Weekend Reading #332

This is the three-hundredth-and-thirty-second weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 13th September 2025.

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What we're thinking.

This was a week where a lot happened and none of it was good. The fragility of Western society was laid bare with the terribly public murders of a young man and a young woman. Simple as that. Many people talk of societal breaking points etc. But there is one common denominator here, an enabler of evil and that is social media. We spend so much time quite rightly talking about the dangers of it to children but the elephant stampeded into the adult’s room this week. It is a tool for derangement which is increasingly resulting in violence and now murder. Of course, it’s the guns and knives that do the job but our view is wholeheartedly that the world would be a less divided and far better place without the cancer of social media. Bad actors use it for bad things. And at the moment, they are winning.
 
Markets wise, we were back to normal programming as our second scenario of a non-violent rotation seems to have played out. The tech names that sold off somewhat have bounced and look strong again. Markets have digested inflation numbers and now await the Fed but it’s hard now to see what derails the resumption of the parabolic move in stocks for the moment. A comment must be reserved for crypto, which has traded very much in line with tech and Nasdaq. For all the move in gold, Bitcoin didn’t move up with it. Only when tech bounced this week did Bitcoin begin its upwards march once again. We still await definitive evidence that Bitcoin is more than a tech trade. Right now, there is only one real hedge against monetary debasement and that, as has always been, is gold. But the real trade here is ETH. It has been all along. It is looking beautiful. We had two options – churn for a while and come back later or blow off some steam and come right back. In line with the mild rotation hypothesis, it is setting up for a major run through previous all-time highs.

What we're doing.

As many of you may know, we are leaving the UK for a while. My wife and I are taking our kids travelling for a few months to check out Asia including most of the countries we do business in. After this we will spend some time in the USA. I believe the UK is broken. It is of course fixable with the right policies and most importantly people. But it will take time and there is a lot of weird stuff to pass under the bridge before even that possibility. I’m not keen to FAFO in this regard. My view is that society is fractured and the political class don’t have the will or ability to fix it in the current format. After our travelling we will look to spend some time in Cape Town and check it out for a while before making a call as to where we want to settle. We don’t know what the future holds but we are going on a great adventure. It is a wonderful opportunity and I can’t wait to show all of these places to my wife and kids. So, my reading, listening, watching etc may be a little more sporadic in the coming months but I aim to use this newsletter to write a bit about my observations in each place we visit. It will be a challenge with 3 kids towed along but I’m pretty sure it will be far more educational for them than spending the next 4 months being mostly bored in school anyway. Next week we begin in Turkey where we will be spending some time in Istanbul first up! DC

What we're listening to.

Josh Wolfe is always excellent and his appearance on Odd Lots this week was well worth a listen. Once again, he mentioned the potential shift in AI focus from chips to memory as advances in memory tech facilitate on-device or “edge” computing for LLMs. This is a potential major gamechanger. This is not the first time this idea has been mentioned but this week is the first time that the memory stocks have begun to move like a subgroup that wants to lead the market. Is Micron the next Nvidia? While never an identical setup, the similarities are eerie. DC

What we're doing.
And so, we’ve now come to the point where humans aren’t trustworthy anymore and decisions are handed off to AI to prove absence of corruption. That’s exactly what Albania has now put in place: its first AI minister, in charge of government procurement. Diella, Albania’s new AI minister, promoted from her previous position as an AI assistant on the e-Albania platform, will supposedly be impervious to bribery and corruption, and probably nepotism too – at least in theory, since the government’s plans for Diella seem to be lacking in detail. All of this comes as part of Albania’s efforts to join the EU. How effective this will be remains to be seen, but full marks for creativity here.
 
In a different but equally weird and wonderful world, Japan has reportedly given the green light to a research group to start putting human induced stem cells into animal embryos, with the aim of growing specific human organs inside these embryos. Strict safeguards have been put in place to prevent the creation of “humanised” animals, but on the flipside, it potentially opens up great possibilities for regenerative medicine and organ transplant research. Japan pretty much remains the leader in the field, having revised its regulations on human-animal chimera research in 2019 to allow the creation of animal embryos containing human cells, and to implant these embryos into animals for development beyond the previous 14-day limit. This is straight out of a science fiction storyline – hopefully we come out in the good outcome, rather than the dystopian ones.  EL