What We’re Reading (Week Ending 26 April 2026) - 26 Apr 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 26 April 2026):
1. Pancreatic cancer mRNA vaccine shows lasting results in an early trial – Kaitlin Sullivan, Marina Kopf and Anne Thompson
Nine days later, Gustafson had surgery to remove the Stage 2 cancer from her pancreas. The day before she was supposed to start chemotherapy, her doctors told her about a clinical trial exploring the use of personalized messenger RNA vaccines for cancer. It was February 2020 — months before mRNA vaccines for Covid would become one of the world’s hottest commodities. Very soon after, Gustafson was the first person to get one for pancreatic cancer.
“It was a no-brainer,” Gustafson said of joining the trial. “I knew that statistically, the odds were against me.”
Less than 13% of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer live for more than five years, making it one of the deadliest cancers. There is no routine screening for pancreatic cancer, such as colonoscopy or mammogram, and symptoms typically don’t show up until the disease is advanced. Once detected, there are few options for treatment. Only about 20% of cases are operable, which is currently required for someone to be eligible to join a pancreatic cancer vaccine trial…
…The vaccines work as a type of so-called immunotherapy, harnessing a person’s immune system to fight cancer cells. The goal is not to eliminate existing tumors, but instead to stamp out lingering, undetected cancer cells, and later any new cells that form before they can cause a recurrence.
…Pancreatic cancer is the poster child for these difficult-to-treat cancers, Balachandran said, and experts have long believed that people with pancreatic cancer could not generate an immune response against tumors. But after nine doses of the personalized vaccine, Gustafson is one of eight people in the 16-person Phase 1 trial who did just that, producing an army of immune cells called T cells that seek out and destroy tumor cells.
“This is one of the hardest cancers to generate any immune response, let alone such a potent one,” Balachandran said.
Balachandran and his team published the results of the Phase 1 clinical trial last year. At the time, the patients, all of whom had early-stage disease before they joined the trial, had only been tracked for just over three years, and it was unclear whether the immune response would last and lead to the patients living longer, he said. New data collected during the trial’s six-year follow-up period shows that it may.
Six years after treatment, Gustafson and six others who responded to the treatment are still alive, along with two of the eight people who did not respond. Two of the responders, including the one who died, had a cancer recurrence; Gustafson’s cancer has not come back.
“The most important finding here is that the people who mount a response to the vaccine live longer than those who do not,” said Dr. William Freed-Pastor, a physician-scientist at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, who was not involved with the trial. He cautioned, however, that the results come from a very small group of patients. More research is still needed…
…Earlier research tested mRNA vaccines to treat people with advanced cancer, with disappointing results, “so we thought we didn’t have a vaccine that would work,” said Dr. Robert Vonderheide, the president-elect of the American Association for Cancer Research and director of the Abramson Cancer Center at the University of Pennsylvania.
In reality, newer research like this Phase 1 trial suggests the immunotherapy may work in less advanced cancer.
2. Brad Setser on the War in Iran and the Future of the US Dollar (Transcript Here) – Tracy Alloway, Joe Weisenthal, Brad Setser
Tracy Alloway: Why don’t we start with that historic analogy—the 1970s oil shock. Lots of ink is currently being spilled on whether or not that’s the correct parallel for our current crisis. In your view, how much does this particular oil shock resemble that of 50 years ago?
Brad Setser: There’s the obvious parallel in the sense that the 1970s oil shocks—’73 was a function of the Yom Kippur War and the Arab nations’ reactions to it. The second oil shock in 1979 was a function of the Iranian revolution. Same geographic region, but different in the sense that the US and Israel are the instigators, and different in that, so far at least, the magnitude of the shock is not at all comparable. It’s not at all comparable in price terms. In ’73 and then in ’79, oil doubled or tripled, and by the end of the decade oil had gone up six or seven times in dollar terms, less in real terms. We’ve only gone up maybe 50% max from spot oil for Brent and WTI and next month’s future. It’s a little higher for delivery in Asia, but we are not yet at the magnitude of the shock we saw in the 1970s.
