Market Commentary
Weekly Points – September 26th, 2025 – 5 Things to Know in Investing This Week – The What if There’s an AI Spending Problem Issue
Last week, Enrique Abeyta warned that OpenAI reminds him of Enron from the dot com boom/bust. This week, Nvidia announced a $100B “investment” into OpenAI which will then be used to buy Nvidia chips. This is the exact kind of accounting shenanigans that Enrique warned about. He’ll be guest hosting the video version of The … Read more
It’s Not a Market Event
We’re nearing another Shutdown Theater event where people pretend the government “shutting down” will result in disaster and both “sides” engaging in brinkmanship gaming. Prediction markets indicate that it’s likely we get a shutdown at midnight tonight. The stock market has shrugged and indicated it doesn’t care. Fiat economists are threatening that each day the … Read more
What if OpenAI is Like Enron and Nvidia is Like Cisco
Last year, there was a lot of reasonable speculation that Cisco $CSCO from a quarter-century ago was analogous to Nvidia $NVDA now. The thinking was that Cisco was selling the hardware that new internet companies needed. (That was analogous to selling the picks and shovels to gold miners more than 100 years earlier.) When the … Read more
Weekly Points – September 19th, 2025 – 5 Things to Know in Investing This Week – The Fed Agrees with President Trump Issue
The big news of the week was the Fed doing exactly what we all expected they’d do; cut the fed funds rate into inflation 50% above the made-up 2% target. Did anyone else catch Chairman Powell accidentally agreeing with President Trump? Gemni has its IPO and the Nasdaq invests. Did anyone expect the crypto markets … Read more
Federal Reserve – As Expected
The Fed press release just came out. I’m getting you my quick bullet points now. Powell press conference in 15 minutes. I’ll update if he says anything that changes my conclusions. – Fed lowers 25bp (.25%) as expected. This is what the market and DKI thought would happen. – There was one dissent. Miran, the … Read more
Weekly Points – September 12th, 2025 – 5 Things to Know in Investing This Week – The Tech and Fin-Tech Issue
We have an extra-long version of the 5 Things this news-heavy week. The CPI rose and was above expectations. The Fed is still going to cut. There’s still no evidence of massive tariff-based inflation yet. The BLS crushes its former record for downward job revisions. They need new methodology and President Trump was right to … Read more
Macro Update – I’m Shocked – Well, Not That Shocked
I write these macro updates infrequently. I try to do so when I have something significant to say that’s different from the dominant narrative. Conventional wisdom in the markets is correct more often than not. But when I find myself annoyed at the obvious falsehoods in the financial reporting and on Fin-X on a daily … Read more
August CPI is 2.9%
Overview: Today, we got the August Consumer Price Index (CPI) report which showed an overall increase of 2.9% for the last year and up 0.4% for the month (annualizes to 4.9%). The annual number is up 0.2% from July and 0.1% above expectations. The monthly is up 0.2% and 0.1% above expectations. The Core CPI … Read more
Weekly Points – September 5th, 2025 – 5 Things to Know in Investing This Week – The De-Merger Issue
Judge Amit Mehta, an Obama appointee, determined Google was abusing an illegal monopoly. The law says he’s supposed to end the monopoly and eliminate the profits from it. Instead, he left it in place and Google is still sending Apple tens of billions of dollars a year. Revolution Wind had its wind power project stopped … Read more