Markets Happy Hour Podcast - September 4, 2026 - Back to School featuring Mark Tinker

In today's Markets Happy Hour Podcast we are joined by Mark Tinker, CIO of Tosca Fund Management in Hong Kong, and, more importantly for us here a prominent commentator and the author of two blogs - Market Thinking and This Is Not Investment Advice. We have here an abbreviated version of our longer discussion which involved two deeper dives as set out below. This abbreviated version touches on cost-push v. demand-pull inflation and why only one can be controlled - what the REAL intention of of the Fed and Scott Bessent is, and how there is more alignment than might be assumed (hint it ties back to the hyperscalers and their ability to raise capital). We discuss the fragility of some of the AI models and the case for rotation into the second tier beyond the hyper-scalers and ask about the robustness of the current earnings wave. Just like other data is increasingly uncertain, the data we are seeing in earnings may be self-referential too - just like the AI financing boom we have been seeing. Our deeper dive version of this podcast is also listed in the same channel. In that we do a deeper dive into the struggle of active managers in recent years as well as a thought experiment around AI financing and what is actually real.