We’ve constantly been sharing a list of our recent reads in our weekly emails for The Good Investors.
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But since our readership-audience for The Good Investors is wider than our subscriber base, we think sharing the reading list regularly on the blog itself can benefit even more people. The articles we share touch on a wide range of topics, including investing, business, and the world in general.
Here are the articles for the week ending 10 May 2026:
1. Corporate dark arts: when incentives tell you what might be coming $GME $EKSO $VAC $RPD – Andrew Walker
EKSO is a tiny little company; its market cap for most of last year was <$10m. But it’s a perfect case study in the dark arts and why paying attention to them can be profitable. In late November they gave all of their executives’ PSUs that vested only if the company underwent a change of control and the stock was “at least $7.50” per share within the next five years. The stock was trading in the mid-$4s at the time.
I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a single PSU grant that flashes “we are for sale” harder than that grant.
Sure enough, at the end of December EKSO announced a deal to merge with APLD’s cloud business spinoff. A few weeks later, EKSO did a private placement; it will shock you to learn the placement was priced at $8.22/share, above the mark that vested EKSO’s PSUs.
It wasn’t guaranteed that the market would respond positively to EKSO’s merger…. but I’d suggest EKSO’s board and management knew something was in the pipes when they made those grants, and that whatever was coming was likely to excite the market.
As I write this, EKSO is trading at $12/share.
2. OpenAI’s AI Chip Deal With Broadcom Hits $18 Billion Financing Snag – Anissa Gardizy
When OpenAI and chip designer Broadcom announced last fall that they would make custom artificial intelligence chips together, they positioned it as a done deal.
The companies said the deal would bring enough chips online before 2030 to consume 10 gigawatts of power, equivalent to five Hoover Dams’ worth of electricity, in a bid to lessen OpenAI’s costly dependence on Nvidia hardware.
What they didn’t say was that they hadn’t figured out how OpenAI would pay for the project.
Months later, the companies are negotiating an agreement for Broadcom to finance the first phase of chip production, which would consume 1.3 GW of data center capacity and would cost around $18 billion, according to an internal memo and two people involved in the talks. At that rate, the full 10 GW program, code-named Nexus, could cost $180 billion in chip production alone before factoring in data center construction and other costs…
…But the negotiations have run into a potential problem. Broadcom has said it would finance the first phase only if Microsoft agrees to buy roughly 40% of the chips, an OpenAI executive told colleagues in a memo last month. Microsoft would install the chips in its data centers and then rent them back to OpenAI.
A purchase commitment from Microsoft, one of the world’s most creditworthy companies with decades of data center experience, would give Broadcom confidence it would get its money back, said a person involved in the talks.
But Microsoft could choose not to buy OpenAI’s chips, which would change the financing terms for the project, the memo said…
…OpenAI has made a habit of announcing landmark partnerships without ironing out the details. A month before the Broadcom announcement, for instance, OpenAI said Nvidia would provide up to $100 billion in funding, allowing OpenAI to build its own data centers and use Nvidia’s chips to power them. The headline-making deal eventually fizzled, though Nvidia later made a $30 billion equity investment in OpenAI…
…And in January 2025, OpenAI announced Stargate, a joint venture with SoftBank and Oracle to spend $500 billion developing data centers. But the effort floundered as the three sides disagreed over details and lenders balked at backing multibillion-dollar projects tied directly to a company with an unproven business model…
…Despite the risks from Microsoft’s sway, talks between Broadcom and OpenAI have been progressing. Broadcom had long insisted that OpenAI put up one dollar of its own for every dollar Broadcom provided in financing, a typical arrangement to limit the chip vendor’s risks. That requirement had become a sticking point in the talks, according to the memo and an executive involved in the talks.
But Broadcom recently decided to relax that demand and invest more capital up-front than OpenAI, breaking from Broadcom’’s “long-held hard-line requirement,” the OpenAI memo said.
