Hello Marathoners-
The Client Who Won't Brag About Himself (So I Will)
For the next few installments, instead of my usual dispatches about riding around with Grandma Sidney in the convertible, I'm going to turn the spotlight over to a few of the people I have the privilege of working with. I'm fortunate to count among my clients an extraordinary group — physicians, scientists, attorneys, and entrepreneurs quietly doing genuinely important work — and it struck me that you might enjoy meeting some of them (if you're not already acquainted as it is!). So I'm starting an occasional series featuring clients who I know are doing big things. Grandma Sidney will be back, I promise!
First up is the inimitable Dr. Scott Hadland.
I've known Scott for over a decade now, and worked with him for most of it. Scott is, by any measure, a big deal in his field, though as the model (humble) Canadian, you'd never get him to say so. So allow me. Scott is one of only a small handful of physicians in the country to hold triple board certification, in general pediatrics, adolescent medicine, and addiction medicine. In 2023 he was named a Presidential Leadership Scholar, a national program run jointly by the Bush, Clinton, George H.W. Bush, and Johnson presidential centers, and in 2020 the American Academy of Pediatrics named him its Emerging Leader in Adolescent Health. He's published more than 100 peer-reviewed papers in journals like The New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet, and JAMA, and he landed on the cover of Boston magazine's “Top Doctors” issue.
Scott spends his days doing something most of us would find daunting: helping teenagers and young adults navigate some of the toughest health challenges of our time. As Chief of Adolescent and Young Adult Medicine at Mass General Brigham for Children and an Associate Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, Scott leads a team of 31 doctors, nurses, psychologists, social workers, nutritionists, and researchers caring for more than 2,500 young patients aged 13-29 across the New England region. Scott's research program, spanning more than $7 million in funding, tackles urgent questions at the front lines of the youth mental health and addiction crises, including why so few young people with addiction receive lifesaving treatment, and how we can change that. His work has taken him from the exam room to the national stage, where he has testified before the FDA, advised the Biden White House, and appeared in hundreds of media outlets, including a weekly health segment on Boston's WCVB Channel 5 on Fridays at 5 pm.
What makes Scott's work especially exciting right now is its momentum. His team is using massive national datasets covering hundreds of thousands of young people to pinpoint exactly where the healthcare system loses youth who need addiction treatment, and then designing fixes that hospitals and policymakers can put into practice. It is the kind of research that does not just sit in an academic journal; it changes how care gets delivered. Outside the hospital, Scott lives in Jamaica Plain with his husband, Jason (also a Harvard physician-scientist), and their two children. When he is not seeing patients or on television, you might find him at the piano, in the pool, or running laps around Jamaica Pond.
Scott on the cover of Boston magazine's “Top Doctors” issue.
Scott and me catching up over coffee after a workout earlier this summer.
A quick aside before we go further: this issue is about to spend more time than usual in genuinely ‘dark’ territory: a possible AI bust, and a strategist who thinks the whole postwar order is unwinding. I'm doing that on purpose. My own outlook hasn't changed. But a lot of the conversations I've been having with clients lately have had exactly that tone, and I'd rather meet it head-on than pretend everyone's asking me about dividend yields this month. So bear with me for a few sections. We'll come back up for air.
The AI Bust Question
If there's one question I've been fielding more than any other lately, it's some version of: is the AI boom actually a bubble, and are we watching the setup for the pop? I don't think this is coming from any one place (it feels like half of you have been trading the same YouTube links), but the argument keeps arriving in roughly the same shape, so it's worth walking through.
The historical version goes like this: canal mania in the 1790s, railway mania in the 1840s, the Roaring Twenties, the dot-com years. Every one of those booms was built on a real, working technology. None of that spared investors from what came after.
The lesson was never that the technology was fake. It's that demand for what got built almost always shows up years after the money that financed it did (the dot-com bust left behind miles of unused fiber-optic cable that the internet didn't grow into for the better part of a decade).
Which brings us to Oracle, the name most often floated as this cycle's version of that story. Oracle is carrying well over $150 billion in debt, its credit rating sits one notch above junk, and a meaningful share of that borrowing is financing the data centers behind its OpenAI partnership. If demand for all that compute doesn't show up as fast as the spending did, Oracle is who people point to first.
There's a narrower, more technical worry underneath this too, and it's about the hardware itself rather than the debt. Michael Burry has argued publicly that hyperscalers are depreciating NVIDIA chips over five or six years for accounting purposes, when the real useful life, given how fast each new generation obsoletes the last, is closer to two or three. If Burry's math is closer to right than the accounting assumes, the chips going into these data centers today could be economically outdated before the debt that paid for them is retired.
