VDB

Investor. Trader. One Punching Walls. Not financial advice.

[Josh Young @JoshYoung]

Howard Marks is on Twitter!

[Hades @0xHvdes]

you realizing you've been playing life on hard mode for no reason

[Ben Carlson @awealthofcs]

We now have:

7% mortgage rates
5% bond yields
3.5% inflation
A roaring stock bull market
A transformational tech innovation boom
Good movies
Angst among the younger generation

This really is the 1990s all over again

[VDB @VDB_____]

@steady_profits I wouldn’t bank on the dividends continuing as business deteriorates

[Ruxandra Teslo 🧬 @RuxandraTeslo]

I don't think people fully realize the psychological, cultural and social implications of this. Probably the single most important fact about recent decades.

[𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐫𝐞𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐯𝐞𝐫 @ThePreserverofU]

STOP ASKING YOUR SON "HOW WAS SCHOOL."

He will say "fine" every single time.

A child psychologist told me to replace it with one of these 4 instead:

[vas @vasuman]

A former COO of Citadel Securities is telling you where the money is in AI

For free

[Drew Cohen @DrewCohenMoney]

If you ever thought of starting a fund…

You really should read this

[VDB @VDB_____]

@2147mill Shit im 35

[The Chairman's Ledger @ChairmansLedger]

I’ve seen a few $IREN takes recently. Here’s my no BS version:

Pros:
- Insatiable demand for compute, major bottleneck
- Real sites, real power, and proven execution
- Vertically integrated full stack HPC DC
- Strong balance sheet, access to capital
- $MSFT anchor tenant that can pay
- $NVDA partnership and cloud contract
- $BTC mining base gave them infra, cash flow and head start while AI ramps

Cons:
- No recent major deal
- Dilution concerns, convert overhang
- Poor capital allocation optics (especially spending dilutive dollars on marketing / brand partnerships)
- Customer concentration
- Bad comms / PR
- Earnings calls lack transparency and info
- Mgmt. comes across too promotional
- Retail trust deteriorated
- Market may keep valuing it like a miner until AI revenue is undeniable

Neutral:
- $NVDA investment (option) is lukewarm
- Mirantis and the software layer could matter, but I’m not underwriting that yet

My view:
This is exactly why the opportunity exists. People want the return profile of an early infra winner, but the comfort of owning something already obvious. You don’t get both.

$IREN is messy because it’s still in the middle of becoming something else. The market doesn’t fully trust it. Retail wants the CEO to babysit the stock price and manage their emotions.

I don’t care about that. I care whether the company keeps executing. If execution continues, the noise won’t matter. That’s the bet. See you in 2030.

[Ashy @AshyCompounds]

Half of X is losing its mind over the new ISA rule.

Let me explain what's actually happening, because the outrage is mostly people misunderstanding their own ISA.

From April 2027, a 22% charge applies to interest earned on CASH sitting inside a Stocks & Shares ISA.

Not on your investments. Not on dividends. Not on capital gains. Just on cash you're leaving idle in an account designed for investing.

Here's the bit nobody's saying out loud:

if you're using a S&S ISA to just hold cash, you're using the wrong wrapper.

Want to save? Use a Cash ISA. Tax-free interest, zero risk, simple.

Want to invest? Use a Stocks & Shares ISA. That's literally what it's built for.

The reason this rule exists is because they assume people will quietly parking cash inside S&S ISAs to dodge the lower cash ISA allowance, rather than actually investing it. The government is closing that loophole before it even exists.

Now let's talk about why investing in the first place matters so much more than people parking cash realise.

£10,000 in a Cash ISA at 4% for 20 years: £21,911.

£10,000 in a S&S ISA invested in a global index fund averaging 8%: £46,610.

Same tax-free. More than double the outcome.

That gap is the entire reason this policy exists, to nudge people out of cash and into growth.

And here's what actually annoys me about the outrage.

You CAN still hold cash-like exposure in a S&S ISA, completely unaffected by this charge.
Money Market Funds are explicitly exempt from the 22% charge entirely, as long as your account isn't 100% cash-like assets.

