Rigatoni Capital Podcast

This is a breaking-news episode. The reporting tonight is that Nvidia’s board is preparing to remove CEO Jensen Huang, and as someone who has been an Nvidia bull since 2017 with it as my largest individual holding, I felt I had to come on to chat. I was up 51x on this position not long ago, so I have seen a lot of my net worth disappear within a month. Jensen Huang is a visionary who saw GPUs powe...

A report from “The Information” alleges that CEO Jensen Huang helped route billions of dollars in Nvidia chips into China around export controls. If true, I would have to increase the odds of Jensen Huang resigning to 50% or more. If you’re a long-term investor in Nvidia like myself, I think you should expect the worst-case scenario at this point. It’s also my suggestion that you shouldn’t panic s...

Warren Buffett has a famous line that “the stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.” On a day like yesterday, under all the forced selling and liquidation, I would tweak it slightly, because the market was busy transferring money from the liquidated to the patient. When I see a whoosh down like that, I squeeze my nose and buy the Nasdaq 100. I would rather...

The Nasdaq 100 is officially in a ten percent correction, the semiconductor index is down to a sixteen times forward multiple, and I keep telling you that is when a long-term investor should be nibbling rather than hiding (not financial advice, see disclosure below). So I have been adding to the Nasdaq 100 and semis into the weakness. Against that backdrop, two of my top holdings reported, Apple a...

I had Clinton Smith of Dawn Run Intelligence back on the pod, and we got into the bottleneck of energy when it comes to the AI infrastructure buildout. Clinton has spent twenty-five years in energy and infrastructure, and he’s building behind-the-meter co-gen plants that let data centers make their own power on site. Clinton has a boots-on-the-ground view rather than a financial analysis from a hi...

Everything AI-related is getting hit this morning, with semiconductors and the whole infrastructure trade selling off hard after Intel spooked everyone. Meanwhile, we should be reminded that the Nasdaq 100 is not even in a correction yet (down 10% from the highs). So let’s all take a breather, and keep it calm, folks! However, there are two names in particular that I wanted to discuss. These are t...

I felt it was necessary to come on this morning and speak on Alphabet, which fell more than eleven percent after earnings. The real question underneath it is whether personalized AI robots are starting to eat Google’s ad business. I keep these as two separate problems. One is AI mode inside search, which Alphabet admitted monetizes at a lower rate per query even as query growth is the strongest in...

After only two strong days, with today the third if it holds, the spooky stretch from last week already feels like a different market. SK Hynix just posted the kind of memory numbers that remind you the AI build-out is not slowing down, with operating profit up more than 600 percent year over year and guidance that memory demand outpaces supply for years. Suddenly, overnight, the whole AI infrastr...

Financials are stuck in no man’s land, and we briefly discuss my thoughts on why, like a flattening of the yield curve, and some uncertainty around the M&A/IPO market. I also grade the top names in the XLF for fun, from Berkshire and JPMorgan down through the card networks, and only two earned an A from me. I still own financials but I think it’s ok to be realistic and admit when I don’t see m...

I sat down with Joe Duarte (the writer of Smart Money Passport on Substack), a physician turned full-time trader who has been writing investment newsletters since 1987 and wrote Options Trading For Dummies, now in its fifth edition. For his first time on the show, Joe walked us through how he reads this market and how he puts options to work around it. We started with the NYSE Advance/Decline line...

Ken Griffin of Citadel thinks we are almost certainly in an AI bubble even as he stays bullish on where the technology ends up, and his own view has swung from calling AI garbage in January to depressed by spring to a golden era now. He says the market is finally asking which names earn the economic rents and which are just riding the build-out. My pushback that AI is not creating any real GDP gro...

I spend most of my time preaching long-term buy and hold, so raising a big cash pile probably sounds off-brand. But a professional buy the dipper without cash is not really a buy the dipper. I continue to watch the AI infrastructure trade get beaten up, we see Anthropic’s S-1 reveal just how much these companies are promising to spend, and I think dry powder on the sideline is extremely important...

Always fun to see investors trying to piece together the same puzzle right now, why the AI infrastructure sell-off is starting?? But there are many reasons, not just one. One important factor is just good ‘ole liquidity, or the potential lack thereof. Joe Duarte of Joe’s Smart Money Passport flagged that the Chicago Fed’s financial conditions index rose last week, a sign the September rate hike is...

