Investing & Markets
Chips, the AI supply chain, macro and money flows: slowly making sense of markets. 141 posts.
An Ant-Hole in the Dam: How an Exception for Wheelchairs Became an Invisible Port
Bloomberg Odd Lots hosts the New York Times' Iran correspondent and Iran International's head of digital on their new book, Stolen Revolution. This isn't an episode about oil. It's about the hardest thing in any economy to price: what happens when passing a certain size means someone knocks on your door for a share.
We Took the Easier Road: Branko Milanovic on What Comes After Globalization
Bloomberg Odd Lots hosts Branko Milanovic on his new book. He names the emerging order national market liberalism — only the international layer got dismantled. And the sharpest passage: facing a stagnating middle class, governments had two roads, and picked the politically easier one.
Hiding the Boat in the Ravine: Where the Risk Went After 2008
Bloomberg Odd Lots hosts two researchers from UT Austin and Yale on their new paper, 'Private Credit's State Backstop.' After 2008 policymakers deliberately pushed risk out of the banking system — and it has come back around, through life insurers, into a public backstop structurally worse than the FDIC and never once tested.
Tungsten: A Hundred-Year Prediction Market for War
Bloomberg's Odd Lots on tungsten — a mine off Tasmania that opened for WWI, closed when peace broke out, reopened before WWII, was rescued by Korea, and flooded shut in 1990. It's restarting now. Columnist David Fickling calls tungsten mining 'a century-old prediction market for war.' Plus one correction I had to make to my own definition of a bottleneck.
Summer Insects and Ice: The Week the Market Sold While the Order Books Said Sold Out
An independent researcher I follow kept posting through the late-July AI deleveraging. Line up the public numbers he pointed at that week and a strange picture emerges: prices collapsing, while earnings, capex guidance and capacity allocation all point the same way — not enough to go around.
MacroMicro EP209: The Same Capex Was Vision Last Quarter and a Crime This Quarter
Notes on MacroMicro After Meeting EP209: big-tech revenue and AI monetisation are still accelerating, yet the stocks are being punished for free cash flow turning negative. What changed is not the fundamentals but which line item the market prices. Plus the Microsoft capex 'cut' that was really a ten-year change in depreciation schedule, and why the death of forward guidance means watching monthly prints instead of officials' phrasing. Educational notes, not investment advice.
Statementdog (財報狗) EP541 Notes: Once Chips Got Big, Round Wafers Stopped Paying
My notes on Statementdog EP541, on panel-level packaging. AI chips have grown large enough that cutting square dies out of a round wafer went from a rounding error to losing nearly half the area, which is pushing packaging carriers from circles to large squares. I cover the technical story and the three camps competing, then add three extensions: why warpage is the real barrier, what it means that glass solves two problems at once, and how to use a 2029 revenue timeline. Educational notes, not investment advice.
MacroMicro EP208: Separate the Long Lead Items From the Short Ones, and You Can Read the AI Cycle
The main contribution of MacroMicro's After Meeting EP208: it splits the order-cut risk for the second half into two layers. Cuts to ordinary components only move the manufacturing cycle around; cuts to genuinely scarce parts are what a real turn looks like. Plus TSMC's inventory rising for two straight quarters and why that number has two meanings, Korea's leverage-on-leverage unwind, and why Kimi K3 did not trigger another DeepSeek moment. Educational notes, not investment advice.
Statementdog (財報狗) EP539 Notes: While Everyone Stares at the AI Endpoint, I'm Watching Where the Shovel Gets Stuck
Personal notes from Statementdog (財報狗) Podcast EP539: Meta renting out compute is a business model taking shape, not a surplus of capacity; AI infrastructure hits hard physical bottlenecks in power and water; capital should look upstream from the endpoint toward mature nodes and silicon wafers; memory makers flip cash-flow structure with ultra-strict long-term contracts. Plus how the episode echoes two things I keep practicing — chokepoint-layer thinking, and reading that 'cheaper isn't peaking.' Educational notes, not investment advice; disclaimer at the end.
Dingmao EP14 Notes: The AI Server Battlefield Moves from 'Enough Compute?' to 'How Do You Run Multi-Node?'
Personal notes after Dingmao Industry Notes EP14 (Computex 2026 observations): Agentic AI forces servers toward multi-node architecture; the bottleneck shifts from 'compute' to management chips (BMC), power delivery (800V), and interconnect; plus how 'the future of devices' changes under the AI wave — from a single machine to a whole rack as one computer, power and cooling as the ceiling, the management layer as the nervous system, and endpoint devices redefined. Educational observation, not investment advice; disclaimer at the end.
Should the Computer Sit in the Corner of the Office, or at the Center?
