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Ever open Disney+ and just stare at the screen for twenty minutes? Same here. So I made a list of my top 10 Disney picks, all streaming online right now. Watch them in order or skip around, but don't skip any. Every one of these will hook you fast.

Warrior Met Coal's Q2 Earnings: Record Volumes, a Beat and Raise, and a Stock That's Actually Cheap

Numbers below are current as of the evening of August 5, 2026, right after the call. Warrior reported results after the market closed, so prices are still moving.

What Is This Article About

Warrior Met Coal reported its second quarter 2026 earnings today. I'll cover what was said on the call, what went right, what went wrong, then do the math on the valuation. I'll end with my own take on whether it's worth buying. This is not financial advice, just my own reading of the numbers.

What Was Discussed in the Q2 2026 Call

Here are the numbers:

CEO Walt Scheller said Blue Creek, the mine Warrior spent years and over a billion dollars building, is now fully operational. The heavy construction spending is done. Management raised full-year volume guidance, now expecting 13.0 to 14.0 million tons of coal sales, up from the prior range of 12.5 to 13.5 million. The board also kept the quarterly dividend at $0.08 a share.

What Are the Wins

Revenue and earnings both beat estimates by a wide margin. Here's the short version:

The balance sheet is also a real strength here:

What Are the Losses

Not everything in this report was clean.

In plain terms: the company sold more coal, but a smaller share of each benchmark dollar made it into Warrior's pocket.

Zoom out and last year is a good reminder of how fast this business can turn:

Analysis

Trailing P/E:

That's a reasonable multiple, and it's inflated by a rough 2025.

Forward P/E:

Price-to-sales:

For context on scale:

What Did I Understand From Today's Call

Blue Creek went from being a multi-year cash drain to an actual profit and cash flow contributor, exactly as management said it would.

Is This a Good Company to Invest in Right Now

As a company, Warrior looks genuinely well run. It's a low-cost producer with a strong balance sheet, a newly completed growth project that's now paying off, and management that just raised guidance instead of walking it back. The net cash position stands out.

As a stock, you're not overpaying for perfection here. You're taking on real commodity risk. Met coal prices swing with global steel demand and Chinese trade policy. Last year's results show how fast this business can turn:

Final Thoughts on Whether to Invest or Not

If you already own this stock, today's numbers back up the Blue Creek investment thesis. The mine is built, it's profitable, and the free cash flow is showing up on the balance sheet now instead of getting spent on construction.

If you're thinking about buying in fresh, you're not paying a story premium the way you would with SpaceX. You're paying a fair, arguably cheap, multiple for a well-run coal miner that just had its best operating quarter in years. The risk isn't the price you're paying, it's the commodity underneath it. Met coal prices can move against you fast, and this company's results will move right along with them.

Personally, I'd put this as reasonably priced, cyclical bet on a company that just proved its big growth project works. I'd want to see the price realization number stabilize and get a read on how China's import demand shakes out before sizing up, but this is a name I'd actually be comfortable starting a small position in rather than watching from the sidelines right now!

Disclaimer:

I am not a financial advisor. This article is based on publicly available earnings data and my own personal analysis and views. It is not financial advice. Please do your own research or talk to a licensed financial advisor before making any investment decisions.

SpaceX's First Earnings Call: A Trillion-Dollar Rocket With No Brakes

Numbers below are current as of the evening of August 4, 2026, right after the call. This was SpaceX's first earnings report as a public company, so there's no real earnings history to compare it to yet. Prices are still moving fast.

What Is This Article About

SpaceX went public in June 2026 in the largest IPO in history, and today it held its first ever earnings call as a public company. This article covers what was said on the call, what went right, what went wrong, and then does real math on the valuation, including just how big this company's price tag has gotten. It ends with my own take on whether it's worth buying. This is not financial advice, just my own reading of the numbers.

What Was Discussed in the Q2 2026 Call

SpaceX reported $7.81 billion in revenue for the quarter, up 92% from a year ago and well above the $6.93 billion analysts expected. The company is still losing money, but the loss shrank a lot. Net loss came in at $541 million, or 9 cents a share, much smaller than the 26 cent loss analysts had modeled and a big improvement from the $1 billion loss a year earlier. Adjusted EBITDA came in at $3.5 billion, nearly double the $2.0 billion expected.

Starlink, the satellite internet business, passed 12 million subscribers and its connectivity segment posted $2.60 billion in adjusted EBITDA, ahead of the $2.41 billion expected. CFO Bret Johnsen said SpaceX is on pace to hit $100 billion in annualized recurring revenue by the end of the year, and mentioned the company has already contracted an additional $6.7 billion in cloud services revenue that starts ramping in October. Elon Musk also said on the call that Nvidia will be SpaceX's exclusive supplier for its AI chip needs, tying the company's new AI infrastructure push to Nvidia's hardware.

Despite all of that beating expectations, the stock fell after hours. The reason given across most coverage was capital expenditures, SpaceX is spending an enormous amount of money building out Starship, Starlink, and now AI data centers, and that spending came in heavier than investors wanted to see.

