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
10/04/2026 · Kanchan
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.
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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.
09/21/2026
Tanker Stocks in 2026: Record Profits, Near-$1 Million-a-Day Rates, and Whether It Is Too Late to Buy
Six listed tanker companies earned $1.83 billion in Q2 2026, 5.6 times a year earlier, as the Strait of Hormuz crisis pushed VLCC rates to records. Five of the six stocks now sit within 2% of their 52-week highs. We read the filings and ask whether the boom is already priced in.
09/20/2026
Reading BRICS Like a Risk Manager: Why Dollar Diversification Is a Model-Risk Problem for U.S. Financial Markets
BRICS is not replacing the dollar. The more consequential question is whether a more diversified global financial system could make yesterday's risk assumptions less reliable.
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Financial Gurkha · New York City · Est. 2022