Shaun Rein: "China is going to become the AI leader of the world"

Going forward, China is going to become the AI leader of the world.  And part of the reason is because they're doing open source, which is something that Global South (or the Global Majority) likes because it's going to lower their own costs in adopting AI.  And then second, the reason why DeepSeek and other Chinese artificial intelligence companies are going to win is because they are able to do the same as American firms can do at a fraction of the cost.  So when you have a combination of cheap and open source, that means it's going to be adopted throughout the entire world.

 ~ Shaun Rein, Twitter/X post, August 18, 2025

 

Harris Kupperman on his investment edges

I know that many investors like to talk about their competitive advantages, but I’ve come to realize that I really don’t have any great advantages on the research side.  So much of my process is simply trusting my gut.  If I’m curious about something, it has a funny way of working, and when I become bored with something, it has a funny way of falling apart.  I frequently have visceral views of things, and an uncanny inability to sleep when some position needs to be disposed of.

Competing investors, focused on harvesting real-time data for almost imperceptible competitive advantages have unlimited resources at their disposal, and we are always going to lose the informational arms race against them.  Where we can win is through investing discipline, knowledge of prior cycles, and most importantly, by harvesting the foibles of others who fixate on the immediate, while ignoring that investing is a process—what happens a year or two from today, should get discounted today, yet rarely does, as investors increasingly truncate their timeframe.

~ Harris Kupperman, Praetorian Capital 2025 Q2 Investor Letter, August 7, 2025

 

Tom Woods on why the MAGA movement shouldn't ignore economics

If you neglect economics, which is really just shorthand for understanding how the world works, you will not achieve the goals that you have convinced yourself are far removed from economics.

 ~ Tom Woods, "Austrian Economics in the Age of Donald Trump," The Tom Woods Show, August 7, 2025

(Speech was given at 2025 Mises University.) 

 

David Stockman on Scott Bessent and Trumponomics

Go back to Wall Street, Scott.  You are clueless about economic policy.  Only free markets including in wages and labor, sound money and balanced budgets can actually revive economic prosperity, Trump-O-Nomics is just populist statism that will eventually generate an economic disaster for the long-suffering folks of Flyover America who mistakenly think the Donald is their savior.

~ David Stockman, tweet, August 5, 2025

 

Ralph Raico on self delusion of the masses

Machiavelli contends that mass of people prefer appearance to reality.  They prefer their fantasy to what actually exists.  If they knew what politics really was, they wouldn't have a good night's sleep for the rest of their lives.

~ Ralph Raico, The Struggle For Liberty: A Libertarian History of Political Thought, p. 258

2025

  

Friedrich Nietzsche on truth

Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed. 

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

 

Evan Lorenz on the retail investor-dominated stock market

Opendoor Technology, Inc. accounted for almost 10% of all U.S. stock market activity last week with 1.8 million shares traded in a single session.  On Monday, Opendoor postponed a special meeting to vote on a reverse split following a share price spurt to $2.05 from a low of $0.51 on June 25.  This marked a sharp turnaround for the unprofitable home-flipper, which had been warned by Nasdaq, Inc. about a possible delisting in May for failing to maintain a stock price above the $1 mark.

Here is just one of the many sightings from a market dominated by small investors.  Retail traders now account for 20.5% of equity trading, more than the combined participation of fundamental traders (14.6%) and banks (5.6%), according to Bianco Research, LLC.

[...]

At the same time, we are in the 98th percentile of all periods since 1990 for penny-stock trading, the 96th percentile for stocks valued at 10 times sales or more and the 85th percentile for unprofitable stocks, according to Goldman Sachs. 

~ Evan Lorenz, "Notes from the Joe and Jane market," Grant's Interest Rate Observer, August 1, 2024