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Today’s Links

Questions and comments, please!

Listen to the full episode now or follow the Saxo Market Call on your favorite podcast app.

Today’s Links

On Veterans’ Day, thinking of two books I would like to recommend in remembering veterans that have served both in the country where I grew up (the US) and elsewhere in the world. One of these I have read and as I did so thought about my grandfather’s brother and many others that I knew who marched across Normandy and into Germany in WWII, often in frightful conditions as the US Army did a lousy job of protecting its soldiers from the brutal winter conditions of 1944-45 as clothing was woefully inadequate. My great uncle Bill suffered frostbite injuries to one of his feet, but luckily no further injuries. Anyway, the first book is Stephen Ambrose’s Citizen Soldiers, a broader look at the US war effort in Western Europe from Normandy through to Germany’s capitulation. He is a fantastic writer, and you may also find his Undaunted Courage compelling, which covers the Lewis and Clark expedition in incredibly close-up fashion so you feel like you were there - simply amazing. The other book is sterner stuff, and one that I have on my must-read list: Antony Beever’s Stalingrad, covering what most Brits and Americans don't realize was perhaps the most decisive and certainly deadly battle of the entire war, with unimaginable horrors for both German and Russian sides.

Chris Innes over at The Dark Side of the Boom with a great Substack post on the how electric grid capacity is the key limiting factor if there is supposedly an exponentially growing demand for AI data center capacity for years to come. Want to know who has unmatched electricity generation capacity? China. But don’t expect US or other outfits to start placing massive data centers there.

As discussed on today’s podcast, Peter Tchir appeared on Adam Taggart’s Thoughtful Money last week and discussed his “Production for Security” framework, the idea that the priority for many companies and banks may be to align with government’s new priorities around the national security angle of ensuring supply chains, with less success for consumptions sectors of the economy. This production-for-security framework could be a kind of overlay like ESG with very different priorities.

The Heisenberg Report on the Dems caving - bookmark this site - they have a lot of sharp-edged commentary, including on the tariffs and the Supreme Court decision.

Endgame Macro weighs in on everything these days, a must follow on X - consider this post on stable coins, still a subject I am weak on.

Chanos doing what the short-selling legend has done so many times in the past - taking profit on his pre-declared trade, this time of short Strategy (former MicroStrategy) vs. Bitcoin.

Chart of the Day - Nvidia again

I was reminded today that Nvidia’s late earnings report (relative to other megacaps) is set for next Wednesday the 19th and is perhaps the last major single-company psychological and actual earnings hurdle ahead of the end of the year. The stock snapped back higher with the broader market from the Friday lows and probably needs to serve as a leader again if we are to see the “Christmas Rally” scenario into the end of the year. As mentioned on today’s podcast, while companies can replace older systems with Blackwell powered systems, which doesn’t necessarily mean a large change to electricity needs, any new major growth in total data center capacity in GW terms is constrained by the pace of electricity grid expansion, effectively a speed limiter for NVidia chip demand. This is why Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has been out bemoaning risks of the US falling behind China on the lack of power capacity (also a convenient way to deflect blame if growth starts to slow??). It’s worth putting up a weekly chart just to point out that the entire volatile episode of late has been on an incredibly short time scale.

Questions and comments, please!