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Entity

Trung Phan

The business writer behind readtrung, who explains companies, moats, and trade arcana with a stand-up comic's timing.

trung-phanbusinessstrategytechanalysis

Trung Phan writes business breakdowns that read like comedy sets: a Garmin R&D chart sits next to a Zuckerberg "masculine energy" meme, and a Skype eulogy detours into Erewhon's $19 strawberry. The highlights collected here show a consistent method — take one company or news peg, excavate the weird operational detail underneath it, and pad the margins with globe-spanning trivia. What the user flagged is rarely the headline; it's the aside that reframes how a business actually works, delivered with a punchline.

The house style: a serious point wearing a joke

Phan's signature is compressing an analytical idea into a memorable, silly phrase so it sticks. Reviewing why Buffett could buy Apple despite avoiding tech, Phan notes the real competence isn't in software but in "understanding monopolies (and their related moats)" — then immediately collapses the thesis into a candy pun: "Buffett loves them! Monopolies and moats! M&MS!"1 The joke is the mnemonic. The same move appears in his self-referential "Phan service" callbacks and running bits, where an analytical nugget gets tagged for the reader to remember later.2

Decoding companies through their strangest detail

Phan's breakdowns tend to hinge on one counterintuitive operational fact rather than a stock-price narrative.

Company / topic The detail Phan surfaces
Garmin's ~$40B pivot Instead of milking a dying car-GPS business, it went "on the offensive" — R&D hit 17% of sales in 2023, more than Apple (8%) and rivaling Meta, Amazon, Alphabet3
Skype's shutdown Its sounds were engineered to be un-memorable — the five-beat incoming-call notice was mixed from "a human breath, water, and voices" and deliberately made unhummable4
Mixue China's largest lemon buyer (110,000+ tonnes in 2023), whose scale lets it procure raw ingredients at 20%+ discounts5
Erewhon's $19 strawberry Off-season greenhouse growing plus farmer competition to pick the best-looking fruit pushes single strawberries past $1006

The Skype case is the purest expression of his taste: a design decision most writers would skip becomes the whole story. "We did that on purpose, because we don't want it sticking," the sound designer tells him, and Phan lets the irony sit — the app is dying, but its refusal to lodge a brainworm was the point.4

Moats, power laws, and the limits of a guru

Phan admires Buffett but refuses hagiography. He translates Berkshire's edge into plain mechanics — moats, monopolies, and the "Power Laws Rule: Some form of the 80/20 rule... A few massive wins in life will make up for countless losses or negligible outcomes."7 Then he turns the knife on the guru's do-as-I-say inconsistencies, quoting a litany of Buffett contradictions: "When WarrenB says 'derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction' then it means never trade derivatives, but when WarrenB sells massive volumes of naked puts in 08 it means never trade derivatives."8 The pattern — reverence for the framework, skepticism of the saint — is the analyst refusing to be a fanboy.

Trade arcana as comedy: tariff engineering

Phan's favorite genre is the systems-loophole story, where companies bend a product to game a rule.

flowchart TD
    A["Chicken Tax (1963)"] -->|Europe tariffs US chicken| B["LBJ retaliates: 25% tariff on 'light trucks'"]
    B --> C["Subaru BRAT welds 2 rear-facing seats in the truck bed"]
    C --> D["Reclassified as a passenger vehicle → 2.5% tariff"]
    E["30-min recording = 'movie camera' (higher tax)"] --> F["Sony, Canon cap recording at 29:59"]

The BRAT is his ideal object — a truck with "two rear-facing seats in the cargo bed and... carpeting on the floor" solely to dodge the light-truck duty. Phan's verdict: "Don't hate the player, hate the game!!!"9 The 29:59 camera limit gets the same delight: cap recording just under 30 minutes and a movie camera is legally a still camera, taxed lower.10

Pop-business history and the Succession memo

Phan reads corporate dynasties through pop culture. On the Murdochs, he marvels that HBO's Succession generated real-world panic: after the writers killed off patriarch Logan Roy, a family-trust adviser — a self-described "Succession" addict — was "forced... to suddenly confront an event they had long avoided," producing a real document he called the Succession Memo to prevent the Roy-family chaos from playing out for the Murdochs.11 Life imitating the show that imitated life is exactly the recursive absurdity Phan hunts for.

The occasional detour into mastery and first principles

Not every piece is a company teardown. Profiling Jerry Seinfeld and Ichiro, Phan foregrounds mastery as a lifelong, zen pursuit — Seinfeld's line that "the only thing in life that's really worth having is good skill... I know a lot of rich people and they don't feel good as you think they would. They're miserable."12 Elsewhere he entertains a genuinely contrarian first-principles claim: "Evolutionarily, we didn't need language to survive... It seems pretty necessary to co-ordinate large groups... But purely for individual survival: did we ever need it?"13 These show the same instinct as his business writing — question the assumed necessity of the obvious thing.

  1. Warren Buffett's $160B+ Apple Bet A History.md ↩

  2. The Murdoch Family & Succession.md ↩

  3. Garmin's ~$40B Pivot.md ↩

  4. An Ode to Skype.md ↩↩

  5. An Ode to Skype.md ↩

  6. An Ode to Skype.md ↩

  7. Warren Buffett's $160B+ Apple Bet A History.md ↩

  8. Warren Buffett's $160B+ Apple Bet A History.md ↩

  9. Tariff Engineering, Explained.md ↩

  10. Tariff Engineering, Explained.md ↩

  11. The Murdoch Family & Succession.md ↩

  12. Jerry Seinfeld, Ichiro Suzuki and the Pursuit of Mastery.md ↩

  13. Magnus Carlsen, David Deutsch and the Fun Criterion.md ↩