Reading the semiconductor cycle

What this article will cover

Semis run on a roughly four-year cycle. Where we are now, what each phase looks like, and the leading indicators that mark the turns.

Veridion's Library is built deliberately. We don't ship listicles or AI-paraphrased regurgitations of what's already on the internet — we write each piece against the same standard the Methodology Lab holds itself to: every claim backed by either a public source or our own backtested data.

While you wait, three Library pieces are already published:

• How the Veridion Score is built — Six factor categories, server-side calibration, and a coverage-aware composite. The public layer behind the headline Score.
• Reading a Veridion Score: what the bands mean — How STRONG, BUY BIAS, NEUTRAL, SELL BIAS, and AVOID should be read as research context.
• Subset-weighting: why missing data drops out — Why Veridion drops missing factors instead of filling them with neutral values.
• How Congress disclosures fit Veridion context — Congressional disclosure sources, their research value, and the limits that come with delayed STOCK Act filings.
• Why earnings remains a core signal — Why earnings remains one of the public factor categories, and what trade-offs that accepts.
• Methodology update: factor-category set — The public methodology now names categories while exact model parameters stay server-side.
• The Risk Panel: what it tells you alongside the Score — Realized volatility, drawdown, beta, and risk tier context, read beside the Veridion Score rather than inside it.
• How to read a 13F filing — What 13F filings show, what they omit, and how Veridion treats stale or incomplete institutional holdings data.
• The greeks, explained without calculus — Delta, gamma, theta, vega — with no equations. Just clear analogies for what each one actually does to your P&L when the market moves.
• Position sizing: the only rule that matters — Most traders blow up not from bad ideas, but from bad sizing. The Kelly criterion, the half-Kelly, and the rule professionals actually use.
• What a 10-K is hiding (and where to look) — The footnotes are where the truth lives. A walkthrough of seven 10-K red flags, with real examples from companies that later collapsed.
• Why your best trades feel boring (and your worst feel exciting) — The neuroscience of trading regret. Why dopamine pushes you toward the wrong setups, and the three-step pre-commit framework that fixes it.
• How to read a Fed statement in 90 seconds — FOMC statements change five or six words at a time. Here's the diff-reading method analysts use to extract the signal in under two minutes.
• Backtesting without lying to yourself — Survivorship bias, look-ahead bias, overfitting, and the four other ways your backtest is lying. Plus the walk-forward method that fixes it.