It‘s kinda weird, Nasdaq is higher than before the war. And the Hormuz situation hasn‘t resolved at all, while a ton of oil & gas infrastructure is destroyed, that needs years of repair. Like Qatar has 20% of its LNG facilities destroyed that needs 3-5 years of repair. US Inflation expectation has somehow collapsed from 5%+ to now about 3%. While oil prices have not come down at all.
Seems like the market is a little over-ethusiastic.
Nasdaq is riding AI wave, less energy concerns.
Isn’t the AI wave dependent on semiconductors that require helium that is constrained by the closure of the strait of Hormuz?
And also power.
indeed, remarkable price recover in the last days given the clearly unresolved situation. I wonder what indicators are considered to drive this buying spree..
An interesting interview with the CEO jan van eck of the Van Eck Investment firm.
He paints a rather positive outlook and gives interesting insights how they are using AI (Claude) internally and already spending already almost 1mio p.a. (500 FTEs- 2k (!) per employee) and how he as a CEO is more than happy to spend that kind of money.
Shows how AI seems to be moving into real corporate productivity which starts to rationalize the high valuations of AI companies and investments.
AI seems to become a real driver for productivity and growth (beyond the bubble ?)
I wouldn’t give much about anything this guy has to say honestly. He is a major Trump supporter and anything he says is majorly MAGA-biased.
Wow, I didnt realize the trump connections… important caveat..
But if the numbers are in the ball park it still shows an interessting direction IMO
That’s easy, we also have rubbish developers wasting 1000s of USD to create slop in the repos.
Spending money != Producing value
While I agree that the potential for creating slop and messing up existing code bases is great - so is the potential if used in the right way at the right places. Not only in coding but also directly in business tasks.
I use the tools daily and I’m fascinated how far coding agent like claude code have come in just over a year. While still far from perfekt using the right spec driven harness and workflows one can build quite solid software way beyond mere vibe coding.
I feel like not to embrace the new AI tools and learning how to use them effectively now, can be become way more costly than making calculated mistakes now - for companies and employees alike.
But i guess thats an entirely new topic/discussion 
It seems we have found modern days pets.com.
Market bottoms typically happen before the end of bad event.
Interesting though VXUS is beating VTI for 2026 (9,5% vs 3%) when US is least impacted country by war in real impact.
But the US are the most impacted country by chaotic leadership that makes company planning difficult, as well as the country that has the most actively destroyed their trade relationships so as to motivate all the other countries to find new trade routes and diversify away from the US as their main export market…
Oh, that brings back memories of this shining predecessor - more recently:
A little later:
… and delisting.
Yet the market, well, the Nasdaq and S&P 500 at least, celebrates with fresh ATHs.
Obviously us naysayers here must miss something really obvious…
TQQQ did 50% in the last 15 days, and despite saying I’d go back in once the 200SMA was crossed I chickened due to the volatility of the period, so broke the one rule of “mechanical” strategies, which is that you gotta follow them!
If you’re into VT, you might be interested in Vanguard’s World Stock Market ETF: Is the Whole Better than the Sum of the Parts?
Summary: using VTI+VXUS instead of VT saves 0.13%
Not applicable to us. Americans can have foreign tax credits with VXUS. As for funds to be eligible for those, they need to hold more than 50% in foreign stocks, which VT doesn’t.
This is completely irrelevant to us, we cannot get these.
So the leftover advantage is still only the blended TER difference of 0.03% (VT now has a 0.06% TER, not 0.07, it got cheaper). That difference is not worth it for the convenience and less frictions (no trading necessary) imo, if you intend to hold at market cap.