tl;drA summary of how we entertained you this week.Market SnapMarket WrapBTC opened at $86.5k on Monday morning prompting some of us to get excited about a push into the 90s before the…

Data wants to be free. I always wanted to look into the news agencies, which fought an uphill battle to monetize it.

One of the long-standing claims of technical analysis and of technical analysts is that poor breadth precedes and predicts a market crash. Countless books make this claim. This claim is even…

The decision by Danish brewing giant Carlsberg to close the historic Marston’s brewery in Burton-on-Trent next summer, though long anticipated, still feels driven by profit and corporate greed.…

The energy sector came roaring back in the third quarter of 2026. After finishing at the bottom of the sector rankings in Q2, Energy gained 16.5% in Q3, easily outpacing every other sector and the…

Wrote section 'I asked LLMs to critique my article'. Minor updates to military and teachers.

There are several serious topics to cover this month. To keep the entire thing palatable, let me start (and close, later) with more lighthearted topics. Laurie Voss offers an economic model to fund…

The following Friday roundup describes an increasingly narrow system: capital and confidence are concentrating around AI and its infrastructure, while strain builds ... everywhere, from public…

2027 Economic Outlook Conference   In times of uncertainty whether you are running a business or planning your investments, knowledge can be your most valuable asset. Stephen Slifer, Owner and…

[i’m open-sourcing relevant sections of my anti fund lp letters, which i write monthly.]Last month, I wrote about how value accrues to scarcity, and ai is changing what is scarce. The next…

According to the American Time Use Survey, American managers work a median of 43 hours per week, and 10% of them work at least 55 hours per week (Flood, Sayer, and Backman; my tabulations). Managers…

I ran into some discussions about “doom loops” involving mortgage hedging in the USD rates market. I am quite distant from current market conditions, so I cannot give market advice, nor am I…

For almost six decades the US labour share hardly moved. Measured as wages’ share of net national income at factor cost and adjusted for the business cycle using my own estimates, it averaged 78.4%…

Ventus Energy took €82 million from retail investors without a licence, until Germany’s financial oversight authority Bafin ordered it to stop and immediately repay all German investors. Now it…

New here? Read my investigation of the plan first: https://www.karsten.me/money/ventus-restructuring-recovery/. Everything below builds on it. Voting no is not enough. If the plan gets its votes, a…

The systematic erosion of purchasing power over the last few decades has coincided directly with a devastating decline in living standards for middle-class wage earners and prudent savers alike. You…

The most important tech companies are much larger than their original markets or what anyone imagined. There is something about them that defies anyone’s ability to estimate their market size. These…

The Fed has raised rates and the market expects there will be at least 2 or 3 more rate hikes over the course of the next year. This has resulted in a significant increase in market rates of late.…

A critical reconstruction of the infinite SaaS factory and a formal test of its technical and economic feasibility.

In a post at the end of August 2026, I talked about interest rates in 2026 and marveled at the capacity of equities to keep rising in the face of rising rates. I argued that the resilience of stocks…

The main investors in private sector infrastructure assets are institutional investors, meaning the usually large organisations that mobilise savings from ordinary people and invest them on their…

Of more than 50 US actions over Iran against listed companies since 2009, six cut the shares by 10% or more within a week. Each one cut off the company's main business or threatened a bank's access…

Mine Print Hash 2026-41

There is one kind of market inefficiency that is quite common but is dealt with in very different ways. In general, a “monopoly” is bad because if only one actor can be in a market, it…

"The future is uncertain. Correlations can change. The analysis is thinking about scenarios and risks and not getting false confidence from the past." – Simon Pilcher Whilst the act of making an…

Deactivating Solana stake is not instant. At most 9% of total stake can leave per epoch, so a crowded exit slows yours. The formula, the floor, and the timing.

Our review of my earliest and least accurate set of predictions about the future of industrial society, published twenty years ago in the first months of my old blog The Archdruid Report, has covered…

A report that independent developer tools vendor JetBrains posted a financial loss for the first time in “tracked history” prompted much discussion on Hacker News, though the title of the…

RÖDL reported worldwide revenue of €785.3 million for 2025, including €442.6 million in Germany. With more than 6,000 colleagues and 117 own offices in 50 countries, the firm has built an…

The talk that I gave at the September 2026 academic conference on Star Trek at the Cité internationale universitaire in Paris.

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New ONS stats out today report that the smoking rate has dropped to 9.8% in the UK. This means that the number of smokers has dropped by a quarter since 2021. All well and good, except that legal…

Reading “Power and Prosperity” by Mancur Olson. Table of Contents 1. References 2. The Book Preface 2.0.1. Is the only hope for the Soviet Union a no-nonsense capitalist dictatorship? 2.0.2. Lobbies…

Debasement is the act or process of reducing the quality, value, or standard of something. It’s purporting that something still contains the same intrinsic value whilst hollowing aforementioned…

AI chips (GPUs) are bought with borrowed money and paid back with rent. A monthly record of what they rent for, and why that is important.

The starting numbers for a monthly record of what AI chips (GPUs) rent for, what lenders charge, and how long owners say the chips last.

How much crude oil does the world have in its ready-to-use stocks? Data is collected by the Joint Organizations Data Initiative (JODI) but rarely presented as a total due to missingness and other…

In this article we look at the different ways of financing infrastructure. The key point is that there is no single best way of investing in infrastructure, it can be done through the public or…

Make sure you read my previous blog before this one. In that blog, I examined volatility: what it is, how we measure it, and how it usually behaves. In this blog I will take a look at useful tools…

The 2025 accounts of Grant Thornton Netherlands provide an unusually clear view of what happens economically when a partner-owned accounting firm enters a private equity backed multinational…

Backtest overfitting: stock predictors fall 26% out of sample and 58% after publication, and the median Sharpe of 215 smart-beta strategies falls 73% once live.

Two Books. One Purpose. A Better Life. It’s really hard to disagree with much of the financial advice that’s available these days.  Save more. Borrow less. Keep enough cash. Be prepared for a…