Investing & Markets
Chips, the AI supply chain, macro and money flows: slowly making sense of markets. 299 posts.
Asianometry Notes: The IGBT, Two Transistors Grafted Into One
Notes on Asianometry's 15 October 2026 episode 'IGBTs Took Silicon Power to the Next Level': B. Jayant Baliga published the MOSFET–bipolar hybrid idea at GE in 1979, demonstrated it at IEDM in December 1982 and shipped it as the IGT in June 1983, while Toshiba's Akio Nakagawa solved latch-up by pushing saturation current below the latch-up limit and sold a non-latching part in 1985. Educational listening notes only — no investment advice, no price targets, and the judgements here may be wrong.
Sixteen Years on the Bench: Tobias Carlisle on Buffett's Three Best Deals and When Value Comes Back
Listening notes on Behind the Balance Sheet episode 64. Deep value investor Tobias Carlisle rereads Buffett through Sun Tzu: avoid ruin first, then talk about winning. Covers value traps versus quality traps, how many positions you need, and the real design behind GenRe, BNSF and the Japanese trading houses. Educational listening notes, no investment advice, no price targets or buy and sell calls.
4F² in Memory, a New Laminate at OCP, and an Energy Expo That Pivoted to AI Data Centers
Notes from the October 15, 2026 episode (#570) of the Taiwanese podcast Caibaogou: CXMT's 4F² DRAM announcement and G4 ramp, PTFE laminates and optics roadmaps at OCP in the US, and a Taipei energy expo where nearly every booth was pitching AI data centers. On the gap between making something work and making the yield work, and why land that has already cleared permitting suddenly became scarce. Educational, not investment advice; no stock recommendations or price targets.
A $50,000 Underwater Drone: Ulysses Wants to Make the Ocean a Permanent Worksite
Notes on the 15 October 2026 episode of Cheeky Pint, where Ulysses cofounder Will O'Brien discusses the cost structure, supply-chain bottlenecks and defence procurement behind underwater robotics. Educational commentary only; no investment advice and no stock recommendations.
Can a Power Plant Roll Off an Assembly Line? Notes on MacroVoices 554
Notes on MacroVoices episode 554 (October 15, 2026), where Aalo Atomics CTO Yasir Arafat lays out a cost curve for mass-manufactured reactors, the fuel bottleneck, and the policy shift. Personal listening notes for education only; not investment advice and not a prediction about any company or share price.
Meb Faber #654: It's a Bubble, So Buy It
Notes on The Meb Faber Show #654 (16 October 2026): Dirk Willer, head of global macro asset allocation and emerging market strategy at Citi, uses a price-based bubble definition borrowed from GMO — a real price more than two standard deviations above long-term trend — to date US equities' entry into bubble territory to mid-2025, and concludes you hold it without leverage and with some hedges on the book. He also states the condition that would void the call: if earnings growth over the next five years matches the last two or three, it isn't a bubble. Educational listening notes only — no investment advice, no price targets, and the judgements here may be wrong.
France's deficit has run for fifty years. Why is the market nervous now?
Notes from the 16 October 2026 Bloomberg Odd Lots episode: former Macron adviser Shahin Vallée unpacks the rise in French bond spreads — what got repriced is who can pass a budget after the 2027 elections. Educational notes on how fiscal and political risk bind each other; no stock views and no buy or sell advice, readers should form their own judgement.
Jensen Huang on BG2Pod: Does the AI Capex Pencil Out, and What Breaks in 2027
Listening notes on the 15 October 2026 BG2Pod interview with Jensen Huang: why compute demand keeps compounding, why land, power and shell are next year's real constraint, and how fungibility turns into financeability. Educational, not investment advice; no stock picks or price targets.
Can Natural Gas Supply Handle the AI Boom? Forty-Eight Months in the Turbine Business
Notes from the 2026-10-15 episode of Catalyst with Shayle Kann, 'Can natural gas supply handle the AI boom?' Dora Partners president Tony Bruff on 36-to-48-month lead times, a 30-35% price rise over five years, and the superalloy and forging capacity that aerospace is drawing from at the same time. Educational commentary, not investment advice; no price targets and no stock recommendations.
After Ringing the Bell, He Laid Out Fifteen Years of Receipts: Index at Highs, Stocks Falling Away Underneath
Listener notes on the 2026-10-13 episode of What Are Your Thoughts. Josh Brown rang the NYSE opening bell for the Halftime Report's fifteenth anniversary and tallied fifteen years of market numbers; the same episode covered bank earnings and breadth at its weakest since the dot-com bubble. Educational notes only, not investment advice, and no stock recommendations.
Gooaye EP705 Notes: The Numbers Are Beautiful and the Stock Won't Move, Because Everyone Onboard Already Knows
Listening notes on Gooaye EP705 (2026-10-14). How 'don't go where the crowd is' actually works at the single-stock level: why equipment names posting violent monthly revenue sit still, why the second-tier name runs hardest, and what you have to wait for before you can tell a positioning problem from a fundamental one. Educational, not investment advice; no tickers recommended, no price targets.
