随想杂谈：2025年7月

You're about to listen to the Yet Another Value podcast. Today is my monthly random ramblings for July. We're going to talk about some quick stock market thoughts on what has been called the casino market. I think that's really apt. We're going to talk about some of my thoughts about the stock market, opportunities, risks, dangers, and parallels.

Following up on that, we're going to talk about pattern recognition. When is it a benefit to you as an investor? When can it be a hindrance? When can it be stubbornness? When can it hold you back, prevent you from seeing opportunities, or keep you from taking risks? We'll wrap it up with some quick thoughts on management arrogance and then a little bit on why I do this.

I do it because I enjoy it, but I also do it because I get great feedback and great thoughts from my listeners. So, if anything you hear strikes your fancy and you'd like to talk, reach out. I'd love to chat about it.

Uh, that's it. That's what we're going to talk about today. But first, a word from our sponsors. Today's podcast is sponsored by DOUPA. Are you still manually updating your financial models after earnings? Ask yourself why. Every quarter, analysts lose hours copying numbers from filings, adjusting templates, and double-checking for errors. It's tedious. It's timeconuming, and it's a terrible use of your time. Dupa changes that. They automate your model updates with near real-time precision using AI that's been trained on thousands of companies filings across every sector. The result, you get a fully updated model in your format with your logic faster than ever before. every KPI, every footnote, every guidance figure exactly where you need it with source links built in. So stop wasting times on data entry and start focusing on what really matters, analysis, insights, and alpha generation. Dupa doesn't just save your time, it gives you time back where it matters most. Book a demo with the DUPA team today at dupa.com/demo. That's dupa d o pa.com/demo. All right. Hello and welcome to the yet another value podcast. I am your host, Andrew Walker. If you like this podcast, would mean a lot if you could rate, subscribe, review wherever you're watching or listening to this podcast. Really helps. Really helps gets the flywheel going to get a lot of reviews, ratings, and all that sort of stuff out there. Uh it is Sunday, July 20th. Today, I'm coming to you with my monthly random ramblings for July. Before we get there, a disclaimer: nothing on this podcast is investing advice. Full disclaimer all the way at the end.

But I'll also disclaim this: one reason you shouldn't listen to anything I say is that this is the July monthly random ramblings, but it's largely going to be topics I touched on in June because I pressed the record button but didn't have my microphone on when I recorded my June random ramblings. So there are just 30 minutes of me waving my arms like crazy. If I'm a semiprofessional podcaster and I can't remember to turn my microphone on, should you listen to me about anything? Probably not.

So, anyway, today, July 20th, I've got some thoughts. I want to start with some quick thoughts on the stock market in general. Then I'm largely going to talk about pattern recognition and the dangers, upsides, and downsides of having invested for a while and developing patterns to recognize. Then I want to move on to a little bit of management arrogance, and then we'll wrap it up and call it a day.

All right, so, quick market thoughts. Again, it is July 20th as I record this. I've been saying on the blog, in my state of the markets that I do every month, that this feels like a casino market. Someone called this a casino market, and it really feels like that to me. It feels very apt.

Every day, you'll see another 2 or 3 companies announce some type of Bitcoin or crypto treasury deal, and the stocks instantly trade up 100%, 200%, or 300%, to trade for multiples of NAV. It's weird to me. I think Matt Levine keeps saying, “Hey, a Bitcoin is worth 1 Bitcoin if you own it, but if you put it into a public stock-market wrapper, it's worth somewhere between 1.5 and 3 times Bitcoin.” It's kind of crazy. There's no other thing that you could do that with.

I could understand years ago when it was, “Hey, you can't buy Bitcoin on the stock market. Maybe a company that offers access to Bitcoin, whether directly or indirectly, trades at a premium so people can bet on Bitcoin.” But crypto is not unique. You can go buy a basket of stocks in a closed-end fund. They trade at a discount because it's an illiquid way to own them, and there are management fees and everything associated with it.

