Chinese new home sales down 77% from peak

So this blogpost keeps getting circulated as some sort of totem on 'how early it is on AI' I don't have a strong view on which innings we are in, but I don't quite get it. What new argument has he made? What new information has come through? www.julian.ac/blog/2025/09...

'Fornite is the metaverse' 'Fornite is a place, not a game' Fortnite looks more amd more like a has-been

Numbers don't mean anything anymore

Following up 'Andor' with this slop is just diabolical Better to shelve it and keep the goodwill generated for something proper

Trailing 10 year total return for Tech has been ~25% CAGR (don't know a single large-cap fund that has done anything close) The relative return vs the SPX is ~1000bps higher annualised, similar to the 10 year rel performance from March 1990 to 2000

The commissar looking you in the eye accusing you of misdeeds he's committing himself (but for the Good of the Nation) is textbook how it works, there is no wallet inspection joke there. This is what the system is for.

What I am most excited about with 'One Battle After Another' is that one of the Great Directors working today decided to set a film in the (mostly) contemporary world It's a shame -- it almost feels like they're afraid to engage with contemporary culture and society via art

Sentiment check -- AI Datacenter Capex can only go up, it cannot go down, nominal GDP growth be damned

This film is absolute genius and despite the critical reappraisal it remains culturally underrated

Emmy's are basically Winner = if("The Studio"=nominated, "The Studio", if("The Pitt"=nominated, "The Pitt", "Severance"))

Being 'too-online' is now a life disadvantage

People are fond of saying that “technology is neutral” Doesn’t feel like algorithm driven social media is a neutral technology

Weirdly enough this a much more solvable/tractable problem than the U.S. deficit and likely has a positive impact on corporate earnings when/if it is addressed France greater financial market risk due to Euro membership, UK will just slowly but surely devalue currency

It's always work asking what incentives are being created right now and how that will affect downstream behavior by future generations

Southeast Asian lifestyle and travel influencer talking about an American political influencer's fate as a seminal moment in the history of the world We are so cooked

This tweet is tongue-in-cheek, but it is actually a fairly good guide to the future as the US transforms into an objectively bad actor on the world stage -- in fact, it is the defacto foreign policy stance for Russia and China (with varying degrees of effort)

I think the exit, voice and loyalty is exactly the right framing for the choices facing people over the next few years — interestingly much fewer people than I thought have chosen exit so far, but financial markets actually have given gold prices pca.st/episode/61f3...

This is completely correct? The persistence in output quality for film directors is one of the, if not *the*, highest amongst artists in mass media Musicians often peak with their first album, many TV showrunners have 1 hit show, but film directors usually have multi-decade talent persistence

True K-shaped economy right now

Honestly kinda wild that Monte is doing M&A deals again This thing was left for dead for more than a decade and almost failed multiple times, requiring some of the most creative financial engineering and regulatory forbearance to keep it from collapsing

This time will need to be different faculty.tuck.dartmouth.edu/images/uploa...

If you feel the need to short OpenAI, $ORCL and Softbank may be the best liquid pure-play options

Sellside keeps arguing the US equity market is actually not nearly as overvalued as it was during the tech bubble because the P/E for megacaps is lower... but that's only a useful analysis if P/E is a good proxy for FCF, which, right now, it certainly isn't Top 10/20 NTM FCF Multiple is ~47x/39x

Chinese household loan growth bifurcation

I am increasingly confident in this view after the last 6 months: anti-immigrant sentiment will run into demographic reality and the 'solution' that Western polities will increasingly gravitate towards is some version of Dubai -- workers without rights & benefits bsky.app/profile/nosu...

Nvidia supplies chips to a company, funds the company so they can buy chips, and then rents out those chips at a markup so the company can show the requiste revenue to get the third party funding needed to buy Nividia's chips

Kinda wild that despite the massive cultural phenom of Kpop:Demon Hunters, it hasn't even outperformed 'The Union', a movie nobody has even heard of, and barely done better than 'Road House'?

Truly the funniest and most deserving outcome for the BJP/Hindutva troll army that has been fervently MAGA for years, believing "Indians are on the team!" while Stephen Miller is aiming to serve a deportation notice to anyone who orders Butter Chicken www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/u...

Content cost / price deflation is here to stay Biggest loser is Hollywood

Paul Kedrosky makes the "American exceptionalism -- currently in the bad way -- leading to extraordinary American growth because we have nothing left to lose AI Bull Case" It's an interesting read, yet he gives short shrift to the most important limitation of this supposed nirvana on the other side

I am not sure @theinformation.com 's defense of AI-native startups is very compelling when the 12% that are not OpenAI/Anthropic are reselling those models/compute at low to sometimes negative GMs and the models themselves have low to (for some queries) negative GMs

Kpop listeners in the US

It's a great irony that American society and elites have fully internalized the efficient market hypothesis -- treating it as an iron law and a guide to future political economy outcomes "if the line doesn't drop, there's no need to panic"

Despite customer support being an AI use case with clear product market fit and wide deployment... BPO employment in the Philippines is still growing www.techinasia.com/call-center-...

K-pop punches above its weight on social media platforms and YouTube Industry revenues are up ~10x over the last decade

I know given the current obsessions of the center-left with housing it seems anathema to suggest that they are fighting the last war, but it's largely true Spending all of one's political advocacy energy on housing policy during an authoritarian takeover will be seen as silly in retrospect

It took a while, but this is now rapidly becoming the consensus

Never though I'd see 'Hong Kong' painted as a 'high yield' rental market

Hilarious chart with random labels The 2007 to 2024 period is fully unexplained when there was a a lot of volatility and zero change point to point in this metric

The Japanese hardware-software capability divide is one of the strangest things to me The 'software update' for my Sony headphones took an hour? wut Why don't these companies just hire a few competent software developers and throw money at them? I hear they're cheaper nowadays

I do take issue with this part though -- Indian growth numbers are questionable and the $ GDP/Capita growth is much lower and doesn't stand out In fact, over the last decade China has outgrown Indian on $/GDP Capita basis and I'd argue the CNY is undervalued and INR + Indian assets are overvalued

Great piece from Andrew Batson on the vast development differences between India and China -- many are structural and it's really hard to see how female literacy improves while the BJP remains in charge

It’s wild that the most unrealistic part of Terminator 2 is now the idea of a tech founder being told their creation will enslave humanity and they decide to destroy their product & company.

This sounds like BS analysis to me What "AI-native" scaled startups have >80% GMs?

Didn't realize that EV battery industry is currently at ~80% oversupply US EV penetration trends highly divergent from RoW

There are 1.5 good films on this list of Netflix’s biggest original streaming debuts True slop in every corner

$AMZN grocery is getting quite competitive

Nothing emboldens analysts like trailing returns

Likely driving fintech lending growth renaissance — the narrowing wage inequality of the Biden years is over