Finance Sources

People will spend hundreds of thousands in Bloomberg, FactSet, and Alpha Sense then go back and short the IGV with a straight face.

One thing I’ll be looking for at Computex: Do we start to “split” AI workloads? Smaller local models handle some questions and computer control while larger models handle deeper requests. This client-server tug-of-war is a staple of tech history and happens on phones today.

My girlfriend of four years broke up with me last Saturday, on what was technically our anniversary, at a restaurant I had selected on the basis of a Yelp review I had not actually read because I was, at the time of selection, in the middle of building a discounted cash flow model for a vertical SaaS company that sells inventory management software to regional auto parts distributors. She had been, I should say in fairness to her, patient. She had been patient when I brought a printout of a 10-K to her sister's wedding and read it during the toasts. She had been patient when I left her grandmother's funeral 20 minutes early because the company I was researching had filed an 8-K and the market was about to open in Tokyo. She had been patient when I cancelled our trip to Italy in 2024 because the CFO of a small-cap software company I owned had agreed, after eight months of polite emails, to a 30-minute phone call, and the only available window was during what would have been the second day of our honeymoon, which, in retrospect, should have been a warning sign for both of us about what kind of marriage that would have been. She had not, however, been prepared for the anniversary dinner. The restaurant was a French place she had chosen, originally, six months earlier, before I had successfully renegotiated the venue to one with what I described to her as "better ambient lighting for reviewing financial statements," which she accepted at the time without comment, but which she now, four years into the relationship, recognized as a euphemism for "a chain restaurant in a strip mall with adequate Wi-Fi." She had worn a dress. She had done her hair. She had brought, in a small wrapped box, a gift, which I will not describe here because I have not yet opened it and it is sitting on my kitchen counter, in its original wrapping, like a small unexplored country. I had brought, in a folder under my arm, the most recent 10-Q of a profitable, debt-free, asset-rich small-cap technology company that was, in my assessment, trading at roughly 4x next-twelve-month free cash flow, and which I had been planning to walk her through over dinner because I genuinely believed, and still believe, that the setup was interesting enough to share. I opened the folder somewhere between the appetizer and the entree. I do not remember which page I was on when she said the words. The words were "I cannot do this anymore," and I understood, in the moment, that "this" referred to something larger than the dinner, larger than the folder, larger than the four years, and possibly larger than me. I closed the folder. I did not say anything. She did not say anything else. We sat in silence for what was, by my watch, four minutes and 17 seconds, and then she stood up, took her coat from the chair, and left the restaurant. I paid the bill. I drove home. I sat on the couch for somewhere between two and four hours, depending on whose account you trust, and then I did the only thing I have ever known how to do at moments of genuine emotional crisis, which was open my laptop, navigate to the OTC Markets website, and read the 14-page annual report of a Pennsylvania industrial fastener company that I have been watching, patiently, for 11 quarters, and that I have a strong intuition is about to be acquired by a strategic competitor at somewhere between 1.7x and 2.1x book value within the next 18 months. I do not know what to do about the gift on the counter. I do not know what to do about the apartment, which is still mostly hers. I do not know, in any meaningful sense, what to do with the rest of the weekend. But I do know, with a clarity that has not failed me in 16 years of equity investing, that the fastener company is mispriced by approximately 40%, and that the only thing standing between me and a substantial position in it is the willingness to do the work that almost nobody else, including the woman I have just lost, was ever going to find acceptable in a partner, which is, as it has always been in every great deep value trade in history, the entire reason the math still works.

Jeepers Nearly half of all new college graduates aren't able to find the kind of work they paid tuition for That does not bode well

Probably the funniest graph ever published by the FT: our 3 possible futures are either 1) infinite wealth and abundance, 2) human extinction or 3) 0.2% faster GDP growth 🤣

NON-PROFESSIONAL & ENGAGEMENT BAIT: Anyone "classically trained" to write code pre-LLMs will take on look at the leaked Claude Code repo and see that it's a pile of unmaintainable slop. However, it is becoming increasingly clear that this doesn't actually matter. Coding is no longer a craft. No one cares how the code looks. All that matters is the utility of the program, with special exceptions made for mission critical considerations like security. Languages like TypeScript are just assembly at this point.

New highs tomorrow