Telltales

Mike Nicoletti, Hunt Lawrence, and Jason Wallace walk this week’s Cash Flow Memo: oil averaging $90 through a Hormuz stalemate, whether Jensen Huang survives the spy story, the accounting inside Anthropic’s IPO, and whether you can run Lilly with 100 people.

The Cashflow Memo

Key Takeaways

* Hunt puts post-February oil at about $90 on average and wants the near month near $85 for a stretch to hold that average; 30 ships moved through Hormuz in a recent 24 hours (5 hit by drones) against ~20 million barrels a day of pre-war crude-plus-products flow, the 2028 strip printed $73, and he reads a st...

Recorded the day after the election, Mike Nicoletti, Hunt Lawrence, and Jason Wallace walk this week’s Cash Flow Memo: what a blue wave means for oil, the deficit, data centers and healthcare, plus the economics inside Anthropic’s S-1.

The Cashflow Memo

Key Takeaways

* Hormuz tanker traffic, increasingly refined products, is back to or slightly above its pre-war (late February) level; crude supply is off only about 2 million barrels a day (103 to 101) and demand about 1 million, yet the 2027 strip printed $89 last Thursday against $60 WTI pre-war, so Hunt expects the near month to sett...

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The Tape — W2644

Universe of 94 cashflow-memo names, snap dates 2026-10-23 → 2026-10-30. Composite is rank-sum percentile of FCF Yield + NTM Revenue Growth (higher = better balance). Banks and finance-book names shown separately.

Telltales Yield — Top 10

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This Week’s Reporters

Sector Medians

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Mike Nicoletti, Hunt Lawrence, and Jason Wallace walk this week’s Cash Flow Memo, from $90 oil and a grinding 10-year to the long-awaited Anthropic S-1, with Montana joining on how pharma will use AI.

The Cashflow Memo

Key Takeaways

* Hunt holds his $90 oil call against WTI near $100 and Brent $112 to $115: the Iran stalemate looks indefinite, Hormuz bypass pipelines are running, and US commercial stocks of products and blending components are 980 million barrels, down 50 million from end-2025; the strip runs $99 near-month, $88 for 2027 and $78 for 2028, which says producers will not sell forward, while diesel trades ne...

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The Tape — W2643

Universe of 94 cashflow-memo names, snap dates 2026-10-17 → 2026-10-23. Composite is rank-sum percentile of FCF Yield + NTM Revenue Growth (higher = better balance). Banks and finance-book names shown separately.

Telltales Yield — Top 10

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This Week’s Reporters

Sector Medians

Debt / FCF Watch (highest leverage on TTM FCF)

Weekly Price Movement

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Mike Nicoletti, Hunt Lawrence, and Jason Wallace walk this week’s Cash Flow Memo: an oil strip pricing a long Iran stalemate, a $2 trillion deficit and a rising 10-year, Europe’s food rules, SpaceX’s data center economics against Musk’s trillion-dollar talk, and Nvidia’s path to $400 billion of free cash flow.

The Cashflow Memo

Key Takeaways

* Despite the Iran war, world oil supply is off only about 2 million barrels a day because demand also fell about 1 million, and US commercial inventories are down just 34 million barrels since end-2025 on a 1 billion barrel bas...

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The Tape — W2642

Universe of 94 cashflow-memo names, snap dates 2026-10-09 → 2026-10-16. Composite is rank-sum percentile of FCF Yield + NTM Revenue Growth (higher = better balance). Banks and finance-book names shown separately.

Telltales Yield — Top 10

Telltales Yield — Bottom 10

This Week’s Reporters

Sector Medians

Debt / FCF Watch (highest leverage on TTM FCF)

Weekly Price Movement

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Mike Nicoletti, Hunt Lawrence, and Jason Wallace walk this week’s Cash Flow Memo: an oil strip pricing a long stalemate, a $2 trillion deficit and a grinding 10-year, what hyperscaler data center capex actually earns, the hyperscalers against the chipmakers, BioNTech’s cancer vaccine miss, and the FDA’s food additive loophole.

The Cashflow Memo

Key Takeaways

* The 2027 oil strip at $83 against a $93 near month leaves only $10 of backwardation (the full $20 does not show up until 2028), so the futures market is pricing the Iran and Houthi standoff as a drawn-out stalemate; the $3.30 2027 gas strip...