So if you want stability inside your S&S ISA, you've got real options:

Money Market Funds: short-term, low-risk, currently yielding close to the base rate, fully exempt from the new charge.

Short-dated gilts: UK government debt, extremely low risk, still counts as a genuine investment.

Gilt or bond ETFs: diversified, low volatility, still doing what an ISA is meant to do.

None of these get touched by the new rule.

The only thing being taxed is literal idle cash sitting doing nothing.

This is a nudge to actually invest - and fix our high-saving, low investing culture.

Stop overreacting to a headline you haven't read the detail on.
Are you holding cash in your S&S ISA right now? What for?
What have I got wrong ?👇

#ISA #InvestingUK #PersonalFinance

[chip 🍪 @chiptomunk]

https://t.co/hQOXTjxfib

[Anish Moonka @anishmoonka]

Your phone charger can electrocute a toddler who pokes a fork into the socket. The British plug cannot. That difference comes from a 1947 engineering project that refused every shortcut and turned a household plug into one of the most deliberately safe objects ever mass-produced.

Britain published BS 1363 in 1947, built for the post-war housing boom. The country was wiring millions of new homes at once and needed one standard that would work safely for everyone. They picked the most paranoid option available.

The earth pin (the large top prong) is longer than the other two. When you push a British plug in, the earth pin goes in first. Inside the socket, it presses a lever that opens two metal shutters covering the live and neutral slots. A fork pushed into an empty British socket hits only shutters. The shutters block it.

The two conducting pins are also coated in plastic for their lower half. A plug halfway out of the wall is still safe to touch. You would have to pull it completely clear before any live metal is exposed.

Inside every plug is its own fuse. UK homes wire their sockets in a loop called a ring circuit, which runs at 32 amps, enough to melt a lamp's cord if the cord fails. So each plug carries a fuse matched to the appliance: 3 amps for a lamp, 13 for a kettle. When something goes wrong in your appliance's wiring, only that plug's fuse blows.

The standard US plug (flat two-pin or three-pin) has none of the pin coating and no individual fuse. American building codes began requiring shuttered outlets in new construction in 2008, decades after Britain made shutters standard. Even those newer shuttered versions lack pin coating and plug-level fuses.

Britain's plug is bulky because a fuse, a shutter mechanism, insulated pins, and three contact prongs all need room. The plug looks the way it does because safety engineers refused to sacrifice any of those features to make it smaller, and that decision is now 79 years old.

[Amjad Masad @amasad]

This is the most inspiring positive-sum vision for AI in the enterprise.

[The Odds @TheOddsFeed]

The most annoying thing about being right on Korea is having to explain Korea to people. Yes the tickers are six digits. Yes you have to use a specialty broker. Yes the AGMs are at 2am Eastern.

Yes the preferreds are different from the commons and yes you want the preferreds. Yes the Value-up program is real and yes it’s working and no it’s not priced in. No I don’t speak Korean. Yes I use Papago. Yes I read the filings in translation. Yes my biggest position is a company you have never heard of with a market cap smaller than your house. Yes the dividend is paid in won and yes the won has been weak and yes I bought more when it was weaker. No the chaebol governance isn’t fixed but yes it’s fixing.

The discount used to be 60%. Now it’s 45%. In two years it will be 30%. That’s the entire trade. There is no twist. The companies are cheap because they were ignored. They are getting less ignored. The math from here is not complicated, it just requires you to have started three years before everyone else figured it out. I started three years before everyone else figured it out. I am not selling. I am buying the next thing nobody is allowed to want. Ask me in 2028.

[𝐀𝐠𝐫𝐢𝐩𝐩𝐚 𝐈𝐧𝐯𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 @Agrippa_Inv]

$IREN: The cloud market's dark horse

I bet most $IREN bulls are starting to get increasingly exhausted by the price action. I certainly am.

However, as long-term investors, we should see day-to-day price action as nothing more than noise.

$IREN is particularly "noisy," which makes it an especially difficult hold. Yet in times like these, it's important to step back and refocus on the company's fundamentals rather than let price action sway one's emotions.

