Week 8 · 2025-02-17 → 2025-02-23 · 10 newsletters
Late-Cycle Quiet and the Practice of Showing Up
late-cycle-markets · the-practice-of-showing-up · teach-by-doing
A thin inbox week. Nine emails across seven days, no breaking news thread, no industry consensus event. The writing that landed broke into three honest clusters: two value-leaning market writers staring at a late-cycle tape and asking what to do about it, three writers making the case for showing up to a craft even when the results lag, and three teach-by-doing posts at the micro level on networking, subnets, and linguistics. The cluster I would have expected this week, the M&A story, showed up only in passing: Capital One and Discover got their shareholder vote.
Late-Cycle Markets: The Value Investor's Bind
Two of the week's strongest pieces came from writers who run the same playbook from opposite sides of the trade. The Stonkstack opened with the line that anyone watching this market has muttered to themselves: "What the hell am I supposed to buy now?" AI stocks at 30x sales, IPOs doubling on day one, profitless companies at billion-dollar valuations, and the bargains that appeared after the 2020 COVID correction are mostly gone. The Stonkstack's answer is to lean into special situations the way Buffett did in his partnership years, when traditional value plays got crowded out and he needed a strategy that was not tethered to the market's every move. The framing is right. The execution is the harder part.
The Last Bear Standing ran "Four Shorts," and the setup is the more interesting one of the two. For months, the column has flagged a recurring profile: negligible revenues, major losses, grand narratives built on unproven technology, massive price appreciation over the past four months. Names that surf the same speculative wave, fueled by options leverage and post-election euphoria, with nothing fundamental linking them except the wave itself. Until this week, the column stopped short of recommending readers fade the hype, on the reasonable theory that standing in front of a crazy train is a bad idea so long as it stays on the rails. This week the tone shifts. The charts are breaking down. The rocket has exhausted its fuel. These are now actionable short opportunities.
The companion piece, sitting awkwardly inside the market thread, was Fintech Compliance Chronicles on the Capital One / Discover shareholder vote. 99.8% approval at Capital One representing 85.1% of outstanding shares, 99.3% at Discover representing 81.6%. The numbers are unusually high, and for comparison a recent Ohio regional bank merger only got 85 and 65 percent. Zarik Khan reads it as a vote of confidence in the deal. The regulatory road is still the harder one, but the equity-holder verdict on the largest US card-issuer combination in a generation is in.
The take: Stonkstack and Last Bear Standing are reading the same tape and giving the same diagnosis from opposite chairs. The market is priced for perfection in the stocks that have a story and broken in the stocks that do not, and the value-investor toolkit of margin-of-safety and fundamental-discount does not have a clean answer for either. The honest read of the week is that the people who got rich in this cycle are not the people running the discount-to-intrinsic-value spreadsheet, and the people running that spreadsheet are either pivoting to special situations or starting to short. The CapOne deal is the kind of event the next twelve months will be remembered for, even if the week barely noticed.
The Practice of Showing Up: Three Writers, One Argument
Alec McNayr wrote the post of the week, and it is a post about loss rates. Fifteen months of monthly attendance at The Moth's live storytelling events in Los Angeles. Eleven shows bought, name in the hat at every one, five stage slots actually pulled. Seventeen names for ten spots. Forty-two names for ten spots. Thirty-three for ten. The framing he uses, paraphrasing Ira Glass, is that he is in the gap between taste and execution, where you can see what good looks like but you cannot yet make it. The discipline is to keep buying the ticket. The lesson is that the change happens beneath the surface, and the audit is whether you are still putting your name in the hat after a year of mixed odds. That is the kind of practice essay that earns its slot.
Abby Falik at Taking Flight ran the institutional version of the same instinct: Flight School applications are open for the second cohort, and the founding Fellows from sixteen countries are now nine months into the year. The pitch is for high school seniors who are searching for meaning beyond traditional metrics of success, and the early-decision deadline is March 15. What gives the post weight is the year-of-evidence she has now, not the original vision deck. The Flight School is past the speculative phase. It exists, the Fellows are doing the work, and the second cohort is the test of whether the model scales.
