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Now, XRP (XRP 0.82%), the digital doodad associated with Ripple, hasn’t exactly been leading the charge. It’s underperformed, dropping a respectable 22% to $2.08 over the last twelve months. But Geoffrey Kendrick, a fellow at Standard Chartered Bank who clearly has more faith in these things than I do, anticipates a rebound. He suggests that regulatory clarity (a concept that feels perpetually just over the horizon) and the arrival of spot Exchange Traded Funds – ETFs, to those in the know – could propel XRP to a rather optimistic $12.50 by 2028. That, he calculates, represents a 500% upside. A significant return, even for those of us accustomed to the occasional lucky punt.

The S&P 500, currently performing a rather boisterous jig, has, predictably, convinced many that gravity no longer applies. Nineteen percent up in a year? A delightful illusion, but illusions, like bubbles, have a habit of bursting. Even if this exuberance continues—and let us not be naive—it won’t last forever. A prudent portfolio requires ballast, something that doesn’t evaporate when the music stops.

Still, Nvidia has done rather well for itself, hasn’t it? A gain of 977% over the last three years is nothing to sneeze at. Their graphics processing units – GPUs, to the knowing – have become the very gold standard for this AI business. And after such a breathless sprint, a little pause for refreshment is perfectly understandable. The stock currently sits a modest 12% below its recent peak, which, frankly, seems a perfectly reasonable place to be.

In the most recent accounting, this Druckenmiller divested himself of holdings in Broadcom, a purveyor of the essential, if largely invisible, infrastructure of the digital realm. He simultaneously initiated a position in Sandisk, a manufacturer of flash memory. A thousand and fifty percent increase in valuation since its separation from Western Digital, they report. Such numbers possess a certain terrifying beauty, a testament to the capacity of the market to generate phantom wealth, divorced from tangible creation. It is a spectacle worthy of careful, if melancholy, observation.

There’s this one player, Amazon (AMZN +0.40%), that only went up about 5% last year. Which, in the current market, is practically a recession. But here’s the sneaky part: they were also growing, thanks to AI, e-commerce, and this weird thing called “cloud computing.” Amazon is a solid pick for both the aggressively optimistic and the cautiously pessimistic. The cautious types will appreciate that Amazon wasn’t built on AI; it was already a functioning business, which is a nice change of pace. Even Amazon Web Services (AWS), which does deal in AI chips and platforms, has a bunch of other stuff going on. It’s diversified. Like a sensible adult.

Now, Thiel Macro, his hedge fund (a sort of collective consciousness dedicated to making more money, which, when you think about it, is a rather alarming concept), has done something… curious. It’s sold all its Nvidia stock. All of it. This is like deciding you no longer require oxygen, or the continued structural integrity of your planet. Nvidia, you see, has been on a bit of a tear. A parabolic tear, to be precise. (A parabola, for those unfamiliar with the geometry of success, is a curve that goes up, up, up… and then, eventually, doesn’t.) It’s become, effectively, the most valuable company in the world, which, as any economist will tell you, is almost always a sign that something is about to become terribly complicated.

Now, Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD as the grown-ups call it, is a bit of a scoundrel, really. It’s been nipping at the heels of the big cheese, Nvidia, for quite some time. Nvidia, you see, is a bit of a bully, hoarding all the best bits and pieces for its fancy graphics cards. But AMD is no slouch. It’s been busy brewing up something special in its laboratories – a whole heap of clever chips for something called ‘artificial intelligence.’ A bit of a mouthful, that one. It’s like teaching a machine to think, only without the messy bits of having a brain.