It's worse than that - I believe that Oracle is one of the (many) companies right now that, if their AI experimentation fails, will stop the music, and everyone will be running for a chair.
Oracle is one of a few foundational components in the circular-investing group of AI companies. If they fail to make their commitments they're the first domino to fall.
A few puts on SPY dated a year or two out?
Assuming you are the average person, and not a financial professional, using actual financial hedging instruments properly is unlikely, and far more likely to just increase risk and lower expected return.
A realistic way for an American citizen to reduce risk in the current market is to have a globally diversified portfolio that under-allocates to the US.
There are almost surely severe bumps ahead for the AI space and that will likely spill over into the broader market. But unless you’re retiring in the next few years don’t worry about it. You can’t time the ups and downs and the only proven strategy is to just keep investing in a broad indexed portfolio and just ride out. You’ll take a short term hit but also end up buying on the dip because you don’t stop investing.
(As for me, I'm just hedging my rhetorical front lawn.)
But that's not what they said?
>> I didn't get to participate in much of that
Never buy derivatives as a non institutional investor.
At the same time, one can make financial decisions based on risk rather than longterm expected returns.
For instance, I'm happy with fixed income yields rn.
What would scare me is losing a big chunk of my portfolio in a downturn, exactly when I'm also most likely to lose my job.
There are a lot of failure modes. The dot-com bubble looked obvious in 1997; it popped in 2000. Anyone shorting in '97-'98 was carried out on a stretcher before being vindicated. In fact 2000-2002 fell in three brutal legs over two years, and anyone who leveraged up after the first 25% leg was destroyed by the next two.
which target date fund exactly? You can increase risk/reward buy choosing a target date fund far in the future or you can reduce risk/reward by choosing a target date fund closer to the present. The point of those funds is to gradually reduce your risk as you get closer to your planned retirement date. I moved my 401k into a target date fund about +10 years from my planned retirement (I'm 50). So a little bit on the risk++ side but not much.
https://workplace.vanguard.com/investments/product-details/f...
You want to search for the chart at "Allocation to underlying funds (actual)"
The AI crash is about stock market indicator ratios matching those that preceded other major crashes. That's what got me spooked. I don't want to be heavily invested in those companies when/if something bad happens.
> The AI crash is about stock market indicator ratios matching those that preceded other major crashes.
The way to put faith in such indicators is not (only) by looking at prior crashes, but by forward testing them. Over the last decade, it's been common for me to hear a sentiment like yours: "Indicator X has always resulted in a serious downturn in the past, and we're in X territory now" - and no crash ensued. Over and over again.
Find me an indicator that someone back tested, and then also actually predicted a real crash (with zero false positives). The cost of even a single false positive can be huge. Ask the guys who pulled out (or sold their houses) when COVID struck.
Don't become the person who predicts 7 of the last 2 recessions.
Most ppl are better off KISSing and lowering risk by selling equity for fixed income.
What? Absolutely not.
However! If you don’t want to learn and want to get rich quick instead, stay away.
honestly, if you're >= 10 years away from needing that money (retirement or whatever) then the best hedge is to ignore the news and just keep contributing to your investment as always. I got caught up in a couple moments (tarif drama April before last was one) where i panicked and sold and then it only took a few months to get back to even meanwhile 18% of my capital gains were now due to the taxman. I wrote a check to the IRS for 10's of thousands for no reason except over reacting and ignoring every financial advisor's advice.
if you're going to need your investment money within 10 years then you need to get advice on how to start reducing risk (and therefore reward) because you don't have time to survive and repair from a crash.
#2: What I've done so far: Haven't bought stock in a year. Have moderate short positions on Palantir, SpaceX, and Tesla. Have big short positions in the most popular Quantum computing companies. (Scams IMO). I have sold most of my positions ("profit taking"?) in stocks which have gone up a lot in the past year. (Nvidia, Broadcom etc), and am no longer using margin; about 1/3 of my brokerage value is now "cash", generating ~3% interest.
Wouldn't it be wiser to get out of the market into fixed rate assets like government bonds?
I just hope the companies aren't considered too big to fail. Bailing them out would be a bad idea.
https://www.openmarketsinstitute.org/publications/no-bailout...