3. The Fertilizer, the Bond Market, and the End of the Country Banker – Dirt Cheap Banks
Chapter 12 farm bankruptcy filings rose 46% in 2025. That followed a 55% rise in 2024. That is the third consecutive annual increase. The Midwest jumped 70%. The Southeast jumped 69%. Montana, of all places, jumped 200%. Pennsylvania jumped 160%. Arkansas led the country in absolute filings — the most this century for the nation’s top rice-producing state. Total farm debt is projected to hit a record $624.7 billion in 2026. The American Farm Bureau Federation surveyed 5,700 farmers and 70% of them said they could not afford all the fertilizer they needed for the spring. The U.S. Department of Agriculture itself — not some doom-pusher on the internet, the actual government department whose job is to make this look fine — projects that 2026 corn will cost roughly $5.00 a bushel to grow and sell for $4.20. Soybeans, $12.27 to grow and $10.30 to sell…
…Nearly 40% more new farm operating loans were opened in Q4 2025 than in Q4 2024. The average operating loan in 2025 was 30% larger than 2024, with maturities running three months longer. Farmers are not borrowing more because they are growing. They are borrowing more because they are bleeding. And the only reason aggregate farm income looks anything like solvent is that the federal government will spend roughly $55 billion this year — $44.3 billion in direct payments, plus crop insurance subsidies, plus the $11 billion Farmer Bridge Assistance Program — propping up an industry that is, in market terms, no longer functional. Strip the subsidies out and 2026 net farm income falls off a cliff that nobody in Washington wants to look over. Agricultural lenders surveyed by the American Bankers Association expect only about 58% of farm borrowers to remain profitable in 2025, down sharply from 78% in 2023. NDSU’s Agricultural Risk Policy Center projects $44 billion in net cash income losses on the 2025-26 crops alone…
…The North Dakota State University agricultural trade modeling team ran the fertilizer scenarios and they are worth your attention because they are the most rigorous public modeling that exists.
Under their “Quick Reopening” case, urea peaks at $782/short ton in June 2026 and eases gradually. Under their central “Contested Transit” case, peak urea hits $784/st in July with prices staying above $700/st through November; fall 2026 prepay urea averages $733/st (56% above pre-crisis); winter fill at $643/st; spring 2027 top-off at $590/st. Add another fifty to eighty dollars per ton for freight and dealer margin to get the actual interior Corn Belt retail price. Under their “Extended Conflict” case, fall prepay climbs to $989/st; winter fill to $945/st; spring 2027 spot prices remain near $791/st. The World Bank’s Commodity Markets Outlook, released April 28, expects global fertilizer prices to rise more than 30% in 2026, with urea closing the year at $675 per ton — nearly 60% above 2025 levels.
For the farmer, this means 2026 is the easy year. Most spring 2026 nitrogen had already been contracted before the Strait closed in February. The real budgeting concern is 2027. American Farm Bureau Federation survey data shows that for every farmer more concerned about fertilizer for 2026, nearly two are more concerned about 2027. Damage to liquefied natural gas production and sulfur output in the Persian Gulf could take years to repair, even if shipping normalizes tomorrow. The infrastructure does not just turn back on.
If the central NDSU scenario plays out, the 2027 crop year sees farmers face fertilizer costs roughly 50% above pre-war levels at exactly the moment their working capital — the cushion that lets them absorb a bad year — has been exhausted by 2025 and 2026. This would be the fourth consecutive year of negative crop margins. Operating loans would grow even larger, even longer. Chapter 12 filings would push past 600 a year. Agricultural bank delinquency rates, currently 1.09% as of July 2025, would climb to 2.5% to 3.5%. Still well below 1985’s peak of 6.7% at agricultural banks, but moving in the wrong direction at speed.
If the extended conflict case plays out — Strait remains contested through 2027, fertilizer at near-1980-level real prices, fifth consecutive year of negative margins — the trajectory accelerates. 2028 starts to look uncomfortably similar to 1984. The structural buffers begin to fail in sequence, not in parallel…
…The American Enterprise Institute has been making the case openly: most farm households receive over half their income from non-farm sources; the agricultural sector’s debt-to-asset ratio is 13.75%; the system can absorb shocks without the level of subsidization currently in place. That argument is not winning yet. But it is being made by serious people in Washington, and it is being made at a moment when every other federal spending priority is under similar pressure. If a debt-ceiling fight or a continuing-resolution fight produces a sequester or a freeze, agricultural subsidies are not exempt. They are politically vulnerable in a way they have not been in a generation.
