Letter №3 | June 2026

Epictetus Fund · Monthly Letter · Published July 2026

Dear subscribers,

this is Message No. 3 | June 2026.

Let's recall Epictetus' line: a person is not responsible for parents, brothers, body, property, death or life; responsibility is given only for what is up to him – for how he handles his own impressions. So why take on what is not ours to carry, and treat so carelessly the small area that really is under our control?

There are epochs where external power still looks impressive, but the inner spine is already broken. This is how rotten regimes are born: not at the moment of the first catastrophe, but at the moment when virtue stops being the norm and is replaced by fear, flattery, greed and worship of power.

The Stoics understood this mechanism very well. For them, a state goes bad when people stop serving the common good and start serving their passions; when the law is still in place, but the spirit of the law has already been pulled out of it, like a blade taken out of its sheath. This is not only a political story, but a human one. Collapse always starts from within: first measure is destroyed, then character weakens, then shame disappears – and only after that do institutions fall.

A rotten regime is not an accident, but a vacuum that forms where virtue has left the stage.

Rome as a warning

The history of Rome remains one of the clearest illustrations of this process. Gaius Julius Caesar's crossing of the Rubicon in January 49 BC became a point of no return: it broke the republican order and launched a civil war after which the old balance could no longer be restored.

The Republic did not die in a single day. It kept its outer forms for a while, the titles and familiar rituals, but the inner principle was already broken: the law was no longer above the person, and personal power became higher than the common order.

Later Rome gave the world both worthy rulers and monstrous ones. But the system itself increasingly produced Neros rather than Marcus Aureliuses. That is one of the main signs of a rotten regime: good people become the exception, not the rule.

The Stoic response

The Stoics had no illusions about the world. Seneca lived at Nero's court, Epictetus in a world of violence and arbitrary rule, Marcus Aurelius in an empire that already carried the seeds of further decline.

Their answer was not to run away from reality, but to build inner freedom. The external regime can be rotten, but the inner governance of oneself still stays in a person's hands: you can keep clarity, refuse to be driven by your own affects, stop confusing crowd noise with truth and make decisions from reason, not from fear.

In this sense, Stoicism is not passivity, but disciplined self-management in bad times. When the world is infected with disorder, it becomes especially important not to let that disorder move inside.

Why this matters for an investor

Let's recall the four Stoic virtues: courage, temperance, justice and wisdom. The equity market also punishes the absence of inner discipline. Where there is no measure, the investor starts chasing noise, fashion, the thrill of the moment or panic. Where there is no inner freedom, any drawdown feels like the end of the world, and any rally looks like proof of one's own genius.

The Stoic approach is useful not because it turns a person into a block of ice, but because it restores the right hierarchy of things. Not everything is under our control: we cannot cancel cycles, corrections, theme rotation on the market or other people's foolishness. But we can control portfolio structure, risk limits, time horizon and decision quality – provided we don't lose our virtues along the way.

That's why inner freedom is not abstract philosophy, but a practical condition for durable capital. Whoever can stay rational through periods of boom and fear gets an edge not for a day, but for decades.

June: back to the market

June once again reminded us that the market cares not only about ideas, but about infrastructure. In recent weeks, the breadth of moves in AI infrastructure has spread across several layers of the chain at once: semiconductors and equipment, memory and storage, optics and photonics, data-centre infrastructure and energy for AI loads.

The big tech names keep ramping up capital spending on AI: estimates for AI capex in 2026 are in the ~650–725 billion dollar range versus roughly 410 billion in 2025, and the bottleneck more and more often is not the models themselves, but electricity, cooling, connectivity and the physical capacity of data centres.

Against this backdrop, GE Vernova's growth reflects demand for generation and electrification for data centres, Vertiv captures demand for power and cooling for AI DCs, Corning strengthens its role as the optical and photonic layer of AI factories, and Arista as the high-speed network layer connecting the clusters.

The logic of June is simple: the market is looking more and more not only at those who write the models, but at those who build the plants for those models. This doesn't cancel future corrections, but it helps to see in time where in the portfolio something should be trimmed, where reinforced, and where new players deserve to be let onto the pitch for the first time.