WHAT THEY WROTE, SAID & BOUGHT THIS WEEK. Shareholder letters, big-money media & insider buys — Saturday November 29, 2025
Hidden Value in plain sight
🔎 WHY THIS PIECE EXISTS
Every week we read the economy through three receipts:
Shareholder letters & earnings notes – what operators write when the numbers have to match.
Big investors in the media – what people who move billions dare to say in public.
Form 4 insider buys – where people closest to the cash flows put their own money.
No themes. No TV drama. Just:
what they wrote, what they said, what they bought.
⚡ THIS WEEK, AT A GLANCE
This week, those three piles rhymed around one idea:
Ray Dalio said AI leaders are “definitely” in bubble territory, but warned it’s too soon to sell just because there’s a bubble and that long Treasurys aren’t the easy “safe asset” people think.
Howard Marks called markets “shakily optimistic” and pointed to private credit as the place where standards are quietly slipping as everyone chases “safe” 7–10% yields.
Michael Burry shut down his fund, launched Cassandra Unchained, and called the AI boom a “glorious folly”, comparing Nvidia today to Cisco in 1999.
Meanwhile:
Clearfield – a small Minnesota hardware name – showed what “clean up the boom” looks like: ~20% sales growth, a 13-point gross-margin jump, and a GAAP loss turning into a GAAP profit.
Insiders wrote big cheques into Carrier Global ($CARR) (HVAC + data-centre cooling) and NextDecade ($NEXT) (LNG export infrastructure) after drawdowns, not at highs.
Narrative is screaming AI.
The receipts are whispering plumbing and credit.
📬 SHAREHOLDER LETTER — CLEARFIELD ($CLFD)
What this business is, in real life
Clearfield sells fibre hardware you can touch:
outdoor cabinets and boxes on poles,
fibre management systems in neighbourhoods and along rural roads,
the last-mile gear that gets fibre from backbone networks into homes, small businesses and towers.
When a town goes from buffering all night to real broadband, somebody pours concrete, mounts cabinets and pulls fibre. Clearfield is one of those labels on the cabinets.
What they just told shareholders
In its latest Q4 + full-year results and shareholder letter, Clearfield basically says:
Net sales from continuing ops grew around 20% to roughly $150M.
Gross margin on that business jumped by ~13 points into the mid-30s.
A GAAP loss last year turned into a GAAP profit this year.
They sold Nestor Cables, took the hit, and now report a cleaner, focused business.
Inventory is down, cash generation is up, and they’ve already bought back >$16M of stock with room left in the program.
In one line:
Last year: “we overbuilt into the fibre boom and ate the hangover.”
This year: “the clean-up is done and it shows up in GAAP EPS.”
In simple words
Clearfield’s letter sounds like an operator, not a pitch deck:
“We got punched by the cycle.”
“We spent a year fixing inventory and overhead.”
“Now you see the result in margins, profit and buybacks.”
No AI poetry. No TAM fireworks.
Just: we did the ugly work; here’s the math.
Between the lines
If you want to understand the infrastructure under AI:
Don’t start with Nvidia.
Start with the small Minnesota company that turned a loss into a profit selling boxes on poles and pulling fibre to real houses.
🎙️ WHAT BIG INVESTORS SAID THIS WEEK
Ray Dalio — “Bubble? Yes. Panic? No.”
Dalio’s message on AI and safety, in plain English:
AI leaders are “definitely” in bubble territory – his long-term bubble indicator is flashing again.
But you don’t sell just because there’s a bubble. Bubbles can outrun your timing; emotional exits kill more portfolios than bubbles.
Long U.S. Treasurys are not the simple safe asset they used to be given the debt and deficit profile. You need real hedges and real diversification, not blind faith in bonds.
Howard Marks — “Shakily optimistic” and eye on private credit
Marks describes the mood as “shakily optimistic”:
Investors are still in mostly because of FOMO, not deep conviction.
Well-underwritten high-yield around ~7% can be a perfectly fine “good-enough” return after fees and defaults.
His concern is private credit: a crowded product where the easiest way to hit 8–10% “safe” yields is to quietly loosen underwriting.
In his language:
The returns aren’t the problem.
The way people are reaching for them is.
Michael Burry — “Glorious folly” and Nvidia as Cisco 1999
Burry closed his hedge fund and launched Cassandra Unchained so he can talk freely about bubbles:
He calls the AI surge a “glorious folly” – real work and innovation mixed with classic over-building.
He compares Nvidia now to Cisco at the peak of the dot-com bubble: essential infrastructure, but priced like the party never ends.
He’s been using puts and shorts on AI bellwethers like Nvidia and Palantir, fully aware he can look stupid before he looks right.
Media synthesis
Dalio: bubble territory, but don’t slam the eject button.
Marks: returns okay, behaviour sketchy in private credit.
Burry: AI boom rhymes with Cisco 1999.
Three angles, one message:
The risk is in how people are chasing returns, not in whether AI or credit are “real.”
💰 WHAT INSIDERS BOUGHT THIS WEEK
While those three were talking, who actually wrote cheques?
We care about:
Real size (six- or seven-figure tickets),
CEOs and strategic holders,
Buys into weakness, not victory laps.
This week, two trades matter most:
Carrier Global ($CARR) — HVAC & data-centre cooling
NextDecade ($NEXT) — LNG export infrastructure
Quick view
CARR — David Gitlin, CEO
Bought ~19,300 shares around $52–53, a ticket of about $1M, with the stock down roughly a quarter from its highs and near its 52-week low.
NEXT — Hanwha Aerospace, strategic shareholder
Bought hundreds of thousands of shares around $5–6, over $2M this week and several million more in recent months as the stock traded well below past LNG-hype levels.
On the surface:
One CEO is buying building and data-centre HVAC into a drawdown.
One strategic partner is adding LNG equity into a long, messy build-out.
Pattern:
Insiders and strategics are adding risk in plumbing – cooling, pipes, tanks –
not in the AI tickers that dominate your feed.
🔒 — PAYWALL — INSIDER PLUS — 🔒
Everything below this line is for paying members:
full breakdown of the Carrier & NextDecade trades,
what they say about a 5% world,
and what this week of letters + media + insider buys really means.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Cundill Deep Value to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.