Rigatoni Capital Podcast

Futures are green after Trump backed off the Iran attack over the weekend, another TACO, with WTI and Brent lower as Iran dismisses his talk plans. Amazon impressed on Thursday, and Japan and the US both bought yen to strengthen it, which is about keeping the carry trade going, since the US actually sold euros to buy yen rather than diluting the dollar. The core of the episode is pushing back on t...

Big tech and the semis are continuing Thursday's huge bounce, which some call a dead cat and others the next leg up. Microsoft was the turning point, noting most of its growing cloud base is not OpenAI or Anthropic while keeping CapEx roughly flat, and Amazon followed with a strong AWS quarter. Part of the bounce likely traces to a Bank of Japan yen intervention easing the carry trade, which i...

Futures are green pre-market on strong Microsoft earnings and a big Lam Research report guiding $8.1 billion for next quarter, with the stock up around 11%. Microsoft spiked and the narrative credits leaving CapEx unchanged, while Meta sold off on softer forward guidance after only raising the bottom of its CapEx range, which reminds me a bit of the 2022 Meta and Netflix drawdowns. I do like the b...

Markets are a mess pre-market with the Fed announcing today, a US surprise attack in Jordan by Iran sending oil spiking, SK Hynix's weak headline number, and the KOSPI selling off after its huge run. As Marc Rudajev said yesterday, the semiconductor selloff is really a leverage and margin story. For a long term investor the focus should stay on earnings, and you should still hold some financia...

Welcome back Marc Rudajev of Learning. Investing. Thriving to the podcast. We got into the semiconductor selloff, mark to market earnings, sector rotation, financials, international markets, and jobless claims. If you enjoyed the conversation, please consider checking out Marc's newsletter in the link below. China started mass production of DUV lithography equipment, which hit ASML and sent se...

Markets are green pre-market on a reversal Monday, with oil dropping after a weekend of war headlines where the US and Iran held off on attacking each other. It is a busy week with the Fed meeting, where I think they should hold, plus heavy earnings. Thursday is the big day with Apple and Amazon, Microsoft and Lam Research report Wednesday afternoon, and I am also watching Waste Management, L3Harr...

Welcome back Kevin aka Bagholder to the podcast. We had a lot to catch up on and I think you will all get a lot of enjoyment and knowledge from Kevin's insights on many subjects that include Silver, Gold, Bitcoin and MSTR, and AI hyperscalers. If you enjoyed what you heard, please consider checking out Kevin's newsletter in the link below. One of the best finance writers on Substack by far...

Markets are rebounding slightly with Intel bouncing after earnings and Brent Crude back under $100, but this is the dog days of summer and I do not expect a strong Friday. Traders are not going to want to hold into the weekend with the US now thirteen days into striking Iran and talk of a much larger attack. Nobody wants to write about industrials, which is fine by me. Lockheed Martin, RTX, Union...

Markets are selling off pre-market after Yemen declared a naval blockade targeting Saudi shipping and struck two tankers in the Red Sea, with oil spiking and Trump saying Iran will be held responsible. This is industrials week for me. Chubb and Northrop Grumman both reported strong earnings earlier and I wrote them up on Substack, with Lockheed Martin, RTX and Blackstone landing today. GM's de...

Trump is reportedly considering banning Chinese open weight AI models in the US, and my take is that the argument it is unsafe to run CCP open weight is fake news, since open weight can be downloaded to your own hard drive and built on locally. It is a head-scratcher that China is embracing open source at all given its history against open code, Bitcoin, and free speech. A clip from Jacob Robinson...

I get into Kimi K3 from Moonshot, another so called DeepSeek moment, and why I think open weights are good for the hyperscalers and AI infrastructure. I explain that the selloff in semiconductors started before Kimi K3, tied to margin calls in South Korea and AI infrastructure taking a breather, and I use Lam Research and Caterpillar as picks and shovels names that trade in sync at around the same...

Tech got spooked by the Kimi's new K3 headline, the open source Chinese model out of Moonshot that is benchmarking competitive with the frontier labs, and it feels eerily similar to the DeepSeek scare. Markets sell off on uncertainty, and my read is this could end up being bullish. Open source is a positive for the broader economy, and I agree with the take that this is a dream scenario for th...

