Portfolio Reviews & the Beige Book (10/14/2026)
Timeline
0:00 – Market check: Dow and Russell already in correction, Nasdaq selling off
2:40 – The “extrapolation” cartoon and why it describes the AI investing cycle
6:06 – The math of AI infrastructure: 30-year rates at 5.6% and the cost of borrowing for data centers
15:28 – Depreciation and circular financing: Nvidia’s revenue is its customers’ expense
23:06 – Historical bubbles: railroads, The Gilded Age, China’s empty cities, Long Island
36:18 – Who actually got rich in the gold rush: the “picks and shovels” sellers
40:02 – Four layers of the AI collapse: vendor financing, OpenAI’s losses, Anthropic IPO, SpaceX satellites
52:32 – Economic impact: AI’s path to profit runs through job cuts and squeezed wages
59:01 – Beige Book and CPI: stagflation, rate-hike odds, and the Fed losing control of rates
1:13:44 – Market valuation vs. GDP (Buffett indicator), stimulus, and national debt
1:28:36 – Portfolio review: trimming the Long-Term Portfolio sector by sector
1:35:16 – $700/Month, Money Talk, and Short-Term Portfolio reviews
1:45:03 – Hedges ($1.4M protection), 70% cash, and getting ready to buy sold-off stocks
1:51:25 – Q&A check and wrap-up
Transcript
Market Check
All right, where are we? Two weeks in a row now my voice is not good. Sorry about that. I’m trying to take care of myself. For some reason Wednesdays are not being good days for me, but I pulled through last week, so we’ll see how it goes.
So where are we? The Nasdaq. Nasty, right? Look at that. We’ll get to that in a minute. The Dow has already sold off. We talked about this: the rally was based on very few stocks in the S&P and the Nasdaq holding everything up, while the Dow and the Russell were clearly in a correction.
Look at the Russell.
