I sometimes journal, with my entries focused on thoughts and questions I have around individual businesses and stocks, industries/sectors, markets, long-term secular themes and tailwinds, and macro-economic factors and cycles.
Over time, I also hope to identify and record what I think are generational inflection points (these are, by definition, very rare), like I did when I anticipated investment dollars shifting to critical, indispensable hardware and other physical assets that the U.S. (and other parts of the world) desperately need. You can read several posts I made on the issue here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. Note that the time stamps date back to 2021, and are pretty heavy in 2022 and 2023. In 2021 Morgan Housel asked the Twitterverse for what is currently underrated. As part of my response I said “hardware and companies that make stuff.”
In those posts I also said things like…
- “I do not think that the asset-lite, profitless companies that benefited from zero [percent] interest rates are going to be the same companies that we need to change the world going forward.” – 2022
- I’m focused on capital intensive companies that are “critical and indispensable to the world.” – 2022
- “I suspect outsized returns can be found in infrastructure today.” – 2022
- “Real tangible industries are going to have an incredible decade IMO.” – 2023
- “We underinvested in infrastructure for the last decade+…[and] the world lost its mind on apps (many of which add little value and are not indispensable) so I’m betting that many of the most world-changing innovations come from tangible, capital intensive industries.” – 2023
- “I’d stay away from low barrier-to-entry profitless SaaS and into infrastructure and industrial technology companies that the world needs…critical hardware (often infused with software) and full-stack vertically integrated solutions.” – 2024
For my journal entry today, the first of which I’m sharing as part of JRo’s Notes, I pose two questions that I’ve been thinking about lately.
(1) I first posed this question to the investing world on the Money Unplugged podcast with Chris Hill back in November 2025:
If you are an investor that thinks we are in an AI bubble, are you choosing to invest in the bubble, and if so, how? Are you investing in the hyperscalers, in a variety of semiconductor-related companies across the semiconductor supply chain (including memory, which is, yes, very hot right now), in the neoclouds, in the optics providers (also very hot right now), in the networking companies, or in a variety of manufacturers of electrical, power, and thermal equipment, etc? Saying you are investing in pharmaceutical companies because you think AI will speed up drug discovery or that you are investing in logistics companies because you think AI will improve routing or in banks or insurance companies with proprietary data because AI will be unleashed on the data to improve underwriting are all perfectly fine and reasonable thesis, but doesn’t count towards this question because it’s very likely that all companies will have to become AI-enabled, in others words adapt AI or die. My question to you, rhetorically, is if you think we are in an AI bubble, are you still choosing to invest directly into the bubble in some way? There’s no right or wrong answer…just something to think about.
(2) To borrow from Warren Buffett, what stocks would you buy today (if any) if you knew the stock market would close for five years and you couldn’t get a stock quote for five years, and therefore you couldn’t sell for at least five years? This is a question for the investors who want to take a business-owners-approach to stock picking because it forces you to think longer-term, and removes the ability to use momentum (which is a factor that has proven successful over time, by the way), or to use technicals (charts), and also removes the emotions that come with seeing a stock quote every second of the trading day. If you were forced to purchase a stock as you would a whole business and you couldn’t consider selling that stock for at least five years, and you wouldn’t get a stock price on it for five years, what would you buy today? Once again, no right or wrong answer.
I will occasionally post more journal entries like this.
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