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 15 November 2026:
1. 2028 Semis Numbers Look Too High (Unless the Labs Reaccelerate) – prefshares
I wanted to try and answer a narrower question with the numbers: can the revenue AI generates actually pay for the data centers that sell-side semiconductor consensus implies?
The short answer is yes for the next ~18 months, and no from 2028 unless the frontier labs reaccelerate from here. At this year’s pace of lab ARR growth, the fleet that chip consensus builds is oversupplied in 2028. At $15B a month of net new ARR, it tips into oversupply in 2029. Even a reacceleration to $25B a month only gets 2030 to balanced…
…In my base case that’s ~$245B at the end of 2026, ~$780B at the end of 2028 and ~$1.37T at the end of 2030. For 2028, that’s ~$525B from the labs, ~$97B from other models, ~$122B of advertising and Microsoft 365 uplift, and ~$36B of labor avoided…
…A material unlock in AI diffusion or capabilities. I don’t think the current pace of diffusion is enough. We need TAM expansion or much faster enterprise adoption. The candidates? Persistent agent swarms (potentially 10-100x the tokens per seat, similar uplift as from chat to reasoning & reasoning to agentic), cybersecurity spend that scales with attacker compute, AI-run R&D, consumer agents taking a cut of commerce, generated video, new form factors, and physical AI. Any one of them could close the gap. The point is that it NEEDS to show up in lab ARR in 2027…
…On calendar 2028 consensus, Nvidia trades at ~8x earnings. Broadcom is ~12x, TSMC ~14x, semicap 14-20x and memory 2-4x. Those are low multiples for businesses growing earnings 30-50%+ a year into 2028. The market is clearly discounting a material haircut to 2030 consensus. With that said, I don’t think it’s pricing a cut to 2028 itself. That’s the year at risk if the labs can’t start adding $15B a month, and 2029 is at risk if they don’t keep accelerating further.
2. Who wins when AI does the shopping? New evidence on agentic commerce – Elizabeth Silliman, Jack Trotter, Kelsey Robinson, Desirae Oppong, and Shreya Jaggi
Of the many findings in this analysis, business leaders should pay special attention to these five:
- More than 50 percent of global consumers now use AI for shopping.
- In the United States, the rate at which AI users completed a purchase with AI jumped 70 percent over last year’s rate.
- Retailer AI assistants trail stand-alone AI tools by as much as two times throughout the shopping journey but catch up at checkout.
- For AI users, AI search is three times more influential than traditional search.
- Agentic commerce is helping e-commerce laggards make up a lot of ground…
…In the United States, AI users who made a purchase with AI grew from 10 to 17 percent year over year on average across all categories we measured in December 2025 (corresponding to 5 to 10 percent of the general US population). Globally, 14 percent of AI users reported using an AI tool to complete a purchase (corresponding to 9 percent of the general population). While that represents a small percentage share of retail gross merchandise value, the growth is notable…
…AI users seem eager to let AI do more of the buying. In the top six purchase categories, between 21 and 30 percent of AI users said they would let AI complete a purchase, roughly 1.5 times as many as those who have made an actual purchase with AI. Retailers see the demand and are moving quickly to implement AI shopping capabilities, through open standards such as the Universal Commerce Protocol stack and by opening their doors to agents in a secure, controlled, and standards-based way as the 2026 holiday season approaches…
…Globally, AI users are 3.2 times more likely to rank AI search tools as more influential than traditional search engines, and 2.6 times more likely to rank them higher than other strong influences, like friends or family.
3. Why hasn’t there been a major financial crisis in recent years? – Henry Allen, Peter Sidorov, and Camilla Siazon
The economist Hyman Minsky warned, in essence, that “stability is destabilising”. He argued that a lengthy period of financial stability could be problematic, as it induced risk-taking and complacency amongst investors, laying the foundation for the next crisis. For example, lenders relax their terms and borrowers are more willing to extend themselves, as nobody wants to miss out. This dynamic makes economies inherently prone to financial panics and boom-bust cycles.
But since the 2008 crisis, and the subsequent sovereign crisis in the Eurozone, we have yet to see another financial crisis happen on a scale that had a lasting market and macroeconomic impact. There have been clear moments of concern, as in early 2023 with the regional bank turmoil, but nothing that has caused a lasting impact. So this led us to ask why.
