Weekend Reading #331

This is the three-hundredth-and-thirty-first weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 6th September 2025.

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What we're thinking.

Another weak of rotation as China, Gold, Copper and the like continued to soar. The flip side was weakness in tech, albeit not as dramatic as our base case called for last week. Yet. The only major selling so far seems to be in AI linked names and crypto related stocks, so we continue to monitor that closely. But the real action on the long side was in commodities and China. Alibaba threatens to break out after many other names already have. Gold is at all time highs yet again and copper names are moving big. The dollar seems remarkably weak. One interesting case to examine is crypto which has been weak since hitting all time highs in Bitcoin and Eth. The tail of coins with no real demand will continue to be driven by the vagaries of thin speculation but Bitcoin appeared to perk up this week, possibly showing signs of wanting to go again. We suspect not. Gold is going nuts and the pretender to the throne (BTC) is not. Simple as that. ETH we sense needs to be treated like a hot tech for now and needs time to churn before going again but as ever our favourite thing about markets is WE DON’T KNOW and anyone who pretends they do is being disingenuous. We have multiple paths in our heads at all times and simply choose the appropriate one when it’s ready. And most importantly we really don’t mind being wrong as we simply change our positions and move on. Do you?

What we're reading.

Here’s a cool story. I was sitting on a plane in June on the way to New York next to an older chap, early 70s or so who was deeply engrossed in his Kindle. As we were stacked like sardines, I couldn’t avoid looking at what he was reading. Turns out it was sci-fi, so I said hello, and we had a long chat (hours) about the best sci fi books. He told me he only got into reading sci fi a few years before but that being 70 plus with more time on his hands, he has since read A LOT of it. So, he showed me his Kindle library, and he really wasn’t kidding. He’d read all the stuff I have plus much more. So I asked him for a recommendation and he told me to read the Red Rising series by Pierce Brown. Without even knowing what it was about I knew it was going to be great. Call it the universe telling me, call it synchronicity, call it whatever. I just knew. So, I delayed the gratification until last week when I started reading the first book, Red Rising. And let me tell you, it is just sublime. I couldn’t even wait to finish it before writing about it. Dystopian sci fi at its best. And the best part is there are another 5 books plus another apparently to be published in 2026. So, 6 more in total! Too good. DC
 
I came across a fascinating write up about AOCs this week. In the plural, and no, it’s not about the congresswoman. Microsoft has an entire site dedicated to explaining Analog Optical Computers, their latest shot at computing at literally the speed of light, looking for even higher performance and speed, but most critically in their words “in the post-Moore’s Law era”. In this set up, instead of going binary, the computer operates using physical systems like LED lights and sensors (presumably with different colours, as presented in their diagram) to process and transmit data at 100x speed AND 100x energy efficiency vs existing GPUs. In theory that makes sense: instead of bits carrying 1 or 0 in a binary system, you could be computing with bits that carry and encode much more complex data: varying colours and intensity for example. After all, it’s not a new concept – qubits in quantum computing essentially already expand on that concept. The most interesting bit of it really is that we’ve gone full circle from analogue (books) to digital and now back to analogue again, in the search for ever more efficient, data-dense ways of transmitting, storing and processing data. No surprise that Moore’s Law isn’t really a Law as much as a rule of thumb for a certain point in time – a meme before anyone knew what a meme was. EL

What we're watching.

If you haven’t looked into The Alpha School, something I’ve written about at length in this newsletter then the perfect intro to it is this conversation with founder, Joe Liemandt. This or some version of this is without question for me the future (and maybe even the near present) of education. There is a lightbulb moment for many who listen to this when Liemandt explains how GenAI is the breakthrough tech needed to improve education and dare we say using a word that over the past 5 years has become rather overused and meaningless, DISRUPT it. The thing with parents is that naturally every single one wants the best for their kids. And the moment that the paradigm shifts in a parent’s mind from “I don’t want my kid to lose out by pulling them out of school and trying something new” to “I don’t want my kid to lose out by NOT pulling them out of school and trying something new” everything changes. I think this is going to happen because its already happening in my own mind. This is an ABSOLUTE MUST WATCH.  DC