Apparently, industrial demand – particularly from those solar panel things (photovoltaic cells, they’re called) – is the really important bit. Who knew? Here’s a breakdown, in case you’re keeping score (I am. I have a spreadsheet. It’s colour-coded):
On the 16th of February, amidst the cacophony of the social media platform X, Hougan, with the élan of a man who has dined with both bulls and bears, declared his optimism for the current crypto cycle. “The myopic souls who equate this winter with the winters of 2018 or 2022,” he intoned, “have evidently forgotten the lessons of those bygone eras. In 2018, we were but infants, clutching our $3,000 bitcoins and dreaming of a ‘global computer’ that could scarcely compute. In 2022, the sky itself seemed to collapse, and the regulators, those modern-day dragons, breathed fire upon our fragile ecosystem.”
The Q4 numbers weren’t pretty. Revenue down 26% year-over-year to around $1.3 billion. It’s a bit like going to a party and realizing you’ve accidentally worn two different shoes. Awkward. And yes, they lost money. A lot of money. But, and this is where it gets interesting, the losses weren’t quite as bad as the analysts feared. A small victory, I suppose. Like finding a tenner in an old coat pocket. It doesn’t solve your problems, but it’s a nice surprise.
Taiwan Semiconductor, as its name suggests, is not merely a manufacturer of silicon, but a weaver of the very fabric of our digital existence. It is the unseen hand that shapes the logic of machines, the silent partner in the creation of artificial intelligences that may, one day, surpass our own. To understand its power is to glimpse the underlying architecture of reality itself. Recent reports – meticulously compiled, I assure you – indicate a revenue increase of 26% in the final quarter of 2025, with high-performance computing – the domain of these nascent intelligences – accounting for a significant 55% of its earnings. The margins, too, are noteworthy – 62.3% gross, 54% operating – suggesting a company that has mastered not merely production, but the art of extracting value from the ephemeral currents of technological progress.
The cause, it seems, is not a failure of yield, but a deliberate sowing. Management speaks of an extraordinary outlay – two hundred billion dollars committed to the earth, a vast irrigation project for future growth. Artificial intelligence is the promised bloom, and the expenditure, a necessary deepening of the roots. The market, however, views this with a caution bordering on skepticism. It is a familiar dance – the tension between present harvest and the promise of a future, more abundant yield. They see the cost of the tending, not the beauty of the eventual flower.
By the closing of the market, the price had ascended by more than three percent, a figure which, while perhaps insignificant to the detached observer, represents fortunes gained and lost, dreams realized and dashed, for those whose lives are bound to the fate of this singular enterprise.
Rigetti Computing, a name now echoing through the halls of speculative finance, embodies this precarious hope. They fashion themselves as pioneers in this nascent field, building not merely machines, but a potential future. They possess a fabrication facility, a testament to ambition, and a programming language, Quil, born of necessity. They even offer access to their quantum capacity, a cloud-borne offering to those willing to gamble on the unrealized. It is a complete, self-contained ecosystem…a fragile one, perhaps, but complete nonetheless.
On February 16, our friend Saylor took to the social media platform X (not to be confused with the letter itself, which has done nothing to deserve such a fate) to respond to Dalio’s alarming claim about the unraveling of the world order established after the last great kerfuffle. In his infinite wisdom, Saylor championed Bitcoin as an asset devoid of counterparty exposure, like a well-buttered crumpet left out in the rain.
Amidst the gloom of XRP’s price, which plummets like a stone into the abyss, the ledger’s assets flourish, a paradox as bewildering as a poet’s muse.
Brookfield Corporation (BN 0.02%), Blackstone, and Apollo Global Management. These are the names the financial magazines throw around, the ones that make my head spin. They all seem to be doing quite well, outperforming the S&P 500 for the past five years. Brookfield, specifically, has seen a 106.6% gain. Blackstone, a more modest 85%. And Apollo, a rather exuberant 143% since 2021. It’s enough to make a person consider taking up fruitcake investing.