And the way I see it, $IREN's competitive standing is rapidly improving.

I recently came across an interesting research report by Goldman Sachs that highlighted the discrepancy between planned data center capacity and realized capacity.

Out of the ~18 GW planned to be commissioned over the past 6 quarters, only about ~11 GW actually got built.

Not only is the gap between planned and realized capacity rapidly widening, but the rate at which new capacity is coming online has actually declined over the past couple of quarters.

Much of this discrepancy comes down to power continuing to be a major bottleneck.

As grids get more and more constrained with lead times reaching 5+ years, many developers are moving toward behind-the-meter (BTM) generation (on site power generation), circumventing the need for grid connectivity.

Yet that comes with its own set of problems and bottlenecks. The end result is an increasing amount of delays and outright project cancellations.

This industry backdrop plays directly into the hands of $IREN, which now has 5.8 GW of secured grid-connected power across global jurisdictions.

The only reason the industry is switching toward BTM is that it's the only option if you don't want to wait in multi-year queues to secure grid connections. But don't get it twisted, grid-connected power remains the preferred option.

$IREN is in a unique position to capitalize on this structural bottleneck and become one of the few cloud providers that can actually bring on 5+ GW of compute capacity over the coming years.

I'd even go as far as saying that this structural advantage is the primary reason the $NVDA partnership came to be.

While $NVDA undoubtedly remains king of the hill, even they face a real dilemma that could cause cracks in their growth trajectory.

On the supply side, they have to come to terms with the fact that the gap between planned and realized data center capacity is widening, while the trend of new capacity coming online is actually decelerating.

This is the issue I just flagged, and it could act as a potential growth bottleneck for $NVDA, since fewer builds means fewer GPU sales.

Layered on top of this is the demand side. It's perfectly clear that demand for $NVDA's AI hardware remains insatiable. However, when looking closer, it's also apparent that competition is increasing.

Pretty much every hyperscaler is working on their custom chips (TPU, Trainium, Maia, MTIA), and not exclusively for internal use cases anymore, but increasingly to service the compute needs of large AI labs. Anthropic alone has signed deals worth billions for Google TPU and AWS Trainium capacity.

Then you obviously have the likes of AMD and Cerebras directly competing against the AI giant, trying to claim market share.

Taken in aggregate, these two issues could gradually lead to a growth problem for $NVDA if not addressed.

This is exactly where $IREN comes in.

They've got the largest secured power portfolio of any neo-cloud at 5.8 GW and growing fast, they develop 100% of their data centers themselves, and they're not building competing silicon.

That makes them the most reliable demand outlet $NVDA can partner with at scale.

The Sweetwater partnership, positioning the 2 GW campus as a "flagship DSX deployment," isn't $NVDA doing $IREN a favor. It's $NVDA solving its two biggest problems at once.

I'm sure you know the popular saying that "history never repeats, but often rhymes." I think today's neo-cloud market is somewhat similar to the dot com era search engine war.

Back then, the front-runners leading the race were AltaVista, Excite, and Yahoo, while Google was a latecomer that ultimately came out on top.

Today, the vast majority of investors in this space are declaring either $CRWV or $NBIS the obvious winners in the race to become the next hyperscaler.

However, I believe the real dark horse that the mainstream doesn't give much credit to is $IREN.

I believe they have all the ingredients to leapfrog every competitor in a short amount of time, in large part due to their structural advantages and pursuing the right long-term strategy from the get go.

The asset-light model, which both $CRWV and $NBIS have been leaning into, doesn't work well in capital-intensive industries, at least not over the long run.

It's somewhat of an oxymoron, since it seems intuitive that one way to circumvent some of the CapEx burden is to outsource from colocation providers.

Yet that approach leaves you with less control, less flexibility, and ultimately higher costs in aggregate in the form of operating expenses (the landlord also has to earn $).

I studied the Bitcoin mining industry for years, and the asset-light model was once a popular strategy around the 2021 bull market. While it proved to be a strong growth lever, it ultimately ended up being a disaster for anyone who adopted it.