Gabby Lord at omglord ran the quietest version of the same idea, on journaling as drain-the-brain practice. The setup is Baader-Meinhof: she has been seeing journaling mentioned everywhere lately and reads it as a sign to get back to it. The case she makes is the one any committed journaler will recognize: an extremely effective act of self-care, one of the cheapest available, and the thing that quiets the head noise most reliably. It is a short post and it does not strain to be more than it is.
The take: McNayr, Falik, and Lord are running three different scales of the same argument, that the work is in the showing up and the audit happens later. McNayr's loss rate, 5 stage slots out of 11 tickets against fields of 17 to 42 names, is the version of this argument that has teeth, because he is naming the actual odds and refusing to pretend the practice is yielding linear progress. That is the read worth keeping from the week.
Teach-by-Doing: Three Posts at the Micro Level
The remaining cluster is three teach-by-doing posts at very different levels of abstraction. Ami Vora at The Hard Parts of Growth made the introvert's case for networking: use common work tasks like recruiting as a relationship-building wrapper, with the soft opener "I know you are probably happy where you are, but it would be great to meet for the future"; say yes to cross-group collaborations as peacetime relationship investments; set hard counting goals at events like "I am going to talk with twelve new people before I leave." The frame is honest. She hates networking, the entire idea makes her shudder, and the tactics are the ones an introvert actually uses to operate in a world that demands the skill anyway.
Aditya Bhargava at Ducktyped continued his AWS-in-cartoons series with "Old man yells at subnets," a chapter on internet gateways, subnets, and the dance required to actually connect an EC2 instance to the internet. The voice is the asset. Most cloud documentation reads like compliance copy, and Bhargava is writing the version that has a sense of humor about the artificial complexity, calling the internet gateway "like the Gateway of India, but online." The teach-by-doing gold standard is that the reader walks away with the working mental model, not the impression of expertise, and this hits.
Lingthusiasm hit the milestone-numbered 101st episode by running the Linguistics 101 sweep: sounds and handshapes up through morphemes, words, sentences, and discourse, with the cross-cutting subfields layered on top: historical linguistics, child language acquisition, fieldwork, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics. The hook is the analogy to nature education, where you start with the charismatic megafauna like cats and dogs and elephants before you ever zoom in to cells or out to ecosystems. Words are the charismatic megafauna of language, or as they offer, the "charismatic megaverba," and most people stay there. The episode is the on-ramp for the curious to push past the comfortable middle level.
The take: the three teach-by-doing posts share a quality the market posts and the practice posts do not. The author is not trying to be wise about their subject. They are trying to make the next person's path through it shorter. That is a different kind of essay and a different kind of newsletter discipline, and a sparse week is the right time to notice it.
Three Takeaways from the Week
The market posts agree on the diagnosis and disagree on the prescription. Stonkstack pivots to special situations because the value plays are crowded. Last Bear Standing pivots to outright shorts because the speculative names are finally breaking. The intersection point is that the conventional discount-to-intrinsic-value playbook does not have an answer for late February 2025, and the writers worth following this quarter are the ones admitting it out loud.
The practice posts are the better read for the week. Alec McNayr's 5-of-11 ratio at The Moth is the most useful artifact in the inbox because it names the actual odds of a craft practice and refuses to dress them up. The frame transfers cleanly to any creative or professional practice where the loss rate is structurally high and the only honest move is to keep showing up. That is the take to carry past the week.
If you only revisit three pieces from the week, I would suggest Alec McNayr on showing up at The Moth for the cleanest practice essay, The Last Bear Standing on "Four Shorts" for the cleanest read on where the speculative bubble actually sits, and Aditya Bhargava's "Old man yells at subnets" for the cleanest teach-by-doing voice of the year so far. A thin week is a good week to read the writers who are not straining for relevance.