Chronicles of 2025

Why would it? Total US is up almost 2% today. So if -2% is a huge crash, +2% is the opposite?
It’s up over 10% year-to-date, with the dollar being down some 12%, so we are basically where the year started, if you care of calendar years.
Don’t think it’s earning season, maybe some central bank stuff or US president social media post? :rofl:

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I think this is a turning point in the market - it survived a double-witching of me selling my shorts and Cortana making a lump sum investment. Time to jump into the market, folks! :rofl:

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My portfolio is going gang-busters. Even after withdrawing equity out post-liberation day to fund my pension contributions, I’m up 7-8% YTD in CHF terms.

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Sold my last crypto and plugged into TQQQ on Wednesday, seem to have hit the local bottom pretty much spot on.

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Congratulations :clap: Can’t check my portfolio right now, nor do I want to, but I think everything (big markets) did somewhat better than US in CHF terms.

Of course, a stock-picking portfolio could be all-over the place.

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No, this time it is the opposite: Yahoo ist Teil der Yahoo-Markenfamilie.

New highs all over, nice. :+1:

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That’s what I meant with central bank stuff xD

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<insert Taxi Driver Robert De Niro You-Talking-to-Me meme here>

Madam, I hate to be the one having to mansplain this to you, but this market move is purely on fundamentals.

Sometimes it takes the market a couple of seconds – sometimes even minutes! – to recognize things, but eventually it does.

:wink:

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Ignore the noise, stay the course. Buy more UPRO.

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Aren’t we experiencing a reverse-Cortana effect, as far as I understand it should be?

We are in unprecedented territory! This time is different?

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Top is in :top_hat: :top_arrow: :waving_hand:

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This is a risk off signal, the market will implode soon. You heard it here first.

Today I listened[1] to a podcast I occasionally tune into – The Market Huddle – where the guest, Harris Kupperman (aka Kuppy), argues that the massive capital expenditures on AI infrastructure, particularly data centers, are reminiscent of the overinvestment in fiber optic networks by companies like Global Crossing during the dot-com bubble. He suggests that the AI industry is currently generating far less revenue than its depreciation costs, leading to a “massive capital misallocation.”

If you’re interested but don’t want to listen to 47 minutes of a (IMO very entertaining) podcast, the main thoughts are outlined in a blogpost by Kuppy: Global Crossing Is Reborn… - Praetorian Capital

Some numbers:

  • datacenter spend for 2025 is around $400 billion
  • 10 year depreciation curve:
    • $40 billion of annual depreciation
    • AI is generating $15 to $20 billion of revenue today
  • desired future gross margin: 25%
    • you need $160 billon of revenue to get $40 billion of gross margin
    • current revenue of $15 to $20 billion needs to grow ten-fold just to cover depreciation
  • desired 20% ROIC
    • you’d need $480 billion of AI revenue to hit this target
    • perspective
      • MS Office 365 generated $95 billion in revenue in 2024 with 400 million paying users
      • Netflix generated about $40 billion in revenue in 2024 on about 300 million subscribers

For more details, tune in yourself.

Oh, and just to clarify upfront: Kuppy thinks AI is a huge technology break, it’s just that the capital allocation in AI, especially data centers, reminds him of companies laying fiber across the country and oceans in the 90s at the ascent of the Internet.


1   Usually, I listen to these podcasts (some with video) on YouTube, but today I had to switch from YouTube to Spotify (paid) because of the YouTube ads. It felt like an unskippable ad by YouTube every five minutes or so.
They must be getting desperate to generate ad revenue ...
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Agree that it is a massive and possibly mis-allocated capital. Worse than fiber optic is that the GPUs they are buying will be obsolete in 3 years time, so they have to get value out of it now.

For big companies, like Google, Meta, they are getting trained models out of their investment which they can deploy in their business. The value of these is difficult to measure. Presumably, the GPUs will also be of some value /required in their continuing operations.

For pure play companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, their investment is make or break.

It’s worth noting that the fiber is/was valuable - it’s just that technological advances meant that a lot more data could be pumped through the fibers. GPUs will have an even tougher ride, we know that they should be depreciated down within 4 years or so - but not only that, we might similar advances which render the current architectures and silicon obsolete.

These numbers are unthinkably big. Simple me says “is there a chance these megacorps got it so wrong?” with regard to their spending vs expected ROI?

Microsoft ninja raised subscription fees from CHF66 to CHF99 or something, that’s a clean (?) 33% increase. Doesn’t mean I’ll quit my subscription to office but WTF?

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Wait a second, people pay subscription fees for MS office these days, like real people, out of your own pocket? So they are on to something with all that spending. :money_mouth_face:

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They really make it unintuitive to get out of using a Microsoft account to install Windows, which comes as the default OS on most PCs. As they do, they hound you to subscribe to one of their plans, which they keep doing everytime you use their trial version of MS Office (which comes pre-installed).

Old farts like presumably us know to avoid these schemes. Older farts might fear loosing access to MS Office and feel compelled to get a subscription. Younger farts may be more used to the “everything requires a subscription and the client never owns anything” scheme and consider paying a normal thing (I have no idea about that one but I do realize that only through my incremental experience can I still manage to block the right scripts to make Youtube and Google search usable. People without the proper knowledge/habit may find there’s no other way than paying a subscription).

Also, most practices (at least in engineering as far as I know) as well as at least several public administrations are using the full MS365 suite since Covid and have switched to MS Sharepoint and MS Teams, even when it’s not suited to their actual needs. Microsoft, as Apple too, is a master at making people pay for simplicity.

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Yeah. I’m so cheap I refuse to get subscriptions if I can avoid it. I think the only subscriptions I have are:

  • Internet/Mobile phone subscription
  • Google Drive subscription
  • GMail

The last 2 I might get rid of eventually.

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I just don’t like the model: pay us monthly/yearly to get access to our software and not own your copy, then get updates whenever because “the internet is an unsafe place” then have your device become obsolete in a pre-planned way since it can’t get access to the updates that are required for the everything app economy to function…

Edit: Also, you can’t get more than 3 search results because goodness forgive that you find what you are actually searching for (Hi Youtube search!) and those come after 3-5 sponsorized links disguised as the site you were searching for (Hi Google search!).

Edit2: And don’t get me started on why every internet site needs 10-20 third party scripts running on it provoking a bloat of data that makes bigger speed/data plans a near requirement for those who don’t block them.

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