Welcome to The Nightcrawler, a weekly collection of thought-provoking articles and analysis on technology, innovation, and long-term investing. The Nightcrawler is published every Friday evening by Eric Markowitz, a partner at Nightview Capital and the firm’s Director of Research. Follow him on X.
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In this evening’s email…
Quote of the week: “The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose, and it will defend itself.” – St. Augustine
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Using an investigative approach to stock investing
There’s an old journalism adage: “If your mother says she loves you… check it out.”
This week, I joined John Mihaljevic, chairman of MOI Global, and Elliot Turner, Managing Partner, CIO of RGA Investment Advisors LLC, to talk about how I started my career as a fact-checker—then an investigative reporter. You can listen to the show, This Week in Intelligent Investing, here.
Oddly enough, I’ve come to see investigative reporting as the perfect training ground for investing. Markets are noisy, but the most valuable insights rarely come from CEOs—they come from customers, suppliers, and people on the ground. In fact, my real heroes aren’t investors; they’re investigative reporters, masters of a craft that’s sadly fading.
Simply put: there are no shortcuts in reporting or investing—both demand asking the hard questions and chasing the truth. That’s the real edge.
- Key quote: “If we’re managing a concentrated portfolio, the approach isn’t all that different from great reporting. Looking back on my time as a journalist, the best reporters never took shortcuts in their research. They went to the archives, spoke with sources in person, and did the hard work—knocking on doors, gathering firsthand information, and verifying facts themselves. They didn’t rely on secondhand accounts or surface-level observations, and neither should investors.”
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The most common mistake investors make
My colleague Arne Alsin shared a short new essay this week about the biggest mistake investors make: they focus on stock prices—not on the underlying business.
Watching tickers and reacting to price swings is a psychological trap. Real wealth, he argues, comes from understanding and owning great businesses—not trading stocks. The investors who win are the ones who ignore the noise and let compounding do the work.
- Key quote: “The stock price is noise. A distraction. A psychological trick designed to pull you away from what actually builds wealth over the long term: understanding businesses. You don’t own a stock. You own a business. If you owned a coffee shop, would you check its valuation every second? No. You’d focus on what matters: Are more customers coming in? Are margins improving? Is the product getting better? I think public investors forget this. They react to every price move like it means something. It doesn’t.”
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Progress always breaks things—that’s the point
I love this latest piece from Jason Crawford in Freethink about how progress isn’t just about breakthroughs—it’s about solving the new problems those breakthroughs create.
True solutionism, as he describes, means embracing challenges head-on rather than resisting them, whether it’s reducing smog from cars or making electricity safer. The history of progress is filled with unsung technical work—things like standards, safety testing, and regulation—that quietly shape the modern world.
Crawford argues that instead of seeing technology and reform as rivals, we should recognize them as partners in building a safer, more resilient future.
- Key quote: “Progress is messy. Its benefits come with inextricable costs and risks: pollution, accidents, radiation, carcinogens, rogue AI. Solutionism acknowledges, even embraces, this fact. It means fully accepting these problems as reality, and enthusiastically stepping up to meet the challenge. It means investigating at the first hint of a problem, not waiting until it becomes too glaring to ignore. It means measuring, diagnosing, and monitoring problems; then preventing, mitigating or curing them.”
Another recent podcast:
- When I was in London a couple of weeks ago, I sat down with Rory Mason, an investor with CADRO, a new wealth management platform, and the venture capitalist Kenneth Kashif Thomas to discuss my path to investing. Links here:
- 📺 YouTube
- 🎧 Spotify
A few more links I enjoyed:
AI Agents will be the biggest shift to enterprise software business models that we’ve ever seen – via Aaron Levie
- Key quote: “In a world of AI Agents, clearly this is going to be very different. Agentic workflows have no upper limit on how much they can be deployed by an enterprise. And all of a sudden the software categories that were once constrained by seat volume, have no such limits anymore. We’re already seeing examples of AI Agents in coding, research, legal work, and other advanced categories that are being billed at multiples of their prior seat-based software equivalent price.”
Fire-resilient prefabs are helping LA build back better – via Freethink
- Key quote: “It’s 2026. You’re moving into your first home, which was built mostly in a factory and then assembled onsite. Unlike the “prefab” homes of the past, this one was fully customizable, giving you the opportunity to design your dream home and then inhabit it just a few months later.”
Will Boom Successfully Build a Supersonic Airliner? – via Brian Potter
- Key quote: “Before Boom deals with the market risk of building a viable business, it needs to work through the technical risk of building the actual airliner. Building commercial aircraft and jet engines are some of the most difficult things that civilization accomplishes, and I expect trying to do both at the same time will be very difficult indeed.”
From the archives:
Failures of Kindness – via George Saunders (2013)
- Key quote: “Down through the ages, a traditional form has evolved for this type of speech, which is: Some old fart, his best years behind him, who, over the course of his life, has made a series of dreadful mistakes (that would be me), gives heartfelt advice to a group of shining, energetic young people, with all of their best years ahead of them (that would be you). And I intend to respect that tradition.”
