[dry-run excerpt] Welcome back to the Epoch Brief. In this edition, we’re covering: Proliferating agents and plummeting costs. Our new report estimates how many AI agents could soon exist in the world: nearly 2 billion at the upper bound, assuming agents run on cheap models. Another report shows that prices for a given level of performance are dropping faster for AI than for any other transformative technology in h…
[dry-run excerpt] AI safety is on fire. On 12 September 2026, Dario Amodei published an essay arguing that frontier labs must deliberately slow the pace at which they improve model capabilities. China was central to his geopolitical argument: export controls and tighter security could preserve America’s lead, creating room to slow down and leverage for a future agreement with Beijing. Within a day, Sam Altman and E…
[dry-run excerpt] The Pulse is a series covering events, insights, and trends within Big Tech and startups. Today, we cover: New trend: building internal vibe-coding apps at mid-sized companies. Ramp and Stripe built platforms for non-engineers to build internal websites and tools with, and both are taking off in those workplaces. I expect more companies to do the same. Do … Read more
[dry-run excerpt] The Panda Perspectives Team | 7 October 2026 Good Evening, We continue to gallop across Asia in our quest to understand the Asain AI landscape better. For part 3 we find outselves in Japan. The Korea and Taiwan pieces followed AI spending through memory, foundries and server hardware. Japan supplies much of the equipment and material those businesses need. Its testing systems, package materials, o…
[dry-run excerpt] THE THESIS IN SHORT Grainger owns 11,078 rental homes across Britain, most of them modern, purpose-built apartment blocks in London, Manchester, Leeds, Bristol and the commuter towns. An independent valuation puts the portfolio at £3.6 billion. The stock market, at the close on 5 October 2026, values the equity at £1.21 billion against £1.52 billion of net debt — an enterprise value of £2.73 billi…
[dry-run excerpt] Recent industry primers: Aerospace , Exchanges , Insurance , Regional Banks . We are delighted to share with you the fifth in-depth research report in our Industry Primers series, this one on homebuilding . The series exists to help fundamental, long-term investors expand and deepen their circle of competence, one industry at a time, and your feedback on what was useful and on which industries to …
[dry-run excerpt] This is Part Two of the Industry Primers audio program on homebuilding, published by Latticework from MOI Global. It is the deep dive, made for professional investors and for anyone who analyzes these companies for a living. It assumes the ordinary vocabulary of investing and explains only what is specific to this industry, and it stands on its own for … Read more
[dry-run excerpt] This is Part One of the Industry Primers audio program on homebuilding, published by Latticework from MOI Global. It is the first of two audio programs that accompany the written primer on the homebuilders, and it is the story of the industry, told for a general audience. The account is built from documented scenes, with the people named, the dates given, and the participants quoted in their own w…
[dry-run excerpt] Good morning, Today I’m presenting a company that, at first glance, looks like an unattractive investment. Its principal business is in structural decline, group revenue is falling, and the balance sheet looks exposed. But beneath the surface is a far more interesting setup. This company owns a growing software business, generates more cash than headline figures suggest, and is divesting assets th…
[dry-run excerpt] Litigation stocks can move sharply around key events, such as court hearings and decisions. These three could see action soon. The post 3 litigation stocks to watch now appeared first on Undervalued Shares .
