Weekly Highlights
Wishing you and your loved ones a wonderful holiday season. Let’s look forward to a healthy, happy and prosperous 2025 ~
Post of the week
Just before Christmas, I worked with another Substack author called Diogo Perneta to dig into Asia’s bubble tea market ($). There are five listed companies in the sector. Two more － Guming and Mixue － are set to list soon. Diogo found that the demand for bubble tea seems to be growing particularly fast in South-East Asia.
Tweet of the week
The following chart from Joey Politano suggests a rapid increase in the import of semiconductor manufacturing equipment into the United States. Some believe that Japanese semicaps such as Tokyo Electron (2760 JP － US$69 billion) will benefit.
Podcast episode of the week
Check out Meb Faber’s discussion with Felix Zulauf on his outlook for 2025. He thinks that Japanese policymakers will try to engineer a strengthening of the Japanese yen. We could see further unwinding of Japanese carry trades, and these tend to lead to forceful moves upwards. Meanwhile, he’s bearish base metals such as copper and aluminium as ~50% of their demand comes from a now-weakening Chinese economy.
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