Telltales

Oil holds steady despite Hormuz drone strikes, SK Hynix tests a $25B US listing, and the team runs its mid-year predictions scorecard across energy, tech, and healthcare — including Vertex’s $10B endocrine bet and Palantir’s Karp taking on Anthropic and OpenAI. The Cashflow Memo The Prediction Scorecard https://telltales.topmarkcapital.com/predictions/ Key Takeaways * Despite Hormuz drone strikes...

▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → Microsoft Is Funding the Next AI Layer With the Last One Enterprise AI stopped being a story about models this week and became a story about invoices. On July second, Microsoft — page one of the Cash Flow Memo — stood up a unit called Frontier Co.: two and a half billion dollars, six thousand people, one job, which is to take AI products th...

Mike, Hunt, and Jason run the exhibits fast, then dig into the AI buildout math that keeps getting worse, Oracle’s brutal week, and a healthcare block anchored by Lilly’s 340B fight. As always, download the Cashflow Memo at telltales.us. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Oil has settled into a ~$70 floor with backwardation nearly gone (~$3 now vs. the $90 near-month / $75 twelve-month spread at th...

▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → The Week Memory Stopped Being a Commodity For forty years, memory was the worst business in technology. Brutally cyclical, structurally commoditized, a graveyard of balance sheets that overbuilt into every upcycle and got buried in the glut that followed. You did not own memory. You rented it, for one cycle, and you got out before the suppl...

Mike Nicoletti, Hunt Lawrence, and Jason Wallace dig into the looming Treasury market stress, proprietary-data risk in the age of frontier AI models, and a Medicare for All blueprint that could reshape healthcare investing. A 30-minute tour across energy, technology, and healthcare, anchored by this week’s Cash Flow Memo. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Hunt puts better-than-even odds on a 2008-...

▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → Three Bottlenecks, One Multiple, and Only One Monopoly The AI argument flipped sides this week. For two years the only question that mattered was whether anyone would actually buy all this compute, and Wednesday’s show put that one to bed. The question left standing is whether the supply chain can physically build it — the lithography, the...

All three hosts in one room: a macro tour through oil, gas and a new Fed chair, then a deep dive on NVIDIA at $5 trillion, the software stack’s capex problem, and the Anthropic export-control fight that turns proprietary data into the next moat. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Macro (Hunt’s exhibits): Oil sits ~$80 heading toward $70 (vs $60 on its way to $50 when the Iran event started), with b...

For the first time in four years, there’s no new Telltales episode this week. The one week all three of us were finally in the same city — Hunt, Jason, and Mike, in one room in New York instead of scattered across two coasts — the recording gremlins picked their moment. The primary recording failed partway through. There’s a backup, and we’re actively working to recover it. So here’s the plan: if...

▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → Good News, Sold: The AI Buildout’s First Bill Came Due Every capital cycle has the same tell. It is not the day the spending stops. It is the day the market stops clapping for it — when a company does exactly what it promised and the stock falls anyway. This week the most expensive trade on earth hit that day three times. Oracle delivered t...

Hunt, Jason, and Mike work through an oil market frozen by the US-Iran standoff, then spend the back half stress-testing SpaceX’s ~$2 trillion valuation against Tesla’s — landing on data centers in orbit and a chronic compute shortage as the load-bearing assumptions. Plus Apple’s WWDC miss, the software disruption map, and a strong week of healthcare data. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Hunt’s...

▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → Even the Cash Machines Are Borrowing Now The story this week was not that the AI build is expensive. Everyone knew that. The story was that the companies best equipped to pay for it out of their own pockets stopped doing so — three of them, in the same five trading days. Alphabet, which had not sold a share of stock since its IPO, raised ab...

A wide-angle look at the three forces colliding in the market: oil supply through a contested Strait of Hormuz, the AI capex boom propping up the economy, and a US healthcare system whose broken incentives now intersect with an unsustainable federal deficit. Pull up the Cash Flow Memo at telltales.us and follow along with Exhibits A (US government finances), B (natural gas), and C (oil). The Cashf...

The Trillion-Dollar Bet That the Cycle Is Dead The market just handed a memory company a trillion-dollar valuation at roughly a hundred times trailing free cash flow, on a yield under one percent.¹² Strip the letters AI off that sentence and it is a bet that the most violently cyclical business in technology has quietly stopped being cyclical. On Wednesday’s main show, Hunt, Jason, and Mike spent...

