Giles Capital Reads - Week 30

Richard Katz finds Japan's fossil fuel diplomacy in Southeast Asia is ceding renewable dominance to China, while Arjun Murti tracks how energy and utility stocks actually traded through the Strait of Hormuz crisis. The One to save turns to AI, separating datacenter operators that actually earn a profit from the ones dressed up as construction plays.

Ben Thompson applies commodity market economics to AI inference, arguing marginal cost explains the real threat from Chinese models better than fear does. Who's Afraid of Chinese Models?

Joachim Klement's Which news is incorporated slowly? finds that some stories take far longer to price in than others, rewarding investors who spot the pattern early.

It's the jockey, stupid....right? tests whether price, management quality and moat can be ranked in isolation, against real cases from Microsoft, Elon Musk and Marissa Mayer's Yahoo.

A close look at AI datacenter economics separates genuinely profitable operators from leveraged construction plays, with metrics exposing wide swings in returns on identical hardware.

What if Canada Did an IPO? compares stocks and flows: at even punishing valuation multiples, no company on earth, Nvidia included, is worth more than the country's economy.

John Urban runs real numbers for three household incomes and finds the widow tax hits the middle hardest, while affluent couples often come out ahead.

A framework for staying disciplined in a bull market, built around avoiding forced selling once it ends rather than timing the exit. Investing in the Boom Times

Cheap Chinese model Kimi K3 does not make American AI chips obsolete, but it exposes the real capex risk: return on capital, not the chips. The Kimi Test

Central bank data shows rate hikes trigger credit default risk differently depending on prior conditions, directly relevant to today's private credit exposure.

Richard Katz argues Japan's fossil fuel diplomacy in Southeast Asia is backfiring, ceding renewable energy dominance to China as costs cross a decisive threshold.

Arjun Murti tracks how energy and utility stocks performed through the Strait of Hormuz crisis, using oil price and profitability frameworks to flag attractive risk reward.

A grounded, on-the-ground case for two Cypriot micro-caps, Bank of Cyprus and Petrolina Holdings, built on concrete catalysts in a market most investors ignore.

An activist fight and asset sales at Braemar Hotels leave its cumulative preferred yielding 10 percent, with a potential 2x payout if the REIT is sold.

A survey of this week's special situations highlights Scholastic's succession fight, where an heir's probate challenge to founder Richard Robinson's will collides with a still-running Dutch auction buyback.

In War Cap's Q2 letter, the manager pairs conviction in Uniqure and Gitlab with a macro thesis on why current AI capital spending cannot be sustained.

Zack Buckley argues Light and Wonder is a slot machine oligopoly trading at half rival Aristocrat's multiple, in a video interview that stress tests the risks.

Bob Robotti explains why passive-driven volatility keeps handing stock pickers opportunities, and flags a trillion-dollar energy shift the market is still missing, on the Meb Faber Show.

Wes Gray cuts through AI hype with sharp factor investing logic, on why even perfect foresight still gets managers fired, on the Excess Returns podcast.

Perimeter Solutions turns wildfire retardant and niche aerospace chemicals into pricing power, using the same acquisition playbook that built Transdigm into a decades-long compounder, on the Investor's Podcast.

John O'Connor argues geopolitical risk and supply chains now move markets as much as earnings, offering a framework for screening portfolio geostrategic exposure, on Hedgeye's Real Conversations.

The same AI data centers, built with the same chips, produce wildly different returns depending on who operates them. This breakdown separates businesses actually earning a dollar of AI capex from the leveraged construction plays dressed up as technology investments.

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