What I Talk About When I Talk About Money

The Melancholy of the Arms Dealer

It is almost noon in Los Angeles. The sun is high and unrelenting, bleaching the color out of the asphalt on the street below. Outside, a gardener is using a leaf blower. The sound is a monotonous, mechanical drone—a machine pushing dead leaves from one pile to another, achieving nothing but noise and a temporary sense of order.

I sat at my desk with a cup of lukewarm coffee, thinking about the invisible war being fought across the ocean.

The Giant Who Stopped Scaring Me

I looked at the chart for Nvidia ($NVDA). For months, the market treated this company like a monster in a horror movie—terrifying, unpredictable, likely to burst. People whispered the word “bubble” as if it were a curse. But looking at the numbers now, the monster feels domesticated. The earnings are too real, the dominance too boringly absolute.

There is talk of Amazon ($AMZN) trying to build its own chip, the “Trainium 3.” It sounds impressive, like a new weapon in a sci-fi novel. But when you look under the hood, it utilizes Nvidia’s own architecture. It occurred to me that Amazon is just serving us Nvidia’s sauce on their own meat. The giant isn’t going anywhere. The fear has evaporated, leaving behind a valuation that is, frankly, mundane.

The Library Hidden in the Desert

Then my thoughts drifted to Google ($GOOGL).

If the market is a noisy casino, Google is the quiet man counting cards in the corner. It feels like the most misunderstood player at the table. Everyone sees the billboard—the Search ads, the YouTube clips. But they miss the vast, underground complex beneath it.

They own the “Holy Trinity” of AI: the chips (TPU), the brain (Gemini), and the memory (Data). They have robotaxis driving around San Francisco right now, while Tesla is still just promising to invent them. The stock is a coiled spring, priced as if it were a dying newspaper rather than the owner of the future.

It is a classic human error: we undervalue what has always been there, preferring the shiny new toy.

The Costumes of Meta

Meta ($META), on the other hand, feels like the flamboyant performer who spends too much on costumes.

I look at their spending—billions poured into the furnace of AI—and I wonder where the ticket revenue is. Unlike the others, Meta has no cloud business to hide its costs. It is naked on stage. They need to stop buying the most expensive champagne (Nvidia GPUs) and learn to drink the house wine (custom chips) if they want to survive the winter.

The Greed of the Spectator

I felt a familiar cynicism washing over me. We are all obsessed with picking the winner. We debate Microsoft ($MSFT) versus Google, OpenAI versus Gemini, as if our cheering will change the outcome.

But there is a colder, wiser strategy: Be the Arms Dealer.

Don’t bet on the soldier; bet on the bullet. Whether Google wins or Microsoft wins, they both need chips. They need TSMC, Samsung, Micron. The war requires ammunition.

The Ghost and The Pipeline

Yesterday, I made a small, almost silent adjustment to the ledger based on this feeling. I added a handful of shares in BitMine Immersion ($BMNR) and Energy Transfer ($ET).

It felt like placing two different stones on a Go board. The digital ghosts of crypto finally seem to be waking from their coma, shaking off the cold to find a rhythm that looks like an ascent. Meanwhile, the energy sector—moving the heavy, ancient blood of the earth—continues to burn bright, clearing a path through the fog for a little while longer. One represents the invisible future, the other the undeniable present. I decided to hold onto both.

I looked out the window again. The gardener had turned off the leaf blower. The silence rushed back into the room, heavy and sudden.

Greed is assuming you can predict the future. Wisdom is accepting that you cannot, and buying the soil instead of the flower. I wrote down the ticker symbols in my logbook, closed the laptop, and went to the kitchen to pour the cold coffee down the sink.

Disclaimer: I am not a cartographer, and this is not a map. It is simply a logbook of the shadows I saw while walking. I am not a financial advisor. The market is a strange, indifferent machine that does not care about our plans or our safety. Nothing written here is a recommendation to buy or sell. These are just notes from the edge of the forest. Please find your own way through the trees.