kab60

I've been buying Adobe. Adobe sells tools to professionals, and I only think AI is gonna make those tools more powerful (they already have launched some very neat features saving professionals a lot of time). Prompting might work for some crude instructions. But translating the imagination of a creative into something tangible is probably easier by hand (mouse+keyboard) than by prompting. It's not like people are already particularly good at articulating their (creative) visions. There is competition at the edges, but I think it's a bit overblown. Adobe could buy Figma with one years' worth of free cash flow (and probably should pay for a new ballroom to make it happen)...). With all the AI slop being generated, trust is only becoming more important. I think strong software vendors with good customer relations will do fine, as long as they keep up with competition and improve their offerings. Adobe might've gotten a bit arrogant, so I don't mind if they lay off the price hikes for a bit and increase freemium offering.

I don't understand why anyone would ever be an 'oil bull' or 'oil bear'. Unless you're trading the commodity, there are ways to be involved that aren't just beta. That seems to be overlooked by both sides.

Supermicro wants to drink from the hose (although peanuts). If Intel is smart, they too will raise a ton of cash. It's really quite hilarious to see them try and front-run SpaceX and these AI Labs. Meantime, it seems like it's mostly programmers that are getting a kick out of LLM's (and anyone researching a new topic - like investors!). I can't help wonder how much of the hype stems from the fact that there's this massive echo chamber, given VC's/Silicon Valley and tech co's are all about 'tech' and 'programming' and thus they're seeing some real gains in areas they know well. And as an investor/researcher, these things are great too! While meanwhile, the rest of the work mostly seems to function as it always did. I always prod service professionals I work with - product managers, lawyers, accountants, animation folks + photographers - and even went on a Claude Course with a bunch of them. And none of them really seem to be gaining much from this shit. They were all afraid for a while that their businesses would be affected in a bad way, but they've seen very little impact and hardly seem to use it. Some have toyed with some Claude Code to 'build stuff', but then given up when a button suddenly stops working. I think the world is completely LLM-pilled. Outside of programming, customer service was the one area which everyone considered 'dead' (as in call-centers...). But people don't wanna talk to a bot if they have issues, and even in customer service, everyone now seems to agree it'll be a hybrid between people+tools. Just like it has been for decades now... Hell, I tried to build a logo for my own firm using Nano Banana, and it was useless, so I hired a graphic designer (like the old days). I really don't think most people wanna 'build' stuff and maintain it, unless it's core to what they do. They wanna buy stuff that works and is maintained and gets real shit done.

8m barrels is still a massive supply shock. Yes, pipelines will be built. And I also own something which should benefit from RoW supply growth. But pipelines aren't quickly built. Another day, another deal. You might be right in Iranian oil fields, but same was said for Russia. I think these petro shit states usually find a way, and they are used to suffering. Hopefully, end is close. My thesis however is that it is in Irans interest to inflict serious damage on Trump, so the world knows they have a nuclear option in the future. But perhaps they, or himself, already did enough damage to approval ratings. (My portfolio will do much better if I am wrong fwiw. I mostly own what others consider levered shitcos)

The spice must flow, and a bit does, but it's still the biggest supply shock in history. Inventories, not least in China, seem to be doing the heavy lifting. That's not infinite though. And no amount of jawboning will change the physical realities. One risk to Trump is that while he has had some success in talking down the price of oil, if he doesn't get the strait open, eventually that might backfire. E&P companies aren't eager to increase supply currently, given the risk of getting rugpulled (and investors feel the same way... Who wants to go big into energy now?). These prices are easy for the US economy to handle. But I still think the market is a bit complacent on a tail risk scenario where the Strait is closed for a long time. Not saying it is likely, but I don't think many oil companies price that option in.

I'm stuffing myself to the gills with $FOUR. It has all the hallmarks of something hated right now. Payments. Software. Financial shenanigans amongst peers (Fiserv) as well as fundamental business problems (Paypal). Aggressive accounting (like everybody else apart from Wise and Adyen). Leverage. Massive acquisition in Europe that won't help numbers before H2' 26 and beyond.

