September 2026 Random Ramblings

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

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Andrew Walker (0:32)

Hilton, listen to the Yet Another Value Podcast with your host, me, Andrew Walker. Today is my monthly random rambling. But before I discuss that, if you are watching on video, you will see me holding up a wire. And why am I holding up a wire? Because this is the wire to my microphone, which I forgot to plug in before I started recording. So it picked up on my laptop microphone instead of my audio, which means the sound quality, it's admittedly probably going to be pretty poor. I will try to fix it in editing, but I'm just disclaiming that out of the way. Speaking of disclaimer, reminder to everyone, nothing on this podcast is investing advice. Always true, but probably particularly true today, because I just go and this is a man who can't remember to plug his microphone in. I'm just rambling for 30 minutes about a bunch of things that have been on my mind. So we're going to get there in one second. Oh, what am I rambling about today? Today, I'm starting with talks on the market overall. Interest rates have been screening higher for the past, for most of the past year, but especially the past few weeks, just some thoughts on interest rates are financial gravity and some thoughts on why we're not really seeing gravity starts to pull yet and all that sort of stuff. Then we're going to go to some brief discussions on crashes and bear markets seem to have disappeared over the past 25 or maybe even 40 years. Where have they gone? Why have they gone somewhere? Are the markets more fragile today than they were because of that?

Maybe not breaking new grounds, but just things that have been on my mind there. Quick discussion of interest rates in special situations. I think a lot of investors, if you grew up in 2010s, you're trained one way and you might not have adjusted for the interest rate environment we are in today. Hit that. Then the discussion of overconfident investors versus imposter investors. I'll discuss that when we get there. Finally, a discussion on mentorship, largely driven by Ian Cassel's book, Stock Picker, had some discussion of mentors. That's just been in my head and I love that book. I've been thinking about that. Get those thoughts out on paper. We're going to get to all those random ramblings in one second. But first, a word from our sponsors. Today's podcast is sponsored by fiscal.ai. fiscal.ai is the modern financial data provider for global equities. Look, that's what they have me tell you, but let me tell you how I've been using fiscal.ai. And I'll remind you, I'm a customer. I paid with my own money to connect to the fiscal.ai API. There's two things that I've really found it useful for. Number one, this is something super unique. They've got a huge database of fund letters, and the fund letters are connected by the API. So whenever I'm researching a company, whether it's researching the company because I'm interested in them or looking up an event or prepping for a podcast, the first thing I have my AI do is I say, hey, I'm prepping for a podcast on hymns.

And the first thing it does is it says, hey, here's all the recent letters on fiscal.ai of people talking about hymns, and here's their thesis, here's their bare thesis, all that sort of stuff. So that's the first thing, and that is really unique and that is really fun. And then the second thing I do is I use it for edited financials, right? I've got my model and I say, hey, I'm looking at hymns, go build me a model. And it says, sure, I'll build you a model. And every line in that model has a link. So I can see, oh, they're pulling this EBITDA number, they're pulling this segment number, they're pulling this number from three years ago. I click on it and it takes me right to fiscal.ai and it says, hey, here's these company-specific KPIs, here's these ratios. And I can see exactly where they're getting it and exactly where they're coming from. So it is a super reliable data provider that can connect to your AI. I found it super helpful. I'm a big fan of the podcast. If you want to try it out, you can use my link at fiscal.ai/yav to get 15% off their AI connector. That's fiscal.ai/yav, and there'll be a link in the show notes.