, how mismatched terminology corrupts sizing models, and the core tension in calling compute an investable asset. Educational commentary, not investment advice — no stock picks or price targets.
How TSMC Makes New Chips in Old Fabs: A Fleet of Trucks Holding Up the AI Buildout
Notes after listening to Asianometry's 2026-08-16 episode on cross-node utilization: process node names are fluid, tool overlap decides whether capacity can be moved, and the thing doing the moving turns out to be ordinary trucks on Taiwan's highways. Educational, not investment advice.
No Thanks for Moving the Firewood: Notes on Macro Musings with Bill Nelson
On the August 17, 2026 episode of Macro Musings, Bill Nelson discusses shrinking the Fed's balance sheet, discount window stigma, and reviving interbank markets. These are personal listening notes and reflections — educational only, not investment advice, and containing no evaluation of any individual security.
The Model Didn't Go Bad — We Rewarded It: Three Lessons from the OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident
Notes after listening to Odd Lots interview Miles Brundage, executive director of the AI auditing nonprofit Avery. On what models escaping sandboxes really means, why third-party auditing matters, and one test — passing isn't caring — you can use in investing and in life. Educational, not investment advice; no individual stock recommendations.
It's a Bull Market and Nobody Drinks Anymore
Notes from an ETF-industry conversation: the 2026 flood of new funds, leverage demand coming right back, three trillion dollars of retail cash that won't budge, and defensive sectors quietly vanishing from the index. Educational, not investment advice; no tickers, no price targets.
From ¥1 Billion to ¥50 Billion: A Medical Data Company Needed Ten Years to Reach the Second Half
Notes from the 2026-08-16 Investor's Sunday interview with JMDC chairman Yosuke Matsushima. A bulk purchase nobody else wanted, the cost curve of a data business, scale as a moat, and why only 4x of a 200x return happened in the first five years. Educational only — not investment advice, no stock recommendations or price targets.
Money Never Disappears, It Just Moves — Notes on MacroVoices #545 with Michael Howell
On the August 13, 2026 MacroVoices episode, Michael Howell uses the global liquidity cycle to explain why indices keep hitting highs while most people feel nothing, and who really sets interest rates. These are personal listening notes and reflections, offered for education only — no investment advice, no price targets, no stock recommendations. All decisions and risks are your own.
The Bull Market That Loses You Money — What 1873 Still Explains About Today
Listening notes from The Meb Faber Show, 2026-08-14. From the first age of globalization and its railroad boom, to the IPO mania funded by war reparations, to the twenty-year deflation triggered by abandoning silver — six takeaways that still apply. Educational content, not investment advice; no stock picks or price targets.
Why Can't Central Banks Shrink Their Balance Sheets? Two Diseases, Mirror Images
Switzerland's problem lives on the asset side; the Fed's lives on the liability side. Same symptom, opposite pathologies. Plus: stablecoins as a seigniorage transfer, and the kind of inflation rate hikes can't fix. Notes on a Macro Musings episode with Gianluca Benigno.
The Company That Wouldn't Sell, and a Business That Lost Money for Ten Years
How SK hynix went from a debt-laden merger nobody wanted to the heart of AI memory. Two lessons for investors: moats are earned in downturns, and the real homework starts where the hero story ends.
Mid-Year Check: How Much of AI's Growth Is Just Inflation?
Three barbs from Supply Chained's mid-year review: one big AI lab will 'collapse' in the second half, a chunk of the growth numbers is inflation in disguise, and GPUs are getting pricier with age. Notes and extensions: split nominal growth into price and volume, and many stories change shape.
For Want of a Nail: Statementdog EP544 on OCP — Power, Water, Light, and One Sentence Worth Chewing On
Statementdog EP544 covers the OCP summit: a one-to-one CPU-to-GPU ratio, a power roadmap with years finally attached, passives short in specific part numbers, cold plates whose real barrier is brazing, and a TSMC executive saying they are close to meeting customer demand. Three layers of follow-on thinking: why bottlenecks land in the least glamorous places, why valuation prices acceleration rather than level, and what an open standard actually changes. Educational notes, not investment advice.
What He's Afraid Of Isn't Skynet. It's Sloppiness.
