Stray Narratives

Three decades in private banking taught me one thing: the best signals are the ones that strayed from the pack.

[Stray Narratives @StrayNarratives]

For a period in late 2024, Dogecoin's market cap exceeded the entire tradable uranium equity universe by roughly two billion dollars.
That tells you what the market was thinking about, and what it was not.

New Stray Narratives piece:
https://t.co/ynxp1w2VIZ

[Stray Narratives @StrayNarratives]

8/ We lay out the full case, the GLP-1 rebuttal, the China question, and a ten-name basket here:
https://t.co/UPkDGThOTb

[Stray Narratives @StrayNarratives]

1/ The market has decided GLP-1 drugs will gut the medical-device industry.

The operating numbers show the opposite happening.

[Stray Narratives @StrayNarratives]

7/ A thirty-year demographic tailwind, intact franchises, and a multiple priced for a catastrophe the operating numbers keep refuting. The market paid in advance for a disaster that is not arriving.

[Stray Narratives @StrayNarratives]

All three legs closed in the black, about +30% total return in three months. The exit is to flat, not to a short: there is a structural floor under freight from sanctioned barrels, a growing shadow fleet and longer average hauls.

Full note: https://t.co/nQsdgr1X5c

[Stray Narratives @StrayNarratives]

Tanker stocks look cheapest at the exact moment they are about to earn the least.

In March I bought a basket of three on a wager that the Strait of Hormuz would seize up. It did. I have just closed the trade, up around 30% in three months.

A short thread on why I sold the disruption, not the treaty 👇

[Stray Narratives @StrayNarratives]

The trap with these names: at the crest of a spike, trailing earnings look spectacular and the shares screen as the cheapest assets on the market. But that multiple is a mirage built from a single, unrepeatable quarter. When freight normalises, the earnings leave with the peace.

So I sold the disruption, not the treaty.

[Stray Narratives @StrayNarratives]

Full piece, free to read:
https://t.co/4NUQLPhcRg

If it is useful, a like or restack helps more than you would think.

[Stray Narratives @StrayNarratives]

California is bulldozing its almond orchards.

210,000+ acres ripped out since 2022. A new orchard needs ~20 years to break even, so nobody plants one.

The supply response that kills every almond bull market is dead. 🧵

[Stray Narratives @StrayNarratives]

Replacement value implies ~A$3.35-5.10 a share. It trades near A$4.

Downside is bound by the dirt: Costa went private at A$3.20 on exactly this logic. Upside is the cycle break. A rare, physics-bound floor under an asymmetric long.

[Chamath Palihapitiya @chamath]

Game theory from here is super interesting:

Original Mags (Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta) now have a serious non-zero opportunity to tank the frontier labs.

Go to the government, kneecap the labs’ motion of putting the latest models out in the wild, become the trusted gatekeeper between the labs and the public at large (including internationally) by having the labs go through their clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure) and implement strict KYC to seal the deal.

The frontier labs should have seen this coming years ago and implemented a robust KYC for just this moment. The fact they didn’t is kind of concerning.

Why did they not do it?

Best guess is because it would have changed the run-rate revenues (downward) which would have then changed funding dynamics - lower valuations, more dilution, less secondary.

A valuation reset may happen now anyways, except the labs may end up with less control and more restrictions at the end of it. At the same time, everyone is already clamoring about token prices of the old models from the labs anyways…

This couldn’t be a better setup for open source and neoclouds. Big question is can they meet the moment?

There are too few of them and their progress seems sporadic at best.