I could listen to Will Danoff talk stocks all day. He's run Fidelity Contrafund since 1990 and is soon retiring.
10 quotes worth saving from a pod dropped today:
1. "If a stock has doubled, you haven't missed it. And lately I've been saying if a stock has quadrupled, you haven't missed it."
2. "Stocks follow earnings. The earnings per share and the stock price are very highly correlated."
3. When Danoff first met Buffett, he told him: "If I were you, I wouldn't talk to any CEOs." Danoff: "That's what I do!" Buffett's point - everything's in the 10-Ks and 10-Qs. Danoff admits that after every management meeting, he digs in and finds it was all there.
4. "Any good CEO is going to tell you exactly what they think you want to hear. So you have to be very careful."
5. "Avoid unprofitable companies. Maybe you miss a double or a triple, but if you wait until they're profitable, that's a lot safer." (though he admits others at FMR are great here)
6. "You find out who's really good after the competition hits you."
7. "The big money is really made in year four and five." (Peter Lynch's lesson)
8. "The one advantage with privates is you can't sell. There are so many opportunities to panic out."
9. "I'm the Woody Allen of Fidelity - I just keep showing up. You've got to keep learning. You've got to keep showing up."
10. "Mistakes are part of the game. Just try not to make the same mistakes - and somehow I keep making the same mistakes."
this is f*cking gold
How to build your first AI agent (Full guide)
if I had this a year ago, I would've shipped my first agent in a day instead of 2 weeks
in the right hands, this changes everything:
Dom Rizzo (PM on TRowe Global Tech Fund) on @WilfredFrost's podcast
"If you grew up covering semis, you grew up in Sparta. If you grew up covering software, you grew up in Athens."
The point: software's seat model meant revenue renewed itself - sell once, collect forever. Semis fight for EVERY design win, EVERY cycle.
AI ends the easy life. Usage-based pricing means revenue only flows if agents actually hit your product. You're either in the token path ($SNOW feeding Codex) or you're the data pipe agents read for free ($CRM risk).
Seats were a moat you built once. Tokens are a position you defend daily. Everyone lives in Sparta now.
In 2009, Charlie Rose asked Jensen Huang about Nvidia vs. Intel.
The chipmakers weren’t directly competing but Jensen said GPU vs. CPU was a “battle for the soul” of computing and GPUs would be “more relevant” in time.
Intel was worth $100B and Nvidia was at $4B. Today, Intel is at $565B while Nvidia is worth over 1,200x more at $5 trillion.
Three years since the first flight of Starship, the next generation is here. New ship. New booster. New engines. New pad and new test site. SpaceX engineers are working to solve one of the most difficult engineering challenges in history: developing a fully, rapidly reusable rocket
Because we get asked a lot.
The Technological Republic, in brief.
1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.
2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.
3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.
4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.
5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.
6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.
7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.
8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.
9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.
10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.
11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.
12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.
13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.
14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.
15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.
16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.
17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.
18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.
19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.
20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.
21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.
22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?
Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska
https://t.co/8igjazz1On
"The thing that China has done brilliantly is they've undercut the continuation of the tool and die skilled trade in America."
@smartereveryday: "It costs $60,000 to make the tool in America, we'll do it for $15,000. The Germans have no choice, they're going to pay $15,000, they send it to America and tell the Americans to run the parts."
"If they can break the intellect chain, they beat us. And I think that's brilliant, and we're stupid for letting that happen."
The Hill & Valley Forum 2026
@HillValleyForum@DestinSandlin@CGarrett_15
The way I’m framing the excursions of the last year including Iran, VZ, tariffs, energy shocks etc are that the US has run around the world priming points of failure by inserting chaos that it can choose to leave dormant or re-escalate at will.
Said another way the US has taken latent leverage and made it concrete.
What you’ll notice is the structure of the priming is such that at any time it can all be turned on at once.
Overnight Trump could: fully embargo trade with a country post-SC ruling, fully end chip exports to a country under ECRA/IEEPA, halt energy exports under the DPA, can break the tenuous cease fire with Iran and make Hormuz impassable, can defang NATO following the domestic shift in sentiment towards Europe, can end support for Ukrainian ISR, can weaponize dollar liquidity with a captured Fed, has god-view of all cyber domains with Blackwell-gen AI models and has put in place the pieces to shift immediately to a war-time economy if needed with DoW initiatives like replicator and the proposed $1.5T budget.