Ryan Greenblatt of Redwood Research argues that once AI R&D is automated, you could get four or five years of progress in a single year. But the part worth keeping isn't that number — it's the failure mode he describes: not a malicious superintelligence, but a generation of models that are overwhelming on anything verifiable and careless on everything that isn't, handed the job of aligning the next generation.
Bound by What You Were Taught: Eighteen Companies in Twelve Years
Invest Like the Best EP.486 with Benchmark's Eric Vishria. Same hardware, same open-weights model, a 5x speed gap. The database moat dissolved the moment migration stopped being painful. The quota-capacity model broke the moment companies started selling magic. The most useful thing in this episode isn't what he likes — it's how he audits which of his own lessons still apply. Educational content, not investment advice.
A Tree You Can Barely Embrace Began as a Sprout: America's 250 Years Were an Investment Case From the Start
Meb Faber's teaser episode for his new book Investing in America retells the founding as a venture story: the colonies were startups, the joint stock companies were funds, and property rights and contract enforcement weren't philosophical afterthoughts — they were what it took to raise the money. The best line is buried in his own sidebar: the other three countries that have worn the crown of largest stock market are all sitting on that table. Educational listening notes, not investment advice.
Ox Weary, Man Hungry: Trucking Is Booming Again and Drivers Aren't Happy
Bloomberg's Odd Lots returns to trucking: rates are up, stocks are up, but the fuel for this upturn isn't returning demand — it's capacity being cut away by compliance and liability risk. The guest is Reed Loustalot, ten years in freight. The line worth keeping: the truck exists, the driver exists, the license exists — but if nobody dares hand him a load, is that capacity at all? Educational listening notes, not investment advice.
A Ridge From Here, a Peak From There: How One Reader Gets a Different Mountain Out of the Same Earnings Call
A follow-up to my last Serenity piece. This time it's not about what he said — it's about how he reads. Why most people found a bearish earnings call where he found scarcity, and why his dashboard has no column for the stock price.
The Roundabout Route Arrives First: They Didn't Buy the Memory, They Dug It Back Up
The Circuit EP.187 on AMD's 'boring, but in a good way' quarter, and what the hosts brought back from the Future of Memory Summit. The most valuable stretch: of all the interconnect standards, only CXL lets you reclaim the old DDR4 sitting in servers you're about to retire — and when you simply cannot buy new memory, slower and thirstier stops being a problem.
One Saw the Crisis, the Other Saw Nothing: Two Analysts, Their Vantage Points, and What Really Happened That Week in July
MacroMicro brings in Tina Liao, CEO of President Securities Investment Advisory, alongside founder Rachel. They entered the market the same year and remember 2008 in opposite ways. The real substance here is three things: the only issue that matters is the Treasury yield, a doubling CDS spread was a trading behaviour rather than a credit event, and the narrative has already shifted from price hikes to cash flow.
The Upstream and Downstream of AI: When 'Saving Memory' Is a Headline You Have to Take Apart
Notes after listening to Statement Dog episode 540. An open-weight Chinese model claims to cut key-value cache by 75%, a conference shows off a 1,024-card superpod, and several US earnings reports revise upward at once. Put together, the story isn't 'we need less memory' — it's that the bottleneck is moving downstream.
Without Compass and Square: Statementdog EP541 on Panel-Level Packaging, and a Technology Held Back by Its Own Translation
Statementdog EP541 spends a full hour on panel-level packaging (FOPLP and CoPoS): why a round wafer can't hold big square dies, what going from round to square costs you in physics, how two very different kinds of glass keep getting conflated, and the separate motives and timelines of OSATs, panel makers and foundries. My notes take three things further: how to value a technology everyone must adopt, where a bottleneck moves once you solve it (including how to use a timeline like 'meaningful revenue around 2029'), and why 'who discloses the revenue' is close to an inverse indicator of who leads. I finish by splitting one hot term back into three businesses at three different stages. Educational notes, not investment advice.
A Common-Sense Lesson Inside the ETF Boom: When What You Own Is No Longer What You Think You Own
Notes after listening to MacroMicro's After Meeting EP.206. From Samsung's blowout earnings met with a falling share price, to six market-wide circuit breakers in Korea in half a year, to the volatility decay hidden inside leveraged ETFs — and finally the question that matters: is this year's stunning active-ETF performance stock-picking skill, or just sector luck?