I have a nice...nearly....large gain so far today. Riding a small wave today. AND....waiting for the markets to decide to reward actual business results.....no matter how long it takes.
You hanging in there LORI? Dealing with post traumatic depression over the World Cup? The five stages of GRIEF? You guys got so close.....it was a GREAT ride. Sometimes you have to simply be satisfied with being NUMBER THREE in the world.....and look to the future.
Oil is back up near $100 bbl and $FDX remains near an all time high. The market doesn't make sense to me. Rationality is gone. Value investing is significantly gone; to be fair, finding value was never easy in any market in my lifetime. PE has become irrelevant. It's getting difficult to be comfortable with so much exposure to the market that has become a black box.
Meanwhile, at AMD, sources I trust tell me everybody has signed on to buy Helios. Every major AI company is lined up to buy. I doubt this has as much to do with AMD's technical prowess as it has to do with desperate hardware shortages. AMD stock price remains relatively stable through this launch to now. The launch is a non-event. I watched a CNBC piece yesterday that mentioned nVidia released Rubin in 2025 and this is AMD trying to catch up to Vera Rubin (link below). Either CNBC didn't bother opening a web browser to look at nVidia's launch schedule or they are straight up lying. 90% chance, it's the later. Either way, this is another example of media misleading the market through incompetence, malice, or both. When I was a teenager, I desperately wished I could own companies based on inside information, like Warren Buffett. I was stuck in Tumbleweed, Canada, with 3 to 5 pages of financial content in the newspaper. It took a lifetime but I finally gained that information advantage. We all did, if we care to take advantage.
"It's getting difficult to be comfortable with so much exposure to the market that has become a black box." You sound like me....TomB16.....before I locked myself in my......MENTAL ZEN BOX. I hope it is able to contain me better than an AI sandbox.
A small loss for me today in my stocks.....TGIF. I also got beat by the SP500 today in my stocks by....0.29%. A late day FADE as all the traders and gamblers bailed out so they would not have to hold anything over the weekend.
As to my year to date for my entire portfolio. I am at +3% at the close today. Small enough that my gain could be wiped out in a single day or two. BUT.....I no longer care about the short term....or the future of the markets. NOT MY PROBLEM.......OM...OM....OM...OM.
It will be a big week for me next week. I will get earnings from.....MSFT on Tuesday. AND....AAPL and AMZN on Thursday.
And you dont even have to be WEALTHY. ANYONE can be an investor. YOU....can start with minimal amounts of money into a SP500 ETF....or other big Index ETF. OR....fractional shares in some select stocks. JUST DO IT.
I dont care....one bit....about sentiment. It is NOW simply a reflection of politics and the day to day media BS. BUT....this is interesting. Bullish Sentiment Starting to Swing https://www.bespokepremium.com/interactive/posts/think-big-blog/bullish-sentiment-starting-to-swing ....."The weekly sentiment survey from the American Association of Individual Investors, or AAII, fell sharply from one of the higher readings of the year to the lowest. As shown below, last week the percentage of survey respondents reporting they believed the S&P 500 would move higher in the next six months came in at 44.9%, tying the reading from three weeks prior for the most elevated level of bullishness since the week of April 23rd (46%). One week later, that dropped to 29.6%, which is the weakest investor sentiment reading since the second week of last September."..... ....."Pivoting back to the most recent week's data, the 15.3 percentage point drop was large. It was the biggest one-week decline in bulls since a 16.5 percentage point decline in September 2021, and that also ranks in the 2nd percentile of all weekly moves since the start of the survey."..... I attribute this to the relentless MEDIA......and.....the near TOTAL disruption of the connection between the short term markets and actual business fundamentals.......which the MEDIA is significantly responsible for....with their ridiculous SOAP OPERA and opinion BS...coverage of EVERYTHING.
Speaking of the MEDIA.....they have been massively FEAR-MONGERING the recent SPCX launch/test......number 13 of the STARSHIP. ONLY....13 test flights is nothing....when it comes to testing and inventing a new massive rocket. In my view......the test launch was a HUGE success. They.....the media.....are relentlessly SHAMELESS. SpaceX launches massive Starship rocket in first test flight since IPO https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/24/spa...ip-rocket-in-first-test-flight-since-ipo.html
I just LOVE these launch videos......AMAZING https://www.spacex.com/launches/starship-flight-13 WONDERFUL that you are able to listen to the ground crew.....and SpaceX commentator..... and watch the entire flight. PUTS NASA to shame. WELCOME to......STAR-BASE TEXAS.
The shots of the cheering employees is AMAZING in the launch and flight video above. The video covers the launch, the booster separation and landing, and the final SOFT splash down at the end of the flight. Basically the whole flight. OUTRAGEOUS photography in the video....of space and the rocket in real time. ALL the employees are.....SO YOUNG....and so excited. INSPIRATIONAL to watch. Makes all the media BS fear-mongering look really....PETTY and SHALLOW.....which of course they are. Watching this entire video makes you immediately realize how FAR AHEAD of everyone else.....ELON is....when it comes to rockets. Thank God we have ELON. As I have said before....without him....we would have ZERO space program and still be relying on RUSSIA to launch our astronauts.
Absolutely. My statement was cynical in that there is no way that the market will go down for too long, as the powers that be will not allow for it. It's apparently the litmus test for everything these days.
