Blog Dispatches
45 dispatches
Signal from the terminal.
Product notes, market observations, and company milestones. Written by the team building Convexity.
Anthropic will slow down only while it is ahead
Its scaling policy promises to delay development 'until and unless we no longer believe we have a significant lead.' The essay proposing an industry slowdown arrived five days before its prospectus, and the cost it would save sits below a reported 80% gross margin.
Read the dispatchThe archive
44 earlier dispatches
Missile contracts not yet final drove RTX's backlog jump
RTX's defense backlog rose $45 billion in the third quarter to $164 billion, and about $37 billion of it was two undefinitized Tomahawk and AMRAAM contracts. The Pentagon obligated $154 million of AMRAAM's $20.7 billion ceiling at award.
The ACA's 2027 price rise lands on full-price buyers
ACA insurers asked for a median 15% premium rise for 2027. Tax credits absorb most of it for 87% of enrollees; buyers without one pay all of it. In 2026 there were 3.1 million of them, up from 1.9 million.
Bending Spoons' real product is the next acquisition
Bending Spoons grew revenue 126% last quarter and 3% organically. Inside the Milan firm Berkshire Hathaway just backed again: its playbook, cuts and debt.
Fuel, not demand, cut Delta's profit forecast
Delta cut its 2026 EPS guide to $5.10–$5.60 from $6.50–$7.50 and blamed jet fuel. Its own numbers agree: fuel added about $2 billion since July. The cut was about $1.4 billion before tax, and fares are catching up a quarter late.
OpenAI's suppliers are paid from the smaller number
OpenAI's revenue run rate is near $50 billion, not $70 billion. Microsoft, Amazon and CoreWeave filings show $406 billion of OpenAI commitments, about eight years of that revenue.
Costco's tariff refund goes to whoever shops next
Costco got $184 million of tariff refunds in its fourth quarter, spent about half on price cuts and kept the rest. Four lawsuits say it belongs to members.
Food makers lost volume, and the price rises are next
Twelve packaged food makers reported between August 20 and October 6. Volume fell at seven of the nine that state it, and only three of those raised prices. Now Campbell's and Conagra are raising prices they expect to cost more volume.
Accenture is buying half of next year's growth
Accenture beat its own fourth-quarter range and its stock jumped 16%, then gave back more than half. Its fiscal 2027 outlook of 3% to 6% includes 2 to 2.5 points from acquisitions, so organic growth slows even with a federal drag gone.
Nike's turnaround is scheduled for fiscal 2029
Nike's first quarter without its tariff refund raised gross margin 60 basis points on logistics and currency. It guides revenue down high-single digits, and says most of Pace's savings arrive in fiscal 2029 and 2030.
Micron locked in the memory boom just as it slowed
Micron's DRAM price gains fell from the low 60s to the high teens percent in a quarter, while it raised take-or-pay contracts from 16 to 26 and took $12.3 billion of customer deposits.
The AI buildout borrowed long, and the long end repriced
The 30-year Treasury yield ended September above its 2007 high. On that move alone, $244 billion of fixed-rate hyperscaler bonds sold since 2025 are worth about $17.5 billion less.
Holtec needed its IPO far more than Oura did
In September more first-time IPO filers withdrew than priced. Oura's offering would have left Oura $6.2 million; Holtec's would have left Holtec $775.2 million.
Monzo is the opposite of the bank Nubank built
Monzo earned more from Bank of England reserves than from its borrowers last year, and 6.9% on equity. Nubank's loans are 87% of its deposits; it earns 33%.
The AI buildout's biggest bill is not on the balance sheet
Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Oracle and CoreWeave: $606.9 billion of capex in four quarters, and $1.15 trillion of leases signed but not started. Company by company, from the filings.
CoreWeave borrows faster than its backlog pays
CoreWeave's backlog reached $103.7 billion. In the first half it borrowed $16.7 billion against $3.7 billion of operating cash, pays about a quarter of revenue in interest, and on September 17 went back to the market.
Holtec is selling a reactor business it does not have yet
Holtec markets a 47 gigawatt pipeline and concedes it has no binding SMR orders and no agreed delivery dates. Meanwhile 76% of its first-half pre-tax income was investment returns, not operations.
Lennar's lower incentives are not a housing recovery
Lennar's incentive rate fell to 12.0%, but orders fell 9% and sold for 2% less than a year ago. Mortgage rates hit 6.95% in the week the Fed raised rates.
The first AI breakout was not a disclosable event
Gemini reached the live systems of three real companies in May. Irregular told Google in late July. The public found out on September 18, after a reporter asked, and no company filed anything.
Cybersecurity is paid in warnings
OpenAI published six misalignment reports and cybersecurity stocks fell. The sector's best session, worth 8.6 points, carried no disclosure at all.
Oracle's bondholders had a different quarter
Oracle's Form 10-Q marks its $125.0 billion of borrowings at $105.7 billion. The gap widened by $5.6 billion in three months, in a quarter when Oracle issued no new debt at all and sold $19.9 billion of stock.
