Spekulatius

It will work for business with little competition that have a lot to customer support function. Some software business likely belong to this bucket. I just saw a newsblip WDAY is current laying off 2% of customer facing workers. Thats on top of a reduction in 2024. WDAY has been accused of being run inefficiently so there is that, but I think the opportunities to save costs here are larger than probably most opteht business. Customer won’t walk way that easily either. https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/04/workday_layoffs_400_jobs/

Human are social mammals and prefer to stay in a pack. It safer this way and comes with many benefits. Now if the pack itself goes in a wrong direction, it creates an issue - ist it safer to stay in the pack or get out of it and either flee or oppose. so being stupid can be seen as a survival mechanism of sort, Case in point, many Nazis survived the war and Bonhoeffer got killed. On crowds- there is wisdom of the crowds and there are crowds that are incredible stupid ( can be called mobs in some cases). Why do we have these differnt outcomes? it not that one is more intelligent on average than another necessarily. A crowd is intelligent when there is free information flow and diversity of opinion. A crowd become stupid if information isn’t free or unbiased and if there is no diversity opinion. All this applies to investing.

Mr Market is bipolar because nobody knows anything. For now, we have no idea who the winner is in this high stakes horse race (Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude) as each try to outrun each other by outspending. Economics even for the winner are unclear as well.

MSFT also has a risk of getting disrupted. Lot’s of their software isn’t really that good. Software like SharePoint to me looks like it’s ripe for disruption. THeir OpenAI partnership has yielded very little other the lousy Copilot. At least their cloud business is doing very well , but that’s also tied to OpenAI. I think MSFT and Google have high disruption risk but they are leading the charge to disrupt themselves. This is preferable to being passive but not without risk either.

Perhaps Europe is run by imbeciles but when I look at recent EPA changes regarding nuclear regulations scratch my head. There are a lot of “ may be”, ”considered” . I have been long enough in the corporate world to know that “ may be” means “nothing” basically. https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5677187/nuclear-safety-rules-rewritten-trump

@TwoCitiesCapital I disagree with you. the USA basically left the gold standard in 1933. In 1934 the exchange ratio between us and Gold was changed. While the gold standard was still technically in place afterwards it was already hollowed out and people knew it too, it wasn’t a secret. Nixon then competed it in 1971. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_6102

Most currencies are decent store of value if you put them into treasuries or sovereign bonds, but some are not, due to poltical disfunction. The primary function of a currency is not to be a longer term store of value , but to be a functional medium of exchanges for goods services and to keep the economy going in good time and bad. In bad economic times the ability of fiat based currencies to create new money out of thin at is a features not a bug. There was a resounding why we went of a gold standard. With a gold standard, the central bank can’t do much if there is a crisis. We had many banking crisis in the 19th century before a central bank was institutionalized and we were running on a strict gold standard (which really was abandoned in the 1930’s mostly and then competed in 1971. Of we were to run our economy on bitcoin , we would go back to the time of frequent crashes where the banking system or parts of it would collapse because some constituents would end up short on liquidity and there would be no way to provide it, because the number of bitcoins is fixed (just like gold is). So be careful what you wish for, but I don’t think a Bitcoin based economy will work, because the financial system won’t work well with bitcoin being the medium of exchange.

Sold $MOH following my rule to sell if unexpected events (in this case very negative earnings) happen). I might buy this stock back, but it’s my iron rule not to do thesis creep.

If every Pharma co reduces the cost to bring a drug to market by let say 20%, do you think it will improve profitability , or it stays the same or it will reduce it?

I don’ t think AI slob marketing will work for luxury, that one needs creativity and human touch. l think the part that is the most affected are customer service or support roles. For competitive industries like airlines or consumer goods l think any cost savings will be quickly competed away. I think in niche industries we could see marking improvement. Think specialized components or services. Software cos are already laying off customer facing positions which usually were the last one to be cut. that has now changed with AI chatbots etc.

