What We’re Reading (Week Ending 22 March 2026) - 22 Mar 2026
Reading helps us learn about the world and it is a really important aspect of investing. The late Charlie Munger even went so far as to say that “I don’t think you can get to be a really good investor over a broad range without doing a massive amount of reading.” We (the co-founders of Compounder Fund) read widely across a range of topics, including investing, business, technology, and the world in general. We want to regularly share the best articles we’ve come across recently. Here they are (for the week ending 22 March 2026):
1. Why Walmart and OpenAI Are Shaking Up Their Agentic Shopping Deal – Paresh Dave
Last year, OpenAI made a bet that it could boost revenue by charging a commission on purchases made through ChatGPT. It partnered with Walmart, Etsy, and other shops on an “agentic commerce” feature called Instant Checkout.
Walmart has made about 200,000 products available directly in chat responses, allowing consumers to provide their shipping and payment details to OpenAI and place their order within ChatGPT. For products like TVs, shoppers still have to open Walmart’s website to make a purchase the old-fashioned online way. Conversion rates—the percentage of users following through with a purchase of an item shown to them by ChatGPT—have been three times lower for the selection sold directly inside the chatbot than those that require clicking out…
…The approach solves what Danker says he believes is the biggest problem with Instant Checkout: It forces people to buy items individually. “They fear that when checkout happens automatically after every single item that they’re going to receive five boxes when they actually just want it all in one,” Danker says. “They generally don’t want to split the checkout experience, where it buys the one item, even though they had other items in their Walmart cart already.”…
…In the new experience, Walmart users log into Sparky the first time they encounter it in ChatGPT. Their basket from Walmart’s website or app and within ChatGPT will sync with another in the hopes of better reflecting people’s actual shopping habits. Consumers add peanut butter one day on the Walmart app, foil the next, and a birthday gift at the last second on the website before checking out…
…Walmart has good reason to want to get the experience in ChatGPT correct. The chatbot is now bringing in about twice the rate of new customers as search engines, Danker says. He suspects that’s because the power users of ChatGPT are not typical Walmart customers. But the retailer’s price, selection, and broad geographic footprint mean that its products are showing up in many ChatGPT responses.
Sparky was developed by Walmart, Danker says. But it relies on open source generative AI models combined with some retail-specific ones trained on decades of Walmart data. “We’re able to route certain questions to one model and certain questions to another because we find that the quality of answers differs,” Danker says. “It’s never stuck in any one.”…
…Sparky has been criticized by people purporting to work for Walmart on Reddit, and testimonials for the chatbot are difficult to find on social media. But half of Walmart app users have engaged with it, according to the company. While people typically use the app to search for staples such as milk and bananas, they ask Sparky about exotic items or for solutions to more complicated problems. Walmart US CEO David Guggina recently said Sparky users spend about 35 percent more per order than other shoppers.
Danker acknowledges that Sparky is slow and generates weak responses often enough that some consumers might dismiss it as unreliable. Danker says the priority this year is training Sparky to be more proactive, getting it to learn more about individual shoppers, and making it helpful across more of Walmart’s many departments, such as the pharmacy.
2. Uzbekistan is gathering pace – what to look at now – Swen Lorenz
Uzbekistan has recently been attracting growing attention from investors.
One reason is the country’s remarkable demographics. With a fertility rate of 3.5 children per woman – far above the replacement level of 2.1 – Uzbekistan has one of the fastest-growing populations outside Africa.
When the people of a nation with a 100% literacy rate decide to have many children, it’s usually a sign that they are optimistic about the future of their country…
…In 2019, I was part of one of the first organised investor trips to Uzbekistan. The country had only just begun to move beyond the legacy of the Soviet Union and its late dictator, Islam Karimov. As I described at the time in an extensive three-part article, there were strong indications that Uzbekistan would embark on a programme of capital market reforms and privatisations.