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The Tape — W2641

Universe of 94 cashflow-memo names, snap dates 2026-10-02 → 2026-10-09. Composite is rank-sum percentile of FCF Yield + NTM Revenue Growth (higher = better balance). Banks and finance-book names shown separately.

Telltales Yield — Top 10

Telltales Yield — Bottom 10

This Week’s Reporters

Sector Medians

Debt / FCF Watch (highest leverage on TTM FCF)

Weekly Price Movement

Top 5 (week-over-week price)

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Mike Nicoletti, Hunt Lawrence, and Jason Wallace walk this week’s Cash Flow Memo: oil stuck in triple digits, a 10-year Treasury headed toward 6%, SpaceX’s $40 billion Nvidia build, the agent threat to Apple’s App Store, and what a trillion-dollar valuation buys at Eli Lilly.

The Cashflow Memo

Key Takeaways

* SpaceX is borrowing $40 billion with Nvidia credit support for what is close to a turnkey rack build, and Mike puts SpaceX’s Nvidia spend at $180 to $280 billion next calendar year against a Street number near $400 billion for Nvidia’s fiscal 2027, so one customer c...

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The Tape — W2640

Universe of 94 cashflow-memo names, snap dates 2026-09-25 → 2026-10-02. Composite is rank-sum percentile of FCF Yield + NTM Revenue Growth (higher = better balance). Banks and finance-book names shown separately.

Telltales Yield — Top 10

Telltales Yield — Bottom 10

This Week’s Reporters

No universe names reporting in the coming 7 days.

Sector Medians

Debt / FCF Watch (highest leverage on TTM FCF)

Weekly Price Movement

Hunt, Mike, and Jason walk the Cash Flow Memo as Hormuz flows recover, the fiscal year closes near a $2 trillion deficit, and the 10-year pushes toward 6%. Then Hunt’s case that the 12 trillion-dollar tech companies compound at three times nominal GDP, what $70 billion run rates at OpenAI and Anthropic say about agents, and whether AI makes drug development cheaper for everyone or just for Lilly.

The Cashflow Memo

Key Takeaways

* Hormuz flows have recovered to roughly 15M barrels a day (vs ~20M before February) via shuttle tankers and the Saudi and Abu Dhabi by...

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Berkshire Gave Up the Quiet Exit

Berkshire’s real commitment to Lennar this month was the paperwork, more than the two hundred and twelve million dollars. On Thursday, September seventeenth, Berkshire crossed ten percent ownership of Lennar¹. Past that line the rules of owning a stock change. Every share it buys or sells now goes public within two business days, and any profit on a purchase and sale inside six months gets handed back to Lennar².

That is a strange thing for Berkshire to walk into on purp...

Hunt, Mike, and Jason walk the Cash Flow Memo with WTI near $101, a $20 discount to next year’s strip, and the 10-year above 5%. Then the data against AI job doomers, and what it would cost Meta to serve its new Muse agent at scale.

The Cashflow Memo

Key Takeaways

* Hunt holds oil flat on Exhibit C: Iranian supply has only slipped from 3.0 to 2.1 million bbl/day under embargo because domestic use absorbs it, and China’s real demand is off ~400K bbl/day (16.2 to 15.8M), not the 2-3M press figure, since the cuts...

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Read the Vesting Schedule

Amazon signed two documents with Generac on Tuesday. Everybody covered the smaller one.

The supply agreement is the small document: backup generators for Amazon data centers, initial deliveries expected to total two point four billion dollars across twenty-twenty-seven and twenty-twenty-eight. The warrant is the large one. Amazon took the right to buy about 1.7 million Generac shares at a fixed strike, roughly eighteen percent of it vesting the day it was signed. The rest vests in tranches, against — Generac’s words, in its own 8-K...

Hunt, Mike, and Jason walk the Cash Flow Memo with oil back near $100, the 10-year above 5%, and the AI labs talking about extinction. Plus notes from the All-In Summit and a Vertex update.

The Cashflow Memo

Key Takeaways

* Hunt holds oil around $90 with the 12-month strip ~$20 lower despite WTI briefly topping $100; the real squeeze is diesel (~$200/bbl globally) from Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries, Chinese product-export limits, and uninsurable Gulf product tankers.

