Family Wealth Management

06/24/2026

ASML makes machines that make semiconductors, and it has had a pretty stellar couple of years. Chipmakers used visible light to carve transistors in the 1990’s, and in the mid 1990s they switched to deep ultraviolet, which brought the wavelength of the light down from 400 nanometers to 193 nanometers. ASML rolled out machines in 2017 that used extreme-ultraviolet light radiation and shoot lasers at tens of thousands of times per second that can get transistor features down to a resolution of 13 nanometers. These machines cost over $100 million apiece, and semiconductor manufacturers snapped them up. Now ASML has got a new machine, one that has a resolution of eight nanometers, selling to chip fabs for $400 million each. The Dutch company is responsible for 90% of all chip lithography tools worldwide.

06/23/2026

06/23/2026

Procter & Gamble controls 60% of the U.S. laundry detergent market, of which 38.3% market share is held by flagship detergent Tide. Fabric and home care was 36% of their business. Their new product, Tide evo is a detergent tile that is the result of a decade of research and development. P&G’s three-inch squares made up of detergent fibers cost almost twice as much as a tub of the company’s 2012 hit Tide pods, and it solves what chemists saw as the key limitation of Tide pods: that it wasn’t feasible to add more chambers to the pods if they wanted to add more features.

06/23/2026

A clever new study managed to analyze data from an e-commerce platform that hawks counterfeit goods designed to imitate designer brands. Namely, it’s the highest-income and lowest-income places were vastly higher consumers of fake designer gear than middle-income areas. Fake shoes and bags accounted for 85% of orders, with the average counterfeit transaction-to-official-price ratio coming in at 35% of mass-market shoes (Nikes), 10.7% for luxury shoes, 8.4% for accessible luxury bags (Coach), and 0.55% for ultra-luxury bags (Chanel and Hermes). Indeed, it seems like the prices of counterfeits are only moderately different from tier to tier, with a fake ultra-luxury bag averaging $54 compared to the $32 for accessible luxury.

06/15/2026

The United States has drawn 66 million barrels of oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve as part of an authorized release of 172 million barrels. At the current rate, we’ll hit that sometime in early September, at which point the SPR will bring inventories to 243 million barrels, a historic low, down from a peak of 700 million barrels in 2009. Any deal to reopen traffic through the Strait of Hormuz would still need months to reverberate through the global energy economy, so that’s a substantial drawdown in reserves. Commercial stocks of oil are also being pushed to their limit; tanks need to have 10 percent to 15 percent capacity in storage to keep operations normal, and one storage hub in Cushing, Oklahoma has drawn inventories down to 21 million barrels, a hair above its 20 million barrel limit.

06/11/2026

The Strait of Hormuz from Marine Traffic, these ships are shoulder to shoulder; something has to give

06/05/2026

The percentage of corporate directors over the age of 70 is now 22.7% of all board members for companies within the Russel 3000. A new high, that is up from 18.4% as recently as 2023. While many companies sought younger board members throughout the 2010s in order to help in digital transitions, there has been a sharp increase in older board members since 2024.