BlackRock reported a blowout quarter with record revenue and record assets under management above $15 trillion. I own BlackRock directly and I am up 75% on the name since 2022, so I walk through the report, including why you need to strip out the HPS Investment Partners numbers when comparing year over year. Larry Fink went on Squawk on the Street and pushed back on Faber's framing that hypers...

I rolled out of bed this morning and my phone was full of distractions. The Warren Buffett and Bill Gates Foundation drama, the Stripe deal with PayPal and Block, a Wall Street Journal headline about blockbuster stock sales overwhelming the bull market. None of that is the most important story today. Financial earnings are. BlackRock reported a strong quarter with assets under management hitting a...

June CPI came in surprisingly low this morning, with the month over month down 0.4% and year over year at 3.5%, a nice cooldown from the US-Iran war energy highs as gas prices came off. Bank earnings are kicking off with JPMorgan reporting a record revenue beat, though the stock is roughly flat, and Wells Fargo, Bank of America, and Goldman Sachs all reporting. I will have a deep dive on the banks...

Ken Griffin was interviewed last week and made a point that lines up with everything I talk about here: as alternative data and AI make each quarter more transparent, the edge shifts away from guessing whether a company beats this quarter and toward those who can envision which companies will create transformative products over the next 10 years. That is the kind of long term vision Rigatoni Capit...

The biggest news yesterday was Meta unveiling its first paid AI model, Muse Spark 1.1, an agentic coding platform that puts them in direct competition with Anthropic and OpenAI. Meta has an advantage here because they own the hardware and the data centers, but the broader read is that frontier models keep getting commoditized and it is a nonstop barrage of competition. My take is that all of it co...

Tech and semiconductors bounced this morning, which has everyone asking whether the great rotation is real. Caitlin McCabe at the Wall Street Journal is pointing to equal weight beating market cap weighted year to date as proof, but the gap is small and I think it is too soon to call a new long term regime. My take is that we are really just consolidating. The Nasdaq 100 is sitting right where it...

Morgan Stanley's Mike Wilson is telling clients to get out of chip stocks and rotate into the hyperscalers. This morning I walk through whether this rotation is real or just too soon to call. Semis are getting whacked today with Micron, AMD, Broadcom, and Nvidia all selling off, and even Caterpillar and Lam Research are getting hit after their huge runs. Meanwhile financials, transports, healt...

We are heading into the dog days of summer with the World Cup on and earnings still a few weeks out. I talk about why the current SaaS software selloff reminds me of the 2022 bear market. I also explain why the AI disruption story hits the stock price first and the job cuts come later. I also flag some funky GAAP accounting to watch, where companies like Amazon have to book gains on their private...

Micron reported last night and the stock is swinging hard, which is exactly the kind of summer volatility that gets friends and family texting me asking what to do. My answer this year is simple: buy in June and go away. I bought the QQQ at $687 during the early June flush down and I am not making any more moves. This morning I talk about why the Nasdaq 100 is now my largest holding and why, at ag...

Jim Chanos was on the Monetary Matters podcast this weekend. He is net long AI through the index and short what he calls the financialized middle layer, the NeoCloud plays like CoreWeave that he views as equipment leasing finance companies with mid single digit returns on capital. Own what the chips produce, not where they reside. I also cover Jordi Visser's take on the CapEx air pocket he thi...

Note: My screen was not sharing during today's recording. Apologies to everyone watching on YouTube. Kevin Warsh held his first press conference as Federal Reserve Chair and said a whole lot of nothing. Yes, he used some hawkish language around price stability, yes the dot plot leaned hawkish, and yes he mentioned task forces looking into the inflation target and the federal balance sheet. But...

SpaceX options are open to trade for the first time today and retail is going crazy. I am watching from the sidelines and I am completely comfortable with that. The QQQ will own SpaceX for me at market cap weight without me having to chase it at any price. I also cover the Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas on the 20VC podcast and his take on why frontier AI labs like Anthropic and OpenAI are being c...

I added a significant chunk to my Invesco QQQ position during last Tuesday's flush down at $687 a share, and the Nasdaq 100 is now my largest holding for the first time, ahead of Nvidia. I walk through why I think this is the right move at age 42, why I want QQQ to eventually be 50% of my portfolio, and how my allocation philosophy will likely shift again as I get into my 50s. I also cover my...