However, the process proved slower than expected. It’s difficult to say whether Covid, domestic policies, or a combination of both slowed the reform momentum…
…Recently, however, circumstances have begun to change, both for frontier markets in general and for Uzbekistan in particular. The country’s demographics have also attracted growing attention from investors, amid the global debate about low birth rates and their knock-on effects on economies and asset prices. Over the past four years, Uzbekistan’s population has grown by an average of 700,000 people per year – more than the population of the country’s second-largest city, Samarkand…
…In Uzbekistan, Uzum may do just that.
The company began as an e-commerce marketplace but has since expanded into financial services, consumer lending, and express food delivery. Its integrated ecosystem could eventually resemble the “super app” model that has delivered spectacular investment successes elsewhere.
Today, Uzum’s ecosystem reaches about 20 million users – more than half of Uzbekistan’s adult population.
Early investors in the company will be delighted.
Founded less than five years ago, Uzum is already valued at USD 2.3bn. On 10 March 2026, it announced a new funding round at a valuation 53% higher than the one completed just seven months earlier.
Still described as a “startup” in media reports, Uzum generated revenue of USD 691m in 2025, up from USD 505m the previous year. Net income reached USD 176m.
3. Agents Over Bubbles – Ben Thompson
You need agency to use agents, and yes, the number of people who will have that agency are probably far fewer than those who might use a chatbot. Of course you can make the (almost certainly accurate) case that chatbots will become agent managers in their own right, but the more critical observation is that by abstracting humans away from direct model management any one single human can control multiple agents.
What this means in terms of compute — and by extension, economic impact — is that it actually won’t require that many people with agency to drastically increase the amount of compute that is actively utilized to create products with meaningful economic impact. In other words, the rise of agents doesn’t just mean a dramatic increase in compute, but also a narrowing of the need for widescale adoption by humans for that demand to manifest. Yes, AI still needs agency; it just doesn’t need agency from that many people for its impact to be profound…
… Most consumers mostly do just want to consume content (which, I would add, means he should be more worried about the Neo, not less). This is why your favorite productivity application always ends up pivoting to the enterprise: it is companies who are willing to pay for productivity, because they are the ones actually paying for the workers who they want to be more productive.
It’s reasonable to expect this to apply to AI as well: the most compelling consumer applications of AI, at least in the near term, are Google and Meta’s advertising businesses, which sit alongside content. By the same token, it was always unrealistic for OpenAI to think that it could convert more than a small percentage of consumers into subscribers; that’s both why an ad model is essential, and also why that won’t be enough to pay the bills. It’s definitely the case that most people don’t want to pay for AI; it remains to be seen if they want to use it enough to make the ad model work.
That is another way of saying that Anthropic got it right by focusing almost entirely on the enterprise market: companies have a demonstrated willingness to pay for software that makes their employees more productive, and AI certainly fits the bill in that regard. What makes enterprise executives truly salivate, however, is the prospect of AI not simply eliminating jobs, but doing so precisely because that makes the company as a whole more productive.
It’s always been the case, even in large companies, that a relatively small number of people actually move the needle and drive the company forward in meaningful ways. That drive, however, has been filtered through a huge apparatus, filled with humans, who accelerate the effort in some vectors, and retard it in others. That apparatus makes broad impact possible, but it carries massive coordination costs.
Agents, however, will tilt much more heavily towards pure acceleration, making those drivers of value much more impactful. I’m sympathetic to the argument that the best companies will want to use AI to do more, not simply save money; the reality of large organizations, however, is that the positive impact of AI will not be in eliminating jobs, but rather replacing hard-to-manage-and-motivate human cogs in the organizational machine with agents that not only do what they are told but do so tirelessly and continuously until the job is done.
This only makes the argument that we are not in a bubble that much more compelling:
- First, all of the weaknesses of LLMs are being addressed by exponential increases in compute.
- Second, the number of people who need to wield AI effectively for demand to skyrocket is decreasing.
- Third, the economic returns from using agents aren’t just impactful on the bottom line, but the top line as well.
