Weekend Reading #345
This is the three-hundredth-and-forty-fifth weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 13th December 2025.
To receive a copy each week directly into your inbox, sign up here.
*****
What we're thinking.
So, QE is back it seems. What does it mean for stocks? Well, it means rotation. Commodities are telling you the story led by gold and copper names. Is this a preview of what 2026 holds? We don’t know but price action is suggestive of this. To be honest as the year winds down we are feeling our energy seep out and look forward to some time off. Our custom is always to close our portfolio to zero and start again in January. This way we can’t get carried away and lose money first up in any calendar year. Experience has taught us this! It also means we can recharge and be ready for whatever is coming. And in this game, it never stops. So, the only way to achieve this result is to take yourself out the game for a short stint.
We wish all our readers a wonderful festive season. We appreciate all our interactions with you and can’t wait for the year to roll over and start all over again.
We will be back with a newsletter on 10 January. Until then good luck out there.
What we're doing.
A second week in Orlando proved way better than the first. Universal Studios is superior to Disney by a significant margin. It’s the same gig - crowds, rides etc but it felt less salesy and less like they were pretending to be magical. Better rides and of course Harry Potter. What they have created (at an exorbitant cost surely) as a world of Harry Potter is crazy. Even JK Rowling must surely be overwhelmed. They have literally built the world of Harry Potter. All of it. Diagon Alley, Hogwarts, Gringotts Bank, The Ministry of Magic, everything. It is the main attraction. And importantly it is GOOD. The rest of the parks are relatively sparse, but Harry Potter related rides and attractions are rammed. Guaranteed payday. This is instructive indeed as to what people want.
We actually went back to the Disney parks a couple times to dip in and out and we went in the evening. It was completely different. The day there is a bit of a slog. The nights are still packed with crowds, but it doesn’t feel as bad. Why that is I don’t know but it was far better. Maybe without the pressure of having to complete the task of Disney one can just go in and out for bits at a time. Either way I’m done with theme parks for a LONG time.
We also went to Cape Canaveral and the Kennedy Space Centre. This was an experience. It was rather like Disney World to be frank. A relic. A monument to the space programme from the 70s. Speeches of President Kennedy on repeat. A bit sad actually. And yet literally around the corner SpaceX and the related ecosystem are developing the greatest technologies in mankind’s history. And apart from the launch viewing platforms the word SpaceX didn’t appear once. What did appear was a host of “prior selected” employees from bus drivers to attendants. There was not a man in sight in any of the videos (apart from Kennedy in the 60s). The first thing shown on the bus was a video about the bird life around Kennedy Space Centre and the impact of the space program on them.
The entire thing was about optics and signalling. I love nature and am all for preserving the environment. I am all for providing opportunity to everyone who deserves it and not discriminating against anyone at all (and even open to debate on equal opportunity etc).
But this is the most obvious example of form over substance I’ve ever seen, and it was just thoroughly depressing. The symbol of American power, innovation and creativity reduced to this?
This requires a turnaround of gargantuan proportions. Or just let it whither away but boost the innovators. Hopefully that is what is happening as SpaceX et al rise. Trump’s appointment of Jared Isaacman as the head of NASA is a possible hint that they know this. One way or another, change is coming.
We tried to see a SpaceX Falcon launch. They were taking some Starlink satellites up to deploy but it was delayed at the last minute, and it was too late for us to stick around. The launch was described as a “routine” launch. This in itself is an incredible indication of success.
We are off to Mexico and then return to Miami for a few days before concluding our trip and heading to Cape Town for the next year. I’m sure I’ll have some overarching thoughts from our trip and maybe I’ll distil them here. DC
What we're reading.
I completed Don Winslow’s trilogy of Narco books and the third entitled The Border, is superb too. One of the best trilogies I’ve read in many years and as I head off to Mexico, I have a lot to bear in mind while there! DC
The internet’s had its share of humanoid robot launches, from the initial “concept” of Tesla’s Optimus, to XPENG cutting the leg of its robot open to prove that theirs was not a “concept” like Optimus. And now there’s the next level of proving the robots are real – with the CEO of Chinese Robotics company Engine AI volunteering to get kicked by his robot. Some say it’s still staged (as it happens, it’s called a T800. The last time a T800 showed up… this happened.) – who knows? But as always, when the state of the art goes from “impossible” to “possible”, it’s just a matter of time before thing start accelerating to catch up with the next level of “good enough”. And it looks like “good enough” is now “pretty good”, with the Chinese state of the art catching up in a few short years with what Boston Dynamics used to show off. Good news is lots of dangerous jobs (including military) can now be replaced by robots – if these are indeed as good as they claim to be. Bad news – what are the people going to do? LLMs took out low level admin and are now in the process of taking out any function that can be described by “anyone with half a brain can do this”. Things are going to get a bit tricky all around.
In the same vein of solutions to problems themselves turning into problems, it turns out that according to this report, this year is the year malnutrition problem tipped into the other extreme, with more children obese than underweight. The waves of processed, affordable foods marketed to children as a solution to their malnutrition, especially in lower income markets, has flipped the malnutrition problem into a different form of malnutrition – a shortage of good quality nutrition, with food supplies supplanted by arguably tasty but otherwise unhealthy foods. Pretty much a result of poorly designed incentives, focusing on volume and palatability. Truly another case of how the best of initial intentions turn into something very far from those initial hopes! EL