Notes after listening to Odd Lots interview Boris Cherny, who runs Claude Code at Anthropic. The part that stayed with me wasn't how capable the tool is. It was a study from the 1990s he brought up: companies bought the same computers, and only some of them got any productivity out of it. The difference was never the purchase.
The Last Short Seller on How AI Could 'Unwind' the S&P 500 — Notes on Meb Faber Show EP640 with Carson Block
Carson Block of Muddy Waters — the man Meb Faber calls 'the last short seller left in the world' — lays out an unsettling chain of logic on EP640: AI displaces high-paid knowledge workers, their 401(k) flows reverse, and the mega-caps that those flows inflated pull the S&P 500 down hard. Full summary, quotes, host and guest intros, and what we can take from it. A podcast listening note, educational.
AI Is Making Lawyers Busier: Jevons Paradox, Live on Odd Lots
Bloomberg's Odd Lots hosted Gary Wingens, chair of a major US law firm: due-diligence costs down 70%, yet more work than ever; billing rates up 10% while total client bills fall. A one-episode masterclass in whether AI destroys jobs — plus my own one-person-company confirmation.
How to Spot an Empty AI Money-Making Post — and Train Yourself to Think Deeper
The internet is full of 'office worker makes $2,000 a month with the latest AI' side-hustle marketing. This piece teaches you five fingerprints for spotting hollow content, a thirty-second wallet check, and six thinking habits you can practice daily — write down a dated prediction, explain it plainly, write your own answer first, ask how a claim could be falsified, think one step further, and cool off for 48 hours. Educational sharing, no accounts or platforms named, not investment advice, disclaimer at the end.
Certainty for Sale: What My Colleague Is Really Buying from That Finance Channel
A colleague started following a large Taiwanese stock-tutorial channel, and I didn't read it as poor judgment on his part. What he's buying isn't financial knowledge—it's the feeling that the market can be understood, predicted, and controlled. This piece uses behavioral finance and media literacy to unpack the six psychological needs these channels target so precisely, the free-trust-to-paid-course marketing funnel, and three questions you can carry with you to test any of them. An educational reflection—no channel is named, not investment advice, disclaimer at the end.
Gooaye EP678 Notes: Meta Just Put Compute Pricing in the Sunlight — the Fog Behind Dream Multiples Is Lifting
Personal notes on Gooaye EP678: Meta repurposing old GPUs for inference and renting them out — refuting the 'AI server bad-debt' short thesis while making compute pricing transparent, which pressures dream-multiple valuations; rotation inside optical communications; the broad component price-hike wave. Educational notes, not investment advice; disclaimer at the end.
Statementdog (財報狗) EP538 Notes: While Everyone Cheers the Compute Boom, I'm Asking Who Got Left Out
Personal notes from Statementdog (財報狗) Podcast EP538: anti-bubble thinking, Korea's memory deleveraging, memory prices slowing but supply still tight, firms starting to rein in AI spend, and compute going tiered-and-cheaper. Plus how the episode echoes two things I've been practicing: separating noise from structure, and watching cross-market leverage. Educational notes, not investment advice; disclaimer at the end.
A Few Things I Saw on X This Week: The Fastest Information Needs the Most Filtering
Personal trend notes after following a few sharp market voices on X: a 'dumbest thematic selloff' driven by noise, memory price hikes that shamed the doubters, the US-China humanoid-robot gap as a Sputnik moment, and $10T price targets as froth signals. X gives you the fastest information — and it's also where you most need to separate signal from noise. Educational notes, not investment advice; disclaimer at the end.
Statementdog Podcast EP537 Notes: Cybersecurity, Software-Defined Defense, and Reading SaaS via 'Contract Liabilities'
Personal takeaways from Statementdog (財報狗) Podcast EP537 (industry deep-dive, cybersecurity special): AI-automated security, the new business of protecting AI, software-defined defense and counter-drone, and using contract liabilities to read a SaaS company's momentum. With a full glossary of terms and techniques, sectors worth researching, and references. Educational notes, not investment advice; disclaimer at the end.
Unreasonable People and the Power Law: Three Quiz Questions That Exposed the Cracks in My Investing Instincts
Notes from reading the introduction to Sebastian Mallaby's The Power Law: three quiz questions that reveal the gap between a retail investor's instincts and how the power law actually works — hit rate vs. the single winner, mean reversion vs. watering weeds and cutting flowers, courage vs. position sizing. Pure reflection and method education; disclaimer at the end.
Contract Liabilities: A Peek at How Much Future Revenue a Company Has Already Locked In
A contract liability is money a customer has paid before the company has delivered. Why it sits under liabilities, why it's a leading indicator of future revenue, and how to find it in the financial statements step by step. Pure method education; disclaimer at the end.