Giles Capital Reads - Week 31

On Odd Lots, private equity rewired insurance companies to absorb private credit risk; on Merryn Talks Money, a Pulitzer-winning historian maps the same structural mistake from the 1870s railway bubble to today. The One to save turns to earnings, explaining why the same AI spending report sent Microsoft up 14 percent and Meta down 9 percent.

Entry price determines which capital allocation paths remain open: How the multiple imposes fundamental questions builds a framework that travels to any business type.

The Scholastic succession fight intensifies: Richard Robinson's estate in probate, a Dutch auction buyback still running. This week in special situations

Ten quality attributes tested against Buffett's greatest holdings and fifteen from the author's own portfolio. Reflections on quality investing

Andrei Stetsenko built his edge in Indian equities through 700 management meetings and a proprietary database of companies most investors never reach.

Sardinia's Costa Smeralda as a controlled experiment in institutional scarcity: how aesthetic control and restricted development have preserved exceptional asset values across generations.

A 1973 psychology experiment showed more data made experts worse, not better: Eight experts, forty facts traces what it means for how investors process information.

A reframe of philanthropic ambition: profit as philanthropy argues the most durable solutions to social problems will come through companies, not foundations.

Joachim Klement shows hedge fund managers aligned with the sitting president systematically underperform those who keep politics out.

Alphaseeker84 tests every plank of the AI bear case with real numbers and finds the critics have the data right and the conclusion wrong.

A capital-cycle analysis of the AI datacenter boom finds structured financing masking excess capacity risks while the industry builds into a possible demand mirage.

Bill Bishop translates July's Politburo readout and extracts the signals on China's macro direction ahead of the Fifth Plenum.

Official data and adjusted estimates diverge sharply on China's trade surplus, with direct implications for currency policy and global imbalances. Is China's surplus really shrinking?

Same earnings call, Microsoft up 14 percent and Meta down 9 percent: Same AI bill, opposite verdicts explains why the market was right both times.

Seer is a cash-rich biotech trading below net cash, with five rejected acquisition bids building a case for a forced monetisation event.

Samsung's best chip engineers are defecting to SK Hynix, raising structural questions about whether Samsung's talent exodus becomes a lasting competitiveness gap.

Tracy Alloway and Joe Weisenthal map how private equity quietly rewired insurance and private credit, absorbing risk in ways most investors have not yet priced, on Odd Lots.

The autonomy software stack for vehicles, robots and drones, with a cross-vertical data flywheel: Applied Intuition on the Business Breakdowns podcast.

Rupert Mitchell builds a contrarian case against Mag 7 concentration from a chart he once called unsellable, on the Excess Returns podcast.

Robert Hagstrom revisits Buffett's portfolio philosophy on the Excess Returns podcast, centering on risk versus volatility and why Wall Street consistently conflates the two.

A Pulitzer-winning historian draws the line from the 1870s railway bubble to today's AI build-out, on Merryn Talks Money. Are we repeating 1873?

True 3D DRAM is a video by Asianometry on the architecture and supply chain implications of the next memory frontier.

The market sent Microsoft up 14 percent and Meta down 9 percent on the same AI spending report. Same AI bill, opposite verdicts is the forensic read that explains why both moves were rational, and builds a reusable test for what any AI spending announcement actually reveals about a business.

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