Rigatoni Capital Podcast

Markets started the morning pulling back, with oil spiking after US strikes on Iran's Larak Island in the Strait of Hormuz, drawing a retaliation of course by Iran. 10YR pushing toward a YTD high as well. On the Fed, I stick with my view that Warsh holds in September and was mostly posturing to walk back his dovish July tone, while acknowledging that prediction markets and people I respect, li...

Kevin Bagholder is back on the show to talk about what he sees at the intersection of scarcity and networks. We start with the metals, where copper is leading gold and silver higher and the miners are confirming the move. From there we get into why he thinks silver has the cleanest setup left in the complex. His inside-the-system versus outside-the-system framework carries the rest of the conversa...

Not sure about you, but I got a Jackson Hole hangover this morning. I was also up late watching the Phillies making another dramatic comeback in Anaheim. Anyway, September rate-hike odds jumped from around 35% to nearly 57%, and short-term yields and the dollar strengthened. My own view is that he still isn't in a position to hike in September, but it does not change my investing strategy or p...

It's Jackson Hole day, and Fed Chair Kevin Warsh delivers his first symposium keynote as chair at 10 a.m. Eastern. What I'm watching is whether he leans hawkish or dovish, his stated preference for saying less and letting markets do the talking, and the chance that the Fed anchors its 2% goal to PCE rather than CPI. My take is that any real clarity from him lands as hawkish. Nvidia had a d...

Last night's Nvidia earnings were the main event, and I live streamed the call and wrote up my full recap on Substack. The quarter beat, but the bigger surprise was CFO Colette Kress guiding fiscal 2028 revenue growth of around 70%, well above the 44% Wall Street was modeling. On top of that, AWS committed to another 2 million GPUs and the company guided Q3 revenue to $108 billion. The stock f...

Nvidia reports tonight and I'm planning to live stream the call so we can go through it together. What I want to hear is a catalyst for 2027 and 2028, some sense of where the next super cycle comes from once the hyperscalers own all the chips they need for this one. Zoom and Intuit both got hit last night after average quarters, which pulls us into the AI disruption debate. Intuit's record...

Bessent said Monday that the Treasury has not bought a single bond yet and the buyback operation begins September 9th, and he's got up to $950 billion available if he wants it. This was clearly posturing, but I would take him seriously if I were an investor at least. Of course we get into Stanley Druckenmiller's WSJ op-ed, "Let the Bond Market Speak," aimed at his old hedge fund...

All eyes are on Nvidia earnings Wednesday and Jackson Hole on Friday, while Bessent keeps talking up more Treasury bond buybacks. My read is this is the debasement trade at work, a liquidity and fiscal dominance signal rather than actual dollar printing, and I get into why Bitcoin is my preferred hard asset here even as gold rips. I walk through the tungsten and rare earth story with Almonty Indus...

Simeon McMillan of Accrued Interest returns for his quarterly check-in after a heavy Q2 media earnings season. We get into why Wall Street keeps misreading Netflix, the watch-hour metrics Simeon thinks are noise, and the margin and free cash flow story behind Bill Ackman rebuilding his position. Then we turn to AppLovin, where Simeon owns getting it wrong, and break down what actually rattled the...

Stocks are up pre-market with Bitcoin hitting $79k overnight, gold ripping, and the 10-year back around 4.7. The debasement trade is still very much alive after Bessent doubled down on TV yesterday. I think Warsh is also more dovish on rates than people give him credit for, even though he stays hawkish on the balance sheet. Jackson Hole next Friday will probably bring little clarity, and mostly no...

Yields reversed hard this morning, with the 10-year and 30-year climbing almost right back to where they were before yesterday's Bessent buyback news, as if nothing happened. However, this is still a liquidity story, and a signal of more fiscal dominance, although it's not actual dollar printing. This is still part of the debasement trade in my opinion. In fact, I believe yesterday's b...

Being a long term investor means you learn something every single day, and that learning compounds the same way a portfolio does, so by year 11 or 12 you pick things up much faster. It is a full time job on top of a nine to five, but the work is what separates you. From there I cover Moderna and Merck's melanoma vaccine trial success sending Moderna up big, the KOSPI's wild swing with SK H...

Bond yields are spiking everywhere, with the Japan 10-year hitting a three decade high, and I get into why the carry trade footprint is still large even after the 2024 blowup. I walk through the profits I took in TQQQ, Palantir and Lam Research to build a little cushion, why I still admit there is circular funding in the AI trade but stay bullish long term, plus Home Depot earnings and Canadian ta...

