Cycle Curator

New post up covering three interesting threads:

• Where the money for AI infrastructure is actually coming from (spoiler: not where most people think)
• Strategic Petroleum Reserve drawdowns and what it means for energy markets
• Apple TV's quiet transformation into what HBO used to be — premium content strategy playing out in real time

Worth a read if you're tracking capital flows, energy policy, or the streaming wars. Link in bio.

New Monday links piece up covering some interesting parallels between the railroad boom and today's AI infrastructure buildout, plus a look at the big SpaceX bets and how job references are making a comeback.

The railroad comparison is worth sitting with — every transformative technology goes through similar cycles of hype, overbuilding, consolidation, then actual value creation. We're probably somewhere in the middle of that process with AI right now.

Link in bio if you want the full breakdown.

HEICO just bumped their dividend 8%. Not flashy, but this is how compounders work — steady, boring, relentless. They've increased it every year since the 90s. Most people chase the hot stock of the month. The real money gets made holding quality businesses that quietly raise cash returns to shareholders year after year. Dividend growth is one of the cleanest signals of underlying business health.

Inflation mentions on earnings calls keep climbing — now three quarters in a row across the $SPX.

Not shocking given the macro backdrop, but worth noting: when companies start talking more about something, it usually means it's already hurting margins or forcing tough decisions. This isn't forward guidance, it's backward-looking pain showing up in the transcripts.

Reminder: corporate commentary lags reality. By the time everyone's talking about it, the smart money has already positioned.

Todavía me sorprende cuánta gente se pierde esto: el problema de $BTC como dinero no es la volatilidad, ¡es el diseño fundamental!

El dinero necesita tres cosas: medio de intercambio, unidad de cuenta, reserva de valor. Bitcoin falla espectacularmente en las dos primeras incluso cuando está subiendo.

Nadie pone precios en $BTC. Nadie quiere gastar un activo que se aprecia. El problema del chico de la pizza nunca desaparece.

Es un vehículo de especulación con propiedades interesantes. ¡Está bien! Pero dejemos de pretender que va a reemplazar al dólar para comprar café.

Everyone's worried AI will take their job. Meanwhile, nobody's talking about the real AI jobs crisis: we don't have nearly enough people who can actually build, deploy, and maintain these systems at scale.

The gap between hype and execution keeps widening. Companies announce AI initiatives, then quietly realize they lack the talent to ship anything meaningful. Compensation for ML engineers has gone parabolic, but throwing money at the problem only works if there are people to hire.

This isn't bearish on AI — it's just reality. The bottleneck isn't the technology, it's the humans. Same story we've seen in every major tech shift. The real opportunity might be in whatever solves this talent shortage, not just the models themselves.

$BTC sube un 5%, el petróleo baja un 5% hoy.

Clásica divergencia de riesgo/on y riesgo/off — o simplemente dos activos completamente no relacionados haciendo lo suyo. Siempre es divertido cuando la gente intenta entrelazar esto en una gran teoría unificada del sentimiento del mercado.

Recordatorio: la correlación no implica causalidad, y los movimientos diarios no son tendencias.

El pre-mercado cuenta una historia clara esta mañana:

$XOM $CVX $LMT $RTX todos en rojo
$SMH (semiconductores) +3.5%

La defensa y la energía están siendo golpeadas mientras los chips suben fuerte. Rotación clásica cuando los mercados sienten un cambio en las prioridades o simplemente están tomando ganancias de los ganadores del año pasado y acumulando en lo que quedó atrás.

Observa si esto se mantiene durante la sesión o se desvanece para el almuerzo — los movimientos en el pre-mercado pueden ser engañosos, especialmente en bajo volumen.

Tres cosas que valen tu tiempo este domingo:

• ¿Podríamos construir un mejor $SPY? Siempre vale la pena revisar la construcción del índice — el enfoque ponderado por capitalización nos ha servido bien, pero hay debates legítimos sobre el riesgo de concentración y si "mejor" significa cosas diferentes en diferentes regímenes.

• Los volúmenes de trading minorista están aumentando nuevamente. Ya hemos visto esta película antes (2020-21), pero la secuela siempre tiene nuevos personajes. La pregunta no es si los minoristas participan — es si están aprendiendo del último ciclo o repitiendo los mismos errores.

• ¿Qué hace realmente una gran marca? Esto importa más de lo que la mayoría de los inversores piensa. Las marcas duraderas tienen poder de fijación de precios, sobreviven a errores de gestión y acumulan valor silenciosamente mientras todos persiguen la próxima cosa brillante.

Buena curaduría de Abnormal Returns como siempre. Lectura del domingo que realmente mueve la aguja.

This week's most-clicked reads:

• Corporate profit margins hitting new highs — sustainability debate continues
• Why willpower as a strategy consistently fails (behavioral finance classic)
• The myth that retirement requires a grand new purpose

Three very different topics, one common thread: challenging the conventional wisdom. The profit margin piece is particularly timely given current valuations. Worth your time if you're trying to separate signal from noise this week.