The tariff refund stayed in adjusted earnings
Of 45 S&P 500 companies that booked a tariff refund and report adjusted earnings, 35 left it in. At Target it was $1.65 of the $4.11 in adjusted EPS.
Lululemon's beat was a tariff refund
Earnings of $2.92 against $2.51 expected. The refund contributed $0.86 of it, so the underlying quarter missed by $0.45, and Americas comparable sales fell 12%, a sixth consecutive quarterly decline.
PayPal's growth plan is a shrinking share count
PayPal guides transaction margin dollars to about $15.6 billion in 2026, growth of under 1 percent, while targeting double-digit earnings per share growth. At $6 billion of annual buybacks, net income can fall 4 percent a year and per-share earnings still grow 10 percent.
Adobe's record quarter shrank its contracted future
Adobe's Q3 FY2026 revenue was a record $6.76 billion, up 13%. Remaining performance obligations fell to $22.16 billion, the first second-to-third-quarter decline in the eight years Adobe has disclosed the figure. Net new ARR was $400 million.
Oracle's record cash quarter is half a customer loan
Operating cash flow was $23.1 billion, up 184%. Of that, $11.4 billion was a customer prepayment Oracle's own accounting note calls a financing. Capital spending was $28.5 billion.
Oura's $924 million loss went to its own shareholders
Oura's IPO filing shows $1.09 billion of preferred stock repurchased in nine months, against $328 million of cash from operations. The company was profitable throughout.
The memory cycle is the AI trade
SanDisk's cost of revenue fell while its revenue rose 372%. Dell and Broadcom both told investors the binding constraint on the AI buildout is not silicon but memory. The capex story is being told without the part that is actually scarce.
Palo Alto guided its run rate in half
Net new security ARR was nearly $1 billion in the fourth quarter. The first quarter of next year is guided to $440 million, and the whole of next year to $2.0 billion.
Dell's margin recovered and its cash did not
Gross margin came back to 20.9% and the note we published that morning was wrong about it. Operating cash flow fell 13% on revenue that rose 58%, and inventories doubled in six months.
Broadcom is arranging the money to buy its own chips
AI bookings were over $30 billion against $10.8 billion shipped. On the same call, Broadcom announced a vehicle with Apollo and Blackstone to fund customers who its CEO says would otherwise have difficulty affording its technology.
Dell's growth is diluting its own margin
Gross margin has fallen from 23.7% to 17.8% over five quarters. In the same period one customer went from under 10% of revenue to 12%, or about $13.6 billion, and Dell does not name it.
Palo Alto is buying growth faster than it earns it
The company reports 60% ARR growth and, to its credit, discloses that organic growth was 28%. Non-GAAP earnings per share grew 6%, and the diluted share count rose by 94 million after two years of not moving at all.
Oracle is funding 2031 revenue with 2026 debt
Remaining performance obligations reached $638 billion, and the share converting within a year fell from 33% to 12%. Free cash flow was negative $23.7 billion.
The AI revenue war's biggest numbers are not revenue
Three hyperscalers reported June-quarter results dominated by marking up private AI labs. Alphabet's unrealized gain on one company it declines to name was $77.4 billion, three times Google Cloud's revenue for the quarter.
Nvidia is now the credit behind its own demand
Revenue of $96.2 billion, guidance above consensus, and a 10-Q carrying $108.5 billion of guarantees the press release never mentions. Operating cash flow fell 52% in the quarter while operating income rose 19%.
Archer paid a fifth of itself for an estimate
Archer is paying 19.75% of itself and no cash. The $200 million revenue headline covers Insitu alone and rests partly on estimates, per a single footnote.
America's housing correction doesn't look like one
Median prices are up 2% on paper and falling in real terms. Builders are cutting while sellers hold out, and a third of Case-Shiller metros are already negative.
The market repriced AppLovin, not its earnings
Revenue grew 53% and adjusted EBITDA margin reached 84%. The stock fell about 20%, taking the multiple below where it sat on a fifth of today's earnings.
SanDisk's backlog is not the reason to own it
A beat-and-raise got a 3.5% haircut. SanDisk trades at 7.25 times the run rate it just guided, and the $41.6 billion of contracted revenue everyone points at is one year of revenue spread over about seven.
Palantir's moat and its ceiling are the same thing
Palantir grew 93% and stopped diluting shareholders for the first time in five years. Its international revenue grew 34%. Both facts have the same cause, and only one of them is in the release.
Bloom Energy's best quarter is its least convincing
A record billion-dollar quarter, and an amended 10-Q filed the next morning showing 73% of it came from one counterparty. Contracted future revenue rose by $1.5 million.
T1 Energy: right company, wrong time, not enough money
Every dollar of T1's 2025 gross profit was a Section 45X credit, and then some. Its only customer is the company that sold it the factory. A narrower bet than the bull case describes, and one unclosed fab financing decides it.
The State of the AI Industry, Mid-2026
A long, data-heavy field report on where AI actually sits at mid-2026: capabilities, the money, compute and power, adoption reality, the competitive board, governance, labor, and the bubble question.
Introducing Convexity
One terminal for primary-source market data, an AI research layer, and the tools to act on both. Here is what we are building and why.