You should never listen to oil bulls. If anyone had much success trading the worlds largest and most liquid commodity, they wouldn't spend all day on X. Anyway, as someone with 15% of my portfolio in a Canadian SAGD producer ($IPCO), I'm not sure I really want anything more than 90-100 USD oil. I'd much rather a long period of sustained higher prices than a massive spike, which leads to demand destruction as well as an acceleration in alternative energy sources and most likely lower-through-the-cycle-FCF. (and by 'higher prices', I mean something in the range of $70-80 for a couple of years, which is fine for economic growth and a lot of earnings for the industry. And inflation-adjusted, it's really nothing special). The most obvious reason prices aren't higher is that oil inventories were very, very full going into the conflict. The longer it drags out, the more those inventories get drawn down. I have no clue on tank bottom or whatever the oil bulls are pitching, but it makes sense that massive inventory draws will most likely mean there's a higher bid for oil post-conflict, if the US and China decides to restock their inventories. The joker in all of this is obviously Iran. They seem to have figured out Trump as well as the leverage they hold. I really don't see why it would be in their interest to end the conflict, before they've really hurt Trump. It's the first time anyone has really stood up to him and told him to fuck off. He's obviously frustrated with the lack of progress, but it's hard to see an easy way out. I don't know how much leverage China holds over Iran and whether they'll eventually force a deal, but I think Trump made a massive mistake, and it would make sense for Iran to take every pound of flesh that they can.

I'm a bear, but it's definitely not accurate. It's very hard to figure out ROI outside of the infrastructure/hardware layer (chips, memory etc.). But, I think one of the biggest winners of 'AI' so far is META (although it doesn't trade like one!). While they've wasted a ton of money on Llama with little to show for it externally (hardly at the frontier...), a lot of their capex is to improve their recommendation engine > higher ad conversion. And their revenue and profitability has really leaped upwards (some of it due to cost cuts). Then the big Q is the hyperscalers. How much of their cloud growth is AI? There are so many open questions. But given the lack of obvious revenue, outside of the AI labs like Anthopic and OpenAI, it's really hard to discern ROI. And it's also kinda funny that everybody chasing AI is currently chasing the bottleneck companies. But bottlenecks, obviously, increase costs and should, all else equal, lead to less demand near term and more supply long-term. But I guess everyone is looking to exit at the top, just before hyperscaler capex growth slows down.

Yeah, I am not highly confident in how it plays out, so it is not central to my thesis. In general, I do think investors often overestimate product/tech and underestimate distribution. Distribution and selling just ain't sexy.

That's my working assumption as well. It's not like department stores became more profitable when the escalator was invented. Everybody eventually adopted it, and consumers enjoyed the surplus. That seems to be the way it goes with new technology in most industries. Obviously with the caveat that execution matters, and some will be better and worse at adapting. I've been buying a lot of Autotrader in UK - an online marketplace for used car, which is basically a monopoly and a royalty on used car sales ( @changegonnacome that's one example of a good business at ~10x '26 profits assuming they keep up the buyback at these levels. They bought 0.6% of shares last week...). I didn't buy Autotrader because of AI, but I think they're an example of a business that should be able to keep some of the economic gains for itself. Both directly, on the cost side, but also in the form of launching more features/increased product velocity, which improves ability to take price. In the same vain, I think investors sometimes focus overly much on new technology vs. the power of distribution/sticky installed base. If AI increases product velocity meaningfully, it should help (well-run) companies with a large installed base of customers but perhaps not the best tech/product. Everything is tbd, but that could be someone like Global Payments.

A lot of the earnings are circular though. Nvidia books earnings upfront, customers depreciate these things over 5-7-10 years. Of course you get a massive spike in earnings. Question is what follows. Sure dotcom had silly companies, but take a look at Tesla/SpaceX. The magnitude is beyond anything we have ever seen.

