Interesting TACs of the Week (August 17 – August 23, 2026)
  Summary – A top-down review of interesting calls and comments made last week in Treasuries, monetary policy, economics, stocks, bonds & commodities. TAC is our acronym for Tweets,…
End-user Pentium and SIMM prices in the 1990s
People buy a computer today because they have a problem that needs to be solved today, or in the near future. If today’s computer is good enough to solve today’s problem, then any…
Markets are people too
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Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive
Anthropic’s best AI model struggles to attract users as cheaper tools thrive A few interesting numbers in this FT story gathered from "people with knowledge of the matter": Anthropic's "annualized…
Fable & The End of the Free Lunch
There’s some talk today about how agentic coders are balking at Anthropic’s pricing and adopting alternatives. I was reminded of a thought I had in the weeks following Fable’s release: the free lunch…
The Most Hated Asset Class in the World
Why everyone hates bonds right now. The post The Most Hated Asset Class in the World appeared first on A Wealth of Common Sense. ...
The Sales-Delivery Assumption: Why One Operating Model No Longer Fits Every Professional Services Business
Professional services firms have traditionally treated sales and delivery as two parts of the same operating model. The partner who owned the client relationship usually also controlled much of the…
Whiners are the worst part of bear markets
Something changed this week when US Treasury Secretary Bessent took a step towards yield curve control. The money printing is coming...it is mechanical and inevitable...and the market suddenly…
Weekly Links: The OpenRouter Singularity, Anthropic hits $65B ARR, and Higgsfield raises $400M
Robots break records in China, Anthropic continues super-growth in revenue, and Stripe buys OpenRouter.
Default alive
A friend running a company was telling me about a run of hard decisions he’d had to make recently to get to a major milestone – hitting cash flow positive. Or, as he put it with a grin,…
The Market Ticker - On The Many Laments
Go figure, this is a problem?Our federal debt is approaching $40 trillion and will cross that threshold soon. It has grown by roughly $3 trillion in the past year, even though the…
Thoughts on Positive AI Usage
There’s a lot about the current AI situation to be upset about. Data center buildup is insane and, certainly at a higher rate than we will need when the market settles. While they’re…
Sharpe Ratio Distribution: When Normal’s a No-Go, Why Not SHASHo? (2/4)
In the first post (1/4), a GAMLSS fit picked SHASHo over Normal for the Sharpe ratio estimator (López de Prado et al., 2026) — all four parameters statistically significant, a better GAIC than…
The calibration hoax
There are many kinds of useless economics held in high regard within the mainstream economics establishment today. Few — if any — are less deserved than the macroeconomic theory and…
A Bond Primer for Non Believers
It really is time for the nonsense to stop.
Is an AI crash coming? The Permanent Contrarian’s view on living life, career, technology, geopolitics and financial freedom.
AI stocks will likely drag everybody else down very soon. As a student of history, you may already know this pattern has persisted throughout history. We are not ready for the type of AI being…
Is there safety in the US Treasuries trap?
There is no immediate and certainly no obvious alternative to the US Treasury market. Should this fact make you feel safe owning the bonds?
Because we’ve already spent all the money
Infographic: Why do we need economic growth No, really, we have. We’ve promised ourselves £250k each of end of life healthcare. £250k each as a pension for our old age. That half a million is…
Which credit card do rich people use?
Long Angle, a free, peer-led community for high-net-worth individuals (minimum net worth US$3 million) published a 2026 High-Net-Worth Financial Products review. The 28 page PDF is linked below. ...…
We're living in the Debt Age
When we learn about the history of civilization, we get to hear about the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age. Whatever follows is named after historical events or political systems…
AI Bubble and Small Models
The AI bubble refers to the concept that the excitement about AI has led to excess investment. Many areas are contending with new data centers being built. The idea is that huge models, with…
Infographic: Why do we need economic growth
How to expand this image If you press CTRL or Command and the Plus (+) key on your keyboard, your browser should increase the size Read the full article...
How to Break Up With Your Financial Advisor
By all means, use a financial advisor if you want to. But don’t assume that you have to, or that you will make more money by doing so. You are perfectly capable of managing your own money, including…
Bravo to Mark Carney
I'll add some commentary later, but for now this will suffice: This from the New York Times : The morning after he pulled negotiators from trade talks in Washington and set off a new round of…
The Finanser’s Week: August 17th – 23rd August 2026
This week’s main blog discussions include … The TrustWeb: Revisiting the Origins of Moneykind Ten years ago, I wrote a series of blogs called The Origins of Moneykind. They accompanied the launch of…
3.39 Does Complexity Actually Help? The Virtue-of-Complexity Autopsy
KMZ's virtue of complexity survives only under a zero-intercept restriction and a per-draw scoring rule. Fix either and it reverses: 15 predictors beat 12,000, and buy-and-hold beats both.