* Gas has settled at ~$3.50 for both 2026 and 2027 as higher oil prices drive Permian associated-gas supply while power-sector demand stays...

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The Biggest AI Builder Just Chose Dilution

Four weeks ago the argument in this column was that the AI buildout had turned into a credit trade — that what prices the complex from here is whether somebody else’s lender says yes. Oracle answered the question this week, in a filing, and the answer was not a lender. It was the shareholders.

Start with the numbers everybody quoted. Oracle earned a record twenty-three billion dollars of operating cash in the quarter and spent twenty-eight and a half billion...

Hunt, Mike, and Jason walk the Cash Flow Memo across an escalating Iran-US oil standoff, the widening federal deficit, a wave of new AI agent products from xAI and Meta, and a Montana law reshaping the economics of cancer immunotherapy.

The Cashflow Memo

Key Takeaways

* Iran-US tensions escalated in the Persian Gulf (US Navy sinking Iranian shadow fleet tankers after a failed missile strike on the USS Abraham Lincoln) and pushed Brent over $100 intraday, but Hunt reads the ~$20 12-month backwardation as the market pricing de-escalation and holds his call that oil isn’t su...

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ONEOK Bought a Ratio

ONEOK announced a four-point-four-billion-dollar acquisition last weekend and raised nine billion dollars to pay for it. The gap between those two numbers is the story, and it is not what the headlines carried. Four-point-four billion buys Brazos Midstream’s Permian gathering and processing assets. Five billion retires debt¹. Page ten of the Cash Flow Memo carries ONEOK at about thirty-three billion dollars of net debt², so five billion is a real dent. The interesting part is which five billion, and what replaced it.

Start w...

Hunt, Mike, and Jason walk the Cash Flow Memo across energy, the federal balance sheet, and healthcare, joined by Montana in San Diego for a deep session on cancer vaccines and how immunotherapy actually works. Nvidia’s quarter and the robotaxi launches close the show.

The Cashflow Memo

Key Takeaways

* The hydrocarbon squeeze has moved from crude to products: with Hormuz closed and Ukrainian drones hitting Russian refineries, the crack spread on No. 2 oil (diesel and heating oil) is running about $80 against a normal all-product spread of $20 to $25.

* Natural gas is pin...

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The Bid Was the Business

PayPal spent the summer being priced by a buyer rather than by a business, and on Friday it found out which of the two it actually had. Advent and Stripe abandoned an approach that had run to roughly fifty-three billion dollars, a deal that would have ranked among the largest leveraged buyouts ever attempted¹. The stock gave back thirteen percent². Nothing about the company changed on Thursday night. What changed was the number of people willing to pay for it.

Price what...

Hunt, Mike, and Jason walk the Cash Flow Memo: oil and gas exhibits, the deficit math nobody wants to do, the Moderna/Merck cancer-vaccine economics, and the SpaceX position Hunt says he’ll probably regret saying out loud.

The Cashflow Memo

Key Takeaways

* Hunt left Exhibit C’s supply/demand untouched: 10-12M bbl/d still clears Hormuz on tankers running with GPS off, near-month crude falls from $87 to roughly $81-82 while the ’27 strip barely moves ($75 to $73-74), so E&P underwriting stays anchored at $70-75 — the price EOG and Magnolia investors are already...

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Twelve Times Free Cash Flow Bought One Company and Trapped Another

Two of our companies signed deals this week, and the Cash Flow Memo prices them almost identically: about twelve times trailing free cash flow, roughly an eight percent free cash flow yield, page fifteen and page six¹²³⁴. One of them got bought at a premium. The other one had to be its own buyer. The multiple decided none of that. Leverage did, and the leaderboard the memo ranks on does not measure leverage at all.

Start with...

Hunt, Mike, and Jason go more than half healthcare this week: Moderna’s Merck-partnered mRNA cancer vaccine cleared phase 3 in melanoma and the stock doubled. Plus Hormuz at a standstill, $7 trillion of federal spending with only one line left to cut, and xAI putting agents on the shelf.

