Spekulatius

So Obama run Intelligence operations one year after leaving office. How does this work?

I think the US has directly purchasing Pesos, so of the currency loses its value, then US will lose money on this “trade”. The swap line is just more or less providing USD for the Argentine central bank to do the same thing. Yes, there are indications that Milei is losing some of his grip on power, regardless of election outcome: https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/argentina-lower-house-approves-law-curbing-presidential-decrees-2025-10-08/

The insider cluster buy is why like EMN on the chemical sector. EMN is more special chemistry than let’s say $DOW. EMN is strong into recycling /circular processes and while most of their production is in the US, about 60% of their revenue are generated in foreign counties. So they have to deal with Chinese composition, depending on where they export to. I do like them much better than European chemical companies though.

Tariffs on China now 130%: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/trump-threatens-massive-tariffs-china-triggering-stock-market/story?id=126405187

I also recommend the Steve Eisman podcast, but some episodes are great and others I think so so. With any high frequency (daily) publisher, you will have that issue. Creating 30 min of content every day is hard for a one man show. You will get days where they go in the weeds. The solution is simply cut it short and skip to the next podcast.

Jeremiah Bickham was president since October 2024, so he took this position just a year ago. I think it’s likely he was canned. https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeremiah-bickham-46857321/

Is there actually a deal? I see a vague announcement and a ceasefire plan. We’ll if the hostages do get exchanged, that’s a success but it’s far from peace deal.

Added to RELY, AZE, BNTGY. New positions on EMN and FBIN.

Wise is more of a fully digital bank than Remitly which simply focuses on remittance payments. their target customers are different.

To be fair, AMZN then decided to move their 2nd headquarter to Washington DC but then fell far short of what they promised to build there.

I think we are close to peak private equity. Private equity used to be better operators than mismanaged public business they were taking out but I am not sure this is the case any more, now they became so large. I guess what is left is sticking the funds to retail and pension funds at very high valuations, as the bagholder of last resort . The reason for companies goin doing the IPO much later is that there is plenty of money available with private funding and many companies want avoid the scrutiny that comes with a public listing. The control issue can be dealt with different classes of stock.

$10k to kill an ICE director sounds cheap to me. You have trouble to even get a contractor for legit jobs around your house show up for that money.

I think it’s a little more complicated than that. The vision seems that they hand off tasks to different apps, then move them along workflows in ERP environments. Basically, what I think companies like UI Path tried to do, but easier to implement. Or maybe the vision is just to replace Google, but that would be more for consumers. Given how well Gemini/ search works, I think the latter is very very unlikely.

Bought starters in $RELY and $AZE (Azelis). RELY/ Remitly has been mentioned in several podcasts and is cheap but with potential macro headwinds. Azelis is a busted IPO from a few years ago and is a cheap chemical distributor. It definitely suffers from macro headwinds.

It seems to me that drilling costs go down over time in real money terms (adjusted for inflation). I expect the price of oil to follow a similar trajectory than drilling costs, so the price of oil will also rise less than inflation. Of course over shorter time frames, anything can happen, but over a few decades that’s how it is likely to play out.

Sounds a bit like OpenAI wants to be an operating system of sorts: https://openai.com/index/introducing-apps-in-chatgpt/

Perception is not everything. It may cause short term price spikes, but not much more. Supply and demand is everything. I don’t think demand is looking strong near term.

ChatGPT’s not so great:

Gemini’s answer:

Lots of tariffs too in this Guilded age. I think Trump / Bessent actually pointed to that time to justify the current tariffs. The guilded Agee of course led eventually to counter movement like antitrust as well as the rise of socialism in many countries (but not the US).

Yes, being “uninvestible” is as strong of a contrarian signal, as you can get.

I totally agree. The AI firestorm, seems to suck the oxygen out of the air for pretty much anything else. However like other firestorms, this one won’t last forever and leave behind a lot of scorched earth.

The cost of new homes can come down by changing zoning - allowing for condos and multi family homes where SFH only allowed before in desirable neighborhoods. Another thing that crossed my mind is if we go full populist is that tax code changes pertaining to real estate tax and deductions will encourage multi family and discourages second home and investment properties especially the like of Blackstone buying up hundred thousands of SFH. Even lassez fair counties like Singapore have a tax code that disincentivizes second homes for example with higher tax rate and transaction tax. .

Added a few ODET.PA shares.

The tikr.com has $21.3 cash earnings for AON this year, close to the Wells #. AON seems to have a larger gap between the adjusted EPS ($16.93) and cash earnings ($21.3) than other insurance brokers? anyone has any idea why this is? It could undervalue AON relative to other unless it’s an accounting quirk that won’t persist.