What Are the Wins

Revenue beat estimates by a wide margin and grew 92% year over year. The loss per share was far smaller than expected, a sign the business is getting closer to breakeven. Adjusted EBITDA nearly doubled what analysts modeled. Starlink crossed 12 million subscribers and its profitability came in ahead of plan. On top of the financials, SpaceX locked in a large new cloud services contract worth $6.7 billion and set a public target of $100 billion in annualized recurring revenue by year end, which, if hit, would be a massive jump from where the company sits today.

What Are the Losses

SpaceX is still not profitable. It lost $541 million this quarter, on top of a $4.28 billion loss in the first quarter of the year. Capital spending is enormous, and that spending spike is exactly what spooked investors and sent the stock lower after hours, even with a clean beat on nearly every headline number. Free cash flow over the last twelve months is deeply negative, around negative $19.8 billion, because the company is pouring money into Starship, satellite manufacturing, and now AI infrastructure all at once. The balance sheet also shows more debt than cash, about $30.6 billion in debt against $23.7 billion in cash, putting the company in a net debt position rather than a net cash position, which is unusual for a company this highly valued.

The stock itself has also had a rough couple of months. It IPO'd at $135 a share in June, spiked to an all-time high of $225.64 within days, and had fallen more than 45% from that high heading into today's report. Today's after-hours drop adds to that slide.

Analysis

This is where it gets interesting, because SpaceX doesn't fit neatly into normal valuation math the way a profitable company does.

Trailing P/E: Not applicable. SpaceX lost money over the last twelve months, so there is no meaningful price-to-earnings ratio to calculate. Any company that isn't profitable doesn't have a real trailing P/E, full stop.

Forward P/E: Analysts currently model SpaceX moving toward a small profit next year, which produces a forward P/E of roughly 190x. I'd treat this number with real caution. When a company is right at the edge of breakeven, tiny changes in the earnings estimate swing the P/E wildly, so a number like 190x is more of a reflection of "barely profitable" than a useful yardstick. Still, even acknowledging that, it signals the market is pricing in an extraordinary amount of future growth to justify today's share price.

A better measure here is price-to-sales, since the company isn't profitable yet. 

Using the after-hours market cap of roughly $1.56 trillion and trailing twelve-month revenue of $19.3 billion, that's a price-to-sales ratio of about 81x. For comparison, even the hottest AI software companies typically trade in the 15 to 25 times sales range. SpaceX is trading at multiples of that, on top of being a capital-intensive hardware and infrastructure business, not a software company with fat margins. On a forward basis, using next year's expected revenue, the multiple comes down to around 33x sales, still very rich by almost any standard.

Now let's talk about the market cap itself, because the number is genuinely hard to wrap your head around.

At today's after-hours price, SpaceX is worth around $1.56 trillion. Here's what that looks like next to some other numbers:

I think calling this valuation "ridiculously high" is fair. It's not that SpaceX isn't a great business, it clearly is, but the stock price has moved into territory where it's being valued like it already dominates AI infrastructure, satellite internet, and space transport combined, years before any of that is fully proven out.

What Did I Understand From Today's Call

The actual business performed well. Revenue beat, losses shrank faster than expected, Starlink is scaling nicely, and there's real, contracted demand for the new AI infrastructure push, not just a slide in an investor deck. That part of the story is legitimately impressive for a company only two months into being public.

But the stock reaction tells you the market had priced in near perfection, and heavy capital spending was enough to break that spell. This looks a lot like the AMD story from earlier today: a real beat, followed by a sell-off, because the bar was set absurdly high going in.

Is This a Good Company to Invest in Right Now

As a company, SpaceX is remarkable. It has no real competitor at its scale in launch, a fast-growing and increasingly profitable satellite internet business, and it's now stepping into AI infrastructure with actual contracts behind it, not just ambition. If you're evaluating the underlying business on its own, it's hard not to be impressed.

As a stock at a $1.56 trillion valuation, this is a much harder call. You are paying for years of flawless execution across three different businesses at once, launch, satellite internet, and AI infrastructure, while the company is still burning cash and carries more debt than cash on hand. The gap between where the stock trades and where the actual current financials would justify is enormous by my own math. That doesn't mean the stock can't keep climbing, momentum and story-driven stocks can stay expensive for a long time, but it does mean there's very little room for anything to go wrong.

Final Thoughts on Whether to Invest or Not

If you already own shares from the IPO, today's numbers were genuinely good, and there's nothing here that breaks the long-term story. If you're thinking about buying in fresh at today's price, understand you're not buying a value stock, you're buying a bet on Elon Musk and his team continuing to execute at a nearly impossible level across rockets, satellites, and now AI data centers, all while the stock already prices in a huge amount of that success happening. I'd also want to watch how the stock trades over the next few months as more lockup shares become sellable, since that alone could create pressure independent of how the business is actually doing.

Personally, this is not a stock I'd chase right after a first earnings report with this much valuation risk already baked in. If I wanted exposure, I'd rather wait and see how it trades through the lockup expiration later this year before deciding whether to build a position, and even then, I'd size it small given how far the current price sits from what the underlying numbers support today.

