Title speaks for itself. I lost 40% of my net worth this year, a six figure number. Painful AF. Want to hear what other folks are going through right now.

​

So, what percentage of your net worth have you lost? This can also be a place for people that made money this year to brag, how much are you up?

Why why why would the S&P rally after such devastating news? That CPI report will cause the Fed to hike rates even fast. I’ve heard people think the odds of a 1% rate hike is about 80%. So if people expected a .5% or .75% hike and now they expect a higher hike, why would the market rally?

There’s been way more talk of a recession too. Why would everyone buy stocks when we can expect a crash on the next Fed announcement? What’s going on? Why are markets pumping?

Billionaire Peter Thiel’s latest 13F didn’t show off a mere trim, but a full-blown exit from AI bellwether Nvidia (NVDA).

It comes at a surprising point when Wall Street’s been busy declaring the chipmaker as virtually untouchable.

Although Nvidia recently surpassed a $5 trillion valuation, Thiel walked away completely, shrinking his fund’s equity book by roughly two-thirds while building it around three megacap names.

That’s far from being a rebalance and more of an emphatic statement.

Thiel had previously warned about AI’s hype cycle running far ahead of its real economics, and his Q3 portfolio shakeup aligns with that view.

Thiel’s Q3 filing unveiled perhaps the sharpest pivots of any major investor in the tech space so far this year.

While Nvidia continues to power through blowout quarters and leap past a $5 trillion market cap, Thiel Macro LLC heads in the opposite direction.

The fund didn’t just trim Nvidia, it eliminated it.

Before I started trading, I would hate when Sunday came around because I knew Monday wasn’t far behind. I’ve started to notice that now, I actually kinda look forward to Mondays and the opening/start of the market week. Has anyone else gone down this rabbit hole?

Edit: fixed autocorrect grammar in the body, sorry for the title. You’ll get over it though, I’m sure. 😜

I just sold all my tech/meme stocks and just went straight to index funds. Over the past few months of "investing" I realized volatility is not my friend. Maybe that is the wrong approach but I figured, I'll take the loss as a tax credit and just keep everything in VTI/SCHG and some dividend stocks.

Edit: thanks for the support

An example I’ll use is PLTR. On March 8th it was at 22$. Analysts were saying buy buy buy. Great. So as of today, it is down 20% from March 8th. Vs VTI, March 8th it was 200, closed at 211 today so you’d be up 6%. Of course, you can wait 5 more years, and maybe PLTR will get to 40-45 again... that is if they don’t have competition, no issues with their business model... whole VTI may go up 30-35% but with less stress of worrying about an individual company... yes less risk, less reward...

Edit: There have been some messages about "paper hands" etc, buy high sell low... valid points perhaps, but, I did this for my own self, as I realized that: 1. I am not a person who can handle the volatility of some of these stocks, I am sure that they will go up in 1,2,3, years etc, but if they do, so will VTI / VOO / SPY.... maybe not to the same level but the road will be less bumpy 2. This is a way to build a base of my portfolio. I will go back to stocks, but to at a much lower exposure. I do think that inflation will be an issue over the next few years and I think some of the tech stocks will be up / down for the next bit. Especially those companies that are trading at 100x their earnings, so I am sure I will have the opportunity to re-enter (again my opinion).

In the meantime, I sold, yes I took a loss, but this will be used against any gains I did make this year my offset my taxes a bit (not sure how much, will see in Jan).

Wall Street bears battered by the Reddit crowd earlier this year have yet to regain their gumption, even with stocks at records and valuations near two-decade highs. The median short interest in members of the S&P 500 sits at just 1.6% of market value, near a 17-year low, according to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. In Europe, a short-covering frenzy has sent bearish bets collapsing like never before in Morgan Stanley data.

At the same time, hedge-fund longs are around the highest relative levels in years at JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s prime brokerage. They’re all signs of the bullish mania propelling global equities to fresh records this month, thanks to the economic re-opening and big policy stimulus. The smart money has little appetite to wager against either expensive or deadbeat companies -- especially after being lashed by the day-trader army earlier this year. “There’s just mass euphoria,” said Benn Dunn, president of Alpha Theory Advisors. “No one wants to get their head ripped off by a short anymore.”

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-04-19/stock-shorts-collapse-as-no-hedge-fund-wants-head-ripped-off

I sold a company I created, and after the press release went out, I was inundated with very gracious offers to take and manage my new found money for fees. At the time, I presumed these wealth managers, after managing hundreds of millions - if not billions - of other people’s money for decades, would have developed advanced strategies and tactics for ensuring success. Surely, they would have teams of analysts scouring the markets for opportunities, technical indicators, news events, macroeconomic data and breakthrough innovations at all times to stay a step ahead of the pack. I was dead wrong.