The obvious point is that our economy as a whole—for the US and for the world—is a little less oil-dependent, but I wouldn’t push that too far. The main distinction is that we sort of started it—the US and Israel—and we in theory can end it, although we would only end it if Iran finds its own equilibrium that allows other countries’ oil to pass through the strait. At least so far, the market has not anticipated that this will need the same kind of jump in price to balance supply and demand. That could change. If you look at it in terms of physical interruption of the flow of oil, some of your guests have noted we’re similar, maybe even worse. So we’re in this weird world where the physical interruption is bigger but the price reaction is smaller.
Joe Weisenthal: I’m glad you brought this up. You talk to the commodity guys like we do, and they’re saying, “This is crazy, this is the biggest shock ever.” Guys like me—I’m an efficient-markets guy, I just see what’s on the screen, and it looks like it’s not that big of a deal. You be the third-party arbiter here. How do you make sense of the gap between what we see on our screen versus the shortfall in physical barrels—20 million every single day that aren’t coming to the market?
Brad Setser: It’s not quite 20. You’ve got the East—there’s been some rerouting. It’s somewhere between 10 and 15, which happens to be between 10 and 15% of global supply and between 20 and 30% of global traded oil. It is still a massive, massive shock, and my elasticities would imply a much bigger increase in price if that was a sustained, expected interruption.
You end up dealing with the reality that oil is close to being a perfectly fungible commodity, but it is not a perfectly fungible commodity. A North Atlantic barrel can only get to China or Japan with a long trek around the world, so there’s an extra shipping cost. A lot of the barrels in the North Atlantic are sweet and light—”light” is a measure of the weight of the oil, “sweet” means less sulfur. A lot of the refiners in Asia were set up to refine medium sour. For some things you want heavier grades of oil because you get more diesel out of the heavier grades. Refiners are configured for different grades of oil. When you interrupt the flow—fundamentally the flow from the Gulf countries to Asia—there’s no immediate, instantaneous substitution using barrels from the North Atlantic. That’s the first point.
The second point is that what people think of as traded oil is not actually oil for delivery tomorrow. It is the futures contract for the next month, and the month after that, the world could look completely different. The US has within its ability the capacity to pull back. If the US pulls back—and maybe the Iranians insist on a toll—there is no shortage of oil that could come out. It’ll take a little longer now because of the physical destruction of some of the export facilities in the Gulf, but if you don’t have this particular choke point strangled, the old global oil market was very well supplied. So the futures market has to balance between one possibility—that there is plenty of oil two or three months out and oil is on a trajectory, not immediately because of the damage, back to $60—and another possibility where this persists and oil is at $150 or above. The market’s had trouble figuring that one out…
…Joe Weisenthal: There are obviously differences, but how did the ’70s reshape the world? You had these oil shocks, and people then started talking about “petrodollars”—a word that came into existence. What kind of legacy did those shocks leave on the global financial system?…
…Brad Setser: Americans are very unhappy—if you remember in the 1970s it was not good for President Carter. When the Iranian revolution came, there were the hostages, but the oil shock did not help his popularity. Americans in general are very unhappy when oil prices are high—it’s one of our national quirks.
In the short run at that time, there was a huge windfall into the Gulf states. The Gulf states piled up dollars, and they were dollars. Most oil—oil was priced in dollars before 1973. It didn’t take a deal to price oil in dollars. The US had been the biggest producer of oil in the 1930s. We were the supplier of oil to the Brits and others during World War II. It was only over the course of the 1950s and ’60s that other parts of the world caught up with US oil production, but the oil industry, in a deep sense, was born in the United States and was always priced in dollars. Saudi Aramco was originally a joint venture with an American company—or maybe even fully owned by an American company, I forget—so it was natural that it was priced in dollars. It wasn’t like in the 1970s you had to do a new deal to price oil in dollars rather than something else. Oil was in dollars.
