Hedgeye Podcasts Sep 25, 2026 57m · 38m saved
With George Noble, Managing Partner of Noble Capital Advisors and author of The Noble Update
George Noble said the biggest story in markets is not artificial intelligence, private credit or the Strait of Hormuz. It is a global rise in the cost of capital, with the 10-year Treasury yield near 5%.
Most investors treat 5% yields as the aberration. Noble said the aberration was the near-zero rates that came before them, and that private equity, private credit and the insurers that funded them were priced off those rates.
"So when you make the cost of capital zero, you make money free, pigs fly."
George Noble, Managing Partner of Noble Capital Advisors, on Hedgeye Podcasts' Protect the Pile. He started as an analyst under Peter Lynch at Fidelity, ran Fidelity's first international fund, the Fidelity Overseas Fund, and later ran two hedge funds of more than $1B each. He now writes The Noble Update on Substack, and his own Substack profile puts his investing experience at 45 years.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 57 minutes of audio, 19 minutes of reading.
Here are the 12 calls that matter.
Key Takeaways
Private marks hide losses for a whole quarter because there is no price on a screen
Noble called the marks "bogus" and said the real damage is the capital misallocated in between
A global rise in the cost of capital matters more than AI, private credit or Hormuz
Insurers that funded illiquid private assets are the next problem, and Noble said some very big names will go bankrupt
He told policyholders to ask how much of their insurer's assets sit in affiliated transactions and affiliated reinsurers
Private equity and private credit are "toast" as real rates rise with demand for capital
You cannot own enough gold and gold miners, because a $2.5T deficit in an expansion will be met by printing money
International diversification is "kind of a lie" when global liquidity ties markets together
Bitcoin is "the Facebook of speculative assets," made duller by institutional ownership
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent will be the most consequential in history, in the wrong way, Noble said
Peter Lynch bought more when a stock fell 10% on rain, the opposite of chart-driven selling
AI funding looks like housing in 2006, when the rate of price gains slowed before the crash
1. Old-School Research Reports
A host asked Noble what has changed since he started at Fidelity in the Peter Lynch era and what has not.
The game is the same, with a twist
"It's buy low, sell high. Although in recent years it's buy high, sell higher." — George Noble
Noble, who called himself a momentum investor, said he started his Substack in January and had to write a research report for the first time in decades. The first was a buy recommendation on Southwest Airlines. He went to boxes in his basement and dug out his research from the 1980s, including a 68-page Fidelity investment committee report that covered a SWOT analysis, cash flow, the balance sheet, income-statement drivers, insider buying and the technicals.
The same report, shorter
"I made three or four pages with AI." — George Noble
A colleague told him nobody writes reports like that anymore, which Noble said was exactly why he would. He added that the market is "starting to become a market for old men." When he asked clients what they wanted, they said one page: the narrative and the charts. A host said the next step is that AI agents will read the reports and nobody will.