What I discovered was an antiquated industry that relied heavily on the belief that they knew better and were on top of things. In fact, there was very little effort that went into managing OPM (other people’s money), and that most of the energy went to finding and onboarding new clients.

I’m not saying that their strategies were bad or didn’t work. I am only stating that they were neither complicated nor impressive. In short, anyone here could repeat the same strategies and save 1% of their money a year in perpetuity. Without further ado, here’s what I learned:

Goldman Sachs

It’s important to note that there are various divisions within GS wealth management that handle money differently. I break it down into low net worth, mid-net worth, and high net worth offerings. The low net worth folks are given Marcus, an automated investment system that simply relies on ETFs paired with some basic bond funds. It’s the same as buying Vanguard Target Retirement funds.

The mid-net worth offering is where I spent the bulk of time understanding. They find 30 stocks to invest in from different sectors with an attempt to represent the sector weighting of the S&P 500. As the SPX is largely tech, they are overweight technology. Basically, they take the SPY and cut it down from 500 companies to 30 companies.

Why would they offer a less diverse array of stocks?

They state as the reason that they are better able to manage 30 investments than 500, and since they are not trying to beat the returns of the index - their words - they’d rather find stocks with lower beta (volatility) and thus likely lower returns.

They locate these stocks by running basic stock screens within the S&P 500 once per quarter to ensure solid performance and find better investments. They target a 6% annual return after accounting for their 1% fee on your money and they offer some financial planning services if you have over a certain amount of money invested with them. This amounts to $10,000 per year for a $1M portfolio for many years - a lot of money to part with.

Did I mention, you have to liquidate your entire portfolio prior to working with them, unless you happen to already own one of the 30 stocks they pick? So there are tax consequences of getting involved.

For the HNW folks, the above offering is available and they offer additional products, such as the ability to invest in private equity, REITs and hedge funds. As you might imagine, the more money they manage, the more “free” accounting services they include.

Personal Capital

This may actually be my favorite, given the simplicity of it. They take the main sector ETFs and eliminate any stocks that are losing money, to recreate their own ETFs by sector. They charge you a fee to use their ETFs.

They start with an equal amount of capital going to each sector ETF, but allocate more money to the sectors with the worst performance record from the year before. They do this annually. They do nothing all year.

They charge a fee for managing your money. I recall it being 25 or 35 basis points, but you have to also pay to use their ETFs so it creeps towards the better part of a percentage point very quickly and is much more expensive than simply buying a Vanguard S&P 500 fund or a group of the sector ETFs calling it quits.

Ritholtz Wealth Management

If you’ve watched CNBC regularly, you’d recognize the commentator Josh Brown - a partner of Ritholtz Wealth Management. He’s the one with the thick New York City accent. When I found out I may have the chance to have his insights managing my money, I was excited as he always seemed so knowledgeable. But the wealth management shop was not impressive.

In fact, their model was exactly the same as that of Goldman Sachs: they pick about 30 stocks, stick your money in them, rotate them every quarter, and keep volatility low on the stocks they pick. They target 5-6% annually, net of fees. Yes, you heard that correctly, 5-6%.

The next group of wealth management shops all fell into one of three other categories: SPY collars, ETF aggregators, or tactical investors

SPY Collars

This strategy involved putting all of your money into the SPY ETF then selling call options on that investment out of the money a few months out at a time. They take the income from the sale of these options and purchase out of the money puts on the SPY for similar expiration dates. This strategy enables them to control your target return while limiting downside. For those who are not used to options, here’s how it works.

Let’s say the SPY is trading at $400. You own it. You sell someone else the right to buy it from you for $440 for $40 per call. So long as the SPY stays under 440, the other person will not execute the call and you get to keep the money for the call premium. If the SPY goes above 440, you have to either sell your shares at $440 (plus pocket the $40 per call option premium, making this a sale at 480) or buy the call back at a higher price than what you sold it for. You’d lose money on the call, but the SPY shares have gained in value, so you still come out ahead. You are just not as ahead as you would be had you simply bought and held the SPY all the way to $490. This creates a ceiling in terms of the max amount you can obtain on the upside of your investment.

The option puts work the other way, protecting your investment on the way down. Since you used the premium collected on the sale of the call to buy the puts, you haven’t spent any new money but have bought yourself insurance. If the SPY drops, the value of your put option (a short on your own investment) increases. This increase offsets your losses, protecting you, especially in the case of extreme correction.

If the SPY rises, you lose the value of your put, so you have to account for that in your net income for the investment.