They will be. When the SHTF, you'll see Rubio in the room^H^H^H^H circus tent, sitting right next to Bessent, arguing that propping up OpenAI is as much a national security interest as bailing out GM was.
Most researchers have shown that attempting to play the market is likely to fail in the end. Set it and forget it. Ride the wave.
I dunno.
"The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent"
A friend of mine and I go out to lunch every 3 months and talk about, among other things, investing. We've made a trope of it, calling out the people who are predicting an imminent market crash every time we have lunch.
I'm not saying that it doesn't look like it's going to crash, but I'll also say that there's also a very sizeable downside potential for getting out of the market.
You think the hedge funds selling SPY options don't have this priced in already? Of course, you can still make money on this bet, just like you can win money at a roulette table, but unless you think have some special insight that hedge/quant funds don't have, buying options should be negative EV.
I’d argue that it is very normal for hedging to be giving up expected value in return for a reduction in volatility of returns.
If you have a lot of exposure to the market already one could say not buying the option is more akin to roulette.
Of course not, but it is a hedge, is it not? What would be your preferred hedge in this scenario?
Much of their current debt fuelled expansion isn't singular to AI. The circular narrative ignores this.
Nvidia owns all the chairs, and they’re letting other companies pretend to for a while, but if it all falls apart the backstop to the collapse will be nvidia.
Frankly, their forays into dubious financial engineering and investments are expected at this point.
qemu definitely won't do that out of the box, so, yeah, VirtualBox is better than qemu there. But I bet there's a fancy-pants GUI out there that has an import wizard that will handle that for you.
[0] <https://www.virtualbox.org/manual/topics/storage.html#vdidet...>
Yet, even now, Fable is able to do the work of 4-5 engineers when used by a single senior engineer. Teams can and will shrink.
Look at all the production and advertising companies switching over to Seedance. I know ad firms bidding 1/4th their typical contract price (pharma, P&G, etc.) and winning contract after contract.
This isn't dotcom "dark fiber" before demand. The demand is here now, big legacy firms are just struggling with deploying it. Nimble small teams are making a killing.
It doesn't matter to investors if OpenAI or Anthropic can build AGI if a year later 10 competitors have similar models and eat into the revenue. OpenAI and Anthropic needs years, if not decades, of significant market dominance, post-enshitification, to justify their investment spend.
> Everyone in the tech and media world is dead set on this being a bubble.
is completely orthogonal to this:
> Yet, even now, Fable is able to do the work of 4-5 engineers when used by a single senior engineer.
The industry being in a bubble or not is irrelevant to the tech being good or bad. The dot-com bubble popped (and was a bubble) even while the tech was fit for purpose.
If that's true or not, it's a bit irrelevant. Maybe teams won't shrink because of Jevon's paradox, or maybe tech debt will catch up.
But it doesn't matter because the people calling this a bubble mostly believe that the companies burning money cannot have the return on investment needed. This can be for a variety of reasons, but my favourite one is just that open source AI models are good enough, cost a fraction of what the frontier ones do (with predictable costs), can be fine tuned, and can be relied upon (no orange tweet banning your acces to the model you've been using). So for me OpenAI and Anthropic will really struggle to merit their valuations.
And then companies like Oracle are just a dumpster on fire. GPU hosting is a commodity business; expensive one, for sure, but there's no way in hell they'll make actual returns on the money burned with zero moat. And things are even worse when you consider the political involvement of the CEO and his nepo baby, which can easily burn good will.
This story has been playing out for years now, and reads to me like the market simply recognizing that Oracle is not in the same business as it once was. It could succeed, wildly, at this new thing, but its risk isn't going to be valued based on the business it was 10 years ago.
Oracle is in a weird shape.
Meta and Microsoft both are also significant makers of GenAI models that are public, though neither has a big tentpole LLM line that they sell access.to commercially like OpenAI, Anthropic. Google, SpaceX, which I infer might be what you mean by major model maker.
What does Microsoft have?
Not sure SpaceX counts. Nobody sane uses Grok. It's untrustable due to reality-distorting political bias training, and it's strongly associated with CSAM production. Not what you want in a reliable corporate utility.
Is Meta even in this race anymore?
