Weekend Reading #284
This is the two-hundred-and-eigthy-fourth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 21st September 2024
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What we're thinking.
A rip-roaring rally on markets celebrating a huge 50 basis points rate cut! At times like these we are reminded not try to overintellectualize our way through all the stuff that makes us feel clever but in reality, has more variables than our simple brains can compute. Things like seasonality, geopolitics, economics and all the rest are fun to discuss but right now we do well to bear in mind this superb meme shared by the Citrini twitter account. A wall of easy money has been gifted. Stocks go up.
What we're reading.
Hitting the newswires just before markets closed for the week was a headline saying Intel had been approached by Qualcomm for a takeover in recent days. Intel, at one point the world’s most valuable chipmaker, and a giant in the CPU days, seemingly invincible given the number of Pentium (and its successor) PCs around, has properly fallen from grace. Their inability to keep up has been made most evident in the AI frenzy of recent years, but arguably their decline started long ago – their inability to keep up with TSMC’s advanced nodes and the latter’s foundry-only model (as opposed to Intel being fully integrated) coupled with a host of other factors, including amongst others GPU parallelisation becoming the preferred architecture for centralised cloud compute, the rise of alternatives to x86 processors, especially in mobile, ultimately culminated in its multi-year decline. Certainly a cautionary tale again about not squandering seemingly impregnable advantages. EL
What we're watching.
A few weeks back I shared an interview with Uruguay national team coach, Marcelo Bielsa in which he voiced his sadness and disillusionment at the state of the modern game of football. In it he spoke about how commercial aspirations have driven the joy out of football by changing the style of play and by completely saturating our brains with too much of a good thing. This past week when watching the start of this season’s UEFA Champions League, I was overwhelmed with football. Whereas already in past years, these matches dominated Tuesday and Wednesday evenings, with the new enlarged format including more teams, we now have Thursdays to look forward to as well. The UK is obsessed with football. Its cultural and for many it provides meaning and dare I say tongue in cheek, self-actualisation. I love football and watch as much as I can in a world demanding my rotating attention but my goodness it’s simply too much. With so much to look forward to, ironically there is far less to look forward to. DC
Amidst the flurry of headlines dominated by politics, war and markets, it’s easy to miss a small but nonetheless cool and arguably iconic moment a violin solo was played for the first time in space, accompanied and synchronised with orchestras on earth. The piece was “Rey’s Theme” from John Williams’ Star Wars repertoire, and the soloist was Sarah Gillis, one of the astronauts on board SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft on its current mission, Polaris Dawn. And while it’s easy to write this of as a gimmick, the Polaris Dawn mission is in truth a milestone for equipment testing, setting new records for the highest altitude crewed orbit (875 miles above the Earth) since Gemini 11 in 1966. And if there’s intelligent life out there (why not?), hopefully they enjoyed that bit of music too. EL
What we're listening to.
The Live Players Podcast episode this week was superb. It is entitled “Civilizational Differences” and features a lively discussion about how culture and history impact politics and the indeed the various political systems we see around the world. I don’t even want to spoil it, there is so much in here and it’s a topic I’ve always thought about but always had to work out myself from books and travel. Of particular interest is the commentary on the nature of reality and a bit of mysticism and how west vs east differ in their outlook! Being an emerging markets investor for many years I realized that these differences are more important than anything else. Numbers on a spreadsheet are one thing but a true understanding of history, culture and society is priceless. DC