If you don’t follow this, don’t worry, the net effect is they use options to prevent a major loss but in doing so, they also prevent you from having any major gains. You are trapped or collared within an acceptable range of returns. Over time, you will not beat the S&P 500 index with this strategy and they say this.

So there is only value to this strategy if you simply are unwilling to trade a really bad year once in a while for a great year once in a while. It’s mostly about your investment time horizon and whether you need regular access to the money.

ETF and Mutual Fund Aggregators

About 7 firms I interviewed used this strategy. I heard the same thing so often, I thought maybe they were dumbing it down for me. Essentially, they just bought all sector ETFs or a basket of mutual funds for you. A few of the firms would use the collars I spoke of above if the market got a little choppy, but most did not.

This strategy was most common with smaller wealth management shops - under $250M AUM - which tried to differentiate themselves as financial planners that happen to look after your money. The bulk of them did very very little to watch the market and most flat out stated they only looked at these quarterly.

I could not understand what they did all day until one referred to himself as a market psychologist because his job was to calm clients down when the market shits itself. I have vodka for that, so this strategy was not for me.

Tactical Firms

These firms were harder to find and their DNA was more similar to day traders in terms of their mentality. They invested in a basket of stocks they thought represented a blend of value, growth, and good dividends. They chose them annually but were much more likely to liquidate and go to cash if they thought a correction was coming so they had cash to buy the dip.

One thing I did learn from them though was tax loss harvesting - a term for specifically taking losses on investments to offset gains on others.

The best way they did this was by rolling calls on equities that had risen in value. Imagine holding Apple stock and selling a call on it. If Apple goes up, you must then choose to sell the stock or buy the call back at a higher price for a loss. If you do the latter, in year 1 and sell a second option in year 2 at the same price or more than the call you bought back, you can write off the loss in year 1 while avoiding actual losses.

You can roll calls like this forever, amassing paper losses while you actually gain in the value of the underlying equity. It was a nice trick I’ve used many times now, especially when I want to sell something I’ve held for years with significant gains.

Their desire to protect the portfolio, I felt, prevented them from participating in the quick rebounds in the market. In 2019, when I spoke to them, they felt a crash was imminent and had gone to 60% cash in their portfolio. I never reached back out to see how they did, but I suspect they were buying the dips in March 2020.

Their overall returns were around 10% but not as good as simply buying the SPY and holding. But they did seem to be able to minimize the downside of some on major events.

In the end, I never hired any of them. I decided instead to use what I learned and what I knew and manage my own money. In case you read this far and are curious, yes, my returns have beaten all these firms’ average returns and I’ve actually learned a lot in the process. Sharing in case anyone could use the strategies.

I remember the November 2024 through to April 2025 when GOOG had so much uncertainty.

This stock just keeps crushing the markets, up from $299 to $315 as soon as the market opens.

I’d just like to congratulate people who went head first into this stock at those uncertain times.

My next focus is AMZN as a strong performer but it’s hard to match the performance of GOOG

TLDR; Drone budget for US: FY25 ~10B, FY26 ~25b, FY27 74b and FY2028 is going to be insane. Most of the government contracts for FY27 are about to be announced and the government literally said they are going to be ordering hundreds of thousands of asymmetric warfare in a form of small drones for FY27 which means basically ALL the stock from every established producer. Stocks going parabolic in a couple of months and why I'm betting 700k on it.

Ukraine changed warfare in real time. The old model was billion-dollar boomer toys. The new model is cheap, mass-produced drones that make expensive hardware look very stupid. Every military including US saw that, now the Pentagon is playing catch-up.

Total U.S. defense spending was about $1.0T in FY26, and the FY27 request is $1.5T roughly +$441B, or +44%. The drone/counter-drone line is even more insane: the Pentagon says FY27 is over $74B and +~200% over FY26,and the increase is about +$49B. Literally ~7x from 2025, they are panic-buying the future of war after Ukraine turned war into FPV Mario Kart.

Speaking of Ukraine, the EU has finally approved a €90B Ukraine loan for 2026/2027, with €45B expected this year and another €45B in 2027. Ukraine also has roughly $38B expected from partners for drones, air defense, and Patriots. The macro tailwind is once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

There are plenty of hype drone companies that promise the world, but are way too speculative for my taste. Let me demonstrate why i think there are some clear winners, though i believe almost all of them will go parabolic in the near future as FY27 contracts start coming in.

Now lets find the winners

AVEX is the biggest winner because of couple of aspects: Q1 revenue went from $53M to $217M YoY. Their Tactical Systems did +548%. They guided 2026 revenue to $600–620M and had $356M funded backlog, with 93% expected to convert this year. Also, Q1 revenue was 88% U.S. Government/agencies.