As Buffet would say, this stock for me goes into a Too-Hard pile! 

Disclaimer: 

I am not a financial advisor. This article is based on publicly available earnings data and my own personal analysis and views. It is not financial advice. Please do your own research or talk to a licensed financial advisor before making any investment decisions.

Stock Market Volatility Is Coming. Here's How to Survive It.

What Is This Article About

This article breaks down my “ThougTHs” about Japan's currency, the yen. The yen just hit its lowest value in 40 years. This is not just a Japan problem. It is starting to touch American mortgages, stocks, and interest rates too. This piece explains what is going on, why it started, and what a normal person should do about it.

What Is Happening

The Japanese yen has crashed to its weakest level in four decades. Japan stepped in to stop the fall. They sold US dollars and used that money to buy back their own currency. This is called a currency intervention. It is a rare and drastic move.

Japan also happens to be the largest foreign owner of US government debt, known as Treasuries. When Japan sells dollars, it also ends up selling Treasuries. That sends shockwaves through the US bond market. US banks have already been told to prepare for more of this.

Why It Is Happening

For years, traders ran a strategy called the "carry trade." Here is how it worked. You borrow yen at a very low interest rate, close to zero. You convert that money into dollars. You put those dollars into US Treasuries, which pay a much higher interest rate. You pocket the difference.

This worked well for a long time because Japan's rates stayed low and the yen kept losing value against the dollar. But once the gap between US and Japanese interest rates got too wide, and the yen got too weak, the trade started to break down. Investors began rushing to sell yen-funded positions, which made the yen crash even harder.

What Has Caused This

Two things collided. First, the US fought record inflation in 2022 and 2023 by raising interest rates faster than almost any time in history. Second, Japan has dealt with decades of deflation, an aging population, and weak demand, so it kept its interest rates near zero just to keep its economy moving.

That created a massive gap between US and Japanese interest rates. Money flowed out of Japan and into US dollars to chase the better return. Over time, this pushed the yen lower and lower until Japan felt forced to intervene directly in the currency markets.

How Will This Affect Americans

When Japan sells US Treasuries to raise cash for its currency defense, it adds a flood of supply to the bond market. More supply pushes bond prices down and yields up. Higher yields mean higher interest rates across the board.

That shows up in daily life as higher mortgage rates, higher rates on car loans and credit cards, and more expensive borrowing for businesses. It also puts pressure on stock prices, since higher rates tend to make stocks less attractive compared to safer investments like bonds.

How Will This Affect the Rest of the World

Global economies are tightly connected. Japan is not the only country selling US Treasuries right now. Other nations are doing the same because they are dealing with their own inflation, often driven by rising oil prices. Demand for US bonds has dropped to a 10-year low.

This is a global chain reaction. One country's currency problem can push interest rates higher everywhere, which slows down borrowing, spending, and investment worldwide.

How Should a Normal American Citizen Be Prepared

Nobody needs to panic, but it makes sense to be alert. Expect more volatility in the stock market over the coming weeks. Expect interest rates on loans and mortgages to stay elevated or possibly rise further. This is a good time to understand your own exposure. Know if you have variable rate debt, know your emergency savings situation, and know how much of your portfolio is sitting in one place.

What Should They Expect

Based on the last time this happened, in 2024, the pattern tends to repeat. Japan intervenes, the yen bounces for a few weeks, and then it slides right back down because the intervention treats the symptom, not the root cause, which is the interest rate gap between the US and Japan.

There are really only two ways this resolves. Either the gap closes slowly, with Japan raising rates and the US lowering them over time, or it closes suddenly, which could trigger a sharp, fast downturn in markets. The next major checkpoint to watch is September 16th, when the Federal Reserve is expected to make its next interest rate decision.

What Should They Do to Mitigate the Impact

A few sensible steps: keep an emergency fund so you are not forced to sell investments during a downturn, avoid making big emotional decisions based on short-term headlines, stay diversified rather than concentrated in one stock or sector, and if you are planning to borrow money soon, like for a mortgage or car, factor in that rates may stay high for a while longer. Long-term investors historically have been rewarded for staying invested through volatility rather than trying to time an exit.

Future Action Items

Keep an eye on a few dates and signals in the weeks ahead: the Federal Reserve's September 16th meeting, any further emergency interventions from the Bank of Japan, movement in the US 10-year Treasury yield, and the dollar-to-yen exchange rate. These will show whether this settles down or escalates.

Disclaimer: I am not a financial advisor. This article reflects my own personal views and interpretation of news, not professional financial advice. Please do your own research or speak with a licensed financial advisor before making any investment or financial decisions.

Warrior Met Coal (HCC): Digging Alabama Dirt to Build the Green Future

Summary

Warrior Met Coal is a pure play metallurgical coal producer born out of Walter Energy's 2016 bankruptcy, when lenders used a credit bid to acquire the Alabama mining assets debt free. The company doesn't sell to US steel mills, it exports 98% of its coal overseas, with 2023 sales split roughly 48% to Europe, 29% to Asia, and 21% to South America, only 2% stayed in the US. Its entire business rests on one number, the S&P Platts index price for premium hard coking coal, and the gap between that price and its roughly $90 to $100 per ton cash cost to dig it out of the ground.