There are publicly traded uranium ETFs. It's very difficult to get direct access to uranium if you're an investor. These things don't tend to trade at premiums to NAV, because something that you can go buy on your own should not trade at a premium to NAV just because it's put into a stock ticker. In fact, it should probably trade at a discount once you think about fees, risks, and all that sort of stuff.

I'm not saying it should, but a big premium to NAV is crazy. All these companies have found what seems to be an infinite-money hack. You announce you're doing a Bitcoin treasury, your stock goes to 2 times NAV, you keep issuing stock to buy more of it, and you keep growing, growing, growing. It's crazy. It seems very bubbly.

I think there are historical precedents for bubbles like this and, honestly, if you put a gun to my head, it would feel like the middle innings. But that's just Bitcoin treasuries. There are plenty of other places to look.

I'd point to Circle, a popular crypto stablecoin company. It IPO'd at $31 in early June. By the end of the month, it was trading at $83. I'm not sure where it's trading right now, but it's at $223. It doubled on its first day. When you're talking about a stock doubling on its first day, almost 10x-ing inside of a month and a half of IPOing, that's huge. Not that one stock is indicative of a bubble, but when you're talking about a lot of growth-oriented, tech-y stocks doing that, it's very reminiscent of a bubble to me.

CoreWeave would be another. They lowered their IPO price and could barely get their IPO done in late March or early April. They had to cut the price and cut the number of shares they were offering. NVIDIA had to anchor it. The stock is casually a 4- or 5-bagger since then, in 3 to 4 months.

They go public, and all of a sudden there are low-float dynamics. I get all of that, but these things are crazy. Circle is another example. There was a day—June 23rd—when it opened at $240, peaked at $300 per share, and finished at $260. It closed the week trading at $180.

Intraday, it swung $60 per share. That's double its IPO price. Intraweek, it swung $120 per share. That's 4 times its IPO price. These things are crazy.

Again, I'm not making a valuation call on any specific company. I'm just saying that when you look at the whole basket of what's happening with Bitcoin treasuries and what's happening with AI, you look at it and say, “Hey, the casino market.” It feels very much like the dot-com bubble.

We're obviously having lots of throwbacks to the growth, speculative rampage of late 2020 and early 2021. It feels very reminiscent of that. If you had to ask me, I'd say we're in the middle stages, because things feel crazy, but things always get a lot crazier before they get more rational. But I'm not a market prognosticator. I don't know.

I would just tell you 2 things. Number 1, and I try very hard not to bring politics into this podcast or anything I do in investing—I hope I'm not doing that here—there was a day when Elon Musk and Donald Trump were having that big fallout, where Elon said Trump was on the Epstein list and Tesla stock was down about 20% in a day.

That kind of made sense, right? Tesla had all the government contracts, and the government might bring the weight of its force against Tesla. It made sense for that stock to be down. But every meme and growth stock was down at the same time.

Bitcoin was down about 3%. I think, if I remember correctly, Coinbase was down 7%, and Palantir was down 10%. I understand there are meme factors at work here. There's a hidden meme factor for all of these stocks and everything. But when I saw Tesla down and every meme-y, growth-y, parabolic stock down in sympathy, it made me wonder if there's a lot more leverage in the system than I'd been thinking about.

That's one thing I've just had in the back of my mind: maybe these things are more interconnected than you think. If that's true, the highs can go a lot higher. You think back to something like Archegos, the firm led by Bill Hwang, which was basically YOLOing ViacomCBS/Paramount and a handful of other companies. They just kept buying, buying, buying, and when they eventually pulled out, all of these stocks completely collapsed.

If what I saw that one day is reminiscent of what's going on here, there might be a lot more hidden leverage. You can blow things up a lot bigger when there's that hidden leverage, and they can fall apart a lot faster once it stops.

The other thing is that I put up a post earlier this week. I do think if we're going to get a full-on manic market—and it feels like we're entering that, if we haven't hit it already—

I personally think—and I’ve been thinking this for a while, but it’s really starting to play out—that we could very much have a SPAC bubble here. You’re already seeing some signs of it. There have been multiple SPACs that have really gotten buzzy, announced deals, and traded up for huge multiples.

