Weekend Reading #352

This is the three-hundredth-and-fifty-second weekly edition of our newsletter, Weekend Reading, sent out on Saturday 21st February 2026.

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What we're thinking.

More carnage in the software space and this week broadly across all equities. There are still many areas of relative strength though in traditional emerging markets as China, Turkey, Brazil, South Africa and friends all held up rather well despite a dollar which is looking like it wants to remind everyone that it is still there. Again, we don't know if this is the beginning of a big move or just a small counter trend adjustment, but the ingredients are there for further market stress. Positioning is high, sentiment is high, and the buy-the-dip mentality is still strong. The way we look at it, most equities price action is poor and even threatening a breakdown, especially US tech related equities. This week also saw further stress in the private credit space - something we have highlighted before here to keep an eye on. Some parallels have been made with the subprime crisis in 2008 and while we don't really know how big this can be, it does have all the ingredients to be a systemic issue given the entanglement of insurance companies and those dreaded off-balance sheet entities.
 
Given our interest in the nature of consciousness and its overlap with UAPs, we absolutely have to comment on President Trump's announcement that he will be declassifying files related to UFOs, UAPs and the like. In reality this is procedural, and it will take a long time before anything serious comes of this but it’s a major signal. Did we just get DISCLOSURE? Maybe. But you can bet this has been coming for a long time if so and every single little tidbit we have been fed along the way has been meticulously planned and timed carefully. We genuinely have no idea what it all will look like once uncovered but maybe just maybe we should buy some calls options on aliens! And with Polymarket or Kalshi it turns out you really can bet on anything these days.

What we're reading.
 
In recent weeks I’ve become particularly annoyed and disillusioned by what is clearly AI “assisted” writing. There are many different levels of using AI assistants to help write. There is what has become known as AI “slop” which is just generic prose with zero insight. You’ll know this because when you are done reading (or usually before that) you feel dirty like you wasted time in your life you’ll never get back. For me this isn’t an issue as I’ve become good at recognizing it even before really starting to read. The one that really bothers me is when established writers begin using AI to help be more “PRODUCTIVE”. The frustrating thing about this is the ideas are clearly good and still there, but these writers have decided their time is better spent elsewhere and leave the AI to elucidate their ideas. It’s horrible as to get the essence of their thinking one has to wade through all the slop.  You can be rest assured we will never use AI to help us write this newsletter as it really does rather defeat the purpose. The main reason we write is for OURSELVES. It’s good to write as it crystalizes thinking and builds connections in the brain. Much like our fund, we enjoy the process, and the outcome solves for itself.
 
For some reason most people inside the crypto echo chamber have struggled to understand why token prices have been so weak while other assets globally have surged over the past year or so. It became clear to us already some time ago that there is a massive disconnect between token prices and progress in terms of crypto technological adoption. And in recent weeks there have been a number of people who have written about this exact thing.  Here is the latest version of it from Spencer Bogart. Remember the Dot.com boom and bust? We first made dotcom analogies for crypto in 2021/22. We even wrote that the vast majority of crypto tokens will collapse and never return but that a small number will see it through and build proper business models and return insane returns to those that can identify them and buy right. When one takes a step back and surveys the landscape, that is exactly what has happened. But the small number of winners have not yet risen up. The ingredients are there. We think it is coming, just as Mr Bogart suggests. DC
 
Another week, another bit of trouble stirred by some AI model – this time they’ve taken the fight to the biggest app gatekeeper in the world, none other than Apple’s app store itself. A newly released model called Rork basically allows users to go from idea to live App Store ready application in minutes, fully compatible with Apple’s SwiftUI, powered by Claude Code. For any App Store developer, the good news comes in the form of the ability to bypass Apple’s notorious Xcode proprietary tooling, something that Apple by virtue of its App Store dominance had very little incentive to upgrade. While not a fatal blow to Apple’s moat at this point in time, it is a chink in its armour – with regulation constantly weighing on monetisation and fees on one end, the loosening of Apple’s grip on code tooling as a result of being able to bypass Xcode is at the margin the lessening of Apple’s leverage over many developers. But what is most certainly going to happen in the short run will be an accelerating influx of new apps hitting the app store approval queue, and Apple’s manual approval and curation process might become the bottleneck for new app deployments. It’s open season for app development now. EL

What we're listening to.

Despite, this week refusing to hold Sam Altman's hand in a very public manner, or maybe even because of that, Dario Amodei is the man of the moment. With Claude code literally changing the prospects of millions overnight, this interview with Dwarkesh is the best of the best. I don't even want to spoil it by giving takeaways other than if you care about the future, you simply have to listen to this. Compulsory and timely.
 
Another excellent listen this week is Shane Parrish's conversation with Nicolai Tange, the man who runs Norway's 2.1 Trillion sovereign wealth fund. I found this so interesting but maybe not for the reasons one would think. Yes, there is lots on investment management and markets etc but the key for me is that I understood after listening to this how much of a political role this is. The first thing he mentions in the talk is climate change. On the one hand, I've become primed to be skeptical when someone mentions climate change as a direct impact on investment prospects. On the other, the argument over a longer time horizon impacting agricultural yields is very relevant. But the fact it was brought up first was interesting to me. If you are interested in how gargantuan pools of money are managed, this is the right one to listen to or watch. DC