Investing & Markets
Chips, the AI supply chain, macro and money flows: slowly making sense of markets. 212 posts.
Treasuries Are the Easiest Thing to Sell? A New York Fed Advisor on the Plumbing of the Bond Market | Macro Musings Notes
Listening notes on Macro Musings with New York Fed Treasury advisor Ellen Correia Golay: how off-the-run Treasuries lose liquidity as they age, and what all-to-all trading, central clearing, and transparency are each trying to fix. Educational notes only, not investment advice, and no securities are recommended.
The World Spends $200 Billion a Year Fighting Money Laundering. Why Doesn't It Work? Notes on Odd Lots, $100 Bills, Handbags and Carousel Fraud
My notes on Bloomberg Odd Lots (2026-09-20): journalist Oliver Bullough on where the money-laundering estimates come from, how value crosses borders as cash and goods, the paradox of banknotes and seigniorage. Educational content only, not investment advice, no stock recommendations.
Software in Silicon Valley, Hardware in LA: Notes from Odd Lots Live on American Reindustrialization
Listening notes on Bloomberg Odd Lots' live LA episode: where the bottleneck sits in autonomous factories, how to split in-house work from outsourcing, why tariffs cut both ways, and how to tell reindustrialization companies that build things from those that tell stories. Educational only; not investment advice and not a recommendation of any stock.
Upstream's Time Has Already Been Sold: Lining Up One Week of Public Posts
Seven days of public posts from an independent researcher covering AI infrastructure upstream. Laid side by side, four threads surface: price hikes compound, 2027 to 2031 capacity is already contracted, the photonics bottleneck retreated one layer upstream, and the market pays opposite prices for certainty and for story.
Podcast Notes Weekly: Sep 14–Sep 20, 2026
The takeaways from 31 podcast notes I wrote this week (Acquired, Asianometry, Macro Musings with David Beckworth, Bloomberg Odd Lots, Serenity Weekly, Lunchuizhe (掄錘者) and more). Two to four sentences per episode, with a link to each full post.
Code Words, Scapegoats, and a Choppy Tape — Notes on Gooaye EP698
From an indie booth at Tokyo Game Show to the AMD price-hike story and the CCL downgrade panic, plus an index at highs while everyone turns bearish. Listener notes on reading a bear case that only covers half the chain. Educational, not investment advice.
Harmony Breeds Life, Sameness Does Not: Notes on a Japanese DEI Episode and the Cost of Homogeneity
Listening notes on Investor's Sunday, 2026-09-20: twenty-five years of DEI in Japanese companies, why opinion diversity is harder than headcount ratios, and whether investors should watch the board or the executive officer tier. Educational, not investment advice.
The Fed Hiked After All — A Tightening the Economy Forced
Notes on MacroMicro After Meeting EP 214: the Fed raised rates a quarter point after three years, 12-0. The added sentence in the statement, why the dot plot and SEP must be read together, and two researchers publicly dissecting why they called it wrong. Educational notes, not investment advice.
Los Angeles Doesn't Have to Build Anything: Odd Lots on Existing Assets, M&A, and the 2% AI Number
Notes from Bloomberg Odd Lots, 2026-09-19, with Gene Sykes — Goldman Sachs co-head of global M&A and president of the US Olympic and Paralympic Committee. How existing venues underwrite a 'privately funded' 2028 LA Games, why this is the biggest M&A year on record, and how to read the claim that only 2% of companies see AI in their EPS. Educational, not investment advice.
Everyone Says Slow Down, Nobody Stops: AI Safety as a Game, and a Trade Show Full of Undecided Technology
Notes after listening to the Statementdog podcast (2026-09-17): why the market shrugged when AI labs collectively called for slowing down, what compliance costs actually looked like in banking and crypto, and what an optical trade show with no settled standards means for reading the industry. Educational, not investment advice.
When Everyone Agrees Something Is Doomed — Notes on Tom Lee and Dan Ives
Listening notes from The Compound and Friends, 2026-09-18: how market narratives get repriced, the interests behind the AI safety debate, and how to turn 'when does the bull market end' into conditions you can actually check. Educational, not investment advice.
Ten Thousand Agents on One Problem: The Most Counterintuitive Line in the Noam Brown Episode
Notes after listening to Dwarkesh Podcast's interview with OpenAI researcher Noam Brown on multi-agent systems, alignment, and recursive self-improvement. Educational reflections on credit attribution, timelines, and evaluation windows — not investment advice.
