My decision to begin reading Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain was inspired, at least in part, by my late father. I have a distinct childhood memory of him reading this enormous book and, perhaps even more vividly, of the satisfaction he took in having finished it.
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One of the great challenges of investing is resisting the temptation to reduce a complex world to a single explanation. We crave narratives because they make decision-making easier. Interest rates are rising because inflation is rising. Apartment values are falling because the Federal Reserve raised rates.
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The Memory Bottleneck: When the Cheapest Component Became the Most Expensive Constraint
For decades, memory was the quiet enabler of technological progress.
It got cheaper every year.
Faster every year.
More abundant every year.
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On Energy, Empire, and the Seductive Power of Coherent Stories
One of the most intoxicating human capacities is pattern recognition.
It is the engine of intelligence, the source of insight, and the reason we survive complexity at all. But it is also the birthplace of our most confident errors—especially when patterns begin to feel inevitable.
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Last week was quite busy, so for this post, I decided to turn to Copilot to help me produce the output. Over the past year, our acquisitions at CWS have been heavily concentrated on properties in the Houston area. Of course,
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The last few weeks have been brutal for software stocks. Words like carnage, panic, and even “SaaSpocalypse” have crept into investor vocabulary as shares of companies long viewed as durable compounders—Salesforce,
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“Freedom is just another word for nothin’ left to lose.”
– Kris Kristofferson “Me and Bobby McGee”
I hope you had a wonderful end of 2025 and start to 2026.
Like most people,
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Gary Carmell
Posted in A.I., Apartments, Economy, Interest Rates, News, Personal, Tennis, Travel
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If there’s one word that keeps returning to me this year, it’s “woah.” Not the “woe” of victimhood, but the woah of awe—the inhale that invites presence, humility, and gratitude. 2025 brought plenty of reasons to pause: service that nourished the soul,
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Rather than laboriously going through the Fed statement released after it cut rates by 25 basis points last week, along with Jay Powell’s key statements at his press conference, I thought I would turn to one of my A.I. assistants to produce an analysis of what was said and how investors reacted to last week’s move.
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It’s been awhile since I have had a blog post with a lot of charts and graphs. This is largely because my typical source for these, www.thedailyshot, had been off line for a long period of time.
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