When I look at Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, better known to American investors by the ticker TSM, I see one of the most impressive businesses in the world sitting in one of the most complicated positions imaginable. TSMC manufactures the advanced chips powering artificial intelligence accelerators, smartphones, data centers, high-performance computers, vehicles, and more devices than most of us realize. It operates the factories behind many of the technology companies that receive far more public attention. Those companies design the glamorous products. TSMC performs the extraordinarily difficult work of turning the designs into functioning silicon at scale. This arrangement has made TSMC indispensable. It has also made the company almost impossible to analyze with ordinary investing language. I cannot evaluate TSM simply by looking at revenue growth, margins, and earnings estimates. Those numbers matter, but they do not tell the whole story. I also have to consider mili...
All financial figures and market prices in this article are based on information available as of August 26, 2026. This article reflects my personal analysis and is not individualized financial advice. When I look at Alphabet, I see one of the strangest valuation debates in the market. On one side, I see a company with dominant global platforms, extraordinary margins, rapidly growing cloud operations, a fortress-like balance sheet, and an advertising engine capable of producing tens of billions of dollars in cash every quarter. On the other side, I see an increasingly capital-intensive artificial intelligence race that is forcing Alphabet to spend money at a pace that would have sounded almost absurd a few years ago. Both versions of the company are real. That is what makes Alphabet difficult to value. It is no longer enough for me to say that Google Search is a great business and slap a historical price-to-earnings multiple on the stock. I have to determine how much of Alphabet’s curre...