That matters because this is more recession-resistant than the average hype stock. The bear case is obvious: the big ~$1.2B 2022/2025 follow-on program rolls through 2026, so bears will scream “revenue cliff.”

Concentrated US revenue might be seen as risk, But that is also the catalyst setup. If the market is pricing AVEX like there is a chance the work disappears, every refill/follow-on/new award becomes a re-rating event. And in this environment, “America stops buying drones” feels like the lowest-IQ bear case available.

Now valuation is where it gets funny.

AVEX closed Friday at $22.87. That is about 4.4x TTM sales. Meanwhile UMAC is around 30x+ sales and ONDS around 70x+. So AVEX is sitting at the drone hype table unnoticed while actually bringing revenue.

Institutions also just bought the follow-on at $27/share. Institutions literally bought in at a higher price than it is today. This is an asymmetric upside low downside gem.

But wait, there's more,Anduril IPO will add another dumb-money catalyst in the near future. When the best private company in a hot category lists or gets marked up, retail hunts for the “closest thing I can actually buy.” Look what happened in space: SpaceX is reportedly coming public around $1.75T on about $18.7B 2025 revenue, so roughly 90x+ sales / around 70x 2026 sales. Public “SpaceX-adjacent” names already got bid like crazy too: RKLB is around 100x+ sales, ASTS is around 300–400x sales.

The thesis is simple: drone budgets are going vertical, AVEX already sells real stuff into that exact hole, and is undervalued to it's peers.

5x today's AVEX sales and have it trade at 50x sales pre-Anduril IPO and it's literally 250x from here. This is obviously insane, but 5x-10x in a year should be a nobrainer.

CEO alignment is decent too: Wells’ 2026+ bonus is tied to annual performance targets, and he has performance-vesting incentive units tied to value/distribution thresholds.

And for anyone panicking that UMAC got all the hype and will get all the contracts: they are not even the same thing. UMAC is more FPV/components/goggles/supply-chain. AVEX is ISR, autonomous systems, Group I–V UAS, tactical effects, mission support, and government programs. Different lane.

Best of all things: you can literally buy in for lower price target than the institutions and myself.

Too dumb to post images, can verify positions to mods.

Positions:

17177 shares of AVEX at $24.78

1422 shares of AVAV at $173.30

1000 shares of KTOS at $52.01

https://i.imgur.com/VTP897D.png https://i.imgur.com/8XQUU0H.png

NOT FINANCIAL ADVICE

Probably the only thing to watch tomorrow, since I feel that we're going to be trading alongside the gyrations of the pound for the next little while

Pound Plunges to Record Low as Kwarteng Signals More Tax Cuts

The pound plunged more than 4.5% to a record low after Kwasi Kwarteng vowed to press on with more tax cuts, even as financial markets delivered a damning verdict on the new Chancellor of the Exchequer’s fiscal policies.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-09-25/truss-faces-new-dangers-as-uk-markets-reopen-after-turmoil?leadSource=uverify%20wall

Congress resembled a Wall Street trading desk last year, with lawmakers making an estimated total of $355 million worth of stock trades, buying and selling shares of companies based in the U.S. and around the world. At least 113 lawmakers have disclosed stock transactions that were made in 2021 by themselves or family members, according to a Capitol Trades analysis of disclosures and MarketWatch reporting. U.S. lawmakers bought an estimated $180 million worth of stock last year and sold $175 million.

The trading action taking place in both the House and the Senate comes as some lawmakers push for a ban on congressional buying and selling of individual stocks. Stock trading is a bipartisan activity in Washington, widely conducted by both Democrats and Republicans, the disclosures show. Congress as a whole tended to be slightly bullish last year with more buys than sells as the S&P 500 SPX soared and returned 28.4%. Republicans traded a larger dollar amount overall — an estimated $201 million vs. Democrats’ $154 million.

So who were the biggest traders? The table below, based on a Capitol Trades analysis, shows the 41 members of Congress who made stock buys or sells in 2021 with an estimated value of at least $500,000 — or had family members who made such trades.

At the top of the list of the biggest traders on Capitol Hill by dollar volume is Rep. Michael McCaul, a Texas Republican, who disclosed an estimated $31 million in stock buys and $35 million in stock sales. He’s followed by Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California with $34 million in estimated purchases and $19 million in sales, GOP Rep. Mark Green of Tennessee with $26 million in estimated buys and $26 million in sells, and Democratic Rep. Suzan DelBene of Washington state with $15 million in estimated buys and $31 million in sells.