[dry-run excerpt] A best ideas pitch on the most hated property market and the most hated stock market by from Fred’s Corner. I hope he’s right. I doubled down this year. A copy of Fred’s slides are below. Read more
[dry-run excerpt] Thank you , , and many others for tuning in. During the chat, we went over the following topics: Buy Now, Pay Later (BNPL) & Accounting Quirks: Banter around the “Buy Now, Cry Later” brand joke, the consumer psychology of 0% interest promotions (including joking around about “girl math”), and how companies account for BNPL sales through deferred revenue, bringing future quarters forward, or moneti…
[dry-run excerpt] For this edition we welcome Orlando Muyshondt, Founder and Portfolio Manager of Elena Partners. Elena Partners aims to deliver attractive returns over an investment cycle by investing in undervalued equities globally. The approach is fundamental, bottom-up, contrarian, and long-term oriented. (Disclaimer: This interview is for informational and educational purposes only, and should not be seen as …
[dry-run excerpt] This report is not investment advice, please do your own research before investing in any securities discussed in this report Introduction I was having a conversation with my good friend Joey Dyke who works at a Chicago based special situations hedge fund where we discussed a business that both of us had looked at in the past and felt had something that investors probably overlook nowadays, at lea…
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[dry-run excerpt] This Week in Special Situations is a research-based slide presentation sent on a separate mailing list. If you do not wish to receive it, opt out here . Almost fully booked — Register to join investors and allocators at Latticework 2026 in Chicago on November 10-11 ( agenda ). This is the seventeenth issue of This Week in Special Situations , our curated survey of actionable ideas. We do not attem…
[dry-run excerpt] “It requires qualities of temperament far more than qualities of intellect. If you’ve got an IQ above 125, you can throw away the rest of the points.” — Warren Buffett As Warren Buffett once said, we need more than just a high IQ to become a successful investor. And as I learned more about investing, I thought a lot about this quote and started asking myself what these qualities actually are. Beca…
[dry-run excerpt] As Warren Buffett once said: "Never count on making a good sale. Have the purchase price be so attractive that even a mediocre sale gives good results." In other words: make sure your purchase price is so attractive that you don’t have to be 100% accurate with your growth or exit multiple assumptions. That’s what our CAGR/IRR ranges are designed for: to understand what growth, high ROIICs, and exc…
[dry-run excerpt] In February 2023, Google released a promotional video for Bard, its answer to ChatGPT. In the video, the chatbot claimed that the James Webb Space Telescope had captured the very first photographs of a planet outside our solar system. In reality, a telescope in Chile had taken the first such image in 2004. On February 8, Reuters identified the error hours before Google’s launch event in Paris, and…
[dry-run excerpt] China's upstream price data confirm the rebound in costs seen in the PMI. Nonetheless, the PBC continued to inject liquidity in September. Details of aggregate household incomes in Japan in Q2 are useful for understanding Japan macro, though the data don't all point in one direction.
[dry-run excerpt] AI moving markets again, this time negatively. OpenAI reportedly told investors its annualized revenue was approaching $50B in September, versus the $70B previously reported. The discrepancy reflects how cloud partner sales are counted when comparing it with Anthropic. (FT) Construction is increasingly dependent on data centers. Real spending growth in that category was 64.5% in the comparison thr…
[dry-run excerpt] Q2 aggregate consumption was weak because incomes were too. Asset incomes are rising, but wages are soft, and in cash terms, the tax burden has been increasing. But while spending in aggregate terms is constrained, the population is falling, so in per capita terms there is actually recovery.