Those dollars piled up, and it was a period of difficulty in the international monetary system. The US was going off the gold standard; Bretton Woods was breaking down; high inflation was not well contained after the first oil shock. There was an effort to convince the Saudis to keep their large stock of new petrodollars in dollars—not buy euros—and to use them at least in part to buy Treasuries. Even then, the Saudis were a little reluctant to visibly buy Treasuries. Some Bloomberg reporters several years ago went through this history, and the US started masking who was buying Treasuries at the request of the Saudis. The Saudis essentially said, “You guys are supporting Israel, we don’t really want to be seen buying your bonds directly, can you hide it?” And we agreed. Because there was still residual tension between the US and many parts of the Arab world, a lot of the dollars did not flow into the Treasury market. They flowed into bank accounts in London—offshored effectively eurodollars originating from petro-states. Those got recycled and lent in no small part to oil-importing emerging economies, and that is viewed as the start of the buildup of vulnerabilities that led to the Latin American debt crisis in the 1980s.
There’s another part of this whole story that I think people forget, which is sort of irritating me lately. After 1979–80, the Saudis had built up huge stocks of dollars—a great decade for the Saudis in the 1970s. In the ’80s, in order to keep prices high they had to cut production, and eventually that wasn’t enough and the oil price collapsed. By the end of the 1980s, and certainly by the middle of the 1990s, all the dollars that had been built up in the 1970s had been spent. The Saudi cumulative current account balance went back to basically being neutral or in deficit by ’95 and certainly by 2000. So in some sense the petrodollar boom came and it went. By the time of the Asian financial crisis, oil prices were very low—in the $20s—and there were no flows of petrodollars nor a very large stock of petrodollars. There’s sometimes a tendency to think the ’70s just continued and continued, but the reality is that, setting aside the really rich Emirates and Kuwait, the rest of the oil exporters were not in a position to continuously build up and save over most of the period after 1980 until the big run-up in oil from 2003 to 2014…
…Brad Setser: The last point, and this is just to be provocative because I’m tired of people blabbering about the dollar as the global reserve currency and how that’s the foundation of everything: an international large-cap equity portfolio will have a US share of roughly two-thirds—65 to 70%. The Saudi Public Investment Fund—my friend Alex Etra has done some work on it—its international portfolio has a dollar share of 80%, and that’s probably typical, because most private equity funds are going to be pretty dollar-heavy. A typical global reserve portfolio is now at 57% dollars. So the notion that reserves are the source of inflows into dollars is a bit dated. A reserve portfolio will typically have a lower dollar share than a standard return-seeking equities fund, which just because of the outperformance of US large caps will be more overweight dollars…
…Brad Setser: a quarter of global reserves, to the first approximation, are in China. China still manages its currency against the dollar, but China as a matter of policy brought its formal disclosed dollar reserve share down to 55%, from 79% in 2005. They did not like the optics of financing their strategic rival and holding a lot of Treasuries in visible ways. That’s a bit misleading, because the dollar share of the portfolios of the state banks—which now have a very large share of the total state portfolio—is much higher, around 70%. If you actually net out the offshore liabilities of the state banks and just look at the net, the euro offshore portfolio is matched by euro offshore liabilities. The dollar offshore portfolio is matched by dollars onshore. In a sense, the BOP flow through the state banks was, setting aside some of the CNY lending which has gone up, almost 100% dollars…
…Brad Setser: Now, we are in a world where an enormous share of the world’s financial wealth—both people looking for safety in reserve assets, people looking for a bit more yield than you can get out of a safe G10 government bond, the private credit/CLO world, and people wanting the equity home runs—all those investors globally are now quite overweight US assets. As a result, the dollar is quite strong. To me, the core question is not really whether geopolitics will change things, assuming we don’t get into a full-on blow-up with Europe, which would accelerate some shifts. The real question is: is this intense overweight in the dollar sustainable when we have fairly reckless policies? The answer so far has been yes.
3. Token Cost Conundrums – Abdullah Al-Rezwan
Each model has its own tokenizer that decides how many tokens your prompt becomes. Feed the exact same prompt to GPT-5.4 and Claude Opus 4.7, and Claude might slice it into 2–3x as many pieces. So even if the headline price were exactly the same, you’d pay 2–3x more for identical content…
…”We sent identical inputs through each provider’s official token counting API and normalized against OpenAI’s…
…”The differences are dramatic. On tool-heavy workloads, claude-opus-4-7 costs 5.3x more than gpt-5.4 even though their list prices are only 2x apart. The rankings also flip depending on what you’re sending: Gemini is the cheapest option for text and structured data, but becomes 46% more expensive than OpenAI on tool definitions.
