Musings on Markets

The war in Iran, oil prices and worries about a recession have all taken turns driving stock prices in 2026 but talk about interest rates and where they are going has been a constant concern all year.

It is undeniable technology companies have found their most hospitable setting in the United States and while there are many reasons for the US dominance of technology, easier access to capital for young businesses has been a key ingredient.

Foreword: I wrote and posted this piece on August 20, 2026, with the promise that I would listen to feedback and try to respond and incorporate ideas and suggestions.

Earlier this year, I was asked what I thought about Leopold Aschenbrenner and I admitted that I knew little about him other than what I had read about him, more in social media, than in the press - that he was a 25-year-old wunderkind who had started at O…

I am a lapsed academic, insofar as I have not submitted a paper for publication in more than two decades, but to acquire academic status, I did have to earn a PhD in the distant past.

I am a creature of habit in my personal and professional life, and in the context of the content that I post online, there is a ritual that I follow with my data updates.

Over the last few weeks, attention has (rightly) been focused on three potentially trillion dollar companies all lined up to go public, and much of the discussion has been about what SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are worth (and will be priced at).

A few weeks ago, I assessed the value of SpaceX ahead of its initial public offering, with the admission that I was making my estimates with drabs of data, some of it coming from unofficial sources.

Through time, we have glorified conquerors and empire builders in politics, civic life and business, from Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan to the tech titans of today.

In 2001, A Space Odyssey, a movie that was well ahead of its time when it was released in 1968, Hal (the computer) famously responded to questions about his reliability with “it (mstakes) can only be attributable to human error”.

Markets play an expectations game, and in March 2026, we saw the process play out, with all of its upsides and downsides.

When uncertainty roils markets, as is the case right now, it is natural for investors to get knocked off balance, a when off-balance, to make investment decisions that they often regret later.

I start my valuation classes with a question of whether valuation is an art or a science, and I argue that it is neither; it does not have the precision that characterizes a science and unlike an art, it does come with principles that constrain you on what

When Chat GPT made its debut on November 30, 2022, it unleashed the hype of AI, and in the three years since, AI has taken on an outsized role not just in markets, but also in our lives.

In the data update posts this year, I have wended my way from the macro (equities collectives, the bond market and other asset classes) to the micro, starting with hurdle rates and returns in posts five and six and the debt/equity choice in my seventh pos…

In my fifth data update, I examined hurdle rates in 2025, and in my sixth data update, I looked at the profitability and return metrics for firms.

Crass and mercantile though this may sound, the end game for a business is to make money, and a business that fails this simple test cannot survive for long, no matter how noble its social mission, how great its products and how much it is loved by its cu…

In my first four posts, I looked at markets - equity, debt and collectibles - in the aggregate performed in 2025.

If you have read my first three data updates in 2026, I won’t blame you if you skip this one, because you found them long and boring.

In my last post, I talked about the disconnect between the bad news stories that we were reading and the solid performance of US equities during 2025.

It was a disquieting year , as political and economic news stories shook the foundations of the post-war economic order, built around global trade and the US dollar.

In my musings on valuation, I have long described myself as more of a number cruncher than a storyteller, but it is because I love numbers for their own sake, rather than a fondness for abstract mathematics.

Stock markets have always rewarded winners with large capitalizations, and with each new threshold, the questions begin anew of whether animal spirits or fundamentals are driving the numbers.

I grew up in India in a time where if you had wealth, your investment options were limited.

In December 1996, Alan Greenspan used the words "irrational exuberance" to describe the stock market at the time, and those words not only became the title of Robert Shiller's cautionary book on market bubbles, but also the beginnings of the belief that c…