In this context, is it any wonder that every single hyperscaler says that demand for compute exceeds supply, and that every single hyperscaler is, in the face of stock market skepticism, announcing capex plans that blow away expectations?…
… I noted above that what made Opus 4.5 compelling was not the model release itself, but changes to the Claude Code harness that made it suddenly dramatically more useful. What this means is that model performance isn’t the only thing that matters: the integration between model and harness is where true agent differentiation is found.
This is a very big deal when it comes to figuring out the future structure of the AI industry and where profits will flow, because profits flow away from modular parts of the value chain — which are commoditized — and flow towards integrated parts of the value chain, which are differentiated. Apple is of course the ultimate example of this: its hardware is not commoditized because it is integrated with their software, which is why Apple can charge sustainably higher prices and capture nearly the entirety of the PC and smartphone sector profits.
It follows, then, that if agents require integration between model and harness, that the companies building that integration — specifically Anthropic and OpenAI (Gemini is a strong model, but Google hasn’t yet shipped a compelling harness) — are actually poised to be significantly more profitable than it might have seemed as recently as late last year. And, by the same token, companies who were betting on model commoditization may struggle to deliver competitive products…
…What matters in terms of this Article, however, is that if agents are making Anthropic and OpenAI the point of integration in the value chain, then the bubble argument that these companies are overvalued, or that the massive investments other companies are making on their behalf in data centers is unwarranted, may not be correct.
I must, in the end, address my opening parenthetical: I’ve long maintained that there is no need to be worried about a bubble as long as everyone is worried about a bubble; it’s the moment when caution is flung to the wind and assurances are made that this is definitely not a bubble that we might actually be in one. And, well, I think the rise of agents means we are not in a bubble. The capex is warranted, and Anthropic and OpenAI look more durable than ever. If my declaring there is no bubble means there is one, then so be it!
4. The “secret” share that allows you to invest in North Korea right now (part 2) – Swen Lorenz
Chung Ju-young was the founder of Hyundai, THE South Korean conglomerate (“chaebol”) in the decades after the Korean War. Today, it’s Samsung that takes the crown among South Korean companies. But back in the 1970s and 1980s, Hyundai was the country’s biggest and most powerful corporation.
Hyundai suffered mightily under the 1997-98 Asian debt crisis and a seemingly never-ending family feud. However, this never dented Chairman Chung Ju-young’s passion for helping to make amends between the two Koreas.
In 1998, he led a herd of 500 cows over a North/South Korean border crossing as a symbol of future economic collaboration between two countries…
…That same year, Chung Ju-young and one of his sons, Chung Mong-hun, started offering tours to North Korea’s famous iconic Kungmangsan Mountain. With special permission from North Korea’s regime, their tourist groups initially traveled to the country’s mountain area by sea. Later, they even got permission to take South Korean visitors across the infamous Demilitarized Zone (DMZ).
The crowning glory of the Hyundai family’s efforts to bring both countries together, though, was the construction of the Kaesong Industrial Region, a special administrative region that was carved out as a place where South Korean companies could operate using cheap North Korean labor. The industrial park attracted 124 companies and grew to employ over 50,000 North Korean workers. It is located ten kilometers (six miles) to the North of the DMZ…
…In 2008, a South Korean tourist got shot and killed by a North Korean soldier. The tragic incident led to all further tours getting canceled until further notice.
Kaesong is currently closed, too. North Korea’s ballistic missile tests in 2016 made the South Korean government ask all companies to shut down operations. The site was professionally mothballed, i.e., it’s maintained but not currently open.
Tragedy struck in the family, too. Not only did Hyundai Group’s founder die of old age in 2001. His son, Chung Mong-hun, committed suicide in 2003 after it was revealed that he had used company funds to pay bribes in North Korea.
Thus ended the drive for economic reunification that Chung Ju-young had mostly focused under the umbrella of one of the family companies, Hyundai Asan…
…Back in the days of the late founder and his late son, Hyundai Asan negotiated agreements that went way further than merely operating tour groups and the Kaesong Industrial Park.
Hyundai Asan also has “exclusive business rights” to the following areas of the North Korean economy:
Electricity: Construction of power plants and expansion of existing ones.