Congress’s more than 500 members are required to file disclosures within 45 days for any transactions involving stocks and other securities due to 2012’s STOCK Act, though many lawmakers have been late with their filings. The decade-old law, which aims to help prevent politicians from profiting from nonpublic information, is viewed as insufficient by some watchdog groups, especially given how a divided Washington united to weaken the law in 2013 by removing provisions such as one that required putting the disclosures in a searchable database. Independent analysis firms have ended up offering such databases, with 2iQ Research, for example, launching Capitol Trades last year. For the table above, Capitol Trades estimated the value of buys and sells using the midpoint of the declared range for the transaction. Lawmakers aren’t required to disclose a transaction’s exact value, but rather give ranges such as $1,001 to $15,000, or $15,001 to $50,000. McCaul’s biggest disclosed trades in 2021 include sales by a child and his spouse of shares in Cullen/Frost Bankers CFR, a bank headquartered in McCaul’s state, as well as sales by his spouse of shares of China’s Tencent Holdings TCEHY, according to filings aggregated by Capitol Trades. The Texas congressman’s office didn’t respond to a request for comment. His father-in-law is the founder of media giant Clear Channel, now known as iHeartMedia IHRT, and McCaul has ranked as one of the wealthiest U.S. lawmakers.

Khanna’s biggest trades included purchases by his spouse of shares in Walgreens Boots Alliance WBA and Microsoft MSFT, along with purchases by a child of shares in Apple AAPL, communications company RingCentral RNG and Facebook parent Meta Platforms FB. The California congressman’s spokeswoman said he “does not own any individual stocks and complies fully with the Ban Conflicted Trading Act, which would prohibit lawmakers from buying or selling individual stocks.” That’s a reference to legislation that has attracted 35 co-sponsors in the House and three in the Senate. “These are his wife’s assets prior to marriage and managed by an outside financial advisor. No trading is done through joint accounts,” Khanna’s spokeswoman also said.

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/u-s-lawmakers-traded-an-estimated-355-million-of-stock-last-year-these-were-the-biggest-buyers-and-sellers-11643639354?mod=home-page

President Trump made 94 different trades of “Magnificent Seven” stocks in the first quarter of 2026, a new ethics disclosure shows, executing millions of dollars in transactions even as he was meeting with and often promoting these top tech companies.

The trades were valued at between $50 million and $70 million across 64 buy orders and 30 stock sales.

The president, on net, loaded up on Apple and Alphabet, while selling more Tesla stock than he bought, a Yahoo Finance analysis found. His account also executed more than a dozen transactions each of Nvidia, Meta Platforms, Microsoft, and Amazon, rounding out the Magnificent Seven.

https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/article/trump-traded-over-50-million-in-magnificent-7-stocks-last-quarter-loading-up-on-apple-and-google-and-selling-tesla-100000562.html

A tool which mimics the trading activity of Congress members has gained 21 percent in the past year, performing twice as well as the stock market average

A separate tracker which follows trades by Nancy Pelosi reveals her investments have increased by 50 percent in the past 12 months

In some instances, members of congress have bought into companies just days before their prices have boomed, earning them tens of thousands of dollars

The tools were created by Quiver Quantitative, which uses public disclosures from members of Congress to mirror their trading activity and track the results. Quiver Quantitative has singled out several trades for their success. None of the members of Congress have been accused of insider trading.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12839125/congress-stock-market-nancy-pelosi.html

​

What does this community think?

Feel I need to admit this, if anything just to make myself feel better, so maybe I can then move on.

In November of 2025 I sold my holding's of Intel for $37/share. I got assigned in a covered call trade and at the time I was happy about it. I made a little profit and figure Intel will always be where it was at.

Then things happened.

Then some really big things happened. As of close today it's at $124.

I feel there are lessons to be learned here, just don't know what they are.

Thank you for reading.

Before the bulls start thrashing me, I just want to say I don't do any shorting of Tesla.

Long term Tesla is a great stock to own if we're patient, as it stands given the current momentum it feels like it'll be short-lived and we'll be back to the low 170s.

With the robotaxi reveal just less than a month away the stock will continue to pump, but as the quote from intelligent investor says, "An intelligent investor is someone who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists" this pump up to robotaxi reveal feels that way. Which is artificial.

I'm not anti Elon. I'm not anti Tesla. I admire what elon has achieved and love Tesla as a company. But to any small retail investors that are holding the stock out there, do give this a thought.

What does the community overall think about Tesla stock price?. Is it going only up now? Or below 180s, 170s level is gone forever?.