Business Model

Warrior mines low and mid volatility metallurgical coal from two underground longwall mines, Mine 4 and Mine 7, near Brookwood, Alabama, then ships it 300 miles to the Port of Mobile by rail or barge for export. The coal gets baked into coke, then fed into blast furnaces to chemically strip oxygen from iron ore, a process electric arc furnaces (which dominate the US market) don't need. That's why Warrior sells almost entirely overseas, where blast furnace steelmaking still dominates.

Bull Case

The numbers show extreme operating leverage. In 2020, average selling price was $113 a ton against a $92 cash cost, resulting in a $35.8 million net loss. In 2021, price jumped to over $180 a ton while cash cost barely moved to $96, producing $150.9 million in net income and over $280 million in free cash flow, a swing of roughly $185 million in a single year on cost structure that barely changed. The company also holds a genuine logistics moat: 300 miles to port, the shortest mine to port distance of any US met coal producer, versus Australian competitors shipping around the Cape of Good Hope. The Blue Creek project adds 103 million metric tons of new reserves for a 30 plus year mine life, funded by a $700 million buildout, layered on top of Mine 4's roughly 40 million tons and Mine 7's 56 to 68 million tons of existing reserves. Because the company emerged debt free from bankruptcy with zero legacy pension or retiree healthcare obligations, nearly all free cash flow can go toward growth or shareholders rather than servicing old liabilities.

Bear Case

Production is volatile and labor dependent. The 2021 UMWA strike dropped output from 7.1 million metric tons in 2020 to just 5.1 million tons in 2021, even as prices were rising, showing how a single labor dispute can erase a chunk of a good pricing cycle. The business is entirely tied to one commodity, one export corridor, and one blast furnace steelmaking process that is facing long term substitution risk from electric arc furnaces, hydrogen based green steel, and alternative structural materials like carbon fiber and aluminum alloys.

Risks

A single port dependency is the sharpest operational risk, the McDuffie coal terminal in Mobile sits on a hurricane prone stretch of the Gulf Coast, and a shutdown there halts the entire export pipeline. Underground mining brings constant geological risk: methane outbursts, water flooding, rock faults, and equipment damage. Regulatory exposure runs through the Clean Air Act and Clean Water Act, and since 98% of revenue is export based, the company is also exposed to tariffs and international trade policy shifts. Longer term, hydrogen direct reduction steelmaking threatens to eliminate the chemical need for metallurgical coal entirely, though that shift is likely measured in decades, not years.

Reward

If global steel demand holds up while new met coal mine supply keeps shrinking due to ESG financing restrictions, Warrior sits in a scarcity position as an already operating, low cost producer. Every dollar of price increase in the Platts index tends to flow almost directly to the bottom line given the fixed cost structure, as shown by the 2020 to 2021 swing from a $35.8 million loss to $150.9 million in profit. Blue Creek extends that cash generation runway past 30 years without needing new mine permitting in an environment where new coal mine financing is increasingly hard to secure.

My Take

The most numerically convincing part of this business is the operating leverage: a roughly 60% jump in price from 2020 to 2021 turned a loss into a nine figure profit because extraction cost per ton barely moved. That kind of cost stability paired with a genuine 300 mile logistics advantage is a real, durable edge, not just a story. The single port dependency and labor strike exposure are the two things I'd watch closest, since both have already caused real, measurable production and earnings swings in the historical data, not just theoretical risks.

Disclaimer

This is analysis based on my opinion, not financial advice. I haven't verified the numbers cited (13F details,  earnings report, FTC settlement terms etc) against primary sources, so worth confirming those before acting.

Leverage Kills. Patience Pays. A Look at Aschenbrenner, Buffett, and Jhunjhunwala

Rahul Chavan | July 31st 2026 

There is an old rule in investing. You can be smart, you can be right, and you can still go broke. The one thing that ties every blowup together is leverage. The one thing that ties every great fortune together is patience. This week gave us a fresh, painful example of the first rule. It also gave us a good reason to revisit the second.

What happened to Leopold Aschenbrenner's fund

Leopold Aschenbrenner is a young former OpenAI researcher. He became famous for a long essay called "Situational Awareness," which argued that artificial general intelligence was coming faster than most people believed. He turned that thesis into a hedge fund, backed by well known tech investors like Daniel Gross, Patrick and John Collison, and Nat Friedman. He bet big on AI. The bet worked, for a while. His fund reportedly grew from around $225 million to roughly $45 billion, riding a huge run in AI-linked stocks like semiconductor makers and cloud providers.

Here is the part that matters. He was not just betting on AI. He was betting on AI with borrowed money, reportedly around four times his own capital. That means for every dollar he actually had, he was controlling about four dollars of stock. When your bet goes your way, leverage feels like a superpower. Your gains get multiplied. When your bet goes against you, even a little, leverage turns a bruise into a bloodbath.