The only way to know what you’re actually paying is to measure it.”…
…Similarly, after understanding these nuances, I think any enterprise would be really imprudent to standardize on just one model developer. This is because the customer loses bargaining power, a benchmark, and the ability to distinguish real quality differences from billing artifacts. If the seller controls both the meter and the service, and the buyer has no parallel benchmark, the buyer is highly likely to end up paying more over the long term. Even if the model developer isn’t sneakily charging you higher price, without any benchmark, how will the customer press the model developer to lower their price or even understand that they’re paying too high a price?…
…Nonetheless, the smart move does seem to be multi-model capability (even if 95% of volume goes to one vendor) plus internal benchmarks run on your actual prompts. That gives you the optionality to switch and more importantly, the negotiating leverage to push back at contract renewal. Given this context, I believe it will be exceptionally unlikely that enterprise AI will ever be dominated by one model developer. Anthropic may be dominating enterprise AI today, but OpenAI and Google will also likely have plenty of opportunities to gain further ground.
4. Elite law firm Sullivan & Cromwell admits to AI ‘hallucinations’ – Sujeet Indap and Kaye Wiggins
Sullivan & Cromwell told a US federal bankruptcy court that a major filing it made in a high-profile case contained multiple “hallucinations” made by AI software…
…The case in question revolves around S&C’s representation of liquidators appointed by legal authorities in the British Virgin Islands who are pursuing actions against Prince Group and its owner Chen Zhi.
US federal prosecutors last year charged Zhi with wire fraud and money laundering, accusing him of “directing Prince Group’s operation of forced-labour scam compounds across Cambodia . . . that stole billions of dollars from victims in the United States and around the world”.
In a separate action, US prosecutors also filed a civil forfeiture complaint seeking to seize nearly $9bn worth of bitcoin that the US authorities said represented the proceeds of the Prince Group crimes. Zhi was arrested earlier this year in Cambodia and extradited to China after a request from Beijing.
Prince Group is incorporated in the British Virgin Islands and the Chapter 15 proceeding in the US court system is designed to get the US government to formally recognise the powers of the BVI liquidators to represent creditors and victims in the US legal proceedings, liquidators told the court.
In multiple instances, S&C in the April 9 filing erroneously summarised the conclusions made in other cases, according to a list of strike-through corrections the firm submitted to the judge.
S&C has an enterprise licence for ChatGPT according to multiple people familiar with the firm’s operations. According to S&C’s website, at least five high-level partners have been assigned to the Prince Group bankruptcy case.
5. Anthropic’s Mythos Model Is Being Accessed by Unauthorized Users – Rachel Metz
A handful of users in a private online forum gained access to Mythos on the same day that Anthropic first announced a plan to release the model to a limited number of companies for testing purposes, said the person, who asked not to be named for fear of reprisal. The group has been using Mythos regularly since then, though not for cybersecurity purposes, said the person, who corroborated the account with screenshots and a live demonstration of the model.
Anthropic has said Mythos is capable of identifying and exploiting vulnerabilities “in every major operating system and every major web browser when directed by a user to do so.” As a result, the company has taken pains to ensure that the technology is only available to a select batch of software providers through an initiative called Project Glasswing, with the goal of allowing those firms to test and safeguard their own systems from potential cyberattacks…
…The users relied on a mix of tactics to get into Mythos. These included using access the person had as a worker at a third-party contractor for Anthropic and trying commonly used internet sleuthing tools often employed by cybersecurity researchers, the person said. The users are part of a private Discord channel that focuses on hunting for information about unreleased models, including by using bots to scour for details that Anthropic and others have posted on unsecured websites such as GitHub…
…The group is interested in playing around with new models, not wreaking havoc with them, the person said. The group has not run cybersecurity-related prompts on the Mythos model, the person said, preferring instead to try tasks like building simple websites in an attempt to avoid detection by Anthropic.
Disclaimer: None of the information or analysis presented is intended to form the basis for any offer or recommendation. We currently have a vested interest in Alphabet (parent of Google). Holdings are subject to change at any time.
