Recently acquired happy.io I love names that are simple, positive, and instantly understood.

Whoever ends up correctly predicting the end of the world won’t get much credit for it.

Painful echoes of the dot com bust are keeping stocks at reasonable valuations despite insane growth opportunities. No one wants to be the sucker who bought Cisco in early 2000.

Everyone knows $AAPL has needed a new form factor. I think demand will be more price inelastic than people expect with plenty of room in personal budgets for the next big thing. The phone is the most used device for most people by far. It’s an extension of the self. iPhone users have wanted the opportunity to spend more on something unique and premium and that opportunity has arrived. Apple finally delivers and they are going to sell these like hotcakes.

Today I asked Siri to play a specific song and 3 different Siris around the house began playing 3 different songs.

Network Based Governance Social media is the most powerful governance tool ever created. Governments traditionally regulated behavior through force. Social media governs using perfectly timed dopamine hits and serves as a fly trap for those who voluntary give up their attention and agency. Voluntary compliance is more scalable than force and requires less friction to enact. Over time, more functions we currently associate with formal institutions will migrate toward network based governance.

One important investing paradox that needs consideration now more than ever: Rapid scientific and technological progress can accelerate aggregate profits now while also shortening the lifespan of those expected profits. We are seeing this play out in real time. The market is a forward looking mechanism, discounting all future expected earnings. If profits now are less durable that they have been in the past, there will be less justification for paying enormous multiples for businesses that used to enjoy unquestionable dominance in their industry. If ai keeps progressing at this rate, the ratio of “knowns” to unknowns will be so small it will be nearly impossible to model expected earnings over a meaningful length of time. This seems obvious but some people cling to the “reversion to the mean” way of investing and expect earnings multiples that have contracted will expand back to where they were. I would not count on this. Earnings may look great now and they may stay great but the unknowns may grow too heavy for the market to bear.

$MSFT What looks like complexity is actually a moat. Just finished a review of MSFT 10k. What stands out to me is the insane number of ways customers can access and purchase their products. It’s like they have a tailored solution for any possible combination of customer needs. On the surface this looks clunky and inefficient but you realize this is a sophisticated distribution network built over decades of delivering essential products to businesses. Despite the decades of technological change, new products, and strong competition, sophisticated distribution holds the core business together. If you own the customer relationship and continue to deliver what they need, you own the long-term economics of a category.

Share buybacks are a good thing if the shares are undervalued and it’s the best use of shareholder capital at the time. Otherwise it’s financial cosmetics and can be a huge conflict of interest that is largely unregulated. Who gets additional compensation when their company stock price goes higher? Who implements the buybacks? Executive compensation is often tied to EPS and total shareholder return. Both metrics that can be influenced by share repurchases. Make sure the company is growing the numerator and not just shrinking the denominator.

Beware the loose narratives that are presented as near certainty in this market. In many cases they are uninformed, surface level, emotional and will change based on the performance of the underlying investment. This market will reward the disciplined thinker, not the follower.

SPCX Many notable big-tech IPOs have offered better buying opportunities in the months to years after they go public. Facebook was down 50% from its IPO price before stabilizing. Uber was down 37% in six months. Markets move at the speed of light now with information, connectivity and analysis being orders of magnitude higher today than at the periods in those historic examples. That doesn’t necessarily make the market more accurate long-term but it is much more efficient (big difference between accuracy and efficiency) with the information available. For that reason, you could expect the violent moves associated with the initial price discovery process for SPCX to be shorter than it was for the historic IPOs. Either way, in ten years you won’t care whether you bought at the exact bottom. If you have conviction just buy it and hang on.

The Fed’s dual mandate of full employment and price stability was built for the industrial economy, not the AI economy. It will have to change and based on their track record, it will be changed too late.

All you need from your investment portfolio is a 1% return per month. Sustain that over a lifetime and you would be one of the greatest investors of all time.

I like the risk/ reward with Meta. Don’t get stuck in the old narrative (cash incinerator) which is already baked in. The hyperscaler’s earnings are starting to confirm there are legs to all this capex. Meta has a lot of uncertainty but also a lot of optionality. Business agents, glasses, prediction markets, compute provider, new apps. The uncertainty is what keeps it cheap for now but they just have to connect with one of these pitches and it’s a new company.

The market treats Zuckerberg like he’s some spoiled kid that just happened to inherit one of the greatest cash flowing businesses on earth and is determined to drive it into the ground by spending inordinate amounts of money on his personal interests which all carry negative roi.

There will be companies with human bosses and ai “employees” but there will also be companies with ai bosses and human employees.

One can imagine society is on the cusp of new physics breakthroughs leading to new technologies and forms of energy generation that were seemingly impossible pre ai. When you consider that governments and select private companies have been using the best tech long before the general public, they should have a much better sense of what’s coming. New forms of energy generation are often a double edge sword with the option to use the technology for more efficient power generation or to weaponize it for destruction. Before rolling out a significant breakthrough publicly, a top priority for global leaders would be to remove the rogue actors who can’t be trusted to play ball and don’t have enough at stake to be restrained by the principle of mutually assured destruction.

How I feel placing a limit order instead of a market order on something thinly traded.

Dollar surges on Mideast war because, contrary to all the recent doomsayer narratives, it is the world’s safe haven currency