None of this changes how we're invested, and it's not our job to guess whether it's right. We are goal-focused, plan-driven, long-term investors, not forecasters of which chipmaker's balance sheet holds up. If there's a real reckoning coming for AI infrastructure spending, it will sort out winners and losers among individual companies. It won't be a referendum on whether you should have a plan.
Sources: Oracle debt level and credit rating — S&P Global Ratings commentary as reported by Seeking Alpha and Investing.com (July–August 2026). Chip depreciation argument — Michael Burry public statements (X / Substack), as reported by DeepQuarry (December 2025) and corroborated in subsequent financial press coverage. Historical bubble comparisons (canal mania, railway mania, dot-com) — general economic history.
Where We Come Down On This
Every one of those concerns is worth taking seriously, and those who raised them clearly did real reading rather than reacting to headlines. Speculative excess in pockets of AI spending is real. So is the dot-com comparison, and so is the wrinkle in how chip depreciation gets accounted for. Here's where Michael and I land after sitting with all of it.
The distinction we keep coming back to is profitability. Many of the largest companies driving this cycle, unlike most of the dot-com era's, are already extremely profitable with growing free cash flow. It's also not a story confined to a handful of chip and software names. Health care, fintech, and industrials are all picking up real benefits from AI adoption. Caterpillar is a good example: it's been one of the companies helped along by rising demand for generators and power equipment tied to AI data centers.
On chip obsolescence specifically: the underlying observation is fair (some depreciation schedules probably are more generous than the real useful life of the chip), but it's less alarming than it sounds. Rapid upgrade cycles are already built into how chipmakers plan to compete, older chips stay in demand simply because overall demand has been so strong, and long-term supply contracts make this a far more gradual, methodical transition than “last year's chip is suddenly worthless.”
The real near-term risk, as we see it, isn't that AI turns out to be fake. It's that the infrastructure gets built faster than the companies using it can grow revenue enough to justify the spending, or at least faster than investors are willing to be patient about it. That's a timing and perception problem, not a fundamentals one, which is exactly why we don't try to guess when it resolves. Elevated debt is one of the reasons Oracle doesn't fit our criteria. Companies that we target need to clear the same five pillars: industry leadership, reliable management, a healthy balance sheet with low debt, growing free cash flow, and consistent earnings and dividend growth. Oracle’s elevated debt means it stumbles early in that process.
Then, right on cue, Nvidia reports earnings. Revenue came in at $96 billion, up 106% from a year ago, and the stock rose as much as 7% in the days after, mostly on guidance: next quarter's outlook came in $4 billion ahead of expectations, with management pointing to growth being limited by supply, not demand. Despite the run higher, the stock trades at a lower earnings multiple today than it did three years ago, because profits have grown faster than the price has. On the raw numbers, its valuation looks less extreme than the headlines suggest. Those results do not eliminate the material risks associated with the company, including valuation risk, unusually high growth expectations, competition, customer concentration and the possibility that AI-infrastructure spending slows.
One family we work with put the whole debate in better perspective than either side managed on its own: a bear market of some kind is probably inevitable eventually, but you could be waiting years for it, and staying defensively positioned for years ahead of a correction that may or may not show up on your timeline has a real cost of its own.
None of this requires us to guess right. The plan is built to hold up either way.
Sources: NVIDIA Q2 FY2027 results (revenue, guidance, growth outlook) — NVIDIA Corp. press release / Form 8-K, August 26, 2026, as reported by CNBC and Investing.com. NVIDIA forward P/E (≈24x) — GuruFocus, August 19, 2026. Caterpillar performance, comparative valuations (Tesla, Palantir, AMD, S&P 500, semiconductor sector), and our 5 Pillars investment criteria — Marathon Financial Group internal analysis; figures should be checked against current data before this issue is finalized.
If It's Not AI, It's Something Else
In my opinion, the AI conversation above is really just this year's version of a much older habit: looking for a reason to believe the future is going to be worse than the past. Long-time readers know I have my own favorite source for that particular flavor of pessimism, geopolitical strategist Peter Zeihan, whose work I wrote about back in February of last year.
Zeihan's newest book, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning, opens with a line that's hard to forget: “2019 was the last great year for the world economy.” His argument, in short, is that seventy-five years of cheap, fast, global trade were only possible because the U.S. Navy made every ocean safe and America absorbed the cost of policing it. As the U.S. loses interest in playing that role, and as populations across most of the developed and developing world age out of their prime working and spending years at roughly the same time, Zeihan expects globalization itself to unwind, taking a fair amount of stability and prosperity down with it.
