A Deliberate Staging: Bond Allocation in Troubled Times

The filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission details the acquisition of 653,537 shares during the final quarter of the past year. A modest addition to the holdings of Kirr Marbach, yet a signal, however faint, of a shift in perspective. This is not a panicked flight to safety, nor a reckless pursuit of yield, but a measured attempt to inoculate a portfolio against the inevitable vicissitudes of the market.

ARM: A Most Unlikely Beneficiary

This is not entirely surprising. The prevailing narrative of artificial intelligence, so relentlessly trumpeted, had already priced in Arm’s potential. The company’s strength, of course, lies in its power efficiency – a quality increasingly valued in the data centres that now house this digital leviathan. (Amazon‘s Graviton5, a processor of decidedly unromantic nomenclature, illustrates the point: a 30% improvement in performance coupled with a 30% reduction in cost. A neat trick, if one can overlook the vulgarity of such demonstrable efficiency.)

Bond Ladders & My Growing Sense of Impending Doom

They bought 226,705 shares of BSCT. That’s a lot of shares. The transaction went down on January 26th, which feels like a lifetime ago in market years. The price was based on the fourth quarter of 2025, which, when you think about it, is practically ancient history. I spent a good ten minutes trying to remember what I had for breakfast that day, and failed miserably. It’s unsettling how quickly things become irrelevant.

Logitech’s Numbers: A Fleeting Respite

The consensus forecast, so readily available to those who traffic in such things, anticipated earnings of $1.81 per share on sales of $1.41 billion. Logitech, with a display of competence that borders on the unsettling, delivered $1.93 per share on sales of $1.42 billion. A rounding error, perhaps, but a positive one. One wonders if the analysts are entirely fulfilling their function.

Sprink’s Sale: A Mildly Ominous Sign?

The details, as always, are…dense. A table, naturally. I always think of tables as a passive-aggressive way for companies to say, “We’re providing transparency, but good luck making sense of it.” Apparently, this wasn’t a sudden, panicked sell-off. It was a pre-planned thing, a “Rule 10b5-1 trading plan.” Which sounds suspiciously like a loophole designed to make rich people feel less guilty. The numbers, stripped of all drama, are these: he sold, reducing his direct holdings by 7.23% to 159,126 shares. He still has a decent stash, and about 2,085 shares indirectly. It’s like watching someone slowly, methodically empty a cookie jar. You know they’ll stop eventually, but the process is… unsettling.

Oracle: A Cloud Bloom in Silicon

Oracle, once synonymous with relational databases—a phrase that now feels deliciously archaic—has discovered a peculiar aptitude for high-performance computing. It’s a niche, certainly, but one that resonates with a certain clientele—those who demand not just processing power, but a certain… finesse. A computational ballet, if you will. And this, naturally, has not gone unnoticed. The recent $300 billion arrangement with OpenAI—a sum that, when uttered, feels suspiciously like a whispered conspiracy—has, predictably, inflated their backlog to a rather imposing $523 billion. A number that, when contemplated, resembles a slowly unfurling scroll of future revenue.

REITs: A Mostly Harmless Investment?

Historically – and we’re talking over timescales that make geological epochs seem like a quick lunch break – REITs have, on average, outperformed the S&P 500. We’re talking annual returns in the 11% to 12% range over 25 to 52 years. The S&P 500, meanwhile, has been chugging along at a respectable, but comparatively modest, high single-digit pace. This suggests that, if you’re planning for the long haul – say, the next few millennia – REITs might be the slightly less improbable option.

Dividend Dynamos: Two Stocks Aiming for the Trillion-Dollar Funny Farm

Visa. Now there’s a name that conjures images of…well, spending money. Which, let’s be honest, is the American pastime. They won’t even need seven years to hit a trillion, I suspect. Currently sitting at a respectable $623 billion, they’d only need a compound annual growth rate of 7%. That’s practically a stroll in the park for a company that essentially controls the world’s plastic. Visa isn’t just a payment processor; they’re the gatekeepers of consumerism! They take a tiny slice of every swipe, tap, and online purchase. It’s a beautiful, ruthless business. Like a very polite, financially savvy pirate.

The Index and the Algorithm: A Cautionary Tale

Now, these funds, these Exchange Traded Things – ETFs, they call them – are generally quite sensible. But there’s a creeping imbalance, a subtle shift in the magical energies that govern the market, and it’s all down to the tech giants. It’s not that they’re bad, you understand. It’s just… a lot of the index is now, shall we say, enthusiastically populated by companies whose business models involve convincing people they need things they didn’t know existed five minutes ago.