St. James Investment Company has released its “Value Investors” third-quarter 2026 investor letter, outlining an increasingly difficult environment for value investors. Rising interest rates, higher energy prices, record government debt, and geopolitical conflicts are testing market fundamentals, even as the S&P 500 trades near all-time highs and stock valuations remain elevated.
The letter does not disclose a specific third-quarter return for the Select Value portfolio. Instead, it highlights the widening gap between stocks and bonds since the pandemic. According to the firm, U.S. equities have outperformed bonds by an average of 28% annually over that period, while stocks now account for 52% of U.S. households’ financial assets.
St. James warns that rising oil prices and long-term Treasury yields could intensify inflationary pressures and increase the risk of stagflation. The letter cites a 10-year Treasury yield of 5.23% and a 30-year yield of 5.55%, underscoring the higher borrowing costs facing consumers, businesses, and the government.
Looking ahead, the firm remains cautious about a market increasingly shaped by enthusiasm for artificial intelligence. Its message is straightforward: resist chasing compelling narratives and focus on businesses with durable competitive advantages, sound economics, and prices that leave room for unexpected setbacks. St. James continues to emphasize patience, valuation discipline, and a sufficient margin of safety.
For a closer look at the firm’s stock selections, explore its top five holdings in 2026.
In its third quarter 2026 investor letter, St. James Investment Company mentioned Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC). INTC is a semiconductor company that designs and manufactures processors and related computing technologies for personal computers, servers, and other applications. Its operations include its client computing business, data-center and AI products, and Intel Foundry, which provides semiconductor manufacturing and related services. Its combination of chip design and manufacturing gives it exposure to both product demand and the substantial costs of operating advanced fabrication facilities. On November 6, 2026, the stock closed at $56.30, an increase of 7.75%, or $4.05, from the previous session. Its market capitalization was approximately $299.23 billion.
Here’s what St. James Investment Company has to say about Intel Corporation (NASDAQ:INTC):
“For roughly two decades, beginning in the late 1980s, Intel Corporation occupied the position Tyre once held. Intel’s “island fortress” combined the x86 instruction set (the language processors speak), world-leading manufacturing, the “Intel Inside” brand, and the Wintel software ecosystem (Intel x86-compatible processors running Microsoft Windows). Nearly every PC and server ran Intel silicon because almost all software assumed x86 architecture, while Intel’s factories remained a generation or two ahead of the competition. Rivals could claim parts of the ecosystem—niche chips or brief performance gains such as AMD’s Athlon—but they could not defeat Intel. Intel’s moat was a PC-and-server world where raw x86 performance and backward compatibility mattered most.
The introduction of the smartphone reshaped the battlefield through extreme power efficiency, a different instruction set (ARM), and a foundry model in which the best factories no longer belonged to chip designers. Intel tried to respond with x86 Atom chips but failed. It treated the new market as a sideshow rather than recognizing it as the place where volume, talent, and the next computing platform were emerging. AMD’s answer, beginning in 2008, was to go “fabless” and later stake everything on a clean-sheet architecture (Zen) manufactured at TSMC’s facilities. Because AMD could not match Intel’s capital spending, it spun off its factories and outsourced its chip production to TSMC. This innovation removed the requirement that a challenger be a world-class manufacturer while TSMC’s rise made the fabless chip company possible. A competitor no longer had to control the entire channel; it could buy access to the best process while Intel shouldered the cost of the entire production value chain.1
Intel planned to launch its first 10-nanometer (nm) CPUs in 2016, but its development never arrived on schedule. The delay pushed Intel away from its long-running Tick-Tock cadence (a two-year process-development cycle), kept the company at 14 nm for years, and helped TSMC and AMD narrow the manufacturing gap. While TSMC shipped 7 nm and then 5 nm, Intel spent years refreshing its 14 nm products. By the time “Intel 7” (a rebranded 10 nm process) reached critical production volume, its competitors had already closed the performance and efficiency gap. Intel assumed its largest customers would never leave the x86 island, but its dominant moat no longer existed. Apple was once Intel’s most prestigious PC customer, yet beginning in 2020, it transitioned the entire Mac line to its own ARM-based M-series chips. Hyperscalers, a market segment Intel once completely dominated, began dual-sourcing AMD’s EPYC processors and later designed their own silicon. Microsoft promoted Windows on ARM, while OEMs that had treated Intel as the default began viewing it as just one option. The moat that had once protected Intel’s business quickly disappeared.
x86 compatibility had once been a genuine barrier to competition: rewriting the world’s software was unthinkable while Intel chips kept getting faster. Once process leadership vanished and new platforms (phones, then Macs, then parts of the cloud) no longer required x86, Intel’s structural moats began to erode. Compilers, emulation, and new operating-system support removed the assumption that “everything important runs on Intel.” AMD did not need to destroy x86; it only needed to make “good enough, cheaper, better efficiency” available on the same instruction set, and then let customers decide. An overconfident Intel had beaten back AMD in the early 2000s and assumed that its process leadership and installed base were permanent. Yet Intel’s dominant moat slowly eroded: first its manufacturing leadership, then its performance leadership, then its pricing power, and finally its market share. Server market share, ~95% in the late 2010s, fell to 50–70%; client PC share, once overwhelmingly Intel’s, became contested. The company that once earned more profit than TSMC, Nvidia, and AMD combined began generating large losses while its competitors pulled ahead.
Intel’s moat was once real and formidable, and the company had every historical reason to believe it was safe. But when competitors changed the battlefield and adopted a manufacturing model Intel had dismissed, they increasingly peeled away the company’s customers. Andy Grove was Intel’s CEO from 1987 to 1998, having already served as president since 1979. He became chairman of the board in 1997 and, in May 1998, handed the CEO title to Craig Barrett, but remained chairman until 2005. Andy Grove popularized the phrase “Only the Paranoid Survive” as the title of his 1996 business book. Grove himself addressed its origin in the book, writing: “I am often credited with the motto, ‘Only the paranoid survive.’ I have no idea when I first said this, but the fact remains that, when it comes to business, I believe in the value of paranoia.” Grove’s business mindset evolved as part of his long-standing management philosophy while he led Intel through the intense competition in the semiconductor industry, particularly during the company’s mid-1980s pivot from memory chips to microprocessors. Japanese firms nearly wiped-out Intel’s memory-chip business in the 1980s, forcing a painful but ultimately successful full pivot to microprocessors.”
Intel’s October 29 earnings release showed third-quarter 2026 revenue of $16.5 billion, up 21% year over year, with reported earnings per share of $0.60 and adjusted earnings per share of $0.52. Management highlighted progress in expanding supply and advancing manufacturing technology, while acknowledging near-term headwinds across the PC industry. Intel also released its Intel 14A 0.9 process design kit in October and announced collaborations involving advanced packaging and manufacturing equipment. For the fourth quarter, it forecast revenue of $15 billion to $16 billion and adjusted earnings per share of $0.25.
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Disclosure: No material interests to disclose. This article was originally published on Global Market Bulletin.