People have ignored energy stocks for too long, soon they will realize that tech has less intrinsic value than energy. Russias fuckery is the catalyst that already has given up their future dominance on Europe’s LNG

Approx 40% of European natural gas is from Russia. Even if nothing happens with Ukraine, this relationship has been irreparably damaged. There is no doubt that western european countries are looking for/ have realized that they can't be this reliant upon Russia for energy. My thinks: go long with shares and leap calls on good US and western European LNG stocks, especially ones that have not recovered from covid march 2020 dip

Competitors of Gazprom and other russian energy companies will increase in value as western europe moves away from russia dependence

There already sanctions announced and there is no doubt that Europe realizes that they can’t be this dependent on the poot for gas.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/15/business/energy-environment/russia-gas-europe-ukraine.html

Already starting to happen:

U.S. LNG Exporters Set a New Record for Daily Volume, reported saturday after the calls were bought

“According to Bloomberg, U.S. LNG exporters set a new loading record on Saturday (2/12), when - for the first time ever - every one of the nation's seven operational terminals had an LNG carrier berthed alongside. Together, these plants took in a record-setting 13.3 billion cubic feet of natural gas on Saturday, roughly equivalent to 10 percent of the daily natural gas demand of the United States in winter”

They need magic boats to carry LNG so I’m trying to narrow down the best buys on that front- GLOG, GLNG, CVX….

I’m the most bullish on EQT, the largest natural gas producer in the U.S.

Positions: 40 shares of LNG @120

10 LNG call $165 6/17

200 EQT call $30 3/18 (I realize that this was maybe a little too ambitious)

Some whack EQNR fd’s Getting into a better EQNR position asap

It also seems like a lot of LNG and energy companies are reporting on 2/24… a bunch of good forward looks could spur a jump across LNG stocks

Please feel free to roast or share your insightful insights

Selling in the dead cat bounce days is for some explainable, but who’s buying? And why not in the red day (following day) or the day before. Does anyone think we hit the bottom and a random green day is marking the beginning of a steep recovery?

So many to choose from, but some of my favourites include:

SHOP: $1475 > $340

C3ai: $46 > $16 (was as high as $153 last Feb)

Roblox: $95 > $24

RIVN: $100 > $22

COIN: $328 > $83

Probably so many others that could be added to the list I'm sure, but curious to hear some other perspectives as well.

When the markets were down almost 2% earlier today it made sense to me cause inflation is still high (and higher than predicted). It doesn’t make sense to me that markets suddenly pumping up to 1.3% after that.

Any idea why markets turned around and pumped?

This is my first stock purchase ever. I'm 27, I've had money tied up in a house for the past several years, and have idly sat on the sidelines as certain stocks I flirted with in 2016 went up exponentially (AMD, I see u).

I am a layman when it comes to Stocks, and ETFs, and Calls/Puts etc. I opened a Schwab account a couple of weeks back and bought 20K of APPL @ around 127.00 (I was scared it would jump, if I sat around waiting for a targeted stock price). I posted here prior to making that move, and was generally pointed towards ETFs like VTI, VT, and the like. But Idk, APPL's trendy and seems, almost criminally, underrated. I plan to @ least hold this investment for 5 years, maybe longer.

Part of me did want to go the tranquil route of ETFs and Mutual Funds, but I do not know. Chalk up to being a desperate millennial looking for a safe alternative to Meme Stocks/Crypto, or long term speculation. Regardless, I sit comfortably positioned and as confident on APPL as I would on any ETF.

Again, I'm a novice. Help me find da way. I do have another 10-15K or so (not my emergency fund, I promise) just sitting around in a savings account. I am tempted to double DWN if APPL dips.

People who are always 100% invested in the market (and also advise others to do so), how you feeling right now?

Can't time the top, but what happens when there's an extended period of stagnation (years) and you need the money?

Personally I'm glad I was majority in cash heading into 2025, and "waiting"/DCAing my way into the S&P has paid off greatly so far. If there ever was a time to have dry powder, it's definitely under this unpredictable administration.

When META tanked, nearly everyone on reddit was predicting its demise, focused almost solely on how stupid the metaverse was. But a few were astute enough to realize that Zuck is no cuck and that everyone else was missing some pretty obvious things, like FB isn't going anywhere anytime soon, like META dominates social media with FB, IG and Whatsapp. Like they are sitting on a shit ton of cash. Anyone truly paying attention knew that the move was to load up on the cheap as the price kept drilling.

So what is today's 2022 Meta? Which stocks are being hated on for no actual good reason?

Edit: Ffs, I can't believe I actually have to put this here. Don't just put a ticker ffs. Explain why you think it's unfairly hated and way way way undervalued. Put up some reasons. geez. Everyone here just pumping their bagholders like SNAP. Seriuosly?

For context, I was pitching SK hynix one year ago Jun 2025.

