The Valuation Hierarchy Is Backwards

The next GLP-1 trade may be real. But the prices investors are paying for Veradermics, Absci and Cosmo tell a much stranger story.

2026-10-05 · David H. Friedel Jr. · 16 min read

The $900 Billion Prepayment

Anthropic may become one of the largest companies ever built. That still does not make it worth $2 trillion today.

2026-09-29 · David H. Friedel Jr. · 11 min read

Where the Displaced Return Goes

If AI compresses the return that used to accrue to skill, that return does not evaporate on contact. It has an incidence — and three of its four destinations are unreachable by the person who used to collect it.

2026-09-24 · David H. Friedel Jr. · 12 min read

The Treasury Market May Not Be Breaking... It May Be Searching for a New Price

Why 5% yields, record equities, fading foreign demand and the AI capital boom may all be part of the same feedback loop.

2026-09-24 · David H. Friedel Jr. · 13 min read

When AI Eats Alpha

AI agents won't just automate investing. They may systematically eliminate the easy returns created by slow analysis, poor execution, emotional decisions, and market friction — just as a heavily indebted system becomes less able to tolerate mispricing.

2026-09-22 · David H. Friedel Jr. · 13 min read

Two Clocks, Both Running Backwards

Lennar handed back roughly $55,000 a home. A meaningful share of the correction has already happened off the index, where the measurement apparatus was never built to see it.

2026-09-08 · David H. Friedel Jr. · 8 min read

The Marginal Buyer Is a Carry Trade

Chinese banks are buying Treasuries. Nobody knows how much. The interesting part is who stopped.

2026-09-07 · David H. Friedel Jr. · 9 min read

Waiting on Appointments

The private equity repricing isn't waiting on information. It's waiting on dates nobody can lobby: redemption windows, audit signatures, and loan maturities.

2026-08-28 · David H. Friedel Jr. · 4 min read

Solvent, But Not on Schedule

The system can afford the losses. What it may not afford is the timeline — and the same compression that broke SaaS marks is already climbing toward the trillion-dollar IPOs.

2026-08-14 · David H. Friedel Jr. · 6 min read