A four-year high in lumber would normally suggest that more homes are being sold. This time the opposite is true. US new single-family home sales were lower than a year earlier in June, while framing-lumber prices rose. Housing demand and lumber prices split apart The industry framing-lumber composite reached $535 per thousand board feet in July. That was the highest since September 2022 and 23% above a year earlie…
Why it matters. Builder costs can rise when lumber supply falls faster than home sales. Even lower tariffs may not remove price pressure if closed mills do not return. That is why demand data alone cannot explain margins in builders or lumber producers.
Serenity models a $427 million midpoint for Sivers' annual revenue. The thesis is that new capacity can be absorbed while laser supply remains tight. The arithmetic is attractive, but company guidance and an investor-built capacity model are different things. Where $427 million starts The model assumes Sivers receives 10% of WIN Semiconductors' wafer capacity. It then applies a 65% yield and a $50 to $75 average se…
Why it matters. The laser shortage can be real while Sivers' revenue still depends on wafer allocation, yield, and price. Reading $427 million like guidance before the company supplies those inputs confuses possible capacity with booked revenue. New shares must also be reflected in the denominator of any valuation multiple.
Three macro numbers carried by the Kobeissi Letter last week did not move in one direction. US companies earned near-record profits, China's central bank bought more gold, and information-sector layoffs rose, but by less than the post claimed. Risk appetite, demand for insurance, and labor stress coexisted. Check the profit denominator Kobeissi wrote that US pretax corporate profits reached 14% of GDP. The exact ra…
Why it matters. Corporate profits, central-bank gold, and sector layoffs move different markets. Together they show a mixed regime: risky-asset cash flows remain strong while institutions and firms add insurance. Correcting the official layoff rate to 2.0% materially weakens the recession narrative.
The government of the Democratic Republic of the Congo immediately banned exports of copper and cobalt concentrate in an order dated June 29. Concentrate is an intermediate product in which ore has been upgraded but not yet smelted into metal. The government wants that intermediate processed at home so more value stays in the country. After Reuters reported the order, three-month copper on the London Metal Exchange…
Why it matters. Export controls by the country supplying most of the world's cobalt and a large share of copper can move prices. Separating concentrate from refined metal reveals how much physical supply is actually at risk.
The number Steve Hanke cites is powerful. Argentina ended 2009 at 3.80 pesos to the dollar; comparing that with levels around 1,800 today implies that roughly 99.8% of the peso's dollar value has disappeared. Hanke uses that loss to urge President Javier Milei to fulfill the dollarization promise from his 2023 campaign. Dollarization replaces the local currency with the dollar and removes the central bank's discreti…
Why it matters. Dollarization and central-bank independence both target political money creation, but one abandons the currency while the other keeps the institution. The chosen path changes the risks around Argentine bonds, banks, and peso assets.
Berkshire Hathaway bought $19.8 billion more equities than it sold in the second quarter of 2026. That ended 14 consecutive quarters of net stock selling. The Kobeissi Letter reads the move as Berkshire leaning bullish again. Part of that reading is fair. Cash fell, while purchases of outside stocks and Berkshire's own shares both increased. Yet spending cash does not by itself mean that the whole U.S. equity marke…
Why it matters. Before reading lower cash as a bullish call on the whole market, separate outside stocks, buybacks and acquisitions because each applies a different valuation test.
An AI server is not complete when a GPU is plugged in. Substrates connect the GPU and CPU to the main board, while multilayer printed circuit boards carry signals and power across the server. That makes board suppliers part of the AI-server buildout, not just GPU makers. Jukan (@jukan05) summarized Korean press reports on August 8. Daeduck Electronics posted second-quarter revenue of KRW 401.0 billion and operating…
Why it matters. This card asks whether the next AI-server bottleneck could be the boards that connect chips rather than the GPUs themselves, and whether the strong second quarter can continue into the third.
The core point is that part of foreign selling can come from a risk-limit adjustment rather than a change in the fundamentals of Korean companies. Meru describes VaR as a loss budget that a portfolio is allowed to absorb. When volatility rises, the same equity holding is calculated as a larger risk. The fund can cut its position to stay inside a preset limit even when its view on the company has not changed. VaR sho…
Why it matters. It shows how higher volatility can amplify part of foreign selling through risk-budget adjustments. It should not be used as a single explanation for every foreign flow.
The July US employment report does not point in one direction. The unemployment rate declined, but nonfarm payroll growth turned negative. Charlie Bilello’s point is that the rate did not fall because unemployed people moved into jobs. It fell while many people moved out of the labor force. The denominator became smaller The unemployment rate does not use every working-age adult as its denominator. It uses the lab…
Why it matters. Because the unemployment rate removes people who leave the labor force from its denominator, participation, the employment ratio, and payrolls reveal the direction more clearly together.
The U.S. government issues Treasury bonds when tax revenue does not cover spending. A Treasury bond is a government debt certificate, and the Treasury yield is the cost of borrowing that money. The Treasury's quarterly borrowing plan, or refunding, is the schedule that tells the market how much it plans to borrow in the coming months and across which maturities. This schedule matters because it shows not only the to…
Why it matters. It shows why the U.S. Treasury can increase total borrowing while keeping long-term auction sizes unchanged, and how the pressure can move into short-term bills and the next borrowing plan.