Therefore, looking ahead – and one does look ahead, doesn’t one? – I suspect a rather significant correction is due. And two stocks that I venture to predict will not only survive, but positively thrive, and ultimately eclipse Palantir in value? Uber Technologies and Intuitive Surgical. Consider it a tip from someone who knows a good investment when they see one. Or, more accurately, when they foresee a rather predictable bubble bursting.
Enter Qualcomm (QCOM 0.01%). Now, Qualcomm isn’t immune to the general air of technological frenzy, but it’s currently trading at a price that suggests someone, somewhere, has briefly remembered the concept of value. It’s a bit like finding a perfectly good towel at a space station gift shop – unexpectedly reasonable.
One such potential locus of observation is the entity known as Toast (TOST +2.85%). It presents itself as a “digital platform” and “operating system” for restaurants, a description that, upon closer inspection, feels less like a solution and more like an extension of the very complexity it purports to alleviate.
But a certain weariness seems to be settling over the more exuberant sectors. The tech bubble, a familiar friend, has exhaled. And in the resulting stillness, healthcare, utilities, and consumer staples have managed a modest ascent. A temporary reprieve, no doubt. As long as the future remains uncertain, people will continue to age, and occasionally, require attention. A rather unromantic truth, but a truth nonetheless.
HONG KONG – Consensus Hong Kong’s first day did not parade into glory, but shuffled forward with the kind of anxious tremor that teeth-chatterers call progress. The city, in its grand modern dignity, spoke regulations like a stern magistrate granting mercy only after a long-standing debt of fear. Stablecoin licenses promised for next month, a framework for perpetual contracts, and a crypto economy that might finally stop pretending to be a mere carnival.
The stock, currently nursing a 56% loss over the last five years, wasn’t exactly setting the world on fire. The question wasn’t whether Nike could hit $100 again. It was whether it had the stomach for the fight. The street wanted a miracle. I dealt in probabilities, and the odds were stacked against a quick recovery.
Enterprise Products Partners, you see, doesn’t so much participate in the oil game as circumscribe it. A yield of 6.2%, sustained through twenty-seven annual distributions – a veritable Fibonacci sequence of income – is not to be dismissed lightly. It’s a dependable, almost predictable rhythm, a metronome marking time in a market prone to fits of arrhythmia. The trade-off? A certain…horizontal trajectory. One doesn’t anticipate sudden ascents, merely a slow, glacial accumulation of return. Think of it as a meticulously crafted miniature garden, rather than a flamboyant, explosive bloom.
They say the average American worker pulls in around sixty thousand dollars a year. Not a king’s ransom, but enough to get by, if a fella’s careful. The so-called experts, them Wall Street fellas with their fancy charts and complicated talk, will tell you to set aside ten or fifteen percent of your earnings for retirement. That’s six to nine thousand dollars a year, they say. Now, that’s all well and good for them livin’ in ivory towers, but for many, that’s just a dream.
The fear, of course, is not new. Every wave of innovation carries with it the undertow of displacement. The loom threatened the hand weaver, the assembly line the skilled craftsman. Now, it is the algorithm that looms, promising to automate not just labor, but thought itself. The logic is simple, brutally so: why pay for a service when a machine can approximate it, and at a fraction of the cost? The suits on Wall Street see only numbers; they do not see the hands that once guided the tools, now trembling with uncertainty.
Let us look closer at the yield of this quarter, and what may come.