Hunt, Jason, and Mike break down the freshly filed SpaceX S-1 and ask the only question that matters: how do you justify a $2 trillion valuation on a company with almost no free cash flow? They work through the AI stack, the Starlink connectivity business, and the launch economics that quietly underwrite all of it. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * SpaceX filed its S-1 targeting a ~$2T valuation a...

The Cashflow Memo Capital Structure Week Nvidia confirmed the demand picture. Three companies restructured this week to monetize it. The Telltales Weekend Update. Ava Cabot and analyst Marcus Graham walk through what happened this week — and what’s coming next — across the 94 companies in the Cash Flow Memo. About 13 minutes. No filler. Download the memo at telltales.us . Hunt, Jason, and Mike are...

Hunt Lawrence, Mike Nicoletti, and Jason Wallace unpack why the Hormuz panic doesn’t hold, where Google’s real AI risk actually lives, and how the PBM business model is unwinding in real time. Get the Cash Flow Memo at telltales.us. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Hunt’s oil base case holds at $90 (Brent $108 / WTI $104 today) against consensus $150 calls: Saudi Aramco already posted higher Marc...

The Cashflow Memo Earnings Week Is a Split Screen — Nvidia, the Big-Box Gauntlet, and the Retail Read-Across The AI trade and the tariff trade get tested on the same three days. By Friday, the market knows which side delivered. The Telltales Weekend Update. Ava Cabot and analyst Marcus Graham walk through what happened this week — and what’s coming next — across the 86 companies in the Cash Flow M...

This week on Telltales: Hunt, Jason, and Mike pressure-test Meta’s position as an AI cash machine, walk through the Iran-driven oil setup, and unpack the FDA shake-up and a second consecutive Harrow miss. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Meta is the most profitable AI application ever built: revenue doubled from ~$110B in 2021 to a $220B run rate today, with current growth still ~30% YoY on a $20...

The Cashflow Memo AI Is Finally Paying. The Question This Week Was How The Suppliers Got Paid. Micron’s 2026 memory is sold out, with customers writing prepayment checks for chips that don’t exist. AMD’s Q1 data center revenue was up 57% — but the strength was EPYC CPUs, not the OpenAI GPU deal, which contributed zero dollars to the quarter. Palantir printed an 85% revenue quarter at a Rule of 40...

This week we walk through the post-Hormuz oil setup, the Intel stake math, and a layer-by-layer review of the hyperscalers — Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and Meta — as they navigate the AI buildout. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Iran ceasefire path holds — Project Freedom (defended Hormuz corridor) is suspended in favor of a one-page 14-point memo brokered via Pakistan; Hunt models ’26 o...

The Cashflow Memo Apple, Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon all printed in 48 hours. Same capex cycle, three different cloud margin stories — and Apple and Meta both quietly repositioned the balance sheet. The Telltales Weekend Update. Ava Cabot and analyst Marcus Graham walk through what happened this week — and what’s coming next — across the 86 companies in the Cash Flow Memo. About 13 minut...

Mike, Hunt, and Jason work through a revised oil thesis, the converging big-retail battle between Amazon, Walmart, and Costco, a hyperscaler preview, and the most-favored-nations finish line in pharma. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Hunt revised his oil thesis: the Strait of Hormuz impasse with Iran now looks structural after the US rejected Iran’s offer of a 5-year enrichment pause, pushing ne...

The Cashflow Memo Q1 prints divide — Intel’s best day since 1987, Charter’s worst Tesla, ServiceNow, Apple, Intel, Charter, UnitedHealth, Kinder Morgan all printed. Five megacaps and Regeneron up next week. The Telltales Weekend Update. Ava Cabot and analyst Marcus Graham walk through what happened this week — and what’s coming next — across the 86 companies in the Cash Flow Memo. About 13 minutes...

SHOWNOTES Tim Cook is out, John Turner is in, and Apple’s AI strategy just became the most important question on page one. This week we pressure-test Apple’s hardware-first bet against the Intel cautionary tale, run Hunt’s contrarian oil math on a closed Strait of Hormuz, and hit a packed healthcare slate from CDC leadership to an mRNA cancer vaccine breakthrough. [00:00] Welcome and Episode Previ...

OPENING DISCLAIMER — 0:00 AVA: The following conversation is intended for informational purposes only. You should always do your own work to determine if an investment is suitable for you. COLD OPEN — 0:15 AVA: You’re listening to the Telltales Weekend Update. I’m Ava Cabot. MARCUS: And I’m Marcus Graham. Every Saturday we walk through what happened this week — and what’s coming next week — across...