If subsidies are cut even modestly — say, a 30% reduction from the projected $55 billion to roughly $38 billion — the market-based losses that currently get masked by federal payments become visible all at once. Farm income drops by an amount equivalent to roughly 11% of total receipts. The farms that are barely solvent stop being solvent. The farms that depend most heavily on subsidies — the commercial row-crop operations in the Midwest and Plains, the largest borrowers, the ones holding the biggest loans at the most concentrated agricultural banks — fail in clusters.
If subsidies are cut substantially — back toward the 2024 level of roughly $10 billion — the math becomes cataclysmic. Net farm income outside government payments would fall by roughly $40 billion. The structural protection that has kept the current stress from becoming a 1980s-style crisis disappears. Farmland values, which have so far held in part because farmers can still service their debts, begin to crack. The 220 community banks that the FDIC identifies as having agricultural loan concentrations above 300% of capital become acutely vulnerable.
This scenario is the dark mirror of 1985. In 1985, there were no subsidies of this scale to remove. The crisis happened anyway. In 2027 or 2028, removing the subsidies would be the trigger that closes a system that is currently holding together by their grace alone…
…The 1980s farm crisis killed 205 agricultural banks between 1984 and 1987 — 37.4% of the 548 total bank failures during that window. There were 14,483 FDIC-insured commercial banks in 1984; by 2023 that number had fallen to 4,027 — a 72.19% decline. At the end of 2024 there were approximately 4,050 community banks left in the United States. Roughly 220 of them carry agricultural loan concentrations above 300% of capital, clustered in eight states: Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, and South Dakota. Most have under $200 million in assets. Most are not publicly traded.
4. Warren Buffett Case Study – East Sullivan Mines 1962 – Dirt Cheap Stocks
At yearend 1962, the Buffett partnership was managing $9.8 million.
East Sullivan was a $106,000 position.
East Sullivan was a mining business that produced copper, gold, silver and zinc.
It was headquartered in Quebec and formed in 1944.
East Sullivan had profitable operations. In 1962, it produced millions of pounds of zinc and copper along with 4,600 ounces of gold and 168,000 ounces of silver.
In 1962 the business had 33% EBIT margins. 1961 had 20% EBIT margins.
It was a nice little business. Of course, margins would swing wildly in this kind of operation, but still, it was doing well when Buffett owned it.
The business had cash and investments in excess of its market cap. It was profitable and paying a sizable dividend.
East Sullivan’s investments were largely made up of ownership in affiliated companies.
Members of the Beauchamin family made up the majority of the management team and the board.
Then there were a bunch of related businesses that were also interconnected and controlled by the Beauchamin family…
…East Sullivan was doing $1.2mm of EBIT from its own operations.
Let’s assume that the $9.6mm of marketable securities and affiliated businesses could produce a 7% return. That’s probably conservative.
7% on $9.6mm is an additional $672k of look-through ebit.
The market cap was $8.9mm. EV would’ve been $7.8mm if only giving credit for East Sullivan’s cash account.
The look through EBIT is $1.9mm (1.2mm + 672k).
That’s ~4x EV/EBIT…
…We don’t know how long Buffett held. But the investment was likely a good one for him.
Shares touched $3.00 in 1963. By 1964 they were $5.70. And they peaked at $9.40 in 1965.
If Buffett had held to the top in 1965 he would’ve earned a 73% IRR.
If he held through the end of his partnership in 1969, he would’ve earned a 34% IRR.
5. Iran war is crushing Asia’s farmers, threatening global food supply – Rebecca Tan and Wilawan Watcharasakwej
Saithong Jamjai has just finished harvesting the rice on the 19 hectares of farmland she owns in central Thailand and now is the time to sow again. But she won’t, she said, because of the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran.
She has gone over the math for weeks. Because of surging prices, driven by the war, of fuel, fertilizer, plastics and other necessities, planting and harvesting will cost her at least $33,000, she said. The grain that she’ll produce, she estimates, will sell in August for only $22,000.
“A confirmed loss,” Saithong, 53, concluded. She’d rather let her land bake under the yellowing husks from last season…
…Addressing world leaders in Rome on Thursday, Dongyu Qu, the director general of the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, said the war had created not only a geopolitical crisis but “a disruption at the core of the global agrifood system.”