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[dry-run excerpt] Hello, Haymakers: Few industries had as bright an outlook as did solar at the dawn of this century/millennium. Its prospects were so radiant that the Chinese set their formidable resource aggregation and manufacturing sights on this field. As Gavekal’s founder Louis Gave has pithily observed, when the Chinese enter a room – or, in this case, an industry – profits leave. That has certainly been the…
[dry-run excerpt] Subscribe now Without question the worst investors over the last ten years have been macro investors. The one trade I probably talk about the most on this substack has been long Yen, which I now call the widowmaker trade. There was a time when Yen would rally when US stocks were weak - but not anymore. Another foolish trade from the macro community is that higher Japanese and US bond yields would …
[dry-run excerpt] The wall between traditional finance and crypto is starting to come down. Imagine that your personal AI has access to all your finances. With the flick of the wrist, it puts your idle cash balances to work, makes investment decisions and negotiates the best mortgage for you. “Claude, find me the cheapest $500K loan and refinance me into it.” Taken far enough, the implications get rather uncomforta…
[dry-run excerpt] Due to popular demand, Guardian now has a private Discord. A lot of you asked for it. The Substack chat was clunky for anything fast, and following a portfolio as it moves needs a faster room with more transparency. It also brings something new: a focus list of my core positions, kept live. Several of you told me the smaller trades in my portfolio updates are hard to track when they aren’t explici…
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[dry-run excerpt] Chris Hohn held TCI’s third-quarter update call this week. The Moats & Multiples account on X was on it and posted notes. According to those notes Hohn “Seemed quite bearish on the macro,” sees no end to falling bond prices or fiscal deficits, and was only “Neutral on valuation of the S&P500,” which he thinks is being carried by earnings growth that is “entirely driven by AI capex.” Then this: “Ve…
[dry-run excerpt] I actually laughed out loud when I came across this meme yesterday. With (near to medium term) unfalsifiable bearish takes flying around for non-AI stocks, I sympathize a bit with the complaints about the rise of “vibes” based investing. However, on a personal level, the more I think about it, the more I realize now that the AIs are so much better at modeling all sorts of different scenarios, it i…
[dry-run excerpt] Two months ago I updated my thesis on one of the market’s most-hated mid-caps. The company I was looking at was sitting on real estate worth far more than the market was giving it credit for and it was clear as day that this company’s largest customer wanted to buy it. If the sales came through, the balance sheet would deleverage, the covenants holding back capital returns would loosen, and the st…
[dry-run excerpt] Laurent Perrier produces and markets premium Champagne under the Laurent-Perrier brand and related maisons. LPE now trades at P/TB 0.68x, despite 10y median ROCE (pre-tax) of 7% and 10y-median EBIT margin of 23%. This is our fourth recent write-up within the beverage industry, and it is always interesting when several names in the same industry show up in the land of deep value at the same time. F…
[dry-run excerpt] Vertiv Holdings Co (VRT) Vertiv manufactures the power and cooling equipment used inside AI data centres, and few listed companies offer more direct exposure to the AI buildout. Even though it raised its 2026 earnings forecast in April, the stock has fallen 33% at the time of writing, significantly underperforming its peers. In this post, myself and break down the investment case for Vertiv Holdin…
[dry-run excerpt] Companies mentioned: Laurent-Perrier S.A. (LPE) – Euronext Paris, France Italian Wine Brands S.p.A. (IWB) – Borsa Italiana, Italy Delegat Group Limited (DGL) – New Zealand Stock Exchange, New Zealand Schloss Wachenheim AG (SWA) – Frankfurt Stock Exchange, Germany Lanson-BCC S.A. (ALLAN) – Euronext Paris, France AdVini S.A. (ALAVI) – Euronext Paris, France Maison Pommery & Associés S.A. (POMRY) – E…
[dry-run excerpt] DCC – post mortem Let’s start with the positive case. I realized my DCC position recently as the share price (~64,4 GBP) approached the bid value (66,72 GBP) and the remaining upside was not so attractive anymore, especially considering potential GBP volatility for me as a EUR investor. Looking back at the initial write-up, the result was pretty Ok. I made slightly over +50% over 3 ¾ years plus so…
[dry-run excerpt] This week’s best investing news: Warren Buffett’s first tax bill at age 14 was $7 (Fortune) Mohnish Pabrai’s Interview with Knowledge Inside podcast (KIP) Biotech Uno Reverse (Verdad) JPMorgan’s Dimon Weighs In on AI Boom, Bond Selloff and UK Banks (Bloomberg) Ray Dalio Warns of US Debt Crisis Within 3 Years (Bloomberg) Greg Abel Committed $6.8 Billion to Homebuilders Like Lennar (G&M) Observation…
