Narrative Change (Part 1) - Ep 301
The Intellectual Investor
In mid-August 2026, the 30-year Treasury yield hit its highest level in 19 years, above 5.3%, and the 10-year touched 4.75%. What happened next did not shock me, but it worries me: the US Treasury bought back its own long bonds to push yields down, financing the purchase by issuing short-term Treasuries. Yields fell for a day and then went right back up. This is the first half of my latest client letter. I sat down to write about individual stocks and kept ending up somewhere else. I get a feeling we are having a Caliber 89 moment. Caliber 89 was the two-pound Patek Philippe pocket watch with...
info_outline
You Are Responsible for What You Have Tamed - Ep 300
The Intellectual Investor
A client of mine left $100 million to his wife and two grown kids after cancer took him at 66. He was Yale-educated, second-generation American, ran the family business his Russian immigrant father started, and worked 16-hour days, seven days a week, in the basement. His son, days away from becoming a father himself, told me: "I don't want to be like my father." That conversation hit me hard. As a father who runs a business, I asked myself whether I'm doing the same thing to my own kids. A few days later I drove my 18-year-old son Jonah to the airport for a gap year in Israel, and he handed me...
info_outline
Chess Nights at Red Robin - Ep 299
The Intellectual Investor
After my daughter Hannah watched Queen's Gambit in January 2021, she said "Dad, let's play chess." With those fateful words, our lives shifted. Just over a year later, I could no longer beat my 16-year-old daughter. Neither could her 6'3 older brother Jonah. I wrote this essay a few years ago. Hannah is off at college now, Jonah is all grown up, and Mia Sarah is no longer eight. I did not want to change a word, because everything I felt on those Thursday nights is still exactly true. Once lockdowns lifted, Hannah wanted to play against live humans, and we discovered chess meetups happening all...
info_outline
Today’s Market = 1999 Capex + 2008 Credit - Ep 298
The Intellectual Investor
Anthropic's revenue has grown nearly 10x a year, three years running. Its losses are accelerating with it. And here is Dario Amodei in February: "If my revenue is not 1 trillion dollars, if it's even $800 billion, there's no force on earth, there's no hedge on earth that could stop me from going bankrupt if I buy that much compute." The AI rollout has felt like déjà vu of the 1999 telecom bubble. It is starting to feel like that bubble is being supersized into something closer to what led to the 2008 financial crisis. Trillions in data centers, financed through the same opaque vehicles that...
info_outline
You Don't Need to Be an Expert to Hire One. You Need a Tunaman. - Ep 297
The Intellectual Investor
My wife and I are taking a perfectly good 25-year-old house and spending 20% of the purchase price on a sizable remodel. Parts of it are going back to the studs. I had never done a big remodel, I knew nothing about construction, and I was shocked by how many landmines, wrong decisions, and outright deceptions we had to avoid just to start. Strangely, the experience gave me incredible empathy for the smart, highly educated people who walk into a financial firm like mine: lawyers, doctors, engineers, businesspeople trying to decide who will manage their life savings. They feel what I felt. A mix...
info_outline
Most People Don't Want to Write. They Want to Have Written. - Ep 296
The Intellectual Investor
I was at a conference in Switzerland. A reader came up to me and asked, "Vitaliy, I've been reading your articles for years. I'd like to write. How should I start?" This question spilled into a long conversation over dinner. When I told him what almost two decades of writing have taught me, his face fell. He'd tried it. He'd spent weeks staring at the computer and written complete garbage. Welcome to my world. In this piece, I work through what I told him over that dinner. Frustration and empty pages are par for the course. Quantity and quality are joined at the hip. "Writing is rewriting" is...
info_outline
You are not as smart as you think you are - Ep 295
The Intellectual Investor
Lately, I've been getting this powerful feeling that everything I touch turns to gold. Every time I buy a stock, it goes up. Did I finally figure out the stock market game? Did I find a secret way to follow Will Rogers' advice: Buy stocks that go up, and if they don't go up, don't buy them? No. I didn't get much smarter. I was simply a willing participant in the latest cyclical bull market. A bull market makes you feel smarter than you are, the same way a bear market makes you feel dumber than you are. This piece is a small excerpt from my first book, Active Value Investing (2007), which I...
