Once again a pretty decent write-up on Symrise from the Sector Stories substack
A good article about Circle, the US Stable Coin company
The Verge has a look into the Abyss errr AI Data Center company CoreWeave
An interesting deep dive into Fraudulent FinTwix favorite Intellego
A couple of interesting Spin-offs have been happening lately
Monevator with a good intro into Derisiking your portfolio for retirement
You didn’t ask for it but you get it nevertheless: Some random thoughts on various aspects of Artificial Intelligence. Spoiler: No actionable insights (I think).
Gemini 3.0. vs. Nvidia
Google Gemini 3.0 seems to be a really good model. I am currently using it with my prompts and it seems a little bit better but not that much. NotebookLM seems to have improved a lot.
However, according to various sources, the model was trained and runs exclusively on Google TPU chips. The Nvidia Bulls keep saying that Nvidia has such a large advantage including their software, that those ultrafat margins will persist for many years as there is no alternative. I am not so sure about this.
This is the EBIT margin development of NVIDIA since 2002:
Decent write-up on Robertet form the Sector Stories Substack. The earlier post on Givaudan is really good, too, as well as the Flavor & Fragrances intro
A significant percentage of today’s investors has not experienced a real bear market
A deep dive into the major issues of the PE industry from the LT3000 blog
Monevator with an interesting post on those battered UK Renewables Trusts
Prof. Damodaran on Gold
And of course Warren Buffett’s “Thanksgiving letter”
The CFA institute thinks private investors should not invest into Private Equity
Wise Plc
Just a few days after my writeup, Wise published 6M numbers. On the positive side, with regard to Transfer volume, new customers and deposits, Wise grew strongly between 18-37% as we can see in this chart:
However, Profit before tax and margins went down:
Investment Disclaimer: This is not investment advice. PLEASE DO YOUR OWN RESEARCH !!!!
AI Disclaimer: This post has been written entirely “by hand”. I do use LLMs as a research assistant but not for generating any parts of this post.
Introduction:
Wise Plc has been on my to do list for some time. A long time ago, part of my professional duty was to monitor and execute (large) international payments and I was always perplexed how slow and cumbersome the process was even for large Financial Institutions. Back then we made the joke that it would be much faster to travel by plane with the cash in a suitcase instead of wiring it through the SWIFT system.
The final push to look deeper into it came when Wise moved into the “Top 10” of my newly created watchlist.
Initially I planned to write a shorter post as a couple of really good write-ups already exist (see appendix), but I had so much fun looking into Wise that I decided to give it the “full treatment” however with a stronger focus on business model, competition and uniqueness.
Here is “the full monty” in PDF form.
Sung Capital Substack on Karelia Tobacco from Greece
Govro with another “alcoholic deep dive”, this time Cuervo from Mexico
Bob’s Payment Substack on the Fiserv massacre
The Optima’s Substack thinks that Coffee prices could go much higher
Weight loss drug use in the US is up and obesity down significantly according to this study
Some thoughts from Dwarkesh on possible AI buildout trajectories
The BG2 Podcast with Sam Altman and Satya Nadella is definitely worth watching/listening to
value and opportunity 