Companies like $MARA are the perfect example.

$MARA heavily adopted the asset-light model and grew to become the largest $BTC miner, yet ended up as one of the most unprofitable public miners of all, leading to significant value destruction for shareholders over time.

Once it became obvious that asset-light wasn't a sustainable strategy, $MARA tried to pivot away from it by increasing self-deployments. But developing infrastructure in-house is a much harder discipline to master, and you don't simply switch into it overnight.

$IREN ultimately won the mining race last cycle by doing the exact opposite of $MARA from the start.

They developed all of their data center infrastructure in-house, backed by a seemingly unlimited pipeline of secured power, which ended up making them the fastest growing and most profitable miner of all time.

While the cloud sector has significant differences from the mining industry, the primary drawbacks of the asset-light model carry over.

Over time, it will become obvious to Wall Street and the broader market that this strategy sounds great in theory, but in practice leads to a stack of operational issues and severe margin compression.

Out of the two current front-runners, $CRWV and $NBIS, I think Nebius will do better. They've at least started moving toward a more diversified mix of self-owned capacity rather than purely relying on hosted colocation, which is the right direction even if they're still early in that pivot.

That said, as the $MARA example showed, developing in-house gigawatt projects at scale is not something you learn overnight.

It's clear to me that a player like $IREN, which has been building this discipline from day one, has the most realistic pathway toward sustained, profitable growth in this space.

In my view, $IREN is the dark horse that will end up winning the race. Thus overthinking today’s price action wouldn't do me any favors.

Cheers guys, have a great weekend! ✌️

[Seraphim @MacroMate8]

what’s happening rn in Asia vs Europe is historical

Korean, Taiwanese and Chinese stocks are creating generational
wealth for their citizens due to smart governmental policies and private sector innovation

meanwhile, not one banger came out of europe. europe is becoming a legit third world country asians visit for tourism

20 years and the tables have entirely turned

[VDB @VDB_____]

@FIREDUpWealth $IREN

[The Cynical Crusader @Cyn1calCrusader]

So, jokes aside, to understand why the heat is worse in the UK than say Arizona for example, the answer is quite long...

First it's the Humidity, it's far higher here.
The UK's island location and prevailing south-westerly winds bring moist sea air, so heatwaves are often humid rather than dry.

In contrast, many of the hottest US states (e.g., Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico) have dry desert heat where sweat evaporates quickly, so you actually feel cooler despite higher temperatures.
Even humid US regions (like the Southeast) usually have widespread air conditioning to offset it.

Second, the buildings and Infrastructure that we have all are designed to Trap Heat, not Release It.

UK homes are built for cold, damp winters: thick brick/stone walls, heavy insulation, small windows, and designs that retain warmth.
During a heatwave, they turn into ovens, solar gain through windows builds up, and there is poor ventilation or passive cooling features like overhangs, shutters, or light-coloured roofs.

Plus, poor air conditioning: Only about 5% of UK homes have AC (vs. ~90% in the US).
It's not standard because it's rarely needed most of the year, but during spikes it's a nightmare.
Also, retrofitting is expensive and tricky in old terraced houses or listed buildings.

This extended to public transport, schools, offices, and even hospitals as they often lack cooling.

Finally, most importantly, we have zero acclimatisation.
Meaning it's just as hot at night as it is during the day.

Britons aren't physiologically or culturally used to sustained heat.

We're properly white!

So, a sudden jump from typical UK summer temps feels extreme, and the body struggles more without gradual adaptation.
Heatwaves often bring "tropical nights" (temps staying above 20 °C), so homes don't cool down overnight.

You can't sleep, recover, or anything which just compounds fatigue, dehydration, etc.
Drier US heat often cools significantly at night.
That is all topped up with the fact that we have longer summer daylight at the UK's higher latitude meaning more hours of solar heating.

Hope this long explanation that no one wanted clears this right up...

[Daniel Roberts @danroberts0101]

A thread on where AI infrastructure is heading - and where IREN fits. 🧵