If you're selling deterministic output, just use traditional code. If you product is inference, it has to be the best inference. This becomes more apparent when you bounce between powerful models and smaller cheaper ones, the cheaper ones _feel_ worse to use.
The problem in this market is that too many players are trying to play a winner-takes-all angle.
For the companies that pull it off, it could be very lucrative.
In a real market we’ll get a couple of big winners rather than one, but there isn’t enough room for all of these moonshot efforts to land.
I don’t see the whole thing coming crashing down, but I do see a consolidation coming that leaves some companies in a very bad state.
All that to say: I had to move my focus around a bit and re-read "...pumped into AI buildout." several times, because I thought I was reading Ed Zitron :D
That's not a good sign and it's a blatant red flag for the market
Managing the total amount of money so that investment bubbles peter out before they get excessively big is supposed to be the central bank's job.
What ROI? There was no return, and there currently isn't any return on investment, because those companies did not exit yet!
The exit plan is to offload overpriced shares, that they paid billions for, onto the public market. If they don't IPO, those investors get nothing.
If Oracle is highly leveraged or betting the farm on AI, then their credit worthiness goes down.
Alternatively, if money floating around to make loans is drying up, companies have to offer better terms to attract the dwindling supply
Those are intrinsically linked to ORCL equity. ORCL needs an ROI to service their debt.
There are different ROIs which are not the same, even if related.
I keep seeing these unsubstantiated claims. They’re out to get us and just pump and dump on public markets!
Yet, before they IPO they have to go around and do what? Who sets the IPO price? Who buys the shares? If the shares tank, the valuation of the company goes down and locked up shares lose value. It’s not really in anyone’s interest for IPOs or investments to fail and while pump-and-dump schemes certainly exist they are not the norm. The conspiracy theory level of distrust and cynicism is not healthy and makes one a very poor investor.
If individual investors are buying shares and getting blown up, that’s their problem. Invest and due your own research. Broad market funds exist and have so for decades. Most financial advisors even will put you in to those funds and corporate 401k plans while increasingly allowing for more investment flexibility (freedom is good) default and educate employees by default on target date funds and index funds. There is a wealth of information out there.
This is simply absurd. Of the investment banks that helped SpaceX IPO, Goldman Sachs has their price target at $205 (139x implied price to sales), JP Morgan at $225 (152x implied P/S), Deutsche Bank at $255 (173x implied P/S), Morgan Stanley at $300 (203x implied P/S), and Raymond James at $800 (542x implied P/S). It's the 1920s all over again; publicly pump and privately sell into the demand you're creating. I'm guessing you're perfectly fine with this behavior from the largest market participants?
It's not the 1920s all over again.
> Of the investment banks that helped SpaceX IPO, Goldman Sachs has their price target at $205 (139x implied price to sales), JP Morgan at $225 (152x implied P/S), Deutsche Bank at $255 (173x implied P/S), Morgan Stanley at $300 (203x implied P/S), and Raymond James at $800 (542x implied P/S). ... I'm guessing you're perfectly fine with this behavior from the largest market participants?
Who do those investment banks sell to? How familiar are you with, for example, Goldman Sachs finding buyers for SpaceX shares? The minimum account requirement at Goldman last I checked was something like $10mm - do you really care if such investors are buying shares in overvalued companies or, like me, declining to purchase?
You are just throwing things around and not providing a coherent argument. Everyday investors don't have to buy these shares. They can continue to follow industry standard advice to buy total market index funds, or target date retirement funds or whatever. Investment banks sell to high net worth individuals who are by definition sophisticated investors - they know and accept the risk of such offerings. So no I don't care even a tiny bit if a Morgan Stanley client decides to buy what you consider to be overpriced shares in a "pump-and-dump" scheme based on your own certainly flawed and unsophisticated valuation of SpaceX or any other company.
And you can just not buy the shares. It's very straightforward.
Sure, but the SEC exists, in theory, to make that decision one you can make an informed decision on, because con artists don't typically put a disclaimer in that says "this is bullshit".
"Oh no, my $10B became $5B!"
They'll still be happy.
> If individual investors are buying shares and getting blown up, that’s their problem.
Having the general populace fleeced by bad actors is everyone's problem, eventually.