And most importantly the admin has legally primed the global economy to shut out Chinese supply via the transshipment clause if Xi becomes belligerent and tries to take Taiwan as a last ditch attempt.
The next question is why? Why not just focus on domestic issues? Why divert so much of your attention to things outside of the homeland?
The answer is simple. Everything is downstream of hegemony. And now when trump exerts all these primed levers at once the resulting state of play is a strong bid for treasuries and strong inflows of capital investment.
That means trump can bribe voters. That means that real wage growth accelerates. That means that robotic supply chains can be done on-shore despite chinas cost advantage.
You have spent the last year watching a seeming mad man run around the world placing explosive charges on support beams and are confused.
I’m telling you that mad man is crazy enough to blow it all up but than inherently gives them the credibility to get massive concessions at the end of all this if he doesn’t press the fire button.
Be patient. Republic to empire 🫡
Je crois qu'on ne mesure pas ce qu'Elon Musk est en train de construire avec X.
Tous les médias de l'histoire ont été couplés à une culture, une langue, une bulle géographique. Le Monde parle aux Français. Le NYT parle aux Américains. NHK parle aux Japonais. Chaque média filtre le réel à travers le prisme de sa culture locale.
X est en train de devenir le premier média de l'humanité. Pas d'un pays. De l'espèce.
Je le vis en temps réel. Mes posts en français se font RT par des Japonais, répondre par des Brésiliens, citer par des Américains. Des conversations qui n'auraient jamais existé il y a 5 ans. Un libertarien français qui débat avec un ingénieur de Tokyo et un entrepreneur de Sao Paulo sous le même tweet. Pas traduit par un éditeur. Traduit instantan��ment par l'IA, en un clic.
Les bulles de filtre culturelles sont en train d'exploser.
Et je pense qu'on sous-estime massivement les effets composés de ça.
Quand une idée peut traverser un océan en 3 secondes, quand un argument sourcé posté à Paris peut être vérifié par un économiste à Singapour et amplifié par un développeur à Austin dans la même heure, le coût de propagation d'une bonne idée tend vers zéro.
Et c'est catastrophique pour un type d'acteur très précis : les médias qui ont construit leur business model sur le monopole de l'information locale. Ceux qui pouvaient raconter n'importe quoi sur "ce qui se passe ailleurs" parce que personne ne pouvait vérifier.
Quand un journaliste français écrit que "le modèle américain ne marche pas", maintenant il y a 50 Américains dans les réponses avec des sources. Quand un éditorialiste dit que "le Danemark prouve que le socialisme fonctionne", il y a un Danois qui explique que le Danemark est 10e en liberté économique mondiale.
Le fact-checking n'est plus un département. C'est un effet réseau.
Les médias honnêtes n'ont rien à craindre de ça. Les médias qui vendaient une narration protégée par l'ignorance géographique de leur audience vont avoir un problème existentiel.
Parce qu'on ne peut plus mentir à l'échelle locale quand le monde entier regarde.
A few ways to think about long duration.
1) Biz creates value over time but non linearly and the stock therefore doesn’t compound linearly either.
2.) Biz creates a lot of value over a relatively short period of time and the stock captures that value creation non linearly.
3.) Biz creates value linearly and the stock more or less mirrors the value creation path.
4.) Biz creates value pretty linearly but stock over and under shoots too much relative to second derivative rates of change.
5.) Biz creates very little value but is sooo cheap it will eventually re rate higher.
IMO only one of these ideas (#3) should have pure duration where the market makes it easy for you to set and forget your position. All the other ones require you to actively add alpha in how you position when the biz value and stock deviate from one another. That’s what I mean when I use the word duration. You can have duration of your opinion without static duration of your position size.
We are in the era of tech-driven COGNITIVE WARFARE
offense + defense
a VERY key breakthrough work from Lux family co @SakanaAILabs
they just engineered a proprietary new AI tech to detect (hostile, foreign) state actors in social media influence + information operations...