Communication: Establishing and operating wireless services.
Rail: Reconnecting railroads between specific regions of both countries.
Airport: Construction of an airport in the tourist region of Kumgangsan.
Dam building: Construction of a dam near the Imjin River.
Water resources: Supply of water from the Kumgangsan Dam to the South.
Tourism: Development of tourism at specific, significant historic sites.
These are precisely the kind of large-scale infrastructure projects that the leaders of both Koreas have identified as priority areas for the potential future economic development of North Korea. Actually, the reopening of the Kaesong Industrial Complex and the construction of railway lines were a high priority part of the agenda of this week’s bilateral summit.
These contracts were all signed between Hyundai Asan and the North Korean government, which makes them both compelling and questionable. The North Korean government could decide not to honor the contracts. However, a country that is seemingly getting ready to welcome international investment back into the fold would be ill-advised to start the process by screwing one of its longest-standing allies in economic development.
It’s highly likely that there are still close contacts between the Hyundai family and North Korea’s dictator, Kim Jong-un. The widow of Chung Mong-hun is chairing Hyundai Asan, and she has made a point of keeping the vision of the company becoming a trailblazing investor in North Korea alive.
5. Rory Johnston on How Oil Could Surge to Over $200 a Barrel | Odd Lots (Transcript here) – Tracy Alloway, Joe Weisenthal, and Rory Johnston
Rory: What we talk about when we talk about the blowout in the product market is we’re talking about – so crude oil has a supply and demand curve as you see in econ 101. Then each individual product – gasoline, jet fuel, diesel, naphtha, petrochemical feed, everything else, shipping fuel – they all have their own specific supply and demand curves which this market becomes fractally complicated very quickly.
But to simplify what we’re talking about, it’s a refinery taking let’s say a barrel of oil for $100 which is roughly where we’re trading right now in Brent. We’re kind of jumping to another side of $100. They take a barrel of oil of $100 and they refine into a bunch of different products. The premiums they get for those products are what we typically call the crack spread, or the difference between crude and a refined product that is yielded from a refinery. And the refinery margin is essentially the weighted average blend of all those crack spreads, plus other costs and everything else.
But what’s happening right now, and the reason that we’re actually seeing the refined product market jump ahead of the consequences in the crude oil market, is that the worst thing for a refinery is literally running out of crude feed stock. And actually full credit to June Goh of Sparta Commodities for educating me more on this because I would have thought, “Wow, product markets are going insane. Refiners must be chasing as hard as they can, running as fast as they can, to capture those exceptionally high margins.” But the issue is that for them, shutting down a facility is the worst case scenario. This is basically a giant flowing chemistry set that if you turn it off, it’s really really hard to turn back on properly and it takes a lot of time and money and downtime and then you’re not capturing any of those margins.
So what the refiners are doing – these are the refineries in Asia that basically have a massive 20 million barrel a day gap coming towards them in the market in terms of feed stock – they’re preemptively reducing activity, reducing the rate of runs so they can extend their runway basically for how long they can remain in the market at all. So this means that with crude oil 2 weeks ago, we still had crude flowing out of the Gulf. It takes a month or two for those cargos to get to where they’re going. It’s only then that we’ll really start to feel the consequence and the supply loss and the inventory drain down. But with the refiners in Asia in particular, preemptively adjusting down their run rates, we’re seeing the impacts in Asian product markets immediately…
…Joe: Talk to us a little bit more about the sort of relationship between the duration of the war and the ability to flip the switch back. Because the president’s communication does seem to be like, we’re paying a price right now, but it’s going to be worth it and then prices are going to come down. As this goes on longer and longer, to what degree does everything compound and make it more difficult to go back to normal?
Rory: I was listening to actually your podcast on the Strait of Hormuz flow with the shipping experts exactly on this topic. I think you guys nailed it there, that this gets worse every single day it goes on. But let’s talk through the ways it gets worse.