The New Shape of Product Engineering
Airtable spun one product into a separate company before selling the rest. I think that detail explains most of this year.
Big Ticks and Small Ticks in Equity Microstructure
Learn how to parse LOBSTER limit order book data with Python and Polars, compute key microstructure metrics, and understand big-tick vs. small-tick equity trading.
Monday 24 August, 2026
Big Skies A view of Brancaster beach that is almost painterly. Quote of the Day ”Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.” John Maynard Keynes (I think he also likened…
AMEX Platinum is Losing Access to Lufthansa Lounges
I’m stopping over at the Frankfurt Airport right now, and just noticed this in the AMEX app when making my way to the Lufthansa lounge:Effective October 1, 2026, eligible Card Members will no longer…
Is Getting Rich Luck or Hard Work? | The Market vs. You
“Thus we are all born into a silent war-game, centuries old, enlisted in teams not of our own choosing.” Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020) I put my newsletter on Product…
Can markets keep it up?
. By Guest Blogger Ryan Lewenza . Global equity markets continued to advance in the second quarter, with strong gains in North America. The S&P 500 and TSX rose 14% and 6%, respectively, during…
I Don’t Like Mondays…..When Is My Retirement?
Everyone eventually becomes a story. Make your retirement tale something to be proud of. Learn more by reading this week’s terrific links. Retirement is far more than a math problem. The…
Martin Dufwenberg is celebrated at Purdue
Purdue recognizes Martin Dufwenberg as a distinguished professor. (Here's his Google Scholar page .) Here's the Purdue announcement: Trustees approve named professorships and deanships, distinguished…
How Legacy Auto Could Save Itself, But Probably Won’t
Ford, Toyota and Volkswagen still have time to survive the Chinese EV disruption. The problem is that survival requires them to dismantle much of the business that made them successful. I keep coming…
Zero-Downtime Deployments in Financial Systems: Shipping Code Without Breaking the Market
Financial systems don't get the luxury of downtime. Exchanges, brokers, and trading engines must ship new releases while orders are flowing, positions are changing, and markets are moving, without…
Your Country Is Your Largest Undiversified Portfolio
A rough historical model suggests that the chance of a catastrophic domestic conflict over the next 50 years may be closer to 50% than 5%. If that order of magnitude is even roughly right, most of us…
Commissions
Apple : Under the new terms: For App Store apps using Apple In-App Purchase , the commission will be 26 percent. For the vast majority of developers, including those in the App Store Small Business…
Six Things: Hedge Fund Crowding, Insurance, Anomie, Iran, and Hyperdeflation
Here are six chart-driven ideas to think about this weekend: New data shows AI has made hedge funds the most crowded in historyLess-educated young men are stagnating worldwide, just as AI comes after…
The 401k Has Been a Success
How to improve 401k plans. The post The 401k Has Been a Success appeared first on A Wealth of Common Sense. ...
Europe’s Soviet Moment May Arrive in the 2030s
Japan did not defeat the Soviet Union. It helped convince Soviet elites and citizens that their economic model had failed. China may be doing something similar to Europe.The most consequential thing…
Trouble in ParadAIse
On the curious economics of a revolution with two paying customers Every gold rush has its shovel salesmen. The AI boom has improved on the formula. Here the shovel salesmen fund the prospectors, the…
Datacenter Distrust is Not Moral Panic
Increasing hatred of datacenters within the US has made the headlines this week, and this seems to finally be catching a tiny bit of notice in Silicon Valley (SV). It’s a hot-button issue that has,…
Such a lovely place, but so many leave
Research published in the International Journal of Environment and Sustainable Development analysed interviews with over 300 Chinese hotel interns to see how perceptions regarding hotel work affect…
Look to the rigging
I spent many years paying fairly rudimentary attention to “the economy.” It was never an academic subject that interested me, and a lot of what I skimmed by and about economists seemed to…
Exporting Investment: The Case For and Against VGEC
TLDR: We are very quick to hand companies tax breaks. I would rather move the same money from corp structures like VGEC into personal tax credits for UK residents earning in strategic creative…
Moving Beyond the Patriot Missile
The U.S. is hesitant to allow Ukraine to manufacture Patriot missiles locally, partially to protect U.S. military IP, but more so because it doesn’t want Ukraine to do it better. The reality is…
Perry's Résumé - Custody & Monetary Systems
R&D engineer with 30+ years building systems where a wrong answer is expensive or dangerous; the last five spent on key management and monetary infrastructure. Shipped a Shamir secret-sharing…