Independent Markets Research · Est. 2022
Financial
Gurkha
Equity valuations, macro analysis, and market coverage — researched, written, and filed from Wall Street, New York.
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Featured Analysis
10/12/2026 · Market Review
Britain's Welfare Bill Is Breaking the Budget — and the Bond Market Has Noticed
The OBR has welfare spending rising from £245 billion to £328 billion in six years. Borrowing is overshooting, the 10-year gilt yields 5.5%, and the IFS says the Chancellor needs £36 billion of tax rises or welfare cuts by October 28. How Britain compares to France — the welfare state that outspends everyone — and the rest of the G7.
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10/10/2026
Record Stocks, 24-Year-High Yields: Which Market Is Wrong?
The S&P 500 closed at a record the same week the 10-year Treasury yield hit its highest level since 2002. Both markets cannot be right for long, and how this standoff resolves matters for investors, banks and households alike.
10/04/2026
Physical AI: The Brain and the Body Have Become Their Own Markets
Humanoid robot brains may get their GPT-3 moment by mid-2027. The money is already moving: Physical Intelligence is raising at $11 billion, Skild AI sits above $14 billion, and Spirit AI has robots working on CATL production lines today. Meanwhile the unglamorous bottlenecks — power, thermal, electrical infrastructure — are where deployment scale will be won or lost. This is the first installment of our Physical AI research section.
10/03/2026
The 30-Year Hit a 2002 High. Why Didn't Wall Street Panic?
A new systemic-risk measure, Systemic Tail Episode Risk (STER), explains the difference between a bond-market shock and a financial crisis, and identifies what U.S. regulators and risk managers should watch next.
10/02/2026
600 Years of Capitalism: Reading the Review of Sven Beckert’s Global History
Financial Gurkha Spotlight Book of October is Harvard historian Sven Beckert’s Capitalism: A Global History (Penguin Press, 2025, 1,087 pages), through Bennett Baumer’s review in The Indypendent #306. Beckert dates capitalism’s birth to a “great connecting” between roughly 1450 and 1640, and argues it was global before it had a name. We read The Indypendent review, test its argument, and add a question: what happened to the dollar and the pound during the panic of 1873?
09/29/2026
Anthropic at $2 Trillion: The IPO Has to Beat a 5.56% Treasury First
Anthropic, the maker of Claude, is preparing a Nasdaq IPO that could value it at more than $2 trillion, twice its $965 billion private valuation from May. Its revenue run rate has passed $65 billion, and it projects $190 billion to $200 billion of revenue in 2028. But with the 30-year Treasury yielding 5.56% and 13-week bills at 4.21%, a $2 trillion price has to eventually earn about $111 billion a year just to match a risk-free bond. Here is what the prospectus shows, what the company is worth privately, and where NVIDIA and its record $150 billion buyback fit in.
09/26/2026
The Bond Market's Bad Week Was an Episode, Not a Day: Why VaR Can't See It
The 10-year Treasury yield reached 5.23% this week, its highest since 2007, through a connected run of bad days rather than one shock. Value-at-Risk and Expected Shortfall cannot tell that run apart from the same losses scattered across a quarter. A new working paper proposes Tail Episode Risk (TER) and Conditional TER (CTER) to measure the worst connected run of extreme losses. Tested on 26 years of data across six markets, it finds that Treasury episodes are the most predictable, and that a richer forecasting model still did not beat a simple EWMA volatility baseline.
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Financial Gurkha operates from New York City. Most articles are researched and written from Wall Street and the surrounding Financial District — on the ground, at least twice a week.
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Financial Gurkha · New York City · Est. 2022