What the Market Was Actually Pricing on Hike Day — Notes on MacroVoices #550
Notes on MacroVoices #550 with Harley Bassman: ten-year breakevens, mortgage convexity, and three traps hiding inside ETFs — what the bond market is really pricing. Educational, not investment advice.
The Math Is Simple — So Why Isn't Everyone Rich? Notes on Roger Ibbotson
Listening notes on The Meb Faber Show #651 with Roger Ibbotson: a century of stock and bond returns, human capital and age, popularity-based pricing, and what he found when he graded his own fifty-year-old forecast. Educational commentary, not investment advice; no stock recommendations or price targets.
America Is Full of Rich People, and They Aren't on the Forbes List
Notes from Odd Lots, 2026-09-18: pass-through businesses, car dealers and dentists, and the missing layer in America's wealth distribution. Educational, not investment advice.
War on the Rocks | After the Iran War, What's Left in the Magazine
Listening notes on War on the Rocks, 2026-09-17, 'A Body Blow? The War on Iran and U.S. Military Readiness': interceptor stocks down 60%, why cheap drones don't close the gap, a carrier at sea for 200-plus days, and what China is watching. Educational reading notes, not investment advice, and not a recommendation on any security.
Bipartisan Data Center Backlash, Underestimated Solar, an Underrated Grid: Notes on a Catalyst AMA
Listening notes on the 2026-09-17 AMA episode of Catalyst with Shayle Kann: why the data center backlash crossed party lines, how much the Iran war moved EV sales, why fuel cells caught the AI power wave, why solar forecasts keep coming in low, and why the grid is underrated. Educational commentary, not investment advice; companies mentioned are examples only.
What Francis Fukuyama Sees After 'The End of History': Why Well-Fed People Are Still Restless
My takeaways from Bloomberg Odd Lots' 2026-09-17 interview with Francis Fukuyama. It covers the last man, the desire for recognition, AI and the dignity of work, and Tocqueville's reform paradox, plus how I use these ideas to read market sentiment and political noise. Educational only. Not investment advice, and no stock recommendations.
Between Knowing and Doing, What's Missing Is an Experience — Notes on Caibaogou Ep. 564
Caibaogou episode 564 hosts clinical psychologist Huang Tien-hao on the boundaries between guidance, counseling and therapy, how to pick a therapist, and why a changed thought is not a changed person. Personal listening notes; educational content, not investment advice.
Apple Silicon's 2nm Year: Peaks Look Good, Sustained Performance Counts | The Circuit EP 192 Notes
Notes on The Circuit episode 192 with Apple's silicon and product teams: process nodes are a tailwind, while thermals, packaging, memory bandwidth, software orchestration and security design decide what users get. Educational only, not investment advice, no stock recommendations.
Six Months In, the Buffers Are Gone: Notes on Columbia Energy Exchange and the Widening Iran War
Listening notes on Columbia Energy Exchange (2026-09-15): seven months into the Strait of Hormuz crisis, inventories, strategic reserves and bypass pipelines are running out, and diesel is tighter than crude. Educational content on how to read the situation, not investment advice; markets carry risk.
The Judge Stayed, the Cattle Trader Left: Michael Moritz on Family, Reading People, and the Price of Obsession
Notes after listening to Invest Like the Best EP.491 with Michael Moritz: two grandfathers and one decision, a mother who predicted doom, the first-fourteen-years interview method, the cost of monomania, and the venture advantages that have disappeared. Educational only, not investment advice, no stock recommendations.
Hot Chips and SEMICON Taiwan, Three Days Apart: One Room Talks AI, the Other Ships Orders
Notes on the Supply Chained episode from 2026-09-15. Two semiconductor conferences ran three days apart: one focused on AI chip startups, the other on the engineering problems of panel-level packaging and memory. These are educational industry notes, not investment advice.
![[Reading Earnings Calls] Two Quarters Side by Side: Where Snowflake Changed Its Wording](/covers/snow-2026-09-02-earnings-call-fy27q2.png)
[Reading Earnings Calls] Two Quarters Side by Side: Where Snowflake Changed Its Wording
I read Snowflake's 2026-09-02 and 2026-05-27 earnings calls side by side: a gross margin promise that loosened within a quarter, a number analysts asked for twice and never got, a quiet change in how growth was credited, and a data problem I hit while preparing that threw no errors and returned nothing. An educational look at a method for reading earnings calls, not investment advice.