I think the one I would point everyone to is CEP, which was run by Howard Lutnick, now the Secretary of Commerce. It was Cantor’s first SPAC. They announced a deal to become a Bitcoin treasury company, and the stock went up 3×. There have been a few others like that.

We’re starting to see some signs of a SPAC bubble, but I think if the markets get much more manic, we could really see one. One thing I really like about SPACs—and this is what I put in the piece; you should go read the piece—is that if you’re buying SPACs around trust, and I’m right, and you get a SPAC bubble, you’re going to have this call option built into SPACs. It’s really going to pay off in spades.

And if I’m wrong—and look, maybe I’m wrong, I will tell you—I put this piece up the next day, Friday, July 18, and the air came out of a lot of these things. I was like, “Oh, maybe I personally marked the top.” So maybe I marked the top, maybe I didn’t. But the nice thing is, if the SPAC bubble—or if the market—falls apart and you’re buying SPACs at trust, then you’re just going to get your trust back, and you basically had a cash equivalent.

I really like them. I’ve gotten a lot of inbound interest on that, and I’m going to keep discussing and thinking about it. But that’s one thing I really like as a heads-I-win, tails-I-don’t-lose situation.

If markets keep going parabolic, as a value investor, if you’re sticking with yourself, you’re going to be really sad as you see the CoreWeaves of the world go from $40 to $120 to $480. It’s going to be really tough to see that. That’s where you see a lot of people toss in the towel and go manic right at the late stages. That’ll be tough. And if the market falls apart, it’s going to be tough.

I think SPACs offer a nice way to get some upside while having a lot of protection. So that’s what’s on my mind for the markets. Let’s go to pattern-recognition danger.

I think pattern recognition speaks nicely to what I was just talking about. I just said, “Hey, in the market today, I’m seeing signs of the dot-com bubble. I’m seeing signs of what happened in late 2020 and early 2021.” That’s pattern recognition.

That’s on a large scale, and I’m not claiming to be unique with those insights. But I think one of the reasons people tend to get better at investing as they get older is that they develop a really innate feel for a lot of patterns.

I would point to a post I did on Warren Buffett’s longevity a while back. I might do a follow-up rant on that. I think Buffett’s a nice example—you can find so many of them throughout his career—but I would just point out how he did during the GFC.

He did well. Not fantastically, but he did very well during the GFC. Obviously, he handled it a lot better than most money managers. I think he could have handled it better, with some exceptions, but he came off pretty well through that.

Why did he do well during the GFC? Part of it is that Warren Buffett is a god among men, the greatest investor of all time, and all that sort of stuff. But I think a large part of it is that he had a lot of pattern recognition to fall back on.

Buffett was investing during the savings and loan crisis of the early ’90s, so the GFC was 15 to 20 years later. There were a lot of money managers who were younger than him who were either in analyst roles or weren’t investing during the savings and loan crisis. They didn’t have that to fall back on. Buffett did. He understood how things could flow through the system, and there were a lot of parallels there.

The other reason I would point to is that Buffett took over Salomon Brothers. He was the chairman, and he saw the inner workings of what a bank run looked like—how quickly it could cascade and how quickly it could threaten the rest of the system.

Because Buffett personally had that experience, and I don’t think any other investors really did, I think he had a lot of experience to fall back on when he was putting capital to work and thinking about how the market overall would respond.

That’s a unique example from the GOAT, but pattern recognition is a really powerful tool. You talk to investors who have been doing it for a while, and you mention something and they say, “Oh, that reminds me of this stock that was a big winner,” or, “This was a stock that I missed that was a big miss. I need to take a serious look at this.”

Or you pitch them something and they say, “Oh, I had a big loser that had that risk. This is a real concern.” I’m not saying that makes or breaks a thesis, but it’s something that’s really useful. It really triggers them.

I do wonder when pattern recognition can become stubbornness and become a hindrance to your investing. Let me start by pointing to something personal, because I like to start with my own examples.

There are 2 places where I would point to my personal experience with pattern recognition, and I’m not sure if it helps or hurts me. There are things that I instantly say no to, and I think most investors have these.

