We celebrated pancake Tuesday here in Ireland recently.
Years ago, it was the final blowout before fasting season started during Lent. Now, it’s just an excuse to eat pancakes.
Here are my daughter’s delicious creations:
Let’s get after it…
- Here’s when the stock market will sell off.
The stock market finally showed some weakness in mid-February.
Aside from that, the market has been unusually strong at a time when it usually struggles (February), especially in election years.
When stocks don’t follow seasonal trends, that’s vital information. It tells you there’s something more important driving markets.
My take: Wall Street pros are panicking into leaders like Nvidia (NVDA) and Meta Platforms (META). Many hedge funds missed the big run-ups in these stocks last year. Now, they’re trying to catch up.
I don’t know when this ends. But it will end. And when it does, we’ll get our correction.
Keep in mind, most stocks on The New York Stock Exchange are DOWN this year. Markets aren’t as strong as the indexes appear—a handful of big, popular stocks are driving the market higher.
This is what you typically see before corrections.
I’m not predicting a crash, but a routine sell-off. In an average year, the market suffers a max decline of 14%. So, this should surprise no one.
It’s a good time to book big gains if you have them.
- Would you light a self-driving car on fire?
Waymo’s fully self-driving taxis have been chauffeuring folks around San Francisco for the past few months.
But there’s a group of robo-taxi activists who go around vandalizing the vehicles. And they recently set a Waymo on fire in the middle of San Francisco:
Source: Business Insider
This is part of a broader “anti-technology” backlash that’s coming to a head with the rollout of artificial intelligence (AI).
People have this notion tech will take our jobs and ruin our lives.
We must push back against this dangerously wrong idea. Far from ruining our lives, technology is the reason we aren’t still living in mud huts trying not to freeze and starve to death.
When people hear “technology,” they think internet and iPhones. Those are digital technologies.
“Technology” really means “invention.” Electricity, airplanes, and indoor plumbing were all once considered “technology.”
Can you imagine having to fetch water from a well every day? Or having to empty your chamber pot into a cesspool every morning? Yuck.
The solution to our problems is MORE technology, not less.
Over 40,000 Americans were killed on the roads last year.
Don’t you think robo-taxis with literal electronic eyes in the back of their heads… that never break the speed limit… never drink and drive... and never send a text message while going 100 miles/hour could help with this? I do.
The folks who blazed a Waymo remind me of “Luddites” in 19th-century Britain who went around burning factory machines because they thought they’d steal their jobs.
History lesson: The machines didn’t cause mass unemployment. Instead, they led to the most rapid increase in living standards and wealth in history (Industrial Revolution).
And we’ve been deploying technologies for centuries, yet practically every American who wants a job has one.
More technology = more prosperity.
- Sam Altman’s $7 trillion startup idea…
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is reportedly looking to raise up to $7 trillion for a new startup.
That’s trillion with a “T.”
He wants to build dozens of new factories that will make computer chips to power the AI revolution, which are in short supply right now.
I’ve learned to never bet against Sam Altman. But even if he somehow manages to raise the cash, it’ll be at least 2030 before the factories are up and running.
In the meantime, AI will need a lot of cutting-edge chips. And there’s only one company on the planet capable of making them: Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM).
Nvidia’s chips power AI tools like ChatGPT. But Nvidia doesn’t actually make these chips. That’s TSMC’s job.
To show you how incredible this company is, read this excerpt from a recent Wired magazine essay:
Every six months, just one of TSMC’s 13 foundries… carves and etches a quintillion transistors for Apple. […] the semiconductor industry churns out more objects in a year than have ever been produced in all the other factories in all the other industries in the history of the world.
The world runs on chips, which really means the world runs on TSMC.
Invest accordingly…
- The risk of NOT investing.
Owning stocks is risky.
The S&P 500 has dropped 20% or more on seven separate occasions since 2000. Individual stocks are even more volatile.
But NOT owning stocks is even riskier.
If you’re not invested, that means you’re likely sitting in cash. And even the world’s best currency—the mighty US dollar—has lost 86% of its value over the past 50 years:
I’m preaching to the choir here… but you must own assets.
Stephen McBride
Chief Analyst, RiskHedge
|
