I agree.
ASML is gem from Europe. Very tough to compete against. I have never seen such high tech anywhere else
In the context of life and innovation, conceding isn’t the fairest way forward: you deprive your opponent of the right to the best possible opposition they could have had, which would have nurtured their drive to get better and outcompete them.
There shouldn’t be a “I’ve lost, I’m going home, have a nice game”, it should be a sportsmanship-like “welcome to the field, your products are good but see what I can put out!”
Protectionism delays the inevitable but it also makes a country weaker than willful acceptance of competition and enthusiastic dive into it would.
I know nothing about the tech, but I’ve read that sentiment many times. I remember reading China bought a machine, broke it down in a university environment, set their best engineers to put it back together and it didn’t work despite their best efforts.
I don’t see the US ever stopping being the destination for the world’s brightest and most ambitious, and neither do I see China becoming that, given their political system and the plain fact their culture is far more insular towards foreigners compared with the US.
Edit: this is NOT a dig on Chinese culture, but the insularity is exacerbated there (as is for JP, Korea, just without the lack of democracy). As someone who has plenty of friends who’ve lived or live abroad, we’d agreed that being in English speaking countries is just EASIER. France, Germany, Sweden, Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands - I have friends in these countries - are all very insular socially compared with UK, Canada, US, and I’d guess Australia, but I don’t have any friends there! My experience is you can be a (bloody) foreigner in the UK, but you won’t feel it on your skin, perhaps ever, while in CH I feel it every single moment. I’m sure it’ll improve once I pull the finger out and learn some proper German, but hear even Germans feel it!
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China is also a developing country while the US is one of the richest. So the US will always attract talent there as talent follows the $$$ and there’s also a boost from a less oppressive government too.
Look at how Jack Ma made one ill-advised comment and was crushed. Or a female tennis player ‘disappeared’ to protect the reputation of a high-ranking politician.
Imagine if China had an Elon Musk - on the one hand they’d like to have Starlink, but do you think such an outspoken person would last 5 minutes before being ‘disappeared’ in China? Maybe China already had the equivalent of 1000 Musk’s but they all got crushed by the system along the way.
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Andre Geim might be considered such a science equivalent of Musk almost crushed by an authoritarian system.
He is the first and only individual, as of 2024, to have received both Nobel and Ig Nobel prizes, for which he holds a Guinness World Record.
Thanks. This video made my day. IMO he should have received more than an IgNobel for this work 
Meanwhile in South Korea -: martial law declared in middle of night
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False alarm. Their Trump tried to fool everyone to avoid probably jail or something.
This seems pretty serious and will, for sure, have people injured or even be killed. IMO not the best moment to drop a questionable joke.
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What part is a joke? The Trump one? The rest is dead serious.
Edit: Check where the parliament voted 190-0 against that. All of them. Even his party.
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Yep, sorry, seems the u-turn happened quicker than the time I had to write my message…. Nevertheless sorry for the emotional reaction
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From the director of Global Macro at Fidelity:
After a newsworthy November, the cyclical bull market for equities is now 26 months old, producing a 73% return for the S&P 500, a 51% return for the equal-weighted index, a 48% return for the Russell 2000, and a 63% return for the MSCI All-Country World index. The median bull market (S&P 500 index cap-weighted) over the past 100 years has produced a 90% gain over 30 months.
(source)
So more gains for another 4 months then!
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We haven’t discussed the US vs RoW in while, hence I’ll pour in some gasonline from Ben Carlson (@awealthofcs):
Excerpt charts:
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There was a piece on CNBC yesterday. Everyone has given up on investing outside of US.
In addition, there is also an interesting discussion with Norges Fund
The real impact of growing budget deficits
I like Ruchir Sharma. Not because he is Indian but he is generally balanced in his views. He praises Switzerland though 
Typical news claptrap. Look, professional gossips (journos) need to talk and write stuff, that’s their job. In the past they wrote about what happened yesterday (as a kid my parents sent me to get the newspapers - and extra thick on Sundays because it was the day of the commentary - a chore I hated), nowadays they write what happened the last second, tick tock, 2 more news pieces, tick, 1 more etc.
Compounded by nowadays’ search/social media engines’ feedback loops and click revenue they need to write catchy stuff all the time. A couple of months ago it was doom and gloom “the black hole is about to open under your butt in the toilet”, “WARREN BUFFETT IS SELLING AND SO SHOULD YOU!”, Goldman Sachs “predicting” low returns for the S&P500 for the next decade, now the topline news I saw this morning said “S&P500 to 7000 by this time next year” (up from 6500 by UBS a couple of weeks or so ago).
All claptrap. There’s wisdom in Bogle’s message about staying the course and tuning down the noise.
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I wonder if people still remember “the terrible Halloween sell-off” from 130 messages before.
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No, nobody remembers, now we’ve moved on to anticipating the Christmas rally, the future is now, carpe diem, old man.
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I wasn’t paying attention, has there been a Thanksgiving rally?
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Today’s Bloomberg MarketsDaily newletter knows how to mix the South Korean episode with US outperformance and rubs it in as follows:
“The political chaos spanning Seoul to Paris this week is reinforcing why many investors have chosen to stick to American markets.”
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