For me, if you bring me something that trades in China, it’s an instant no. Why is that? Because I saw all the frauds in China in the early to mid-2000s and 2010s. I also think there are serious tail risks with investing in Chinese-domiciled companies: the assets over there, the structure, everything.

I think there are serious tail risks that I’m not willing to underwrite. That’s a pattern-recognition thing, right? There’s a tail risk there, and there’s a history of fraud. I’m not accusing all of them, but I look at Alibaba, and there is political risk there. The government decides they don’t like the founder or they don’t like the company, and boom, the company’s stock is in the tank.

I wonder: when I’m instantly saying no to something, is that pattern recognition? Is that stubbornness? Is that laziness on my end? I honestly don’t know. But it’s something I’ve thought about with pattern recognition.

Are you cutting off too much of the world or certain subsectors of the market? Is that a good thing? Is that a bad thing? Are you staying within your circle, or are you refusing to expand your circle? Are you being lazy? I don’t know.

The other thing—and again, I’ll point to myself specifically—is that if you’ve been burned investing in a certain sector before and then someone brings you a similar opportunity, you’ve been burned. You invested in an oil and gas company off the Gulf of Mexico, they drilled a well, it came up completely dry, and the stock went to zero. You’re going to be really hesitant to invest in the next company in that sector, right?

I wonder if that’s a good or bad thing. I’ve been talking to some friends about different sectors where I have prior experience. Here’s a great example, off the top of my head: Talen Energy. The ticker is TLN.

This stock’s basically a 10-bagger from when it emerged from bankruptcy. It emerged from bankruptcy, and I had a lot of venture friends who called me up and said, “Hey, you’ve got to take a look at this. Great backers, really good assets. The puck’s going where the puck’s going in terms of power demand.”

I don’t think anyone saw this much AI power demand, but tons of people were hitting me up on this. I looked at it, and I have some history with utilities. I said, “Utilities like these are commodity businesses. When they work, they can work, but they’re a lot more complex.”

This is an independent power producer. It’s a commodity business, and it’s not in a regulated market; it’s in a deregulated market. I said, “When these work, they can really work, but there are lots of interconnected parts, and one small part of this can break and break the whole thing.”

Basically, every 5 to 7 years, every independent power producer ends up in bankruptcy. Talen emerged from bankruptcy. All these things end up in bankruptcy every 5 to 7 years.

I was like, “Look, it sounds like a good thesis, but I’ve got this prior history with it. It’s a pass for me.” Shame on me. The thing’s at 10.

I do wonder when that pattern recognition—there are a few other industries where I’ve been around them for a while and seen some risks—makes me hesitant to invest in things, or makes the bar too high for me to invest in things. I don’t know. I wonder: Is that pattern recognition helping me?

Is Talen the example that proves the rule? Were there unique risks there where maybe the tailwinds, the market we were in, or something overruled them? Or was it a good investment? I’m not sure, but it’s something I think a lot about with pattern recognition.

To apply this to other people, there are a lot of investors I’ll talk to—and I’m sure people can think about whoever they want to think about. I’m sure I’m not thinking about the exact people you’re thinking of—who have been doing this for 30 years.

To make this way over the top, their returns over the past 10 years have been awful.

You know, every market is racing, and they’re delivering 0% returns. But they’ve still got a great track record because they probably smashed the indices from 2000 to 2005, on the heels of the dot-com bubble, when anything value-oriented was skyrocketing and everything else was falling apart.

You ask them about a company and, let’s say I ask them about Talen Energy, which is a nuclear energy producer. They say, “Oh, that’s interesting. It reminds me of this tiny company I bought in 1999, when the dot-com bubble was peaking, and 2 years later it got taken out as a five-bagger.” You’re like, “Hey, that’s cool, but that has nothing to do with the company I’m talking about.” You wonder if they’re trying to apply a pattern too broadly and have become stuck in their ways.