[dry-run excerpt] During their recent episode of the Acquirers Podcast, Travis and Carlisle discussed AI Spending Risks: Can OpenAI Justify Its Huge Funding Needs? Here’s an excerpt from the episode: I use AI, I love AI. I can see that there’s this enormous demand for it and you can automate all of these great little things in the business. There’s really never been a better time to be a solo entrepreneur. But havi…
[dry-run excerpt] During their recent episode, Taylor, Carlisle, and Jonathan Boyar discussed Pool Corp Stock: A Buying Opportunity After the COVID Boom?. Here’s an excerpt from the episode: [Jonathon] Yeah. Pool Corp. Another fresh look constituent. Pool is a name that we profiled in 2009. We did a huge issue talking about investing in consumer-related stocks. We’re in the middle of a global financial crisis. And …
[dry-run excerpt] “The art of investment has one characteristic that is not generally appreciated. A creditable, if unspectacular, result can be achieved by the lay investor with a minimum of effort and capability; but to improve this easily attainable standard requires much application and more than a trace of wisdom.” —Benjamin Graham Read more
[dry-run excerpt] On September 29, OpenAI’s annualized revenue was widely reported to be approaching $70B . Our tracking had it at $50.44B, suggesting the reported figure was significantly overstated. Today, the Financial Times reports OpenAI told investors it was approaching $50B in September. TickerTrends was tracking within ~1% of that figure before the $70B headlines. Source: TickerTrends Blog Post On September…
[dry-run excerpt] By: Wilson I have been using AI religiously since early 2025. The innovation is amazing. It makes your life a lot easier; you learn faster, and, hell, it lets you do things you never thought possible (for example, I have zero coding experience). But over the past few months, I saw a dramatic drop in AI usage. Not because it’s no longer useful; I still use it daily, but it feels like something else…
[dry-run excerpt] Most BDCs trade below NAV right now. The market spent the past year deciding it doesn’t fully trust private credit marks, and some of the largest names in the sector sit at 0.7x NAV or worse. trades at 1.4x NAV, and it has traded at a premium for most of the last decade. Equity investors pay a premium for a BDC they believe can keep earning more than its cost of capital and keep growing, and CSWC …
[dry-run excerpt] Official Dashboard, coming soon and will be published here. Key Rules ➥ 4 stocks ➥ One monthly rebalance That’s all. Simple by design. Alpha Four goes live on November 1, 2026. A new long-term strategy built around a very simple process: ✅ 4 stocks in the strategy ✅ 1 rebalance per month ❌ No daily decisions ❌ No stop losses ❌ No trailing stops ❌ No profit targets Members Get 🔥 Full track history …
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[dry-run excerpt] Kartik B. Athreya As fall starts to show itself in cooler weather, I want to discuss a topic that usually raises temperatures: inflation. Like a budget-conscious consumer, the Federal Reserve is highly attuned to changes in the price of goods and services; minimizing such swings is one of the Fed’s primary duties, after all. But how does the Fed’s view of prices differ from that of a consumer? And…
[dry-run excerpt] Those resources include the world's largest deposits of lithium, huge deposits of oil and gas, rare earth minerals, gold and silver, and the world's largest freshwater reservoir.
[dry-run excerpt] POTUS Trump seems to have TACO'd again, delaying any renewed attacks on Iran until after the US midterm elections while Ansar Allah hit Saudi airports and oil facilities and took most of the key Yemeni highland city of Taiz, and explosions rang out in the Strait of Hormuz.
[dry-run excerpt] Happy Friday! We made it through the week. Friday posts are for paid subscribers and offer behind-the-curtain lessons that hopefully either help you in your job (we know a lot of you are in public health, health care, and community-based organizations) or pique your curiosity about the mental model of YLE. Raise your hand if you have hit a pothole in the past year. I bet you thought about raising …
[dry-run excerpt] Back when I was a teenager, a lot of people were very into the Left Behind series . Evangelical Christianity was still very strong in those days, especially in Texas, and Left Behind blew up by putting Christian eschatology into page-turning airport-bookstore-novel form. People really believed that the stories in those novels weren’t just stories — they were glimpses of a very real future event. T…
[dry-run excerpt] Worker-managed firms not only reduce inequality but are in the main very efficient.
