Telltales

▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → Microsoft Bought Twenty Years of Power. The Market Graded the Buyer. The AI build spent this week being graded on the buyer’s income statement. The most consequential thing that happened to it was signed by a seller. Chevron agreed to supply Microsoft with two-point-six-seven gigawatts of behind-the-meter power at a West Texas data center,...

Hunt, Mike, and Jason walk the Cash Flow Memo for value in a still-expensive market — with Iran re-heating the oil tape, open-weights politics reshaping who captures AI rents, and a full-page scan of who benefits from cheaper tokens. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Iran–US flare-up leaves Hunt more uncertain than any week since February, but base case stays oil in the $80–90 band (not $120–150);...

▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → GE Vernova Is Already Selling 2031. The Scarcity Was Manufactured Twenty Years Ago. Every company in this week’s news was selling capacity it still has to build. GE Vernova was selling a place in line. It shipped three gigawatts of turbines in the second quarter and booked twenty gigawatts of orders and slot reservations against them. ¹ Six...

Hunt, Jason, and Mike walk the full 20-page Cash Flow Memo, from a shut shipping channel in the Strait of Hormuz to a tiny ophthalmology compounder, hunting for value in an elevated market. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Energy desk: the Strait of Hormuz South Channel is effectively closed after Greek tanker owners pulled out following drone and missile strikes (two crew deaths), pushing Brent...

▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → Wall Street Called PayPal Dead Money for Two Years. This Week, Private Capital Sent a Term Sheet. Two markets looked at the same cash flows this week and reached opposite verdicts. The public market has spent two years pricing PayPal, Comcast, and half the telecom block as value traps — cheap for a reason, and the reason is they’re dying. T...

Hormuz risk pushes Hunt’s oil call toward $80 (not $90–100), the team hunts for value on a high market — and lands on hyperscaler infrastructure over AI models — while healthcare delivers the first MRD-guided cancer approval and a live UNH margin-recovery setup. The Cashflow Memo Key Takeaways * Hunt on Hormuz: a multi-week/month US–Iran stalemate keeps crude closer to $80 than $65 (not $90–100);...

▶ Explore this week’s Tape — live, sortable, drill-down → Micron and Intel Poured the Same Concrete This Week. The Market Paid One and Punished the Other. Micron and Intel spent the same seven days making the same bet: tens of billions of dollars, poured into American fabs, on the promise that the chips coming out the other end will pay for the concrete. The market paid one and punished the other....

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...