I wonder about pattern recognition. The pattern recognition is great, but going back to the point on stubbornness, can you be too wedded to the patterns? Can the pattern overwhelm all your other thinking, to this extreme example I’m talking about, where you look at everything through the lens of the winners you had 30 years ago and ignore how the markets have been trending?

Let me apply this to an example. Going back to Buffett, when he was underperforming during the dot-com bubble, he wrote a very honest letter that said, “Hey, we’re underperforming, but we won’t switch from a strategy I understand”—let’s just broadly call that value investing—“to one that I don’t.” Let’s just broadly call that dot-com IPOs. We won’t switch from one that’s made us money and that I understand to one that I don’t.

You look at that and say, “Hey, that’s what you want, right? You want somebody dedicated to their conviction, dedicated to their ideals.” That would be great. But if I took that and applied it in the 2010s, look, Buffett bought Apple in 2017 or 2018 after saying for years, “I don’t do tech,” and all this sort of stuff. Buffett wasn’t willing to evolve with the times.

You wonder about those investors I was talking about earlier, who have been doing this for 30 years and whose returns the past 10 years have sucked. Why have they sucked? In part, it’s because they said, “Hey, I only buy things at 3 times price-to-earnings.” That’s cool, but the stuff at 3 times price-to-earnings now—those quantitative screens don’t really work. Those companies are picked over by computers. Stuff generally trades at 3 times price-to-earnings for a reason.

That’s not to say you can’t make money buying something at 3 times price-to-earnings. But if that is the whole reason you’re buying something, you’re probably going to get beaten. If you look at everything that trades at 3 times price-to-earnings, do the work, and find one that you think is the gem in the rough for X, Y, and Z reasons, that’s a thesis. But saying, “I only buy stuff at 3 times price-to-earnings” has been a recipe for getting your face ripped off over the past 10 years.

I think with Facebook in particular, I was too wedded to it. I saw the moat. I remember when they bought Instagram, and people were making fun of them for spending $1 billion on a company with zero revenue. I saw that it was going to be a category killer, but I never really bought the stock.

I look at that and say, “Hey, Andrew, you were probably too married to the idea that you need to buy stuff at 10 times price-to-earnings.” I think there were other things, too. There are a lot of examples of that, but it’s just one thing where pattern recognition, stubbornness, and sticking to your principles can become a problem.

One more example I’ll give: for 100 years, if your family was the local newspaper owner, you were probably the richest family in that city—one of the richest, at least. That was great. It basically got passed down from father to son or father to daughter through the family, and you were the richest person. That worked, and everybody said, “Just own the newspaper and we’ve got a license to print money, basically.”

That worked until it didn’t, when the internet came around. If you were a family who recognized that it wasn’t going to work anymore, you sold, and you probably still had your family fortune. If you were a family who said, “This newspaper’s been in the family for years, for decades. It’s always been a license to print money. We’re going to weather the storm and come out stronger on the other side,” you probably lost most of your family fortune.

There was a pattern of holding the newspaper, but you needed to not be stubborn and recognize when that pattern had changed. I think about that with a lot of things.

Buffett has a famous joke about oil rights. I can’t remember if it’s Buffett or Munger. What does the Texas oil man say to his grandchildren on his deathbed? “Whatever you do, don’t sell the oil rights.” For the past 100 years, that’s been the right move. At some point, from now until the heat death of the universe, that’s probably going to be the wrong move.

We’ll probably wean ourselves off oil at some point, or oil will get so cheap that there’s no real value in those oil rights. You could imagine a lot of things. But I think about that: The pattern recognition and the rules that you’ve always followed can make a lot of money. When is following them a good idea? When is that being a smart investor versus when is it stubbornness? When is it leading you to take tail risk that you don’t mean to take? I don’t know.

I did a post on Thibs getting fired a few months ago. I won’t belabor it here, but Thibs—Tom Thibodeau, the New York Knicks coach—was very stuck in his ways, and he got fired in large part because of that. You look at that and say, “Hey, he’s one of the winningest coaches of all time. He stuck with his system, and his system made him one of the winningest coaches of all time.” But as Curtis would say, he wouldn’t adapt from his system.