In late July 2026, AI-linked stocks like SK Hynix and CoreWeave dropped somewhere between 35 and 47 percent. That is a bad month, not a bad decade. Plenty of great investors have sat through drops like that and come out fine. But Aschenbrenner did not have that luxury, because his positions were pledged as collateral against loans from his prime brokers, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Bank of America. When the value of that collateral fell below what the loans required, the brokers issued margin calls. He needed to post more cash or more securities, fast, or the brokers would sell his positions for him.

He did not have the cash. So on July 30, 2026, his fund sold its entire public stock book, longs and shorts together, in a single block trade before the market opened. The buyer was Ken Griffin's Citadel, which picked up the portfolio at a discount, because that is what happens when you are a forced seller. Aschenbrenner's fund reportedly shrank from around $45 billion to about $10 billion in a matter of days. The one thing he kept was a private stake worth about $5 billion in Anthropic, which was not part of the public, leveraged book.

To be clear about what actually happened: his research was not necessarily wrong. AI stocks had gone up over 1,000 percent under his watch before the crash. The problem was not his judgment about the future. The problem was that he built a position so leveraged that he could not survive being wrong, or even survive a normal, temporary dip, long enough to be proven right.

The same story, explained like you are five

Imagine you have ten dollars. You really believe your friend's lemonade stand is going to be the best one on the block. So you buy ten dollars of lemonade stand tickets.

Now imagine a grown-up offers to lend you thirty more dollars, so you can buy forty dollars of tickets instead of just ten. If lemonade sales go up, you make four times as much money as if you had only used your own ten dollars. Sounds great.

But the grown-up says one thing. "If the value of your tickets ever drops too much, you have to pay me back right away, even if that means selling your tickets when the price is low." One rainy afternoon, fewer people want lemonade, and the price of the tickets drops a little. Not a lot. Just a little. But because you borrowed so much, that little drop is a big problem for you. The grown-up says pay up now. You do not have thirty extra dollars sitting around, so you have to sell all your tickets right away, at a bad price, to someone else who is happy to buy them cheap.

If you had only used your own ten dollars, that rainy afternoon would not have bothered you at all. You would have just waited for sunny days to come back.

That is the whole lesson. Borrowed money makes good days feel great and bad days force you to sell exactly when you should be holding on.

Why long term investing works

Warren Buffett has said that the stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient. Good businesses grow in value over years and decades, not days and weeks. But their stock prices bounce around every single day for reasons that have nothing to do with the business itself: interest rate news, a bad headline, a scared seller, general mood swings.

If you own a good business without debt hanging over your head, those bounces do not threaten you. You can simply wait. Time does the heavy lifting. A wonderful business compounds its earnings year after year, and if you hold on long enough, the stock price eventually reflects that. Mohnish Pabrai, who studied Buffett closely, likes to say investing is about a few big decisions, not constant activity. Find a good business, buy it at a fair price, and then do almost nothing. Let boredom be your strategy.

Long term investing also lets compounding work in your favor. A dollar that grows at a steady rate for thirty years turns into far more than most people intuitively expect, simply because growth builds on top of growth. But this only works if you are never forced to sell. Selling early, especially selling at a low point because you have to, is the single biggest way people destroy their own returns.

Why leverage is the enemy of patience

Leverage and patience cannot coexist for long. The whole point of long term investing is that you get to choose when to sell. Leverage takes that choice away from you. A lender or a broker gets to decide, based on a formula, not based on whether your reasoning about the business was right.

This is why Aschenbrenner's story is not really a story about AI stocks being a bad bet. It is a story about the danger of being right on the idea but wrong on the structure. Even Buffett, who has been enormously right about American business for seventy years, has almost never used leverage in a way that could force him to sell. He keeps huge piles of cash on hand specifically so that no one can ever make him sell a good business at a bad time. Charlie Munger put it simply: to get rich, you do not need leverage, you just need to avoid being wiped out. A small chance of a total wipeout, multiplied across a long enough career, eventually catches up with almost everyone who uses heavy leverage. That is the whole moral of the Aschenbrenner story, and it is not new. It happened to Long-Term Capital Management in 1998, it happened to countless investors in 2008, and it happened here in 2026.

Warren Buffett's big bets

There is a well known idea, often traced back to Charlie Munger, that Berkshire Hathaway's extraordinary results did not come from thousands of small, clever trades. They came from a small number of very large, very concentrated decisions, held for a very long time. Munger once said Berkshire's record was built on something like ten or twelve truly good decisions over fifty-plus years, not constant trading.

Look at the current numbers and the pattern holds up. As of early 2026, Berkshire's top five public stock holdings, Apple, American Express, Coca-Cola, Bank of America, and Chevron, made up about 67 percent of the entire public equity portfolio. Apple alone was worth more than a fifth of it. And that is before counting Berkshire's wholly owned businesses like GEICO, BNSF Railway, and See's Candies, which are not even in that public stock count but which have generated a staggering amount of the actual wealth over the decades. See's Candies, bought for $25 million, has thrown off more than $2 billion in profit over time.

The exact number, whether it is four bets or ten or twelve, is less important than the pattern. Buffett did not get rich by owning a little bit of everything. He got rich by finding a small handful of wonderful businesses, buying them without borrowed money, and then simply refusing to sell for decades. That patience, not any single stock pick, is the real skill.