> Having the general populace fleeced by bad actors is everyone's problem, eventually.
Sure. Creating false narratives and parroting unsubstantiated misinformation and fear mongering is everyone’s problem too.
The flaw in your thinking is assuming it's actually worth the IPO price.
If I'm a bullshit artist, $100 is great, $50 is good, and I'm just trying to avoid the $0 scenario.
Then don't buy it at the IPO price? The bullshit artist will have to lower their price until there are takers in the market.
> If I'm a bullshit artist, $100 is great, $50 is good, and I'm just trying to avoid the $0 scenario.
They're not bullshit artists, they're greedy. If you think you're pulling one over on someone $100 is great but $200 is better - might as well see if you can get $200. Since we're just making up random people and motivations.
I think you're getting lost here.
If I invested $0.50/share, I know my company is worth realistically $10/share, and I can convince you to buy at $100/share, and it plunges to $50/share before I can offload, I am still a pretty happy camper.
Retail investors are the marks, not the scammer here.
> They're not bullshit artists, they're greedy.
Those aren't mutually exclusive.
Musk is both, for instance.
> Retail investors are the marks, not the scammer here.
Retail investors who aren't sophisticated enough to do analysis and evaluate equities shouldn't buy them less they potentially lose (or make) money. You're inventing a scam and scammers where none exist here. Uninformed retail investors, and who knows how much money they even have, should be buying index funds which is what is advised by investment firms, CFPs, and more.
IMO, those shares are overpriced even at private investment levels, but my opinion is still irrelevant to the fact that there is no ROI until the investors exit!
Nobody forces you or any other individual investor to buy shares in their “pump-and-dump company” when it lists.
Who knows? Who cares? My point is that until those investors exit, there is no ROI.
The comment I originally responded to was talking about investors getting ROI from AI companies. I'm pointing out that no such thing will happen until the investors exit.
Ok well they can just exit in private markets before these shares are "dumped" on public markets. Therefore there is an exit and ROI. QED.
Anyway your overall point, which was a bad one I'm sorry to say, was about investors dumping shares of overvalued companies on public markets.
You are ignoring things like lockup periods, vesting schedules, and other general machinery that specifically exist to prevent day 1 or short-term dumps of shares. It's not in the interest of the company that is IPOing or the bank - how can the investment bank go to investors and market securities and then on Day 1 those securities (because it's a pump and dump remember?) drop by 10% - 20% - 30% or more. That's bad business and investors will leave investment firms that did that.
When one of these "overvalued" companies IPO (and let's be honest, you don't know how to value these companies anyway so your accusation of them being overvalued is faulty from the start), someone has to buy those shares. If everyone starts selling, the value of the company and the value of the shares drop unless there are buyers. This doesn't really serve anyones interests and even better, you as an individual investor don't have to be a buyer! If someone wants to buy because their own model says it's worth it, that's up to them to decide, not you. Fortunes are made betting against the market (and betting in the general direction of the market). If someone wants to forgo buying, that's fine too.
For investors who don't know about the values or models of valuations of securities they can just take industry standard advice and buy index funds or target-date retirement funds. Stop infantilizing people and assuming that because you lack the knowledge that others must too, or that everyone is just out to scheme and "dump" on public markets, especially without any evidence or without considering how the IPO machinery typically works, who buys these shares, or the incentives.
Oracle paid out 5 billion in interest last fiscal year.
Well, they certainly tried to, with SpaceX.
Information is only relevant in the long term, in the short term the stock market is about FRIENDSHIP.
Just friendship and love :)
In what sense?
This may be related to the commonly-held fallacy of "cash on the sidelines". Cash is always on the sidelines. Cash is not created or destroyed by buying and selling stocks or bonds. Cash is simply handed from one party to another, but the cash has to be held by somebody.
What? No it's not, and never has been.
Without even getting into the practical vs. theoretical of Fed dual mandate (funding deficits), even the most uncharitable take on modern CBs wouldn't suggest this.
Downgrade of credit worthiness is different. That depends on how leveraged the company is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulip_mania
> No of course there isn't enough capital for all of this. Having said that, there is enough capital to do this for a at least a little while longer. -- Gil Luria (Managing Director and Analyst at D.A. Davidson)