The Cashflow Memo

Key Takeaways

* Hormuz traffic has gone from 15-20 ships a day to effectively zero and Hunt sees an indefinite stalemate, so with WTI at 82 last Thursday against a 2027 strip at 73, the backwardated 2027 price is the number to underwrite because it is the nu...

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The AI Buildout Just Became a Credit Trade

Broadcom put up the best AI guidance in the semiconductor industry and lost five percent for it. Nobody who read the release thinks that was a demand problem. The buildout has passed the point where equity markets fund it, and what prices the chip names from here is whether somebody else’s lender says yes.

Start with the number that did the damage. Bank of America’s Tom Curcuruto put the financing requirement sitting behind the chip buildout at...

Hunt, Jason, and Mike walk the Cash Flow Memo through $90 oil that will not change oil-patch spending, a compute market sold out through 2028, and a healthcare desk that still found time for Eliquis.

The Cashflow Memo

Key Takeaways

* Hunt’s $70-$90 oil range still holds at the top - crude is ~$90 and he does not see it running much higher - but Iran’s infeasible demands (US bases out, Hormuz cargo tolls, reparations, sanctions off) keep him closer to 90 than 80 for 6-12 months; ~20 ships/day still move (Iraqi crude allowed, Saudis can go Red...

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A note from the desk: this week’s update is landing a few days late. We hit a technical problem over the weekend that took our production pipeline down. Everything below is as of Friday’s close, August 7. We’re back on the normal cadence next week. ## The Public Market Just Quoted a Price on a Drug Pipeline. The Price Was Zero.

Eighteen billion dollars of biotech changed hands inside seventy-two hours this week, and not one dollar of it was priced by the tape. That is the part worth...

Hunt, Mike, and Jason walk the Cash Flow Memo through an oil tape driven by Hormuz headlines, a power grid that has started saying no to data centers, and the valuation question underneath the Tesla-SpaceX merger.

The Cashflow Memo

Key Takeaways

* Oil is trading the Hormuz headline, not the fundamentals: Saudi Aramco earned $33B in Q2 because price more than offset shipped volume, and its CEO says ~2 mmbbl/d of Saudi supply covers customers with or without the Strait open. Hunt’s pattern holds (roughly $90 on missile strikes, high-$70s to $80 when calm, ~$20 of...

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Microsoft Bought Twenty Years of Power. The Market Graded the Buyer.

The AI build spent this week being graded on the buyer’s income statement. The most consequential thing that happened to it was signed by a seller. Chevron agreed to supply Microsoft with two-point-six-seven gigawatts of behind-the-meter power at a West Texas data center, for twenty years, disclosed inside Chevron’s own second-quarter release.¹ Twenty years. In a week the market spent deciding whether Microsoft’s spending was disciplined and Meta’s was reckless, one of them committed to...

Hunt, Mike, and Jason walk the Cash Flow Memo for value in a still-expensive market — with Iran re-heating the oil tape, open-weights politics reshaping who captures AI rents, and a full-page scan of who benefits from cheaper tokens.

The Cashflow Memo

Key Takeaways

* Iran–US flare-up leaves Hunt more uncertain than any week since February, but base case stays oil in the $80–90 band (not $120–150); US pullback looks like the only workable option versus ground troops or deeper infrastructure strikes.

* Open-weights models favor hyperscalers (Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft, Meta, SpaceX) that already sunk CapEx in...

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GE Vernova Is Already Selling 2031. The Scarcity Was Manufactured Twenty Years Ago.

Every company in this week’s news was selling capacity it still has to build. GE Vernova was selling a place in line. It shipped three gigawatts of turbines in the second quarter and booked twenty gigawatts of orders and slot reservations against them.¹ Six or seven claims on the factory for every machine that walked out of it. That is a queue, and Vernova now sets the price of standing in it.

Start with...

Hunt, Jason, and Mike walk the full 20-page Cash Flow Memo, from a shut shipping channel in the Strait of Hormuz to a tiny ophthalmology compounder, hunting for value in an elevated market.

The Cashflow Memo

Key Takeaways

* Energy desk: the Strait of Hormuz South Channel is effectively closed after Greek tanker owners pulled out following drone and missile strikes (two crew deaths), pushing Brent into the 90s and WTI into the low 80s; the deep backwardation says the market expects an Iran accommodation within days, and Hunt agrees one is likely by...