Iran’s destruction of gas infrastructure in the Gulf and the dueling U.S.-Iran efforts to choke the Strait of Hormuz have prevented crucial supplies of fuel and its derivatives like urea — a potent source of nitrogen that enhances harvests — from leaving the Middle East. Because fuel infrastructure takes years to build, there is no ready replacement for these supplies.
In effect, 30 percent of the world’s urea has been “wiped out,” said Pranshi Goyal, senior analyst at the market intelligence firm CRU Group. China, a major fertilizer producer, has restricted exports to ensure its farmers have enough. Russia, another big manufacturer, is seeing demand soar, potentially boosting its economy and aiding its war in Ukraine. On what is known as the spot market, urea prices are up 40 percent since February…
…The longer the production plants in the Middle East stay closed, the longer they will take to restart. “This problem builds in a nonlinear fashion,” Goyal said.
So do its repercussions.
In Thailand, the Philippines, Bangladesh and Australia, which are the first since the war to enter key sowing periods, farmers are choosing to skip or reduce planting, or cut fertilizer use, which will lower yield.
As the war stretches deeper into the crop calendar, farmers from more countries will be forced to make similar choices, said Maximo Torero, chief economist for the FAO. “Right now, the impacts are more severe in Asia,” Torero said. “But clearly, this is moving east to west and south to north.”
In June, India and Brazil, two of the world’s biggest agricultural producers, will ramp up orders for urea. If, by then, vessels carrying urea are not sailing, there will be “significant yield loss” across many countries, Torero said…
…Thailand’s Commerce Ministry, for example, said in April the country still has 343,000 tons of urea fertilizer, sufficient to support the upcoming planting season. Driving through the vast flatlands surrounding Thailand’s Chao Phraya River basin, however, reveals a different picture.
Across Ayutthaya and Suphan Buri provinces, fertilizer shops large and small were completely out of urea — and said they had been for weeks. Distributors are offering only Russian compounds that farmers are wary to use, shop owners said. Seansdee Teerasattayaporn, 62, who runs a fertilizer wholesale business, sent a truck to a marketplace frequented by large dealers to try to procure urea but after waiting four days, he said, the truck returned empty.
Heading into planting season, many farmers said they are facing the worst conditions in their lifetimes. Not during the outbreak of the Russia-Ukraine war were shortages or costs this dire, they said. Nor during the pandemic…
…In an interview, Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow asserted that Thailand still has sufficient farming supplies and Thai leaders are jetting across the world to procure more. But he acknowledged the country is competing against bigger nations with deeper pockets, amid extraordinary logistical challenges. “We have not faced such a crisis before,” he said.
On Tuesday, two weeks after a trip to Moscow, Thailand’s agricultural minister said an attempt to secure urea from Russia is likely to fall through. Because of shipping disruptions, it would take at least two months for Russian urea to arrive in Thailand — far too late for the current planting season.
Agricultural experts say the Iran war has underlined the need for farmers to become more self-reliant, for example, weaning themselves of diesel by switching to solar power or swapping out chemical fertilizer for organic alternatives that can be produced locally. But to make these switches, farmers need government subsidies and time, both of which are in short supply, said Esther Penunia, secretary general of the Asian Farmers Association…
…Thai farmers have been doubly hurt because the Middle East is also one of their biggest export markets. The region accounted for 17 percent of Thailand’s rice exports in 2025, according to customs data. Iraq was the single largest destination for Thai rice.
The day U.S. and Israeli forces bombed Iran, ship operators at a Bangkok port told sellers to lift containers of rice bound for Gulf countries off ships and back into warehouses, said Chookiat Ophaswongse, president of the Thai Rice Exporters Association. Since then, there have been no shipments of rice to the Gulf. Malaysia and the Philippines have absorbed some of Thailand’s excess supply but not all of it, leaving a glut that has kept rice prices low, Chookiat said.
Even before the war, many Thai farmers were in financially precarious situations, relying on loans to survive from one season to the next. Now, the squeeze of higher planting costs and lower projected rice sales could drive millions of farmers into spiraling debt that will take years to clear, said Pramote Charoensilp, 64, president of the Thai Farmers and Agriculturists Association.
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