When we talk about the Strait of Hormuz, you could think of it very simply as the world’s largest pipeline, or a big giant garden hose through which 20 million barrels of petroleum flows. When the Strait was closed initially for the first day, 2, 3 days, it’s like a kink in the garden hose. If the conflict had ended then, which is honestly when I expected it to end, you would unkink the garden hose and things would get back to normal pretty quickly. No harm, no foul. Some issues, but you can make that up pretty quickly.
But now, 10-plus days into this, we now have the equivalent of a 200 million barrel air gap in the global flow of petroleum. First of all – not to mention that in addition to this kind of kink in the garden hose – that pressure has built up because these countries can’t export out of this region anymore. Countries like Iraq and Kuwait in particular, both of which lack sufficient domestic storage capacity because they just export the stuff all the time for decades and decades, they have been forced to shut in production. Iraq as of yesterday shut in over 3 million barrels a day of production from its southern Basra fields. That is just Iraq alone so far. That is the same size as the feared loss of Russian supply in April of 2022 that sent the market ripping higher above $120 Brent. Just for perspective – and we didn’t end up losing that supply in the Russia case – we only lost one briefly and it came back. But in Iraq we’ve already lost, Kuwait we’ve already lost it, in the Emirates and Saudi Arabia, they have more storage capacity and a bit more optionality. There’s a pipeline to the west coast in the Red Sea in Saudi Arabia that can divert some of the flow. Similarly with the United Arab Emirates, you can divert some flow out the port of Fujairah. The pipeline to the west coast of Saudi Arabia can get bombed, if we get to an existential battle, this keeps grinding. Same with the ports of Fujairah, I think. These systems can all be broken. So you’ve lost that. You’ve lost supply structurally at least for weeks, potentially a month, even if the thing resumed, even if flow resumed tomorrow. That’s on the exporter, the supply side.
On the demand side, on the importers in Asia. Like I said, you’ve already begun to lose refining runs. Jet fuel is very particular, I think rightfully so. You don’t store as much of it typically. I think part of that giant spike in fuel prices, in jet fuel in particular, was this sudden loss of supply, not a lot of inventory cover and all of a sudden, you had all of these airlines all across Asia like, “Wow, I’m not hedged for this. I need to get every barrel I can right now.” So I think even if this resolved, which it doesn’t look like it’s going to, but even if it did, now we have a big air gap in the system that’s going to need to work itself out. And all of these different supply chains will probably end up taking 2-3 months minimum to get back to something resembling normal. And it doesn’t look like we’re about to resume flow through the Strait of Hormuz right now, despite what the White House says.
Tracy: I have what is perhaps a silly question, but does demand destruction actually exist when it comes to higher oil prices? I know that airlines will go bankrupt eventually because of high oil prices. But it feels like it is one of those things that you want to keep using for as long as you are physically or financially capable of doing so.
Rory: I’ll talk about three different angles here. The first is the difference between the elasticity of price versus the elasticity of income. When we typically think about demand destruction, we think primarily through the lens of “Prices got too high, so I’m not going to drive to work today.” There’s also the angle of prices got so high, they crashed the economy and you lost your job so you no longer have to drive to work. That is one angle if this goes on for much longer. We’re talking serious recession, if not outright global depressionary conditions if the Strait remains closed for a month-plus, two months.
I agree. I’m not going to stop driving my kid to school. I have a fairly high tolerance for high prices. But we live in wealthy advanced societies. I think what you saw for instance in 2022 I think is illustrative of this in the LG market when there was a very, very high-profile event when a contracted LG tanker that was supposed to land in Pakistan got diverted and ended up in Europe because the Europeans were willing to pay way way more and basically the LG supplier broke the contract to service that, which economics dictated. But I think the human cost was very real. Pakistan just couldn’t afford it.