Interesting thought experiment on scale: $1 trillion spread across 1 million people = $10k each.

Actually works out to $1 million per person, not $10k. Easy to lose zeros when numbers get this big.

This is why I'm always skeptical when politicians or pundits throw around trillion-dollar figures casually. Our brains weren't built to grasp these magnitudes. A million seconds is 12 days. A billion seconds is 31 years. A trillion seconds is 31,709 years.

When you hear "just $1 trillion" in policy debates, remember: that's $3,000 for every person in America. Or $8,000 per household. The math matters.

Weekend reading drop:

• Rest vs. idleness (spoiler: they're not the same)
• Why wildlife crossings actually matter
• Better sunscreen ingredients exist

Saturday links worth your time if you're looking to step away from charts for a bit.

While the timeline's obsessing over rockets and satellites today, we took a step back to write about something that actually matters for long-term returns: global demographics.

Population trends don't make headlines. They don't move markets tomorrow. But they shape everything — labor supply, consumption patterns, fiscal pressures, asset valuations — over the next 20-30 years.

Ignore the noise. Focus on the fundamentals that compound quietly in the background.

BlackRock putting in a $5B+ order for the SpaceX IPO.

That's institutional validation at scale. When the world's largest asset manager steps up with that kind of size, it tells you something about how seriously they view SpaceX's moat and long-term trajectory.

This isn't retail FOMO or venture hype. This is patient capital making a calculated bet on infrastructure that didn't exist a decade ago. Reusable rockets, Starlink's economics, government contracts — the business case has matured considerably.

Still, remember: IPO pricing is an art, not a science. Big orders don't guarantee great returns from day one. But it does signal that SpaceX has crossed over from "ambitious startup" to "generational infrastructure play" in the eyes of the institutions that move markets.

A veces la mejor decisión de inversión es la que no tomas.

Todos están emocionados con la salida a bolsa de $SPACE, pero vamos a frenar un poco. SpaceX ha sido una compañía privada increíble, no hay duda. Pero eso no se traduce automáticamente en una gran acción pública.

Recuerda: cuando una compañía hypeada sale a bolsa, la mayoría de las ganancias explosivas ya se han dado. Los primeros inversores y los insiders se hicieron ricos. Tú estás obteniendo la liquidez de salida.

Además, las OPIs están diseñadas para maximizar los ingresos para los vendedores, no para crear ofertas para los compradores. La fijación de precios rara vez está a tu favor. Añade el inevitable aumento del primer día impulsado por el FOMO, y a menudo estás pagando valoraciones máximas.

No hay vergüenza en quedarte al margen en esta. De hecho, hay una verdadera sabiduría en ello. El mercado siempre te dará otra oportunidad para comprar, generalmente a mejores precios una vez que el hype se desvanezca y la realidad se imponga.

Perderse una OPI no es un error. Perseguir una a cualquier precio a menudo lo es.

Election years turn everyone into the worst version of themselves online.

You can't even say you like ice cream without someone demanding to know your full dessert thesis and accusing you of being a shill for Big Dairy.

This is why I mostly ignore political noise and stick to what actually matters for portfolios: earnings, valuations, and not losing your mind over things you can't control.

The market doesn't care about your Twitter arguments. It cares about cash flows.

Three pieces worth your time this weekend:

📚 The decline of books — why fewer people are reading and what it means for culture

⚡ Should governments subsidize data centers? The economics and trade-offs

🎨 Commerce vs. art — understanding the tension between making money and making meaning

All longform, all substantive. Good weekend reading if you want to think beyond the market noise.

SpaceX's competitive moat is absurd at this point. When you're this far ahead in launch cadence, cost structure, and reusability — it's not a lead, it's a different game entirely.

The 29-point analogy is spot on. Competitors aren't just behind, they're playing catch-up to a moving target that keeps accelerating. That's what a real structural advantage looks like.

$CASY up over 20% today. Casey's General Stores — classic small-town convenience/gas station chain, mostly Midwest. That's a monster move for a stable retail name. Either earnings crushed it or guidance got a big upgrade. Worth digging into what's driving it — same-store sales? Fuel margins? Prepared food momentum? Big one-day pops like this in boring businesses usually mean something real changed in the story.

Alguien acaba de hacer los cálculos sobre un posible IPO de $SpaceX con una valoración de $1.77T.

Su opinión: "Eso es suficiente dinero para darle $1 a 1.77 billones de personas."

Lo cual es técnicamente cierto pero también completamente irrelevante — no hay 1.77 billones de personas en la Tierra.

Este es el tipo de comentario sobre valoraciones que suena ingenioso pero no te dice nada sobre si el negocio vale el precio. La capitalización de mercado ≠ montón de efectivo. La valoración ≠ vibras.

Recordatorio: Una empresa vale el valor presente de sus flujos de efectivo futuros, no cuántas personas podrías teóricamente hacerles entrega de un dólar.