In this FSD episode, titled Ladies, Liquor and Leopold, Ram borrows Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger's old warning about ladies, liquor and leverage and maps it onto the market's main character: Leopold, the 24 year old Columbia valedictorian who just got married to the chief of staff of Anthropic and ran 4x leverage on a single concentrated AI bet. The lender of last resort always wins, and this time it was Citadel, picking up the positions at a discount and sitting on a couple billion dollars of gains already.
From there Ram walks through the history of bodies floating in the water at leverage driven bottoms: Archegos taking down Credit Suisse, and JP Morgan buying the legendary Bear Stearns for two dollars and getting the most sophisticated prime brokerage desk on the street with it. He points to the bigger trend underneath: where the Fed once convened the big investment banks in a crisis, today it is Citadel, Jane Street and Millennium doing the bidding. The lesson from the blow-up itself is about proximity. Leopold's thesis on AI capex demand was actually right, but he was too close to it, and surrounding yourself with people who share your thesis is a disadvantage. Buffett's edge is Omaha, far removed from the hype, and the same trap catches people who spend too much time with Michael Saylor or inside Silicon Valley.
The back half turns constructive. Markets sniff blood and sell in front of forced sellers, but with the main character out of the game, Ram sees a cleaner setup. Microsoft's numbers were very strong: 18 percent revenue growth, Azure up more than 40 percent, and the key takeaway that most of the growth is real enterprise demand rather than OpenAI or Anthropic, from an earnings transcript he says reads like walking through the Louvre. He closes with the bargains: NVIDIA in the 190 to 195 range, TSM at 18 times earnings, SK Hynix with the CEO buying shares, and the 1987 playbook, where the best time to buy stocks was a few weeks after the crash.
(00:00) Ladies, liquor and Leopold
(00:43) The lender of last resort always wins
(00:59) Bodies in the water: Archegos to Bear Stearns
(01:53) Citadel, Jane Street and the new buy side
(02:53) Too close to the thesis: Buffett's Omaha edge
(04:00) A triple X levered semiconductor fund
(05:19) Markets sniff blood; the forced seller is out
(05:44) Microsoft earnings: walking through the Louvre
(06:43) Cloud and semis; bargains and the 1987 playbook
About the show: Non-Consensus Investing is Ram Ahluwalia's running commentary on markets, where he shares how he's actually positioning capital and talks through the ideas most investors are missing. Real-time analysis, specific names, and a bias toward what's overlooked rather than what's crowded.