So what you’re going to see here, let’s say in this horrible scenario where the Strait of Hormuz remains closed until 2027, this is what the world would look like. What you would end up seeing is massive demand destruction from lower income countries that can no longer afford to get those barrels and attract them to their shores in the first place. You and I would see this as massively surging prices at the pump and we would grumble and it would it would sap our consumer-spending-energy, etc., etc. But the barrels would likely be there. We are in the countries that will attract the most supplies because we’re willing to pay the highest prices. But other lower income countries in the world, it’s not going to be a price issue for them. It’s going to be an outright shortage. And that I think is how demand destruction in this particular instance would work…
…Tracy: I don’t think we’ve mentioned OPEC once in this conversation, which probably says something about OPEC’s relevance today. But to what extent can OPEC respond with a big supply increase and maybe shift some production away from the Gulf and start firing up output elsewhere?
Rory: It’s a great question and unfortunately the Strait of Hormuz is a risk concept, shortcircuits the OPEC’s normal reaction. When you’re talking about spare capacity, virtually all the spare capacity in OPEC is on the wrong side of the Strait of Hormuz. It’s in Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. All of that is currently caught up in this. I think that’s part of the challenge and why the Strait of Hormuz was always the boogeyman scenario. There’s no real normal way that the market can get around it.
The one major producer that’s within OPEC that is likely the single greatest beneficiary of this is actually Moscow. The Trump administration has put a lot of pressure on what I call the Big Sanctioned Three. You’ve got Iran, Venezuela, and Russia. Venezuela we have a regime change. Iran was in the process of doing so or trying to. And then in Russia, they said that they were prioritizing the war in Ukraine and they were at various points. But now they had actually been putting a lot of pressure on the Russian oil trade. India, which was one of the largest importers of Russian crude, largest seaboard importer of Russian crude after the invasion with the price cap and everything else, they got under increasing pressure on two fronts. One, the Trump administration issued blocking sanctions, really really tough sanctions that were on Iran, issued those on Roseneft and Lukoil, which are Russia’s two largest crude oil exporting companies. The Indians didn’t like that and they started pulling back purchases there because they’re afraid of the sanctions risk. But in addition, Trump actually imposed a specific punitive 25% tariff on India for being such large importers of Russian oil. So between October and say January, we saw Indian imports of Russian crude drop from over 2 million barrels a day to about 1 million barrels a day. That Russian oil, a little bit was going to China, but it wasn’t finding many other buyers. So Tracy mentioned that we were building up lots and lots of oil and water. That’s where a lot of this was ending up. So the prices for these, the discounts that were suffered by Russian barrels were exploding, they were building up on water. The oil industry was on its back foot and probably going to start contracting pretty meaningfully if that continued.
Now what are you seeing? All of a sudden one of the major places that has any incremental supply at all to share around the world is Russia. India’s back in the market for Russian crude and the White House actually explicitly gave them a waiver for those sanctions that I mentioned previously. So they’re going to start importing a lot more Russian crude because they need to. Even the Europeans have started clamoring about easing sanctions or reopening flow on the Druzbha pipeline to Eastern Europe and into Germany. It’s a mess. It’s a mess that overwhelmingly serves the interests of the Kremlin above any other single national actor in this oil market…
… Rory: Let’s use an example of the US Gulf Coast which is the major refining hub of the United States where you have all of the outlet from the Permian and all the rest of the oil fields and directly into that refining hub, much of which is exported. You see a lot of diesel exports, about a million, million and a half barrels a day of diesel exports out of the region, largely going to Mexico, Latin America and other areas. If you banned exports, let’s say across the board, what you would do is you would start building those inventories at that pace in the US Gulf Coast. You would start overflowing your tanks of diesel. Diesel prices would crash. That would be great briefly for your drivers of big diesel trucks and shipping etc. That’s great.
But eventually you reach the stage where it’s the same kind of thing as you’re seeing from the Gulf exporters. You run out of storage space and all of a sudden you can’t produce any more diesel. You can’t put it anywhere. That begins to overflow your tanks. You need to cut runs. That’s when things get bad because then you’re starting to lose gasoline supply. You’re starting to lose everything else as well. And all of a sudden you’re going to get turned into an importer of various fuels.
Disclaimer: None of the information or analysis presented is intended to form the basis for any offer or recommendation. We currently have no vested interest in any companies mentioned. Holdings are subject to change at any time.