Housing All of Finance on One Chain: Notes on Odd Lots with Hyperliquid's Jeff Yan
Listening notes on the October 15, 2026 Bloomberg Odd Lots episode with Hyperliquid Labs co-founder Jeff Yan: perpetual futures, oracle prices, the 31-hour deployment auction, and which layer regulation should sit on. Educational, not investment advice; no stock recommendations or price targets.
From Orbit to Seabed: I Had Defense Tech's Scoreboard Wrong — Notes on Valley of Depth, Oct 13, 2026
On October 13, 2026, Valley of Depth hosted the CEOs of Varda, Firestorm, and Bedrock Ocean. These are my listening notes on moving from 'whose machine is better' to supply, repair, and observability. Educational reflection only — no investment advice, no prices or trades discussed.
The 10,000-Page Environmental Review: Daniel Palken on the Senate's 417-Page Permitting Bill
Notes from the October 13, 2026 Columbia Energy Exchange interview with Arnold Ventures' Daniel Palken on what the bipartisan Senate permitting bill changes and what the environmental left is worried about. Educational commentary, not investment advice, and no individual stocks discussed.
Supply Chained: A $3 Trillion Company and One Number Nobody Has Published
Notes on Supply Chained (13 October 2026): Tim Culpan and Jon of Asianometry work through Reuters reporter Echo Wang's story on Anthropic's leaked IPO prospectus — $4bn of 2025 revenue, an $8bn operating loss, about $7bn of compute spending, two customers for a quarter of revenue — and Tim converts the $3 trillion valuation into 500 times sales, with the fibre bubble as his comparison. Educational listening notes only: no investment advice, no price targets, and the judgements here may be wrong.
TechWave EP159: Musk Bought 800 MHz — and Then What?
Notes on TechWave EP159 (12 October 2026): SpaceX acquired US 800 MHz low-band spectrum on 8 October (817–824 MHz uplink, 862–869 MHz downlink), US carrier shares fell 8–9% that day, and host Harry works through path loss and beam capacity to explain why Starlink fits better as a backup network. Educational listening notes only — no investment advice, no price targets, and the judgements here may be wrong.
Betting Before the Evidence: What Muse Wonder's Launch Reveals About Signing the Check First
Notes after listening to the 12 October 2026 Cheeky Pint with Mark Zuckerberg and Alex Wang. Why Meta committed hundred-billion-dollar spending before seeing a model, why they moved evaluation in-house, and where that argument is weakest. Educational discussion of method; no investment advice and no view on any stock.
When the data center gets big enough, the corner parts become a business — notes on The Circuit's Marvell analyst day episode
Listening notes on The Circuit, 2026-10-12: why Marvell's five-year targets came in above sell-side models, and where heterogeneous racks, BMCs and grid interconnection set the limits. Educational industry observation, no individual stock advice.
Ten Thousand People Serving 140 Million: David Vélez on Banking's Second Half
Notes after listening to Invest Like the Best EP.495. David Vélez's numbers: global consumer finance is a $10T industry with ~90% still flowing through branches; Nubank serves 140M customers with 10,000 employees at roughly 3% of an incumbent's cost to serve. Educational discussion of his reasoning and where my own read was wrong — not investment advice, no stock recommendations or price targets.
A Lithography Machine That Never Sold, Reborn Two Decades Later as an ASML Inspection Tool
Asianometry's 11 October 2026 episode on ASML's eScan 2200 multibeam inspection tool, whose technology came from Mapper Lithography, the Dutch startup that went bankrupt in 2018. Listening notes: the twenty-year timeline plus my own reading. Educational only — no investment advice, price targets or stock recommendations.
Sixty Years Pegged to the Dollar: The Bahamas' Central Bank Governor on Exchange Rate Anchors, Reserve Buffers, and the World's First Nationwide CBDC
Listening notes on the October 12, 2026 episode of Macro Musings with Bahamas central bank governor John Rolle. Covers the fixed exchange rate, reserve buffers, procyclical policy, and the Sand Dollar's design, plus the strongest objections and the conditions under which the setup breaks. Educational macro notes, no individual stocks, no investment advice.
One Week of Public Posts, Laid Side by Side: What "Sold Out Through 2029" Actually Commits To
An independent researcher covering the AI infrastructure upstream posted eleven times on X between 2026-10-05 and 10-10. Lined up together, the posts put the tight spot in lasers and substrates — and put the date it loosens into public documents.
Podcast Notes Weekly: Oct 05–Oct 11, 2026
The takeaways from 22 podcast notes I wrote this week (Asianometry, Macro Musings with David Beckworth, Bloomberg Odd Lots, The Circuit, Invest Like the Best, Tech Wave (科技浪) and more). Two to four sentences per episode, with a link to each full post.
Gooaye EP704 Notes: When $70B Became $50B, and Why It Didn't Move His Position
Listening notes on Gooaye EP704 (2026-10-10). How to tell an accounting-definition dispute from something actually breaking, using OpenAI's revised annualized revenue and Marvell's investor day guidance. Educational, not investment advice; no tickers recommended, no price targets.