It's a genuinely well-constructed argument, and I don't dismiss it. But it's worth knowing the track record behind it. Zeihan has been forecasting the imminent collapse of specific countries, China chief among them, since roughly 2010. In a later edition of his earlier book, he actually walked a couple of his own calls back in print, conceding he'd overestimated Russia's military strength and underestimated how much Alberta's own politics would end up shaping Canada. Economists who've reviewed his newest book tend to land in a similar place: the demographic argument holds up, but the specific, dramatic scenarios built on top of it (regional resource wars, famine, the wholesale fragmentation of world trade) are, in one economics writer's phrase, likely to end up mostly wrong, even where they're directionally right about the underlying problem (Noah Smith).
I share all this not to relitigate geopolitics, but because the same lesson applies to Zeihan as it does to the current AI bubble worries: there is always a smart, well-sourced case available for why things are about to get much worse. There has never been a year in market history when that case was unavailable. Historically, repeatedly moving in and out of markets in response to forecasts has created the risk of missing subsequent recoveries and long-term market appreciation.
That's really the whole distinction. If your investment approach only holds up as long as nothing scary is happening, you don't have an investment approach, you have a reaction waiting for a trigger. We are goal-focused, plan-driven, long-term investors, and that description doesn't come with an asterisk for tariffs, AI capex, or Peter Zeihan.
For what it's worth, my own read leans the other way entirely. We're living through a period of real technological acceleration, and the businesses we own keep innovating, growing earnings, and adapting regardless of who's in the White House or what any one strategist predicts about the Navy. There's a real case that this turns out, in hindsight, to have been an unusually good time to have had capital invested in high-quality companies.
Zeihan may turn out to be right about dramatic deglobalization (shift away from the current, post WW2 world order). He may not. Either way, our plan was never depending on him being wrong.
That said, there's one place where Zeihan and I firmly agree, and it's worth naming. For all his pessimism, he's decidedly more bullish on the United States than on most of the rest of the world, its demographics, its energy position, its capacity to keep reinventing itself. On that, we see eye to eye. It's a big part of why, for going on a decade now, our portfolios have carried a deliberate bias toward U.S. businesses. That's not a prediction about next quarter or next year; it's a long-standing conviction about where durable, world-leading enterprise is most likely to keep being built. Zeihan arrives at American optimism by way of a dark road. I get there more cheerfully. But we end up in the same place.
In the next installment, I'm going to go deeper on Zeihan's work, especially The End of the World Is Just the Beginning. I know there's a lot of fear out there right now, and at first glance a guy whose books have titles like that seems like the last thing an anxious investor needs. But hear me out. For those of you with an angsty outlook on the world, I actually want to take his arguments seriously, because to his credit they're cogent and genuinely well-informed. And then I want to look at the other half of the story, the half the doom headlines skip: how Zeihan sees a new, deglobalized order actually taking shape, why he thinks America sidesteps most of the chaos, and the surprising number of ways he believes humanity can blunt the worst of it, economically and ecologically both. Even the doomsayer, it turns out, sees a lot of paths through.
Sources: Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning (Harper Business, 2022), including publisher jacket copy for the opening line quoted above. Zeihan's China-collapse forecasting history and his acknowledged revisions on Russia and Alberta — Wikipedia, “Peter Zeihan” entry, citing Money & Macro's published critique. Independent review characterizing the book's scenarios as “directionally correct” on demographics but likely “mostly wrong” in their specifics — Noah Smith, Noahpinion (October 2023).
The Only Distinction That Actually Matters
Whatever the specific worry du jour happens to be — AI infrastructure debt this time, Peter Zeihan’s predictions, something else three months from now — my answer doesn't change. It comes down to one question I've been putting to clients for years: are you an investor, or are you a speculator?
The distinction has nothing to do with how much research went into the worry, or how smart the person voicing it is. It's simpler and less flattering than that. If your investment decisions are built on a plan you're working over the long term, regardless of current conditions, you're an investor. If your investment decisions are contingent in any way on what's currently happening, or what you expect to happen next, in the economy or the markets, you're a speculator, however sophisticated the reasoning behind it sounds. There's really no middle ground.
Most people don't think of themselves as speculating. It usually sounds more like, “I have a solid long-term portfolio built around retirement, but I'm prepared to go to cash if things get bad enough.” That sentence describes a plan to watch, react, and hope you guess right. The moment reacting becomes an option you're keeping open, investing has already left the building.
The historical record below illustrates why our process generally avoids making long-term allocation decisions solely in response to market declines. Since 1950 the S&P 500 has moved through 11 declines of 20% or more, closing basis, an average of roughly once every seven years. Every one of them arrived with its own fully-formed, well-argued reason the world was ending. $10,000 invested in the index in January 1950 and left alone, dividends reinvested, would be worth just under $46 million today, compounding at 11.64% a year.