September CPI came in hot at 3.7% against a 3.6% estimate, with core running 0.3% versus the 0.2% the street wanted, and the 10-year jumped to 5.3% on the print. Food was part of it, which is exactly what I have been warning about, between a tough year for AG, fertilizer costs, and overall energy-freight costs, I’m almost surprised we aren’t higher. A hotter number like this keeps a December rate...

Welcome to the opening ceremonies of earnings season. JPMorgan, Citi, Wells Fargo, Goldman, and Morgan Stanley all reported today, with Bank of America tomorrow, and the early read is better than the higher-rate worriers feared. JPMorgan had a rare earnings miss, but the stock bounced after it raised net interest income guidance to $106 billion, and Goldman is up double digits year over year. I wo...

The biggest story over the weekend (in my opinion) was the Houthi missile strikes on a Saudi airport, which canceled more than a thousand flights, killed 13 people, and injured over 400. This is the kind of attack that the entire world condemns, and it matters to markets because it likely pulls the United States in deeper given our strategic partnership with Saudi Arabia. Oil is back above $104 on...

This week Nick Ridenour of CompoundingAlpha is back for a run through his latest deep dives, starting with Nu Holdings, the SoFi of Latin America, where he lays out why Mexico and Colombia could let Nubank replicate its Brazil playbook and why a global expansion beyond South America is a long-term bull case. From there we dig into GameStop, which is quietly earning yield on a growing pile of Treas...

This week Kevin, also known as Bagholder, who writes Mytwocent$ on Substack, joins me before bank earnings season kicks off. Bag lays out the bearish case on the big banks. His argument is that the banks loaned out deposits long term at pandemic-era mortgage rates near 2.5%, and with rates now at 7.5%, the market value of those loan books has collapsed to a fraction of what is still carried on the...

When friends ask how I build my investment portfolio, aka the Rigatoni Capital portfolio, it really comes down to three major investment themes. The first is technology, because I believe it is exponential and I believe large-cap tech names can continue to get larger (this is almost a contrarian thought). I also believe semiconductors are and will continue to be the picks and shovels underneath ex...

A potential new theme is taking shape in this market, and it comes down to cash-rich companies winning while debt-heavy ones get punished. The chart below represents quality versus the most shorted names splitting into a Y, with the market piling into healthy balance sheets and dumping anything carrying a lot of debt. In a world of higher rates, that has always made sense in the past, like the yea...

After the Nasdaq printed fresh all-time highs day after day, futures are finally pulling back this morning on an oil jump from Hormuz tanker attacks, a 30-year yield at 2002 highs, and an overnight Bitcoin flush that liquidated a pile of leveraged longs. I want to be clear that this is a healthy breather, the kind of thing you should welcome after a run like the one we just had. Some momentum need...

Everybody is passing around the scary version of this upcoming earnings season, that the top ten stocks will account for roughly two-thirds of the S&P 500's earnings growth and that Micron and Nvidia alone will carry more than a third of it while the median company won't grow at all. I want to make the case that this is okay. If you own a market-cap-weighted index like the QQQ or the S...

Michael Hartnett at Bank of America points to the 1999 template, the narrow breadth where tech ripped more than 40% while almost everything else fell, as a warning that we are near a top. I see it differently, because I think the strength in big tech is just a flight to safety. The mega-cap names have been consolidating for the better part of a year and a half, and with the market staring down a p...

This week George Dykes, co-host of the Investing or Gambling podcast, joins me to work through what it really takes to be a long-term buy and hold investor, and he frames it as a worldview built on three pillars that we go through step by step. The first is optimism, the refusal to get hypnotized by a doom-and-gloom media that profits from your fear. The second is incrementalism, the Arnold Schwar...

The indexes are at all-time highs, but what's happening underneath the hood is quite different. The Mag 7 is masking what looks a lot like a bear market in everything else. The culprit, in my opinion, is the combination of higher rates and the sheer speed at which the 10-year has climbed to a 24-year high. When yields spike this quickly, the sectors that live and die by interest rates get hit...