Rakesh Jhunjhunwala's Titan bet

Rakesh Jhunjhunwala, often called India's Warren Buffett, built much of his legend on one stock: Titan Company, the watches and jewelry maker owned by the Tata Group. He started buying Titan around 2002 and 2003, at roughly 30 to 35 rupees a share, when almost no one else was paying attention to it.

Over the next two decades, Titan turned into one of the greatest compounding stories in Indian markets, rising well over 10,000 percent from his entry price. By the time of his death in 2022, Titan was the single largest holding in his portfolio, reportedly making up close to one-third of its total value. That is an enormous concentration for one stock to hold in a diversified portfolio, and it is a big reason his overall fortune, estimated at around 5 to 6 billion dollars near the end of his life, grew as much as it did.

It is worth being precise here, since the numbers get repeated loosely online. Titan was not literally "most" of his $5 billion portfolio in the sense of being over half. It was close to a third, which still made it by far his single biggest position and his single biggest source of gains. The rest of his fortune came from a long list of other holdings, companies like Crisil, Escorts Kubota, Star Health, and several others, plus new ventures he backed directly. But if you had to point to one decision that defined Jhunjhunwala as an investor, it would be Titan: spot a quality business early, take a real position in it, and then simply hold it through twenty years of ups and downs without flinching.

Putting it all together

Three stories, one lesson. Aschenbrenner had a good idea, wrapped it in heavy leverage, and lost most of the value in days when the market dipped and his lenders called. Buffett had good ideas too, wrapped them in patience and zero forced-selling risk, and built one of the greatest fortunes in history over seventy years. Jhunjhunwala did the same thing in India with Titan, buying early, sizing it big, and refusing to sell for two decades.

The difference between these outcomes was never really about who was smarter or who understood the future better. It was about who could afford to be patient. The investors who avoid borrowed money give themselves the right to wait out bad weeks, bad months, even bad years. The investors who lean on leverage hand that right away to someone else, a bank, a broker, a lender, who does not care about your thesis and will sell you out the moment the numbers say so.

If there is one thing worth taking from this week's news, it is this. Find good businesses. Buy them with money you actually have. Then be boring enough, and patient enough, to just hold on.

Top 10 Movie recommendations to watch it online:

Ever spend half your weekend night just scrolling Netflix, Prime, and Disney, still not knowing what to watch? Same here. So I put together my top 10 picks, all streaming online right now. Watch them in order or jump around, but don't skip any. Every one of these will hook you and keep you glued till the end.

1. Oppenheimer (2023)

A physicist builds something he can't fully control, and spends the rest of his life answering for it in rooms full of people who weren't there when it mattered.
IMDb: 8.2
Cast: Cillian Murphy, Emily Blunt, Robert Downey Jr., Matt Damon

2. Nuremberg (2025)
A psychiatrist is assigned to determine if a top Nazi official is fit to stand trial, and finds himself in a battle of wits he didn't expect to lose ground in.
IMDb: 7.4
Cast: Russell Crowe, Rami Malek, Michael Shannon, Richard E. Grant

3. The Imitation Game (2014)
A brilliant, difficult mathematician is handed an impossible problem during wartime, and the cost of solving it turns out to be just as complicated as the puzzle itself.
IMDb: 8.0
Cast: Benedict Cumberbatch, Keira Knightley, Charles Dance, Mark Strong

4. Pressure (2026)
In the final hours before the largest military operation in history, one man's forecast becomes the single decision an entire war might hinge on.
IMDb: N/A
Cast: Andrew Scott, Brendan Fraser, Kerry Condon, Damian Lewis

5. The Trial of the Chicago 7 (2020)
A politically loaded trial turns into a performance, with the courtroom becoming the real battlefield for a country tearing itself apart.
IMDb: 7.8
Cast: Eddie Redmayne, Sacha Baron Cohen, Mark Rylance

6. Bridge of Spies (2015)
A lawyer gets pulled into the coldest corner of the Cold War, negotiating an exchange where one miscalculation could tip into something much bigger.
IMDb: 7.6
Cast: Tom Hanks, Mark Rylance, Amy Ryan

7. Conspiracy (2001)
A group of officials sit down for what looks like an ordinary meeting, and the calm, bureaucratic language they use makes it far more unsettling.
IMDb: 8.2
Cast: Kenneth Branagh, Stanley Tucci, Colin Firth

8. Eye in the Sky (2015)
A modern war room drama where one strike decision gets passed between officials across continents while a countdown quietly runs in the background.
IMDb: 7.3
Cast: Helen Mirren, Aaron Paul, Alan Rickman

9. The Report (2019)
An investigator spends years buried in classified files trying to push an uncomfortable truth past people who'd rather it stayed buried.
IMDb: 7.2
Cast: Adam Driver, Annette Bening, Jon Hamm

10. Darkest Hour (2017)
A newly appointed leader faces the loneliest decision of the war, surrounded by advisors pushing him toward a different answer.
IMDb: 7.4
Cast: Gary Oldman, Kristin Scott Thomas, Lily James

The Netflix Stock Paradox

Jul 30th 2026

Summary

Netflix's Q1 2026 earnings looked like a home run on paper. Revenue grew 16%, operating margin hit 32.3%, and EPS jumped 86%. Yet the stock dropped 9% the same day. The reason: a big chunk of that profit came from a one time $2.8 billion breakup fee after Netflix walked away from buying Warner Bros, not from the core streaming business. Strip that out and the real story is slowing growth expectations meeting sky high market expectations.