On memory, I will just say; look at all the covid winners, who are now - 5 years hence - still struggling. Some of these businesses would have been way better off had they not had that massive demand spike, which led to malinvestment as demand signals were all screwed. I don't know what happens to memory, but it looks like a massive bubble to me. It's a commodity, should be a matter of time before you get a supply response or people design around it. As for LT contracts, they usually have those in shipping as well during boom times... Then they get renegotiated when things turn to shit. Happens in a lot of industries, all the time. Look at EAF...

I'm very confident there's a massive bubble in anything related to AI as well as the Elon complex. It's the dumbest market I can recall, but it also seems like a tremendous opportunity. I've never had as many actionable and juicy ideas, as AI has sucked out the air (and capital...) of large swaths of the market. It even deflated most of the 'quality' bubble, so unlike in the past, I can even buy great franchises at 10x fwd FCF instead of (just) dumpster diving. SpaceX is trying to go public at close to 2T. It does 20B in revenue and loses money. Tesla is a shitty business shedding market share but still commanding a trillion dollar+ valuation. Does anyone really think making cars and selling space-beamed broadband will be a great business? Or launching rockets into space? SpaceX only makes sense if data centers in space works and he has a monopoly on that sort of thing, but given he can't make his cars run autonomously in Austin ten years after proclaiming self-driving was here, I'll take the under on that one... But there's also this weird dissonance in the market... Because if people will pay 2T for SpaceX based on some datacenter-in-the-sky fancy, shouldn't all hyperscalers, neoclouds and what have you be selling off due to massive sunk costs? Memory is another one... It reminds me of 2021, when every 'quality bro' was doing 100p deep dives on pool companies, junk yards and tile stores and capitalizing a one-in-a-lifetime boom... But memory is a certifiably crappy business, how exactly is it gonna end well paying trillions for commodity companies due to a temporary bottleneck? Google, Meta & Amazon are a bit different. They're not crazy expensive on the typical metrics. But I still struggle to see how Google, despite fending off Open AI somewhat in search, isn't a worse business than it used to be. These companies used to stay in their lane and be royalty-like businesses. Now they think they're in some kind of existential battle with each other and investing like a drunken E&P major (on 'roids). And given Google now has real competition in search, which requires massive commute to compete, that just seems like a much worse business than an asset-light business with +90% market share and no competition.

Yes, people are generally easy to rattle. Most people are also lemmings. Looking at the 'what are you buying today'-thread, I don't get the sense that people on here are any different than the average investor! What I will say, though, is that Liberation Day was caused by Trump, and he had the ability to - and quickly did - backtrack in a big way when equity markets tanked. Nobody had any interest in covid screwing up a fragile global economy either. What's different here is that the outcome of the conflict in Iran isn't up to Trump, at least as far as I can tell. I think he made a big mistake, perhaps emboldened by Venezuela or just the fact that most everybody bent their knee to him. But the outcome of this conflict seems to be very much up to a (decimated) Iranian leadership that few seem to know. One reason why Countries generally don't cut off the head of states of other nations in a conflict is arguably that it makes negotiating some sort of settlement difficult! As I know just as little about these guys as everyone else, I have to resort to a simple framework of incentives. And it seems to me that it'll be very much in Irans interest to do enough damage to avoid future attacks (and gain long-term leverage and perhaps meaningful income from the SoH). And my point is that given prevailing equity prices of some select E&P companies, even if I'm wrong and this conflict is resolved before oil moves (much) higher, I don't think I lose much. While it doesn't have to be terrible (I don't think it will be!), every day is drags on is millions of barrels of oil drained from global inventories which, all else equal, should be helpful for medium term prices (and I would expect - and have bet accordingly! - that it might also be a kicker for deepsea, offshore oil outside the Gulf).

Appreciate your view, but those names are probably not for me. I like founder-led companies, and I don't like companies on a perpetual treadmill of drilling wells. SAGD is basically all I find interesting in Canadian O&G.