info_outline
Guy and I - Ep 294
The Intellectual Investor
My dear friend Guy Spier did an almost hour-long interview with CNBC's Becky Quick. It is an interview I wish had never happened, or, if it did, for a different reason. Guy has been diagnosed with glioblastoma (GBM), one of the deadliest cancers. In January, Guy returned money to his investors, closed his fund, and wrote a must-read letter. I first heard of Guy at Charlie Munger's Daily Journal meeting, when a friend pointed to his silhouette and whispered his name with a deference that made me take note. Our friendship actually began a few years later in Trani, Italy, where my brother Alex...
info_outline
This Is Your Captain Speaking - Buckle Up - Ep 293
The Intellectual Investor
I am on the flight from Denver to San Francisco with my twelve-year-old daughter when I write this letter to IMA clients about the craziness I am seeing in the markets. The turbulence on the flight gave me the pilot analogy. The rest came from what I see in valuations. This market is starting to feel incredibly bubbly, approaching circa 1999. The similarities are eerie. Intel and Corning, darlings of 1999, are at multidecade highs at nosebleed valuations. Walmart is trading at 50 times earnings again, the same multiple that produced no returns for shareholders from 1999 to 2014. And Nvidia,...
info_outline
Fiddler on the Roof and Value Investing - Ep 292
The Intellectual Investor
It was 2006, my fifth year teaching a graduate investment class at the University of Colorado at Denver, and I had stopped preparing for lectures. One day I opened the syllabus and found discounted cash flow analysis on the menu. I started with: "Imagine you are a farmer about to buy a cow. How much would you pay for that cow?" A few days later, on a Saturday morning, I was sitting in my basement working on the valuation chapter of my first book, Active Value Investing. I was stuck. Valuation can be a very dry and boring topic. After staring at a blank screen for hours, I started listening to...
info_outlineIn mid-August 2026, the 30-year Treasury yield hit its highest level in 19 years, above 5.3%, and the 10-year touched 4.75%. What happened next did not shock me, but it worries me: the US Treasury bought back its own long bonds to push yields down, financing the purchase by issuing short-term Treasuries. Yields fell for a day and then went right back up.
This is the first half of my latest client letter. I sat down to write about individual stocks and kept ending up somewhere else. I get a feeling we are having a Caliber 89 moment.
Caliber 89 was the two-pound Patek Philippe pocket watch with 33 complications that marked the bottom of the Quartz Crisis in 1989. It was a narrative-change moment, a reversal of mass behavior after a decade when everyone thought mechanical watches were dead. I walk through why August 2026 may be that kind of moment for the US dollar and for inflation, and what it means when the Treasury starts intervening in interest rates and propping up the Japanese yen during what is supposedly a booming economy.
I also get into why we spend more on interest payments than on defense, why I would not buy a 10-year Treasury even at 6%, and the strange fact that 120 of the 500 stocks in the S&P 500 now have negative correlation to the market, something last seen in 1999. The AI economy and everything else are no longer the same economy.
Part 2, on why I have reluctantly turned bullish on gold, arrives in the next episode.
Read the full letter at investor.fm.
_________________________________________________________
📩 Join 100,000+ readers on Vitaliy's FREE weekly newsletter: https://investor.fm/sign-up/
📚 Vitaliy's books:
Soul in the Game - https://amzn.to/43CF73v
The Little Book of Sideways Markets - https://amzn.to/3QWTlqZ
Active Value Investing - https://amzn.to/3u8zn3A
🌐 Follow Vitaliy:
X/Twitter - https://x.com/vitaliyk
LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/katsenelson/
Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/vitaliyk/
Website - https://investor.fm/
_________________________________________________________
WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) and an award-winning writer. Forbes Magazine called him "The New Benjamin Graham." His work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, Fortune, Institutional Investor, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of three books, including Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. _________________________________________________________
Please read the following important disclosure: https://investor.fm/disclosure/
View IMA's regulatory filings — including ADV Part 2A & 2B, Form CRS, firm brochure, conflicts of interest disclosures, sample quarterly letters, and privacy policy — at imausa.com.