BirchCourt

Tokens are this cycle’s eyeballs. There exists some correlation to economic profit but conflating the measurement instrument for the goal is an easy route to a bubble.

@mmm_btus Why would this be beneficial for US interests?

I have think if Bessent had his druthers he would rather we not make a deal until Asia (ex China) and ARA were at tank bottoms

TSLA valuation obviously wild, but shorting this name when SpaceX is about to IPO and get a wad of cash is imprudent risk management

@evrgn11112231 I just tell myself at night they are currently the worst they’ll ever be

Msft is so bad at product it’s tragic

There shouldn’t be a copilot button in outlook or other office apps. There should just be extra buttons on the toolbar that do the things $MSFT imagines you should be using copilot for. “Summarize this email” “Create daily email tasks” Etc Typing in LLMs (esp at the app level) is not an elegant approach to unlocking the capability that AI provides imo. Copilot should be a single app/agent like Claude code that exists at that OS level that can look inside, manipulate and be a thought partner across anything open on your screen instead.

@pandawatch88 dinner soundtrack labelled YMCA but really it's YMTC

"so tf SK hynix?" "Man I know" "The Joseons must be stopped" "Shake on it"

@pandawatch88 @LowAlphaHighVol What a weird session today

@pandawatch88 @LowAlphaHighVol The light at the end of the tunnel is sometimes an oncoming train Long $BABA, see you in Valhalla

Only one man can save MSCI China this year. The name of that man? Liu. Uncle Liu. (edit: tf BABA ticker I picked?? Turkey stock exchange? Still valid, not deleting)

A quick checklist for great investments Good ROIIC High capability of reinvestment No dangerous leverage Great management Don’t get suckered into cheap valuations or share buyback stories if 3 or 4 red flags are showing

“It's so overlooked even the yahoo discussion board is a ghost town.” The cadence of positive investor news out of Japan continue to increase.

Seeing other people get rich quick truly is truly one of the most dangerous things an investor can expose themselves to. Just play your game.

@ByrneHobart pointing out that investors are never pleased with fcf

@John_Hempton High dispersion / nothing much in index been happening a lot lately. What conclusions do you draw from it? Other than marginal transaction is pairs trading (pod shops?)

With a short book essentially flat today gosh there is a lot of movement underneath. So many up and down double digit, sometimes big double digit.

@evrgn11112231 How some PMs trade other people’s money vs own money

Tangentially, there seem to be two distinct camps in this debate: 1) People predominantly optimizing for making as much money in the near term as possible. 2) People predominantly optimizing for not blowing up. There is a third group which is people who have for too long been group 2 but for career risk have been or are becoming group 1.

@pmje73 @evrgn11112231 Would think numerically folks were anchoring on historical high and stable gross margins and ROIC/ROE. Which are great numbers to lock in on, as long as the future looks like the past, and one isn’t overpaying now!

@evrgn11112231 All of those plus margins

A few years ago I mentioned on a podcast that “biz quality” is overrated as an analytical tool and industry structure/barriers to enter the industry are more important. A simple case study of the fragmented SW industry vs the oligopoly like semi and components sub sectors shows how these industry structures can just sit there for years waiting for an internal or external catalyst to come along and expose those structural weaknesses or strengths.

Amazon, the last samurai fighting for lower prices against the hydra of inflation Ai gen image:

NEW YORK - Amazon.com (AMZN.O) said on Thursday its pharmacy will stock Novo Nordisk's Ozempic pill to treat type 2 diabetes at its kiosks and offer ​same-day delivery of the drug … Half ​of Amazon's U.S. customers have access to same-day delivery and all customers receive their medications within four ‌days. ⁠Amazon will offer same-day delivery for Ozempic to about 3,000 locales and will expand access to 4,500 by year-end. Customers with a prescription can order the pill through Amazon Pharmacy for $149 monthly for cash or through insurance, the company said. The lowest price ​with insurance is $25, Amazon ​said in its ⁠release.

Think folks are arguing past each other here. The bulls like the backup plan for compute. Everyone agrees that if the backup plan is being used, the original plan must not be going so well. The alternative isn’t magically switching timelines to the good state of the world, the alternative is a company that doesn’t have a backup plan ex-ante; i.e. doesn’t have a backstop on asset value.

@pandawatch88 Just trust us on the marks! Who decides the buyout price?

LBO of LBOs First came secondaries, then continuation vehicles, and now.. Collateralized LBO Obligations! CLBOOs Constrains drive creativity, like Deepseek.

Still can’t get over how Google started off paying Apple to be default search provider and now Apple pays them to be the AI provider. And Google will end up having the best user based RL for consumer AI as a result. Zuck ain’t the only one doing Jiu-Jitsu. Well played, Sundar.

@pandawatch88 Thanks for the book rec!

This new China regulation on sanctions is going to make CEOs and in-house counsels of companies with activity in both US and China sweat, a lot. The complaint from China here is jurisdiction. Historically the US is the only country to effectively impose secondary sanctions (other countries inc EU and China complain about this, probably part of it is envy 😂 as only the US is powerful enough to do it). What are secondary sanctions? A country can sanction their own companies of course, they have jurisdiction. When they sanction an international company/country, what they are doing really is to prevent their own national companies (under their jurisdiction) from trading with them. For example, Chinese company X is sanctioned, means no US company can deal with them, the company is also effectively shut down from business in the US too. See Huawei sanctioned, google cannot do business with them, so no android no app store in Huawei phones. But secondary sanctions extend one level further. It sanctions any international company (over which you don't have jurisdiction) from dealing with a sanctioned company/country. For example, if Chinese Company X is sanctioned by the US, then European bank Y doing business with the Chinese company in Europe or in China or wherever, also needs to shut down all the accounts and loans to that company, because otherwise they can get sanctioned by the US, and the European bank cannot afford to lose access to US banks and USD. What this effectively means is that a US sanction makes a company immediately a global pariah, because no other third party country/company will dare to do local business with them, even if the transactions dont touch the US. With this new Chinese regulation, that becomes a problem. If European bank Y shuts down loans and accounts for the Chinese company, just to be safe from potential US secondary sanctions, the Chinese company can sue them for damages in China, and if the European bank has business in China, thats a problem (effectively, up until now the default option was to shut down business with the Chinese company to protect US business, now China is saying there are consequences to your China business from doing that). Legal experts (I am not one) can opine if I got this more or less right No other country is so effective at secondary sanctions. Imagine the EU daring to sanction a US company for doing business in a third country that is under EU sanctions. The US would be like "ayo? says who? under what rules? Nah". I read a fantastic book on all this called "Backfire" by Agathe Demarais. Sanctions have become a go-to foreign policy tool because they are super efficient, much better than embargoes. Policy makers see sanctions as a low-cost tactic: only a handful of civil servants are needed to draft sanctions, the burden of implementing sanctions falls on multinationals and banks, which have to hire an army of compliance officers and create systems and paperwork. They make it so painful to comply, that just the mere scent of a possible sanction to a company or a country down road precludes global companies from investing there or establishing a relationship. Not worth it. The book also analyses instances when sanctions fail to achieve their intended goals and have large side effects (I have a summary of the book from my kindle highlights if interested). It really is a book about 1980s-2020s economic history, geopolitics, and financial warfare. Super interesting, and recommended it at the time for anyone sitting at the board of an MNC. Also two screenshots here from Geopolitechs article on the subject, which is also very good.