To The Moon

News and my thoughts from the past week (29Dec25)

Private equity firms are struggling in late 2025 due to high interest rates, tariffs, and a weak economy. This has created a record backlog of over 30,000 unsold companies, hurting investors (like pension funds and wealthy individuals) by locking up their money longer, delaying cash payouts, and causing returns to lag the stock market. To raise quick cash, more firms are selling small stakes in their own management companies—a trend continuing strongly into 2025 and beyond. This helps the firms but signals ongoing industry weakness that impacts investor returns. (Source is WSJ) - X user Kristen Shaughnessy

Debts, deliquencies and defaults from federal, private equity, shadow banking, junk bonds, corporate credit, consumer debts like credit cards, mortgages, auto loans, student loans, BNPL, others. Zombie companies, and add fraud & corruption. Are we a black swan away?

Fed Reserve just pumped $2.5 Billion into the U.S. Banking System through overnight repos. More than $120 Billion has been injected this year, compare that to prior years - BarChart

Medical costs in the US now account for a record 11.6% of US GDP, with healthcare expenditures doubling since 2012. This comes as consumer spending on healthcare services rose to $3.6 trillion in Q3 2025, an all-time high. As a result, healthcare now represents a near-record 17.0% of US consumer spending. By comparison, this percentage stood at 13.5% in 2000. US consumers are downing in healthcare costs. - X user The Kobeissi Letter

Assets in US leveraged long ETFs now outweigh short ETFs by 12.5x, the most extreme imbalance on record and nearly 3x higher than in April. Nearly a record ~$146 billion is now parked in leveraged bullish funds, versus just $12 billion in inverse ETFs. By comparison, the ratio stood near 1 to 1 during the 2022 bear market and the 2020 crisis. This level of leverage would significantly amplify the downside move in any correction. - X user Global Markets Investor

One of the most overvalued markets.

S&P 500 on track for its 8th consecutive green month, its longest winning streak since 2017/18 - BarChart

Google parent Alphabet said it will acquire Intersect, a data center company. Alphabet said the acquisition will help bring more data center and generation capacity online faster. - CNBC

Peter Thiel says the quiet part loud: AI chips will get commoditised. This is why I avoid $NVDA. It made an immense amount of money marking up its GPUs by 10x and others had to pay as alternatives weren’t good enough. Now they are getting good enough. $AMD has already caught up with $NVDA in hardware performance, and ASICS are proving unexpectedly competitive due to their efficiency. $GOOG trained Gemini 3 solely on TPUs, and Anthropic is running a significant part of its training and inference workloads on Trainium clusters. As alternatives become even stronger, $NVDA margins and volumes will erode, and profits will shift from hardware to the application layer. - X user The X Capitalist

Grok's inputs on the risks from Softbank funding OpenAI: The main risks in SoftBank's Arm-backed loan setup for its $22.5B OpenAI investment include: - Arm stock price drops, pushing LTV above 25-35% thresholds and triggering margin calls or forced sales. - AI/tech market volatility or bubble burst, eroding collateral value. - High debt load ($18.5B margin debt) straining liquidity amid other commitments. - Delays in OpenAI's growth or monetisation, impacting returns. - Asset sales (e.g., Nvidia) are exposed to market timing risks. From Reuters and SoftBank reports as of Dec 2025.

@TigerStars

$Vanguard S&P 500 ETF(VOO)$

$Cboe Volatility Index(VIX)$