Business Model

Netflix makes money from subscriptions across ad free and ad supported tiers, plus a fast growing advertising business built on programmatic bidding. It's expanding beyond streaming video into live sports, video podcasts, and mobile games, all aimed at owning more hours of a person's day, not just the evening.

Bull Case

Growth is broad and global. Every region grew double digits, led by Asia Pacific at 20%. The ad tier now makes up over 60% of new signups in available markets, and ad revenue is on track to double to $3 billion in 2026. Live events like the World Baseball Classic drove record signups in Japan and created a halo effect, pulling viewers into other shows on the platform. Retention actually improved after price hikes, meaning consumers still feel they're getting value. Leadership succession, with Reed Hastings stepping down, was handled calmly and planned for years.

Bear Case

The headline profit number was inflated by a one time M&A breakup fee, not organic growth. Q2 guidance decelerated to 13%, and in a stock priced for perfection, even a small slowdown triggers a sharp selloff. The pivot into podcasts, mobile games, and live sports raises real questions about brand focus and whether Netflix is spreading itself too thin chasing every hour of a person's attention instead of doing one thing extremely well.

Risks

Continued reliance on constant content spending, over $15 billion a year, to keep subscribers engaged. Live sports rights are expensive and don't guarantee long term retention on their own. The AI production tools, including the Ben Affleck linked Interpositive acquisition, could invite backlash from Hollywood creatives already anxious about AI replacing jobs. Nielsen's changed measurement methodology could create future noise around how streaming's true reach gets perceived, even if it doesn't reflect real viewing behavior.

Reward

If Netflix successfully becomes the default entertainment layer across video, audio, gaming, and live events, it locks in a much stickier and harder to cancel subscription. The ad business alone could become a massive new profit engine as programmatic buying scales. Continued global subscriber growth combined with pricing power gives a long runway for revenue expansion even without new subscriber growth alone.

My Take

The core streaming business here is genuinely strong, and the market's initial panic was more about optics than fundamentals. The Warner Bros breakup fee muddied the earnings picture, but the underlying growth in ads, retention, and international markets looks solid. The bigger long term question isn't this quarter's numbers, it's whether the aggressive expansion into podcasts, games, and live sports strengthens the core habit or dilutes what made Netflix special in the first place.

Disclaimer

This is analysis based on my opinion, not financial advice. I haven't verified the numbers cited (13F details, Q3 2026 earnings, FTC settlement terms) against primary sources, so worth confirming those before acting.

Alibaba Just Burned Its Profits to Build an AI Empire 

Jul 30th 2026

Summary

Alibaba's March quarter 2026 earnings looked like a contradiction. Revenue rose just 3% to 243 billion RMB, and operating profit fell 84%. Yet the stock jumped 8% to $145 on the news. The reason is simple. Alibaba sold off low margin physical retail assets and poured the savings into AI and cloud infrastructure. The market rewarded the pivot, not the headline numbers.

Business Model

Alibaba runs three core engines now. Its China e-commerce group covers Taobao, Tmall, and quick commerce delivery. Its Cloud Intelligence Group sells AI and cloud services to outside enterprises, powered by its Quinn large language model. Its international arm covers AliExpress, Lazada, Trendyol, and cross border trade tools like AIO Work. The company just quietly shed physical retail chains like Sun Art and Intime to focus capital on these three digital pillars.

Bull Case

Strip out the divested retail businesses and core digital revenue actually grew 11%. AI revenue just posted its 11th straight quarter of triple digit growth, now running near a 36 billion RMB annual pace. Cloud revenue grew 38%, external cloud growth accelerated to 40%. Quick commerce revenue surged 57% with improving unit economics. International losses nearly disappeared, from a 3.5 billion RMB loss to just 138 million. Management is trading short term profit for a long term AI powered ecosystem, and investors are buying that story.

Bear Case

Operating profit fell off a cliff, down 84%, and the company posted an actual operating loss this quarter. GAAP net income jumped 96%, but that's mostly a mirage from investment gains and asset sales, not real operations. Non-GAAP net income, the true operating measure, nearly vanished. If the AI bet doesn't pay off as fast as management expects, this reinvestment phase could just look like a company burning cash with nothing to show for it.

Risks

Heavy reliance on continued AI monetization. Execution risk in quick commerce, a notoriously brutal, capital intensive business. Competitive pressure from Amazon, Microsoft Azure, and other Chinese platforms like PDD and JD. Currency and regulatory exposure given the China concentration. The all others segment still shows a widening loss.