Semis keep ripping with names like Cerebras, SanDisk, Marvell and Western Digital leading the way. I get into the Wall Street Journal piece on AI circular funding and off balance sheet backstops, why I am looking for investments detached from the AI CapEx trade, Figure Technologies, Stripe acquiring OpenRouter, Apple training an AI model in China with Alibaba, Hartnett's long gold trade, and M...

I test out the live stream and read through some of the latest 13Fs for fun, including Berkshire, Bill Gates Foundation, Bill Ackman, David Tepper, Seth Klarman and a few others, plus the Nvidia and SB Energy news that dropped over the weekend. Read the full write-up and see my portfolio on the Rigatoni Capital Substack: https://rigatonicapital.substack.com Rigatoni Capital is a daily morning mark...

I open on the SanDisk CEO's Squawk Box clip about dampening the cyclicality of memory, and while it is a good company I would rather own the SMH than pick winners in a crowded chip trade. Retail sales came in soft at minus 0.6%, another reason for the Fed to hold. The bigger theme is the 13Fs rolling in, and the lesson is to look where the crowd is not. AI infrastructure names only run while t...

Bill Ackman's Pershing Square opened six new positions, and one of them is Netflix, a stock I already own and that I have talked about being on a roughly 50% discount. It always feels good when a big investor buys something you thought was valuable, and I get into why Ackman sees Netflix as a de-rated winner from over 40 times forward earnings down to 21, the same way he played the Chipotle E....

July CPI came in at 3.4% year over year, roughly in line, and market odds for a September rate hike fell to around 34%. As always, this is not a news show, and the point is keeping your eye on the ball as a long term investor rather than reacting to headlines. I get into the softness in the consumer showing up in the Berkshire operating businesses and the K-shape economy. AI infrastructure names b...

The big story is Nvidia and Wall Street firms like Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR striking an AI financing deal targeting $500 billion to fund Nvidia's customers, from the neoclouds to whoever Jensen Huang sees an opportunity in, rather than putting it on Nvidia's own balance sheet. Nvidia is my largest position and I get into both sides. The bull case is that thi...

The big Monday headline is Berkshire Hathaway reporting earnings and being a net buyer of stocks, with oil green and the market still climbing a wall of worry over Iran and the Strait of Hormuz. The point of my weekend post is that Berkshire's operating businesses are the real read on the economy, not the flashy stuff. Rigatoni Capital is a daily morning podcast for long term, buy and hold inv...

Stocks jumped, especially tech, on a weak jobs report showing a loss of 23,000 jobs, which markets read as the Fed being less likely to raise. My take is this is background noise and mostly an excuse for a V-shaped bounce to continue after the Nasdaq's 10% correction, with unemployment actually ticking down to 4.1%. Kalshi traders now price a 62% chance of no change versus 34% for a 25 bps hik...

Earnings were ugly with AppLovin down as much as 27%, Datadog off 15%, and SanDisk down 11%, as weak guides got punished across growth software even when year over year numbers looked fine. DoorDash and Nvidia are up this morning, jobless claims came in hot at 197K, and the Nasdaq is soft, likely a continuation of Alphabet's slide after news that chief scientist Jeff Dean is leaving in a wave...

Amazon continues higher even after Jeff Bezos sold $4 billion in stock, gold and silver are catching a bid off their 50-day, and Nvidia got a leg up to $219 after Elon talked up partnering with Jensen and running xAI on the Vera Rubin chip. My post "Vindication Isn't a Reason to Celebrate" uses an old DraftKings win to make the point that being right on Palantir's A++ quarter and...

Palantir delivered an A++ quarter, with revenue up 93% to $1.94 billion, US commercial up 159%, a Rule of 40 at 155, and guidance raised over $8 billion for 2026. I get into Alex Karp's CNBC clip on AI sovereignty, why Michael Burry's short thesis that Anthropic is eating Palantir's lunch misses that they sell to different enterprises, and why there is no bear case to find on the surfa...

Thank you Nick Ridenour of Nick | CompoundingAlpha on Substack for joining me this evening to review a number of popular names in markets today, including Axon Enterprise, Palantir, Toast, and FTAI Aviation. Nick writes what I think is some of the best fundamental research on individual names anywhere on Substack. I highly suggest checking out his newsletter in the link below. Nick's recent po...