It is Friday, 5 June and only six days to go until the FIFA World Cup starts again. I don’t know about you, but after the first five months of 2026, I am really in need of five weeks of distraction.Of course, if you ask the people who live
Last year, I wrote a post showing that hedge fund managers have an inkling when they are going to underperform, and it can be measured with their SEC Form PF filings. Unfortunately, that information is not public, but I am glad to see that
Runaway housing costs are such a big issue that even in the notoriously divided US Senate, 89 out of the 100 senators recently voted to pass the most ambitious legislation in decades to bring down housing costs. And there are many reasons f
Analysts (and strategists and economists) are trying to bring order into the chaos of financial markets. But not all analysts are truly adding value. Some of them just reinforce the existing consensus, while others are shifting the consensu
We all know the studies that examine the returns of politicians in the US. For some reason, US politicians are insiders on key regulatory and legal changes but somehow not exempt from trading individual stocks. But there is another group of
My latest piece for Reuters is online. I follow in the footsteps of my earlier comments on why I think the business model of AI companies like Anthropic and OpenAI is fundamentally flawed and why hyperscalers face impossible math. In this o
It is the time of year when high school students pay their first visits to US college campuses and decide where to apply. During my time, we didn’t typically visit campuses because in Germany and much of Europe, university was tuition-free
Businesses everywhere are currently trying to figure out if and how to use AI to improve business processes. But because it is such a new technology, everybody seems to make things up as they go along. Some businesses are trying to be early
Trust in government has sunk to all-time lows across most developed countries. And if it is not at an all-time low, it is close to it. At every election, people kick out the previous government, vote in a new bunch, realise that they aren’t
The massive demand for electricity from data centres is increasingly straining supply. This is particularly a problem in the US, where a lack of investments in the power grid is now increasing the risk of blackouts in those parts of the cou
Normally, crazy useless studies tend to come from Chinese universities, but this one came from the RWTH in Aachen, Germany, proving once and for all that Germans do have a sense of humour…Wolfgang Breuer and Sophia Marie von Banhans (née Sc
Overnight, SpaceX filed for its IPO (documents available here) and aims for a market valuation of $1.75tn. I am not going to comment on whether this valuation, given annual sales of $18.6bn for a price-to-sales ratio of 93.7x, is justified.
A couple of months ago, I wrote in my regular Reuters column about LLMs and why I think they do not have a sustainable business model. In a second piece, which is based on an extensive research note I wrote, I turn my attention to hyperscal
Earlier this year, I wrote in my regular Reuters column about the huge investment opportunity from the reconstruction of Ukraine, once the war there ends. Now, things have got a bit sidetracked this year, but the opportunity persists no mat
OK, I am wading into a politically charged area again, but stay with me. I think most people will agree that illegal immigration is a bad thing and needs to be stopped. Most people tend to agree that skilled immigration is desirable since s
I admit, I am ambivalent about bribery. Not about being bribed myself or me bribing anyone. I would never do any of that. But I am under no illusions that there are countries where the only way to get anything done is to pay ‘kickbacks’, ‘i
I always thought I would get the mother of all midlife crises. Ok, I don’t have the money to build penis-shaped rockets like Jeff Bezos, but I was always a well-behaved and conformist teenager. So I thought I would eventually act out and be
Last year, I wrote a post explaining why defence spending tends to increase economic growth. Today, I want to double down with the results from an extremely detailed study of individual procurement contracts in the EU between 2009 and 2023.
Editor’s note (14 My 2026): I was made aware by the good people at Allocate Smartly that they have tested the Lazy Man’s and found that it stopped working around the turn of the century: https://allocatesmartly.com/challenging-the-lazy-mans
If you are a professional investor covering US or European stocks, you are about to come to the end of another busy earnings season. If you want to have a cheat sheet for the next couple of months in the markets, so you can relax a bit, tod