[dry-run excerpt] By Ryan McMaken, Mises Institute On Wednesday, The US government sold $39 bilion worth of 10-year notes to investors, with the high yield for the auction at 5.3 percent. There was solid demand at the auction and put to rest some fears that a rapid bond sell-off might spiral as demand for bonds deteriorated. So, Wednesday’s auction showed that bonds are unlikely to be dumped wholesale in the near f…
[dry-run excerpt] Note: Next week I’ll be traveling to San Jose for the OCP Global Summit, which has become one of the most important AI infrastructure conferences of the year. All the big name companies will be there. If you’re attending, please say hello. I also have several interviews in the pipeline for our Substack that I’m extremely excited about, filled with the deep technical detail we’re known for. Look fo…
[dry-run excerpt] Share THE core causes of the lack of innovation, such as rent-seeking dominance, policy distortions, institutional weaknesses, cultural barriers, and brain drain, track closely with observable economic patterns. Other nations that achieved a high innovation economy, like Japan in the 1980s, South Korea in the 1990s–2000s, and more recently China, were able to shift from commodity/OEM dependence to…
[dry-run excerpt] By: Ainur Rohmah Prabowo Subianto was welcomed at Joko Widodo’s private residence in Surakarta in 2024. Photo from the Ministry of State Secretariat As public satisfaction with President Prabowo Subianto declines, his predecessor, Joko Widodo, is stepping back into the political arena, campaigning for his own party and raising questions about the balance … Read more
[dry-run excerpt] A still from The Jetsons Welcome! This is a new Thursday edition of the Animation Obsessive newsletter. Today, we’re expanding on three topics from recent times. It’s not our aim to do exhaustive articles. In each issue, we try to distill what we’ve learned about a given subject into a narrative; a lot of tangents get left out. Plus, we often collect more… Read more
[dry-run excerpt] In past election years, I’ve shared how I plan to vote in local elections. A few years ago I scaled it up and aimed for voter guides from some of the larger US cities and states. This year, it’s open to anyone who said they were interested. If you’re in one of the cities involved, consider going to the meetup and helping decide who to recommend. You’ll probably want a laptop, or at least a smartph…
[dry-run excerpt] In a few hours the NBS will release September inflation and price data, and we should get more data on economic activity over the holiday period. In this issue: 1. European Commissioner for Trade and Economic Security in Beijing 2. PBoC position paper on the RMB 3. Holiday spending data 4. Measures for protecting the rights and interests of gig workers 5. PRC views on AI safety The Feed: Business,…
[dry-run excerpt] Illustration by Tony Johnson One of the best decisions I ever made was inviting my friend Aaron to punch me in the face. It was almost four years ago. My daughter had recently started boxing: a kids’ class at a local gym, one evening a week with other kids her age. I told Aaron how great it had been for her: improving her confidence, meeting new friends, and learning how to throw a punch, should s…
[dry-run excerpt] I run Glosso , the holy grail of surveys (both ones you can take and create). It’s got a feed, a matching system, the ability to rate your friends, extensive data on your results and how you’re seen, etc. One of the surveys is a ‘ how rationalist are you ’ survey. If you want to take it, I recommend you do it now, before you read the rest of this post and get primed! Okay, did you take it? Let’s g…
[dry-run excerpt] [ Author’s Note : PepsiCo’s first earnings call this morning was scheduled to be the first of the briefs. Claude returned the following synopsis back: “I read the whole call. The headline finding: PepsiCo’s call says nothing about licensing, characters, entertainment IP or studios . Every brand mentioned is PepsiCo’s own (Doritos, Gatorade, Poppi, Mountain Dew), and the only AI mention came from a…
[dry-run excerpt] U.S. interference and right-wing gains across Latin America have eroded democratic legitimacy, calling into question elections elsewhere.