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Wall Street Called PayPal Dead Money for Two Years. This Week, Private Capital Sent a Term Sheet.

Two markets looked at the same cash flows this week and reached opposite verdicts. The public market has spent two years pricing PayPal, Comcast, and half the telecom block as value traps — cheap for a reason, and the reason is they’re dying. Then Stripe and the private-equity firm Advent put fifty-three billion dollars on the table for PayPal at a twenty-eight percent premium, and PayPal’s own board came back and said...

Hormuz risk pushes Hunt’s oil call toward $80 (not $90–100), the team hunts for value on a high market — and lands on hyperscaler infrastructure over AI models — while healthcare delivers the first MRD-guided cancer approval and a live UNH margin-recovery setup.

The Cashflow Memo

Key Takeaways

* Hunt on Hormuz: a multi-week/month US–Iran stalemate keeps crude closer to $80 than $65 (not $90–100); producers still budget off the 2027 strip, so higher spot just widens backwardation rather than spurring rig activity.

* Value on page one of the memo: Amazon, Microsoft (~20x earnings), and Google/Alphabet (~30x) look reas...

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Micron and Intel Poured the Same Concrete This Week. The Market Paid One and Punished the Other.

Micron and Intel spent the same seven days making the same bet: tens of billions of dollars, poured into American fabs, on the promise that the chips coming out the other end will pay for the concrete. The market paid one and punished the other. Micron raised its U.S. commitment to a quarter-trillion dollars and poured first concrete in Clay, New York a full quarter ahead of schedule, and the stoc...

Oil holds steady despite Hormuz drone strikes, SK Hynix tests a $25B US listing, and the team runs its mid-year predictions scorecard across energy, tech, and healthcare — including Vertex’s $10B endocrine bet and Palantir’s Karp taking on Anthropic and OpenAI.

The Cashflow Memo

The Prediction Scorecard

https://telltales.topmarkcapital.com/predictions/

Key Takeaways

* Despite Hormuz drone strikes on three ships, Hunt sees no material oil supply disruption — crude drifts to the high-$70s (vs. high-$60s) while natural gas holds flat near $3.50 through 2027, and Medicare/Medicaid (~$2T of $7T fe...

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Microsoft Is Funding the Next AI Layer With the Last One

Enterprise AI stopped being a story about models this week and became a story about invoices. On July second, Microsoft — page one of the Cash Flow Memo — stood up a unit called Frontier Co.: two and a half billion dollars, six thousand people, one job, which is to take AI products the last mile into enterprise deployment.¹ Two days later it moved to cut up to five thousand roles from sales, consulting, and Xbox.² The new layer is being...

Mike, Hunt, and Jason run the exhibits fast, then dig into the AI buildout math that keeps getting worse, Oracle’s brutal week, and a healthcare block anchored by Lilly’s 340B fight. As always, download the Cashflow Memo at telltales.us.

The Cashflow Memo

Key Takeaways

* Oil has settled into a ~$70 floor with backwardation nearly gone (~$3 now vs. the $90 near-month / $75 twelve-month spread at the Iran peak), and Hunt reads the Strait of Hormuz drone tit-for-tat as an indefinite status quo gated by cargo insurance, not Iranian intent, while Northeast heat firms nat gas a...

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The Week Memory Stopped Being a Commodity

For forty years, memory was the worst business in technology. Brutally cyclical, structurally commoditized, a graveyard of balance sheets that overbuilt into every upcycle and got buried in the glut that followed. You did not own memory. You rented it, for one cycle, and you got out before the supply caught up. This week Micron told you that business is over — and the people still pricing it as a cycle are fighting the last war.

Start with the number tha...

Mike Nicoletti, Hunt Lawrence, and Jason Wallace dig into the looming Treasury market stress, proprietary-data risk in the age of frontier AI models, and a Medicare for All blueprint that could reshape healthcare investing. A 30-minute tour across energy, technology, and healthcare, anchored by this week’s Cash Flow Memo.

The Cashflow Memo

Key Takeaways

* Hunt puts better-than-even odds on a 2008-style Treasury market dislocation within 12-24 months as ~$2.5T of new government paper collides with the incoming Fed chair’s plan to run the balance sheet from ~$7T down to ~$1.5T, plus the...