Insights on markets, emergent trends, history, innovation, risk management, global economics, strategy, policy, and other topics that catch our attention. Inspired by ongoing research, conversations and events. Written and edited by Osbon Capital Management and published every Thursday morning.
"*" indicates required fields
Too much time is spent talking about price. Fundamentals are ultimately what drive equity prices higher over time. To say this another way, a company’s stock price can’t continue to rise unless it continues to be successful. The famous quote by Warren Buffett is, “In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run (...)
LK99 and Quick Bites
LK99 is the new buzzword I hesitate to write about this because it’s an unproven technology and, therefore, will not impact markets if it does not live up to its promise. However, I’ve found in conversations over the last week that while it’s an extremely popular topic in some circles, it’s still not quite made it out in the mainstream,…
Direct Lending & AI
Direct lending and private credit Historically, banks dominated corporate lending, providing the majority of debt financing to both large and smaller businesses. However, the great financial crisis severely impacted banking lending capacity. This was due to tighter regulatory restrictions, capital constraints, and a shift towards more conservative balance sheet management. This void in lending capability paved the way for non-bank…
QQQ Rebalance & AI Model Collapse
QQQ – Nasdaq Rebalance The Nasdaq 100 index is in the middle of a special rebalance due to the overweight of the largest positions. Microsoft, Apple, NVidia, Google, Amazon and Tesla collectively make up over 50% of the index. In order to maintain balance, Nasdaq will redistribute the weights by selling those positions down slightly and increasing the other 94…
Uneven Recovery, GPT Example, Quick Bites
Uneven Recovery Yesterday’s latest inflation (CPI) number continues the downward trend, which is exactly what people want to see. The unattractive part of the report was the 7.8% shelter inflation, which is a core issue. More on that below. While the S&P and the Nasdaq are recovering just fine, many asset classes are still down badly. The long-duration Treasury market…
Literacy and Education, Bitcoin, AI
Demographics & Literacy We’ve written recently about the importance of demographics in investing over long periods. This week I wanted to highlight the role that education plays. As a refresher, population growth is a significant tailwind for a country’s GDP growth and vice versa. The United States has an immigration advantage that other developed nations have opted not to use….
Early Days, NeuroHacking, Klarman, Fast
Early Days We are still in the earliest days of generative AI tools. Much of what has been released to date is a proof of concept. One neat emergent behavior of generative AI tools is that they seem to behave more like people and less like computers or calculators. Generative AI, so far, is lacking precision and accuracy, but it…
Progress, XB100 Deep Tech List
XB100 Deep Tech List – Bessemer I enjoyed reading this list of the 100 leading deep tech companies by Bessemer Venture Partners as well as the intro letter. Bessemer is also known for maintaining the Cloud 100, the leading 100 public cloud companies. While the list is probably repetitive for many, it’s useful to be aware of, for example, the…
Henry George and Land Value Tax
Land Value Tax is a compelling and relatively unknown economic philosophy related to land taxation. Henry George popularized it in the late 1800s and fans of his work are known as Georgists. This week, we’ve decided to focus on this topic to spread awareness of Georgism as a plausible solution to our nation’s serious urban housing, inequality, budget and populist…
Winners and Waste, Federated Learning, Robotic Gardening
Mid-Year Winners The performance gap between the equal-weight S&P 500 and the regular-weight S&P 500 is on track for it’s largest gap since the metric started 30+ years ago. This indicates a growing split between haves and have-nots. The winners are obvious, they are the technology leaders with the largest balance sheets like NVidia, Meta, Google, Apple, and so on….