[dry-run excerpt] Last week, I wrote a piece titled “It’s Official: The AI Emperor Has No Clothes,” arguing that the artificial intelligence bubble was approaching the point where investors would be forced to confront the financial reality underneath years of hype, circular financing and absurd valuations. A couple of weeks earlier, I had predicted that the AI bubble would begin to burst within the next six to ten …
[dry-run excerpt] Taiwan A Chinese militia vessel has been seen off Taiwan’s sensitive Pacific coast for the first time, according to a Reuters report, as Beijing continues an apparent campaign of intimidation against independently governed Taiwan, which it views as part of its territory. The Minfudingyu 07902 ship is a fishing boat that doubles as a militia vessel, a surveillance report reviewed by the news agency…
[dry-run excerpt] The big drop of this week was not a new AI model. It was instead the biggest day (so far!) in the history of mathematics, as OpenAI dropped solutions to 90 of the top 500 open math problems, along with many others, reached on an average budget of three hours of Pro-level compute per question. This was kind of a big deal and I plan to cover it tomorrow. We did see Claude Haiku 5.5, which looks prom…
[dry-run excerpt] You can also listen to a narration of this article iTunes & online . My New Daughter On August 30, 2026 we gained a daughter. My son Jonah married Molly after eight years and one week of dating. I wrote about their engagement in “ Operation Molly “. Today I’ll share the speech I gave at their wedding, a bit about the incredible rabbi that married them, and conclude with Mia Sarah’s speech and the …
[dry-run excerpt] A Stranger Things hoodie from Netflix. A Barbie or a Hot Wheels set from Mattel. A box-logo tee from Supreme. A bodysuit from SKIMS. Every one of these stores runs on Shopify. None of these brands lacks the resources to build its own. Supreme ran a custom-built site for years before moving to Shopify in 2023. And they are far from alone. Millions of merchants in 175+ countries now use Shopify, rea…
[dry-run excerpt] Democratic participation requires more than voting rights, including material security, practical knowledge, social belonging, and agency.
[dry-run excerpt] What if the global oil crisis gets much, much worse? I’m not talking about another $10 move in crude. I’m talking about a genuine global energy emergency, where oil reaches $150 or even $200 a barrel, physical shortages begin shutting down meaningful portions of the global economy, and central banks find themselves confronting an inflationary recession. I don’t think it is going to happen, but tha…
[dry-run excerpt] Today at Advertising Week, we’re unveiling the next phase in our Sponsorships program: three new formats to help participating publishers earn more and reach new readers, plus new ways for brands to measure the trust, awareness, and consideration these partnerships build. Mock-ups shown for illustrative purposes only “Tonight, we’re getting Boston Market and going clubbing,” my mom would sometimes…
[dry-run excerpt] The Jewish Table is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts, like this week’s interview and recipe, and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber. Delicata Squash Shakshuka Dear The Jewish Table Readers, I have a first-rate dinner recipe for you this week: Delicata Squash Shakshuka. With its creamy, sweet flesh and tender skin, Delicata squash makes an ideal vessel for shakshuka…
[dry-run excerpt] To be frank, I don’t care where you stand on Israel, Palestine, Netanyahu, Hamas or the broader conflict in the Middle East. At the end of the day, we all have our stance and arguing about it at this point accomplishes little other than wasting time, energy and emotional capital. Having said that, there are certain moments when human decency should transcend politics. Yesterday, October 7th, the t…
[dry-run excerpt] Photo by NASA on Unsplash News about artificial intelligence feels both overwhelming and starving for context. On Sunday, I’ll read that the AI industry is booming, and on Monday, I’ll learn that its revenue is plateauing. On Tuesday, I’ll read that AI is driving economic growth, but on Wednesday, I’ll read that it’s strangling the economy by squeezing out the construction of everything that isn’t…
[dry-run excerpt] The efficient markets hypothesis is often synonymous with the phrase, “prices reflect all available information.” This sounds really smart, right? And it is really easy to explain to people. “Ah, you see, if I have this information and you have this information, then everyone else must also have this information and therefore it is already reflected in the price of this asset.” However, other time…