I see a lot of parallels there, and I honestly don’t know what the right answer is.

The last thing I want to talk about real quickly is that I talk to a lot of management teams. Every now and then, I’ll talk to a management team—a CEO, a chairman, whoever—and they’ll say, “Hey, I am the father of this industry.”

Talk to Thomas Edison about electricity: “I am the father of this industry.” Talk to Alexander Graham Bell about the telephone: “I am the father of this industry.”

Sometimes they’re right. If you talk to Edison or Bell, they’re right. Sometimes they’re arrogant. Maybe they were at the company that was the father of the industry. Maybe they were involved. Sometimes I’ve seen managers who like to say, “I’m the father of this industry,” and I’m not even sure if they were there for the industry’s founding or if they know what they’re doing.

None of that matters. But when a CEO says, “I’m the father of this industry,” it indicates at least a little arrogance, right? I always wonder whether that’s good or bad. I tend to lean toward bad, because whenever I’ve heard a CEO say, “I’m the father of this industry,” the subtext is, “You little money manager who runs a silly podcast and is talking to me, you have no clue what I’m doing. You have no clue about this industry. I will forget more during this conversation about the industry than you’ll ever know.”

Maybe they’re right, but I’m often talking to them because there’s a capital-allocation problem or something else. Maybe it relates to the industry and maybe it doesn’t, but it’s more my wheelhouse than theirs, and I’m being dismissed.

I never know when I talk to another investor and they say, “Oh my gosh, we’re investing in this company, and their chairman is the father of this industry.” It always sounds great, but I never know: Is that indicating arrogance, where they won’t listen to you? Is that indicating a management team that feels like it should get all the value from the company because they’re the father of the industry? All the value the company creates—or all the value the industry creates—should belong to them. That often goes along with arrogance.

Management arrogance is something I’ve been thinking about and speculating on.

I think we’re coming up on the end. I really need to start timing these when I record. I guess the last thing I wanted to mention is that people ask me all the time, “Hey, Andrew, why do you do these ramblings? They’re kind of silly.”

Look, the main reason is that I enjoy it. I like listening to myself talk, I guess. But sorry, that is not the main reason. I do enjoy it, and that’s one reason. But one of the main reasons I do it, and one of the main reasons I enjoy it so much, is the feedback I get.

I get so much feedback. I get so much discussion and so many talking points from it. I think it helps me improve as an investor, helps me talk to people, reach out to people, and do all that sort of stuff. All this to say: I do it because I enjoy it, but I do it because of the discussions I generate.

So, if you’re listening to this and you’ve got thoughts, I just ended with management arrogance. If you say, “Company XYZ has this manager who says he’s the father of this industry, and look at this guy—he’s so silly. He wasn’t involved; the industry was founded 20 years before that,” I’d love to look at that.

If you know of Company ABC and there’s a CEO who says, “I’m the father of this industry,” and you think the stock is interesting, the guy’s a genius, and the whole industry is about to change, I’d love to hear about that.

I'd love to look at that. I'd love to discuss anything you want to talk about—Tom Thibodeau getting fired from the Knicks. Let's talk about it.

Anyway, I mentioned that because that's why I do this. Reach out to me if you'd like to talk about any of that. I got so much inbound on the SPACs piece. Obviously, SPACs are a longtime following, a longtime love of mine, and I think they're really interesting right now. So, if you'd like to talk about SPACs in any way, shape, or form, I'd love to talk to you there.

But, yeah, reach out. I'd love to talk. You can find me on Twitter, and you can find my email. It's all very visible. I think I'm going to wrap it up here. That's it for my July 2025 ramblings. Hopefully, I remembered to turn my microphone on. I'm looking, and it looks like I remembered, but hopefully I remembered that.

I've enjoyed talking to you. I'm looking forward to chatting about any piece of this that struck you, and we will talk in my August ramblings. A quick disclaimer: nothing on this podcast should be considered investment advice. Guests or the hosts may have positions in any of the stocks mentioned during this podcast. Please do your own work and consult a financial adviser. Thanks.