Milu

Ya I don’t think it’s a bubble either. Blown away each day with how helpful Claude is for my job. Only have the pro subscription for now and annoyingly keep hitting token limits. Could only imagine how much stuff could get done with unlimited tokens. Investment wise I’m just sticking with my mag 7 stocks (Amazon, Alphabet, Meta etc) who I continue to believe will see great payoffs to the large capex spend they are currently putting out. I’ve no edge in chips or memory type stocks so don’t own or plan to buy any of them. But they likely do have good runway ahead of them.

Ya one of my pet hates is when I see some wall of text from Gemini cut and pasted into a thread as if this is supposed to add insight or back up an argument. All of us on the forum are well able to ask questions to Gemini/Claude etc and get similar answers so I don’t know how it adds anything to the conversation. I think AI is a great tool but should be used as an add-on to people’s investment research not a replacement.

Add llm's to the mix and now every investor can spew bolded bullet points about how company xyz's moat is invincible, or condensing 10k's and earnings call transcripts into 5 key takeaways, thus missing any real understanding or nuance. I actually think next few years could be a fruitful experience for the genuinely good investors.

I’d like to think so. Although I suppose if any massive capital control or special one off ‘solidarity’ tax was going to be rolled out in some emergency situation, the last thing they would want to do is telegraph is in advance and lose all the potential money they would be trying to seize.

I’d put it on a spectrum, with most of my wealth I am like you said growing wealth through productive assets like stocks, but that doesn’t mean you can’t decide to hold some portion of your wealth in something outside the system. Some sort of insurance policy if you will. While having all of your wealth stored at various counterparties (your bank, broker, etc) will likely work out 99% of the time. There is always that minuscule chance that something happens, maybe your account gets hacked and drained, maybe some new government comes into power that decides to confiscate 10% of all wealth for some emergency situation, maybe a socialist government gets into power and decides to levy all kinds of new taxes/levy’s on people with large account balances. Unlikely yes, but in that circumstance it would be quite nice to have some portion of your wealth in an asset that they can’t confiscate, could be taken across borders simply through a plane flight, or could be sent to any person globally at the click of a mouse.

Can’t we all just get along. Bitcoin (self custody, held on hardware wallet) has one use case for me, a fixed supply, non sovereign asset, with zero counterparty risk. Same as physical gold without the hassle/risk of having to store it in a safe, large bid ask spreads, and possible risk of it not being pure gold. The large growth in price since I bought is a welcome side effect rather than the specific reason I hold it.

The 4 year cycle always seems like a load of nonsense to me. Doesn’t really make and logical sense and the sample size of 3 or 4 cycles is too short to draw any actionable conclusions. Although I’ve thought this for a long time and so far it seems to be following the cycle again. Maybe I’ll change my mind if it bottoms later this year and then proceeds to boom in 2027.

My strategy is to live in Europe, but have a portfolio of mostly US stocks. Best of both worlds.

Thinking tennis for my twin daughters too who both just turned 5. Bought them a golf club recently too and brought them to the driving range. They just started swimming lessons too which they seem to be enjoying.

Thanks for answers so far, the main reason I still track is a want to see if my results over the long term have been better or worse than just dumping it all into S&P index fund. So far they have been better. But I suppose the question I’d have for myself is if they ended up being worse would i then decide to go the index fund route or not. If I’m being honest I don’t think I would as I enjoy the investing challenge and process. So the tracking of returns is just a habit really that perhaps no longer serves a purpose for me.

Likely a question for some of the wealthier folk on the board but I’m curious if you tracked your returns and CAGR etc during the earlier part of your wealth building but then when wealth got to a certain size it kind of became pointless. Obviously that number would be different for everybody depending on where they live and their lifestyle but if you are a good investor over time you will eventually get to a point where your net worth is large and whether you end up getting 5%, 10% or 20% return on that it mostly becomes meaningless. Do you still like to track it to compare yourself to others or see if you still got it, or do you now just check your net worth every now and then, and as long as it’s not dropping all is good. Maybe some people never tracked their returns, nothing wrong with that either. For me I track things quite diligently but sometimes wonder should I bother.

The challenge I have with buying Salesforce though is that the only thing I like about it now is that it is so hated by the market and seems like decent value. Everything else such as the leadership, capital allocation skills, constant insider sales of stock historically, large SBC (although that is same for most SAAS businesses). I live in Salesforce every day due to my job configuring it for clients and I can see the sticky nature of it, I just don't really like or trust the leadership that much.

I think we are getting close to the point where I might hold my nose and buy one or two SAAS stocks. CRM is almost worth a shot at this price. If they can execute well stock could be a bargain, if they don’t then I think the product is sticky enough at large enterprises to stop it from falling down completely.

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/spacex-erupts-after-hours-trading-soaring-above-210-and-surpassing-apples-market-cap Seems a tad bubbly and this is coming from somebody who has drunk the Musk Kool-aid . No position in spacex but just enjoying the show.

Probably because he is a decent human being who doesn’t just dump his wife the second he becomes rich and popular. Make me respect him more actually.