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Tuesday, August 18

Tuesday, August 18, 2026

Everything we published on this day.

36 stories — the front page that day →

@OddDiligence 1 click

Odd Diligence on X

$NTWO new DA with FORT Robotics, $500M EV, current price $11.17 ($10.78 NAV value for the SPAC) They build hardware and software for robotics to make them safe to operate - whereas CCXI (Agility Robotics) directly builds humanoids FORT Robotics partners with NVIDIA and Google. PIPE with Tiger Global, Prologis Ventures, Mark Cuban SPAC has 17.25M float. 6M shares traded so far- good start towards churning the arbs https://t.co/nHFAVGwnlQ (im heavy long both ccxi + ntwo)
@convequity

Convequity on X

The $3T “hidden AI debt” number is not the story WSJ just put a headline on the shadow capex we’ve been tracking for a while. Purchase commitments + leases that have not started. Most of it never hits the balance sheet. The $3T is real. The interpretation is not. Add the explicit debt-like items on the books of $GOOGL $MSFT $META $AMZN and you get ~1.69x. Widen the definition to implicit / off-book instruments and it can balloon to 8.36x — approaching that $3T figure. That is the chart. It is not the economics. 1. Most of this is contract value, not a hard legal obligation to pay. A lot of it is pay-as-you-go. The commitments they actually have to fund already sit on the balance sheet. 2. The implicit load is shared. It is spread across financial players — private credit and equity — who are underwriting the build. Their IRRs are not insane. Current ROIC on this spend is still high. This is not a bubble from here. 3. AI ROIC can compress later. I would not be surprised. Near-term it is more likely to stay elevated or even rise. Compute is still short. Efficiency gains are raising, not lowering, the value of each incremental GPU-hour. 4. What the hyperscalers are actually doing: paying a bit more, accepting a slightly lower margin, and sharing a slice of the economics with investors who want the risk. That is risk offload, not hidden leverage. The cleaner setup is still the player that can keep building more capacity internally without leaning as hard on this structure. SpaceX is the extreme version of that. It also means more profit pass-through to the specialized GPU clouds sitting in the middle of this: $IREN $NBIS $CRWV and others. The $3T is a real number. Treating it as imminent balance-sheet stress is the wrong read. Pictures below are snapshots from our AI Bubble Barometer.

Over Target

Ukraine’s Black Sea attacks on CPC infrastructure threaten Kazakhstan’s 1.4 million bpd oil export route through Russia, putting Chevron’s…

CVX $416B
Doomberg 1 click

ContextLogic

ContextLogic’s US Salt holds about 23% of the US and Canadian pharmaceutical-grade salt market, one of only two suppliers, supporting…

LOGC $691M
Kairos Research 1 click

Revisiting Veeva #2

Veeva plans Falcon agents for pharmacovigilance, clinical-trial documents and regulatory writing, targeting multibillion-dollar…

VEEV $46B
Lewistown Capital 1 click

Cashing In on the OTC

Table Trac (TBTC), a $22 million casino-software provider, trades at 4.7x EV/EBIT as maintenance revenue from 300-plus casinos compounds…

TBTC $24M
Deep Value Insights 1 click

Boston Scientific (BSX): New Position

Boston Scientific’s Farapulse competition and weaker Watchman demand have slowed growth, prompting a $2 billion buyback, restructuring and…

BSX $61B
Aurelion Research 2 clicks

Jumia

Jumia’s January 2028 $7/$15 call spread risks $1.15 for up to $6.85 if cost cuts and marketplace growth deliver adjusted EBITDA and…

JMIA $866M
Triple S Special Situations Investing 14 clicks