Again another other good one from David Giroux:

I think people are getting very concerned about issues like loosing seats but is this actually a big deal? aid the software is useful, they will find other ways to get paid, presumable per usage. Seat based subscription is just a shortcut for usage anyways. Someone on X showed exploding depository’s using Claude in GitHub - how is this bearish for Gitlab for example ? If software will be cheaper and quicker to write there will be way more software. I think the market for IT budgets will increase not decline to get all those AI tools and agents into the hand of people. The we have increased cybersecurity threats and budgets due to exponential increases in threat vectors sand the easy to create malicious agents. AImis an advanced tool and it’s a bit like we went from coding on a machine level (hardware specific Assembler ) to higher level programming languages like COBOL, Fortran, later C, then higher object oriented languages like Java. We all knew that TAM for software increased not declined because it was cheaper to produce. I sued d most SaaS vendors that deal with systems of records and tie together business processes will do fine by adding AI agents as a layer to their software either developed by the vendor or the customer in some cases. Some will fail to adopt and die but probably slower than most think.

Mechanical or electrical engineering may be better than computer science, especially those that know the nuts and bolts on a practical level. Analog stuff > digital.

I follow Kainos, mostly because a recruiter contacted me once and it sounded interesting but not sure it’s the work I want to do. They are still have to solve many problems on the material science side as well as with equipment. My guess is they are 5 years away from even a prototype . The advantage of small nuclear reactors is less large catastrophe risk and you can iterate faster. However, from a safety POV, they still have to be protected enough that you can drive a large truck, fly a small airplane into a unit and break the containment. Assume a molten metal reactor like Kainos and this would create quite a radioactive mess.

It tells you all you need to know about whoever posted or approved it.

Read Bonhoeffer essay on stupidity being the most dangerous trait of all. I linked it above in this thread and you can find several interpretations of it on YouTube. Just my guess, but you can get at least 30% of the people in any country to behave in inexplicable stupid ways and now with social media probably more than that.

Thats not many and Uni’s have their own security staff. These research reactors are also mostly not used to generate power and hence have low power density. Again, not an unsolvable problem but I don’t think any little town will have their own nuclear reactor in the future.

If every company will be using it, there should be no profit margin improvement . I suspect that will be true for Pharma. However, I think there will be some companies who use AI well and others don’t . I am not sure how we know which ones are going to be winners or not since I have a hard time believing they will disclose enough details. AI could advantage large Pharma over smaller biotech startups but even that isn’t a given. my suspicion is that AI native startups will probably do a better job to harness AI than big clumsy organizations.

The small reactors are many years (perhaps a decade) away from production. The startups working on them will tell you otherwise, but when you look at what they’d are working on, it’s clear they have ways to go. One thing about the small modular reactors is security? How do you make sure l that mo malicious actors will take control of one and uses it to make a dirty bomb. Could be quite a mess. Large central units are early to protect but if you have many small ones then it could become an issue. I guess that’s something to worry about later down the road,

Stable coins are indeed of much more practical value than crypto currencies like BTC for cross border payments. If you are located in the Philippines or Argentina, where the currency transfer fees are high and inflation is an issue (in Argentina), they could save a a lot of money and the holder could just keep the money in their wallet as USD stand pints until needed for consumption and then convert, Digital currencies depending on how they are designed and regulated could do the similar things. Less friction would create more competition for currencies as holders could easily swap one for another until needed for consumption.

Sinners has some absolutely magical moments: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/sinners_2025 Fun thing that Buddy Guy has a cameo. I watched him than 20 years ago and he still got it now. I highly recommend catching him if you have a chance

That’s what I use. Its great value for what you get. If you sign up, take someone’s referral link.

CPNG, NTDOY and BZU (Buzzi). Also a starter in ZS.

What else other than TA can you do if you want to trade bitcoin? It’s not like there is an intrinsic value floor here.

OpenAI is painfully slow compared to Gemini and Gemini‘s output is about as good. I want my AI slob fast . Maybe OpenAi is toast. Claude is slow too but has their strong suit in coding etc.