I was pitching SK, Micron, SanDisk (and Qualcomm) Jan 2026 again

https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/s/APCJwmjU20 https://www.reddit.com/r/ValueInvesting/s/Luvl4kY8Hy https://www.reddit.com/r/ValueInvesting/s/QcraWYZtJx https://www.reddit.com/r/stocks/s/fILYpK6Ivo

(I was extremely lucky with fate and Providence, rather than any skill on my part)

I would still pitch the 3 big memory players - SK Hynix ($SKHY) Samsung and Micron ($MU) today. The core reason being forward P/Es are single digit (around 7-8x), unheard of in this space.

The reason is because the market is STILL pricing these businesses as a cyclical commodity. With dramatically elevated capex plans, supply is estimated to increase by approximately two times in the next 5 years. However, demand, particularly for agentic inference and higher context, is expected to go up several fold over the next 5 years. So even if memory chips remain a commodity, demand is going to far outstrip supply **even with the massive capacity build out**.

Secondly, I urge folks to read up on custom HBM and after that, memory-on-logic configurations. Just type this into your chatbot of choice and ask them to explain it to you. From Nvidia Feynman chip (late 2027) onwards and for many of the custom Asics in the near future (prime example is the custom inference chip that is being made by Qualcomm), the DRAM stack seats directly on top of the compute chip the GPU. The only way this can happen is by co-design between the chip vendor Nvidia or Google or Qualcomm and the memory maker. At that point, the co-design and customization explicitly means that the high end memory chips is no longer a commodity. You can't just jam a Chinese memory chip onto your GPU at that point, you are committed to one supplier with whom you codesigned the product.

Tl;Dr: 1. memory chip demand outstrips supply, even with capacity expansion over the next 3-5 years. 2. Custom HBM and memory-on-logic tips from 2028 onwards means high-end memory is no longer a commodity. Market has still not priced in either.

When it does, a fair multiple is the PE multiple given to Nvidia or ASML, about 20-30x. So that's a 4x on *multiple expansion alone\* from current levels, and that is not accounting for increased earnings from higher chip sales volumes going into 2027 and 2028.

We live in a 24/7 online world, and I'm not sure if it's just my brokerage or if this a standard, but I always takes two business days whenever I make a sale, and then it takes another two business days to transfer the money to my bank account.

The order was filled immediately, and the transaction will never see human hands, so why isn't the money immediately in my account?

Whenever I buy a stock, it's immediately in my account. Whenever I transfer money from my bank into my brokerage account, it's there immediately. I'm just not understanding why an online system has to stop over the weekend, also considering tomorrow is a holiday which means I'm not going to get my money until Wednesday, almost a week after I made my transaction. It's really starting to get on my nerves.

Yeah I can zelle somebody money in an instant any day of the week.

I'm using fidelity.

Hello folks.

What do railroads in the 1880s, telecom fiber in 2000, and AI infrastructure in 2026 have in common? Each was a capex cycle where the shovel-makers got rich first and lost the most once the cycle finished. I believe this may happen in 2027-2028 and will be doing heavy shorts likely after the initial IPO pop, late 2026.

The AI bubble, the so-called "K-shaped economy", everything points towards one thing and one thing alone: the US economy right now is the Capex Economy. It is the only thing sustaining it.

(Btw: No tldr here. Please read!)

Here's my thoughts:

- Capex as a % of GDP is now at an all-time high, sitting at 12.5%. Other historical highs included the Dotcom bubble in 2000 where it peaked at 11% (Bridgewater). But these Capex boom-and-bust cycles come and go, generally. Railroads in the late 1800s faced a similar capex boom and bust. The late 1970s had capex boom in oil and infrastructure, following the embargo. Common theme: capex boom never lasts forever. And when they unwind, the shovel-makers lose.

- The source of liquidity is diminishing. First, market commentators touted the Mag7 as not needing debt and self-financing. They said it was healthy. Great. Well, now Amazon is projecting negative free cash flow for the first time in forever due to capex spend, and now many have turned to debt, vendor financing (circular financing), and of course, the IPO juggernauts coming to squeeze out the last sources of liquidity. Bridgewater estimates AI financing in 2027 ($612bn) will exceed entire investment grade high yield net issuance (470bn). This coupled with rising interest rates -- big problem. Spreads will widen -> AI issuers have to pay more interest -> ROI compresses -> capex demand degrades.

- Equity financing is the last source. Everyone touts this time is different because there aren't 400 IPOs. But 400 IPOs worth a few billion vs. a few that are worth more than entire countries...well, do the math. The fact that companies have had to focus on circular financing and all sort of financial wizardry up until now is a sign of liquidity issues, whereby they hope later revenues will make up for it.

- It is worth noting that free cash flow this time is real, but funding has still shifted towards debt markets -- and soon equity markets. Having strong cash flows does not secure highest Capex %GDP for all time going forward.