Let's file this in the "Cartel does not want anyone else getting a slice of the pie" folder: https://appleinsider.com/articles/2...-house-to-reject-apples-blacklist-memory-plan These memory companies are absolutely tacitly working together to limit production and string this "crisis" along as long as possible. It is a very boom and bust industry. Fiduciary responsibility to maximize profit and serve shareholders and all that. Only this time they are intent on keeping China out of this feeding frenzy as long as possible now that they are a semi viable alternative. It's the same thing as the TikTok crap before. It's NOT about national security or protection. It's about control. I am not a fan of China's government at all, but this is just speeding up the inevitable. Either ramp up supply immediately and deal with lower margins (and probably heavily subsidize Micron/Intel), or China will eat your lunch. The Chinese are not stupid or inferior. They are just playing a heavily subsidized game of catch up, and catching up they are. The grunt work is going to India, SE Asia, and eventually Africa. The Chinese are after the high end jobs now.
Next week prices for diesel and essence (gasolina 95 octanes): 2.20/2.10 €/liter. What a disaster, inflation will kick again. I have company car, dont pay for gas insurance tyres maintenance etc, so Im partially imune. But for major part of people this is a fucking disaster.
A RARE voice of SANITY. My view EXACTLY in this article. Why are investors freaking out about Big Tech's booming AI capex? https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/a...out-big-techs-booming-ai-capex-123000998.html (BOLD is what I consider important content....and more importantly REALITY and TRUTH) "I've long held one core belief when it comes to markets: Price is truth. By that I mean that each day, a stock's movement is trying to tell investors a story. Over time, those stories begin to paint a fuller picture. Of course, the stories aren't always precise. Why does a stock get hammered or rip higher when an earnings report surprises one way or another? It's because the story those in the market told wasn't 100% accurate. The harsh reactions to the early batch of tech earnings are testing my patience with this belief in markets. I fancy something is off when markets react as if increased capital expenditures related to artificial intelligence are a horrible thing. I am seeing the use cases up close. I am seeing AI being monetized. And I am not hearing of any slowdown in AI investment — in fact, quite the contrary. I have seen the AI promised land, and it is growing more lush by the day! "I am absolutely convinced of the power of compute," AMD (AMD) chair and CEO Lisa Su told me. "When I say I think AI compute equates to intelligence, why wouldn't you want more intelligence? Of course you want more intelligence." Su added, "Now, the important thing is where is the return on investment for those investments? We are seeing the return on investments. I mean, the fact is, we are ramping our own AI usage within AMD very significantly month over month. And we're seeing the productivity come back in just better products, more capable products, faster time to market. And that will come out as you look at the long arc [of technology]." I had a similar conversation with Mastercard (MA) CEO Michael Miebach this week. Miebach is increasingly tapping into AI to build up fraud-prevention capabilities. He is also leaning into agentic commerce. It's not a pipe dream — it's an actual thing that is starting to happen on the platform. Then there is the case of IBM (IBM). The company has had a terrible month, no doubt, amid a disastrous earnings warning. But the reason behind the earnings letdown is capital allocation to AI, not less AI. "What's new is right now … companies, given the AI investments that they are going to make, which I think ultimately will get monetized and valued, … are building out the infrastructure portfolio to support that future of the AI realization," IBM CFO Jim Kavanaugh told Yahoo Finance. Yet here we are, watching prominent tech stocks getting obliterated. Alphabet's second quarter capital expenditures came in at $44.9 billion, slightly above Wall Street forecasts of $44.7 billion. Full-year capex guidance was raised to $195 billion to $205 billion from $180 billion to $190 billion, with a "significant" increase seen for 2027, executives said on the earnings call. Alphabet stock took a hit on Thursday to the tune of a 7.13% decline, erasing about $293 billion in market value. I encourage you to read the earnings call again — it's very apparent that AI is being monetized at Alphabet, and increasingly so. Tesla (TSLA) said it will commit $25 billion in capital expenditures for 2026, roughly three times what the company has historically spent. A significant increase is also expected in 2027 as Elon Musk ramps up Optimus and robotaxi production. Tesla stock plunged 14.5% on Thursday. Are these sell-offs truly warranted? Executives get paid handsomely to make bets on the future. Those bets are being made today on AI. And in so many cases, bets made 18 months ago on AI are paying off today. So when investors rush to the exits because of increased capital expenditures, do they think they know better about the future of tech than Elon Musk and Lisa Su? I sure don't. Give these companies a little cover to deliver. I suspect 24 months from now, we will be singing from a different hymn sheet." MY COMMENT WELL....the above is OBVIOUS. Companies ARE doing the right thing and AI is NOW embedded EVERYWHERE. YES...it is just the crude early days of the AI revolution....but it is happening on a massive scale. YET....every day we see the constant negativity and fear-mongering. NOT to mention....earnings being TRASHED for no reason at all. YES.....I have HUGE concerns....not for AI or business.......for the future of the markets in this extremely DIRE environment that is being created. I thought TRUTH mattered.....I guess not. BUT.....not my problem.....yet....OM, OM, OM, OM..... I have no plans to do anything but sit tight as an investor. I have no POWER to change anything. UNFORTUNATELY I have to live with what I believe I can see happening....every day.....as the markets come......more and more....under the control of outside SINISTER FORCES....that INTENTIONALLY push FALSEHOODS. (YES.....a little tongue in cheek and a little bit sarcastic....but a bit of TRUTH also)
AND......EXTREMELY dangerous "stuff" being advocated here...... for society, culture, and the USA. So seductive...but in the end it will lead to....as usual.....oppression, suffering, control, and totalitarianism. How AI wealth could be distributed to all Americans https://www.cnbc.com/2026/07/26/how-can-ai-wealth-be-shared-with-all-americans.html
