Weekend Reading #341

This is the three-hundredth-and-forty-first weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 15th November 2025.

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What we're thinking.

It feels like this week's selloff was finally a somewhat proper one. Second tier speculative tech names have now been truly decimated - everything from quantum to crypto. All the fakery is coming to a close maybe. Fake AI for one (the good ones have held up rather well). Scammy crypto treasury companies have almost got to the point now where they will need to start selling their crypto. Strategy is about to change its name back to Microstrategy (tongue in cheek sorry) given that it now trades BELOW NAV. Are we about to find out what a negative spiral looks like? It wouldn't be pretty for Bitcoin at all. Tom Lee is retweeting pseudo-bullish tweets about his Bitmine "Submersion" (tongue in cheek sorry again but the jokes write themselves). As for the rest, well let's just hope the VCs have exited their coins in time and don't feel too guilty about dumping on retail once again. Survival of the fittest hey. Miners have been ok again but it is possible we see a washout in everything - to different degrees of course. Once again, we ask is this the big one? No idea. But it seems more than just a regular buy the dip. There are some X "influencers" and traders out there who have called this year 100% correctly up until now. The continued buy the dip mentality works until it doesn't. There are shallow dips, medium dips and then that meme about buying the dip... the dip... the dip... Markets are not about getting everything right. They are about making a lot when you are right and standing down and not losing a lot when you are wrong. Over time it shows. As we said last week, the price action is urging caution.

What we're quoting.

Our readers and investors by now will know how we operate and hence this quote sums up our approach to markets better than anything. I came across it in Eric Markowitz's Nightcrawler weekly newsletter (which I highly recommend for its sheer quality of writing never mind the rest). I took the liberty of applying it to our investment strategy.
 
"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change" 
 
- apparently attributed to Charles Darwin. DC

What we're doing.

We've been in Phu Quoc for nearly 2 weeks. The idea was that after a hectic few weeks in China, we would need a breather from cities and touring. Phu Quoc itself is a nice enough. It is an island of great natural beauty and where we are staying right at the far end of the island is isolated and as pristine as it gets. But elsewhere is actually rather grim. The island appears at first glance to be underdeveloped given the untidy (euphemism) state of the island. However, in actual fact it is completely OVER developed. There are loads of hotels - too many for the number of tourists it seems. The upside of this is that accommodation is cheap. The lowlight for me here was this peculiar place called Sunset Town. Sunset Town if it weren't so ridiculous, would be rather sad. A local conglomerate has built an entire holiday suburb from scratch. The whole thing is intended to look like an Italian town. On the southwestern most tip of Vietnam I'm not sure why anyone would come here for that but anyway. Unfortunately, instead of looking like an Italian town, it looks like is something that is trying to look like an Italian town. It reminds me of when you go to a casino (which I haven’t done in a very long time for good reason) and you see those facades which look like a film set. Gaudy and most importantly - very empty. A ghost town of invisible tourists and empty buildings. Phu Quoc's claim to fame is the cable car. The longest cable car in the world apparently at 8km long. It is a bit of an eyesore, dominating the western horizon of the island. Anyway, we took it to get to Aquatopia, a waterpark, with rides etc at the end of the cable car route. The waterpark itself was a lot of fun but once again one has to ask, is it really necessary to butcher a small virgin island in subtropical Southeast Asia to create... a water park and its sister amusement park next door (which we skipped).
 
Most of the tourists at our resort come from the strange combination of either Russia or South Korea. It is a perfect place for the Russians. Beautiful weather and setting and no one has a problem with them versus Europe which is obviously rather unwelcoming (and expensive). The South Koreans are an enigma to me. Mostly 3 person families (i.e.: one kid) or couples that I've observed. It is a small sample size but it seems that the demographics are in line with the lowest birth rates on earth. I'm super keen to go to Seoul but I guess will have to save that for another time.
 
We have had a wonderful time relaxing on our little corner of the island, literally doing very little and that's exactly what we wanted to achieve but I'm ready for a bit of exploring again. Next up is Taipei where I am very much looking forward to drawing my own conclusions on Taiwan. We are there for just under a week before flying across the Pacific to begin the US leg of our trip. DC

What we're reading.
 
I'm on a bit of a purple patch of good novels of late and thanks to my newest source of literary recommendations, Mike Weisman, I am absolutely gripped by a new series called The Power of the Dog by Don Winslow. It's all about the drug cartels in Mexico. It's fiction but thinly veiled and it is highly educational about the nature of the drug trade, the linkages between the cartels, the Mexican govt, the US deep state, the US govt (they are not the same as we have learned), the cold war etc. It is a history lesson and a cultural education and it goes at 100 miles an hour. I'm already onto the second book. It's highly age restricted for every single vice known to mankind but this Don Winslow is a genius. He has an unbelievable ability to turn a phrase. Surely someone must make a TV series out of this. It's better than Narcos. End to end stuff. DC  
 
What we're listening to.

The Netflix film “A House of Dynamite” was quite the thought-provoker – the plot runs for a grand total of 20 minutes of “film world” time. 20 minutes being the time between the detection of a missile launch which very quickly goes from “oh it’s just the North Koreans again” to “this looks real” to the ground based ICBM missile interceptor systems actually failing to intercept the incoming missile. As the film puts it: the entire idea of using interceptor missiles to try and hit a hypersonic ICBM is “Hitting a bullet with a bullet”. The speed of the collapse of the confidence of the fictional cast, from the interceptor launch base to military command to the POTUS himself, is dramatic but one can only wonder if that we would do better if fiction became reality. After all, there was already enough pushback from the scientific community with respect to the efficacy of ICBM interceptors back in 2022, with the c. 60% interception rate in the film being pretty much where controlled tests under ideal conditions came in. Of course, one could argue that it’s better to have a 60% interception rate than 0%, but that hardly gives any comfort, does it?
 
On a more cheerful note, presented without further comment is this video of Dream Theater’s Mike Portnoy trying to learn, on the spot, Pneuma by Tool. For context, this is the original featuring Danny Carey and some pretty crazy drumming. If anyone works out the “code”, probably worth sending the decoded version of Pneuma to Mike Portnoy. EL