Sources: S&P 500 historical monthly levels — Robert Shiller dataset via Officialdata.org and Multpl.com, both citing Standard & Poor's. Most recent close (7,666.60, September 2, 2026) — S&P Dow Jones Indices via FRED (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis). Count of 20%+ declines since 1950 (11, closing basis) independently compiled from the above and cross-checked against publicly reported bear-market tables (e.g., Yardeni Research methodology). $10,000-since-1950 compounding figure (≈11.64%/yr, dividends reinvested, ≈$46 million) — Officialdata.org calculation on the same dataset, current through the most recent month available.This illustration reflects hypothetical growth of the S&P 500 Index with dividends reinvested. An index is unmanaged and cannot be invested in directly. The illustration does not reflect advisory fees, transaction costs, taxes or client withdrawals, all of which would reduce actual returns. It assumes continuous investment throughout the entire period. Past performance does not guarantee future results.
There's a second version of this mistake that gets a lot less attention than panic-selling, mostly because it looks so much more responsible: going too conservative, too soon. For a lot of people heading into, or already living in, a multi-decade retirement, the real risk was never one bad year. It was quietly holding too much in cash and bonds for too long and losing ground to inflation the whole time. Money you'll need in the next few years genuinely calls for a different posture than money that has thirty more years to work. Confusing the two, in either direction, is where plans actually go wrong.
None of this requires guessing correctly about AI, Oracle, Nvidia, or Peter Zeihan. It requires a plan built around your actual goals, and then, mostly, leaving it alone. If you've made it this far and noticed I've now made basically the same argument three separate times in one newsletter, that's not an accident. There's only one point in this whole issue.
Where I Always Land: A Permabull's Creed
Longtime readers know how I describe myself: a self-proclaimed ‘permabull’. I say it with a wink, but I mean it seriously. A permabull isn't someone who thinks markets only go up, or who ignores risk, or who can't tell a good business from a bad one. It's someone who has looked at a hundred years of market history and concluded that betting against the long-term progress of great American enterprise is, over any meaningful stretch of time, a loser's wager. I've been called an equity zealot too, and I'll cheerfully own that as well.
What makes that more than a slogan is that it rests on a handful of convictions I've stated in these pages before, and will keep restating, because they don't change:
• We are goal-focused, plan-driven, long-term investors, working over years and decades toward your most important goals.
• We are investors in businesses, not traders in “the stock market.” We own companies, not ticker symbols.
• Temporary declines in market value do not necessarily represent permanent losses in business value.
• We do not react to current events, economic, financial, geopolitical, or otherwise.
• We believe the economy can't be consistently forecast, nor the market consistently timed, so we stay invested through the good and the bad.
• The critical issues are how much you invest and for how long. Time, not timing, is the fuel.
Everything else, and I do mean everything, the AI bust, Peter Zeihan, whatever next month's headline turns out to be, is commentary.
Which brings me to the one thing I'd ask you to take from this issue above all others. In a lifetime of investing, one of the most damaging and unforgivable mistakes an investor can make is abandoning a sound investment plan during a severe decline solely because of fear or market headlines. It isn't buying the wrong stock, or paying too much, or missing a rally. It's what I've come to call the Big Mistake: panicking out, selling your great businesses into a decline because the headlines told you the world was ending. Markets have handed investors a hundred reasons to make the Big Mistake, and they'll hand us a hundred more. Our entire job, yours and mine together, is to make sure that when the moment comes, and it will, we don't make it.
Articles:
How to Set a Safe Withdrawal Rate After You've Already Retired
I Thought I Had These 3 Retirement Topics Figured Out. Here's Why I Changed My Mind
Your Will Doesn't Control Who Gets Most of Your Money. This Does.
Retirees: Should You Take RMDs Early in the Year or Wait?
Retirement Planning for Couples Who Became Parents Later in Life
Don't Fear Long-Term-Care Expenses. Prepare for Them.
Have a great Labor Day weekend!
-Charlie
This newsletter is provided for informational and educational purposes only and is not intended to constitute personalized investment advice or a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any security or adopt any investment strategy. Certain statements reflect the author's opinions, interpretations, and market observations as of the publication date and should not be construed as statements of fact, guarantees of future performance, or predictions of future market events. Such views are subject to change without notice. References to market performance, economic conditions, or historical events are provided for illustrative purposes only. Past performance is not indicative of future results, and historical trends are not guarantees of future market performance. All investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Investment decisions should be made based on an individual's financial circumstances, investment objectives, risk tolerance, and time horizon.