Investing & Markets
Chips, the AI supply chain, macro and money flows: slowly making sense of markets. 141 posts.
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.
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.