In this paper, we examine why the post-GFC era has seen fewer financial crises. Explanations include the reforms made after 2008 to avoid a repeat, the lower proportion of financial assets held by the banking system, as well as the speedier reaction of policymakers when wobbles have occurred. We then consider a few candidates that could cause the next crisis, including AI vulnerabilities, private credit, and stretched fiscal positions.
Ultimately, financial crises haven’t been abolished, but the reforms of recent years have made it harder for shocks to propagate through the traditional banking system. Moreover, policymakers have become far more inclined to intervene when initial signs of stress have emerged.
4. Quant Quake II? Thoughts on the Selloff – Barry Ritholtz
Thursday was one of the most significant one-day sell-offs we have seen in a long while. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index plunged 12%, with some names like SanDisk, AMD, Micron, and Marvell falling much more. Reuters noted it was the second-worst day for semiconductors on record.
The S&P 500 fell 4.4% — the worst drop since the tariffs announcement in April 2025 (“Liberation Day”). The Nasdaq, which had hit an all-time high in October, fell ~12% below that mark. The Volatility Index reflected this; the VIX saw its third-largest percentage jump ever, gaining 69.7% as it leaped from 16 to over 28…
…Several potential drivers of the selloff resonate more with me than the political narrative.
The first was rumors about a forced liquidation of data center loans. Bloomberg covered one side of the story mid-day: “Mystery Seller Puts Up $500 Million Data Center Loans”; this aligns with a reversal in bullish sentiment. The next day, it was revealed that the seller was ING.2
Given the hundreds of billions already invested by the hyperscalers in the AI data center buildout, half a billion dollars is a modest sum and should not be enough debt to cause widespread panic.
While I do not believe this was the cause, sometimes, all it takes to ignite a room full of flammable gas is a small spark…
…The third potential cause – and in my mind, the most significant – was a huge, leveraged growth unwind by the major multi-strategy hedge funds. These pod shops are filled with quants who frequently end up in crowded trades – this time, it was semiconductors and AI.
Rumors circulated that ~108 separate pods closed and unwound on Thursday in what is best described as “forced liquidations.” That might help explain the fastest $2.5 trillion wipeout on record. (Note we saw a somewhat less ugly selloff on the last trading day of October).
For those unfamiliar with the term “pod shops,” these are multi-manager, multi-strategy hedge funds that have hundreds of small, semi-autonomous trading teams – aka “pods” – on the same platform. Many of the best-known multi-strat funds run large amounts of capital: Millennium ($98B), Citadel ($77B), Point72 ($55.5B), Balyasny ($37B), Schonfeld Strategic Advisors ($23.5B), Hudson Bay Capital ($20B), etc. Add to that Viking and many other Tiger shops, and it all adds up to a rather sizeable amount of capital.
The strategies may differ, but one consistent theme is centralized risk management that aggregates all positions across every pod’s book in real time. Last Thursday felt (at least to me) like many of these pods got caught in a crowded, systematic, long-leveraged growth equity trade. Think mega-cap growth, momentum, and tech names, especially AI/Semis.
The multi-strat shops are disciplined, mechanical, and formulaic. Any pod that hits a specific drawdown limit (~5% or 7.5%)4, it triggers a hard stop automatically. When I refer to forced liquidation, this is precisely what I mean.
5. It’s Called the Tech Bubble for a Reason – Matt Cerminaro
Many stocks actually went up during the dotcom crash…
…Two years after the Tech Bubble peaked, there were more S&P 500 stocks up 50% than down 50%..
…Tenet Healthcare was up 247% over the period. Lockheed ripped 231%. United Health? Up 217%. These are more than triples…
… 68% of Staples rallied as the Nasdaq got crushed. More than 40% of stocks within Financials, Discretionary, Energy, Health Care, and Utilities all went up from the dotcom peak to the low…
…The average Tech and Comm Services stock fell 69.4% during the crash. But everything else in the index, on average, was up 2.8%.
Here’s my point: the bubble existed in a very specific segment of the market. Technology stocks…
…99% of tech stocks fell at least 20% during the dotcom implosion. Comm Services got nailed. But stocks in the other sectors held up well.
When they say Tech Bubble, they really mean it. Many other stocks actually did okay. Some even thrived.
Disclaimer: The Good Investors is the personal investing blog of two simple guys who are passionate about educating Singaporeans about stock market investing. By using this Site, you specifically agree that none of the information provided constitutes financial, investment, or other professional advice. It is only intended to provide education. Speak with a professional before making important decisions about your money, your professional life, or even your personal life. We currently have a vested interest in TSMC. Holdings are subject to change at any time.