🔊 TL;DR
The Masters
Course: Augusta National. You know.
Weather: Perfection. Too good.
Story: Rory chasing history.
The Card
Outright Winner: Rory McIlroy
Favorite Bet: Justin Rose Top 5
Fade: Bryson DeChambeau
📣 The Good, Bad & Ugly
GB&U: The Current State of Golf Media
The Good: Golf is in the middle of a viewship boom nobody saw coming. The 2026 Farmers Insurance Open did 2.9M viewers on its sunday finale, best Torrey Pines number in 6 years, and a 70% jump YoY. Koepka’s PGA Tour return drove +87% and +115% Thursday/Friday gains on Golf Channel. The Masters delivered its highest-rated final round in 5 years (w/o Tiger or Phil). The U.S. audience for golf is bigger and younger than ever. And, they are digital native. TGL, for example, pulled in a median viewer age of 51 (younger than NHL, F1, and NFL). There is real demand.
The Bad: The audience is healthy. But distribution is broken. To watch a full PGA Tour season legally in 2026 you need CBS, NBC, Golf Channel, Peacock, ESPN. Six platforms. Five subscriptions. No single discovery surface. TGL ratings declined meaningfully in Season 2 (but I expect that to rebound in Seaon 3) the league's existential test is whether it can stabilize above ESPN's primetime average, and the early data suggests that's a coin flip. LIV will be dead by Summer and the PGA Tour is stacking way too many signature events between Majors..
The Ugly: The honest read is that the Tour is being attacked from three directions at once and doesn't have a media strategy that addresses any of them. Bryson DeChambeau is on the record saying "majors-only and YouTube is incredibly viable" — that's a top-five player publicly endorsing the unbundling of professional golf. Grant Horvat and the Bryan brothers just launched Your Golf Tour with a $1M Wynn finale and 16 creator captains. Wesley Bryan is suspended from the PGA Tour for a LIV YouTube cameo while building his own competing tour. The audience isn't the problem. The audience is here. The problem is that the most innovative and most-distributed golf content in 2026 is increasingly being made by people who don't work for the Tour, the broadcasters, or any of the leagues. That's the category we're investing behind.
💰 Wedge Fund
Brief: Saronic is building the autonomous platform for the contested-water future the Pentagon is openly planning for. One of the only companies actually delivering autonomous surface vessels at scale. The team is heavy on defense and ex-Anduril builders who’ve shipped real hardware against real DoD contracts.
Saronic: Defense Tech
Bull Case: The timing is historic. Few companies sit at the intersection of (a) a defense procurement environment that has finally cracked open, (b) a manufacturing thesis that can scale, and (c) a technology stack already battle-validated by Ukraine. Saronic has all three. Every quarter the procurement window stays open, the lead widens.
Bear Case: Defense procurement is famously slow even when budgets exist. Multi-year programs slip. Geopolitical priorities shift with administrations. Hardware businesses carry capital intensity software companies don’t. And, valuations can compress meaningfully if production timelines stall. Multi-year hold; not a quick mark-up.
Macro Environment
The U.S. Navy needs more ships and can’t build them fast enough. Traditional shipyards are slow, expensive, and backlogged a decade out. Ukraine showed the world that cheap autonomous boats can sink billion-dollar warships — a structural shift in how naval power works. The Pentagon is now spending real money on unmanned vessels, and the supply side is still tiny.
Not investment advice. Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