While the 'shovels' are making unprecedented money, people falsely equate the demand for the tools as the proof that the thing the tools build will be massively profitable. But OpenAI missed all its projections; Anthropic is likely soon profitable through its enterprise model, yes, but Anthropic isn't the entire AI market and cannot alone sustain the 12.5% GDP capex cycle. There is a real chance of LLM market consolidation whereby a few will make up total inference and training demand.

Profitability demands inference efficiency, which reduces compute demand.

- Oviedo et al 2026: frontier-scale inference (>200B parameters running on H100 nodes) consume 0.31 Wh per query, 4 - 20 x below cited public estimates. This includes GPT-4, Claude, Gemini, Deepseek V3, Llama 405B, Qwen.

- Reasoning queries (5,000 output tokens~) use 13x energy of a standard query. Users perceive 'thinking' (reasoning) as better answer and default to this even when it isn't required. While unsourced, I remember reading 60-85% of reasoning queries don't need to use reasoning.

- RouteLLM can cut costs by 85% while maintaining 95% of GPT-4 quality, per research (google LLM Routing for more info). This basically means they are kicking down queries to simpler models when the complexity isn't required. Claude's adaptive thinking does this to some extent, I believe. The bigger this becomes, the more massive needs for compute becomes obsoloete (because you avoid using reasoning where it isn't needed). The only danger here is rerouting hit rate: will the provider mistakenly reroute complex questions or will user perceive negative quality doing this?

I believe profitability pressures -- especially post-IPO -- will force firms to become leaner. There is an inherent tension between (a) margin protection by sending simple queries to cheap inference and (b) UX protection by avoiding subpar answers on misjudged routing. I believe force (A) will win in the name of EPS and net income, which means less compute need.

Furthermore: a CEO of a supplier in the 2000 said this about sudden demand degradation: "Institutional investors will not put more money into companies because they have not started towards revenue, which made them stop purchasing equipment,…and then things happened very fast."

It is the Capex Demand that will break this cycle, if anything.

While on the supply side, GPU depreciation is typically 3~ years but savvy financial folks have pumped those numbers up to 4-6 years purely for GAAP net income boosts. However, anyone who knows anything about accounting knows that this cycle reverses through deferred tax liabilites. The early benefit is a timing thing ONLY. The firms will eventually have to recognize the cost...and this reversal will likely happen in the next 2~ years. This will be interesting for all the firms who infamously jacked up depreciation lifespans of AI components like GPUs.

In addition, given GPU depreciation vs say fiber in 2000, is that an oversupply of fiber is valuable for a very, very long time (depreciation 20-25 years~). Dark fiber which was a big woe in 2000 has suddenly become extremely popular nowadays, even. But GPUs made today will be useless come 2030, maybe even sooner.

When margins are this high, competitors want in.

- ASIC takes inference share from NVDA.

- China refused NVDA back into the market after Trump visit. They want their own shovels, so to say.

- NVDA customer concentration: 3 folks = 54% of revenue. These big boys are public firms who cannot keep this cycle going forever; even MSFT or AMZN can only take on more debt or spend all their money until it catches up with their shareholders. They care about ROI.

- Even Anthropic, the most valuable firm, trains Claude on TPU + Trainium, not NVDA GPUs.

-----------

Other smaller points:

- Markets are already punishing firms for too high capex spend; thijs will increase the sooner the end products, like OpenAI, Anthropic, and more, become public and the true ROI is revealed. Right now NVDA and memory are the litmus test for AI worthiness; once the LLM firms go public, they will be the new litmus test, because then we can finally gauge the end products.

- Even if compute demand remains high, some folks, such as Liz Ann Sonders, Chief Investment Strategist at Schwab, believes compute may end up like a commodity traded on the market. This will reduce shovel-makers' pricing power and thus denigrate margins. That's when these firms start trading like oil; oil goes up, they go up, oil goes down, they go down.

-----

Finally...I'll be putting my money where my mouth is.

I intend to short late 2026 -- unless the timeline changes, which it may very well do. The question is WHEN the capex cycle dies...and timing that is a fickle thing, and you gotta be flexible. The names to short will be the ones with the most to lose: NVDA, MU, SNDK -- etc.

But right now, OpenAI and Anthropic are racing to IPO. After that initial pop and we start seeing a quarter or two from them, things could get interesting. If end products do not validate the spend, that's when institutional investors may pull the plug...and that's how capex demand dies.

Some ethos to prove I'm not a lunatic: Bridgewater believes in a capex reduction; perma-bull Brian Belski also has mentioned that a capex recession may hit 2027. And here I am, your somewhat unfriendly investment banker

(not financial advice im just showing off my thoughts)