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

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

The Clearing Price

Airtable grew revenue 20% and sold for 89% off. The argument left is not whether $3.8 trillion of private equity reprices — it's how fast, and who absorbs it.

2026-08-08 · David H. Friedel Jr. · 12 min read

Free Solar, Fatal Math

Space-based AI data centers solve the one problem space doesn't have. The people pricing the risk can't make the numbers work... and that's the tell.

2026-06-19 · David H. Friedel Jr. · 8 min read

Earnings Are a Lagging Indicator. The Labor Market Already Knows.

The aggregate penetration story misses the real trigger and the gap between when costs fall and when prices follow is what actually decides whether we get a productivity boom or managed stagnation.

2026-05-21 · David H. Friedel Jr. · 9 min read