Reward

If the AI bet keeps compounding at this pace, Alibaba could own the enterprise AI stack in China while also transforming its own retail business into something stickier and higher margin. The market already seems to be pricing in a successful transition, so the reward is a company that fundamentally re-rates from an e-commerce conglomerate to an AI infrastructure leader.

My Take

This looks like a company making the hard, correct call: cutting the low margin legacy stuff to fund a genuinely strong AI business. The 11 straight quarters of triple digit AI growth is the number that matters most here, everything else is largely accounting noise around it. I'd watch whether quick commerce unit economics keep improving and whether AI revenue growth holds up, since those are the two real proof points behind the story.

Disclaimer

Why H&R Block (HRB) screams bargain | Jul 30th 2026

Introduction:

H&R Block is the market's clearest cash-flow-vs-narrative gap right now. The company earns roughly $600M in free cash flow a year, holds a 29% ROIC, and has paid a dividend since 1962 without a single miss. Yet it trades at a trailing P/E near 6.4 and an EV/EBITDA around 7, multiples usually reserved for companies people expect to shrink. That gap is the whole story. Li Lu's Himalaya Capital bought in near $31 in Q1 2026, right at the bottom, which is the kind of signal that gets serious investors to look twice.

Bull Case:

The bull case rests on three legs. First, the business is bigger than the strip-mall image suggests: 20 million returns a year, 21-22% operating margins held steady for four straight years, and a real ecosystem (Wave, Spruce, Emerald Card) built to keep customers engaged past April. Second, management has bought back 47% of shares since 2016, timed opportunistically, funded by real profit growth (net income up 43% from FY19-25) rather than debt. That's why EPS more than doubled even as total profit grew more modestly. Third, the market seems to misclassify the stock. It sits in "consumer discretionary" when tax filing is really a mandatory annuity-like obligation, tone-deaf to economic cycles, sometimes even more resilient in a downturn.

Bear Case:

The bear case is real too, and it's why the stock cratered 50% before Li Lu stepped in. A brand-new C-suite (CEO, CFO, chief strategy officer all turned over within months) has zero recent open-market insider buying, which is the most honest tell of managerial conviction, or the lack of it. IRS Direct File, though defunded for now, proved real consumer demand for free filing and could return under a different administration. An FTC settlement stripped H&R Block's ability to trap free users into paid tiers through dark patterns, pressuring DIY margins. And the negative stockholders' equity (-$823M) alongside $2.9B in debt looks alarming on a balance sheet, though it's mostly a buyback accounting artifact, not insolvency, with debt maturities pushed out to 2030-2032.

Risks:

Risks: leadership inexperience at scale, zero insider buying, dormant IRS Direct File threat, margin pressure from AI/tech spend, seasonal cash burn that looks scary if you check the balance sheet in November instead of April.

Rewards:

Rewards: a 5% dividend yield paid just to wait, continued aggressive buybacks that mechanically shrink the share count and boost EPS, and multiple expansion potential if the market ever reclassifies this as a stable annuity business instead of a discretionary retailer. Even modest re-rating to 10-12x earnings implies a rough doubling.

My take: 

This looks like a genuine Ben Graham-style asymmetric bet, cheap enough that the downside is cushioned by cash flow and buybacks, with upside driven by re-rating rather than needing heroic growth. The insider buying gap is the one thing I'd want resolved before treating this as a high-conviction position rather than a statistically cheap one.

Disclaimer:

This is analysis based on my opinion , not financial advice. I haven't  verified the numbers cited (13F details, Q3 2026 earnings, FTC settlement terms) against primary sources, so worth confirming those before acting.

The Odyssey – A Cinematic Experience That Deserves IMAX

July 24, 2026

Last Friday, my wife and I finally managed to watch The Odyssey, and honestly, just getting the tickets felt like an adventure in itself. Every IMAX show was either sold out or nearly full, so when we finally found seats, it already felt like we were about to witness something special. By the time the credits rolled, I completely understood the hype.

Watching this film in IMAX is non-negotiable. The scale, the sound, and the visuals make every frame feel larger than life. There were several moments where I genuinely forgot I was sitting in a theater because the world on screen felt so immersive.

What impressed me the most wasn't just the spectacle but how every scene seemed carefully crafted. The storm at sea was breathtaking, the combination of the cinematography, sound design, and the overwhelming power of nature made it unforgettable. I also loved the quieter scenes where Odysseus reflects on his journey. Those moments slowed everything down just enough to remind you that this wasn't only an epic adventure but also a deeply human story about perseverance, sacrifice, and finding your way home.

The production design deserves a special mention. Every location looked authentic, and the practical effects blended seamlessly with the visual effects. Nothing felt excessive; everything served the story. That's a rare achievement in modern filmmaking.

As someone who simply loves great cinema, I walked away appreciating the incredible amount of craftsmanship behind every frame. You don't need to be a film expert to recognize the artistry. It's the kind of movie that reminds you why people still line up for the theatrical experience.

If you're planning to watch The Odyssey, do yourself a favor and see it in IMAX. It's one of those films that deserves the biggest screen possible. For me, it wasn't just another movie, it was a cinematic experience, and sheer brilliance from start to finish.