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It’s now the second-largest dividend ETF, apparently. Eighty-five billion dollars! That’s… a lot of money chasing yield. Makes you wonder what everyone else is missing, doesn’t it? Or maybe they aren’t missing anything and it’s just a temporary blip. I’m leaning towards the blip. They were bragging about eight years of being in the top third of Morningstar’s Large Value category. Top third. That’s… participation trophy territory. And keeping pace with the S&P 500? That’s like being slightly less bad than everyone else. It’s not a ringing endorsement.

Two entities, CoreWeave (CRWV 2.67%) and Nebius (NBIS 6.61%), are currently engaged in a peculiar race. They build, ostensibly to serve the insatiable appetite of these AI ‘hyperscalers,’ but one wonders if they are not simply constructing monuments to their own ambition, elaborate sandcastles awaiting the tide. Both offer the promise of computational power, a commodity increasingly divorced from any discernible purpose. The distinction between them, if it exists, is likely lost in a labyrinth of contracts and projections.

But let’s not mistake this for simple optimism. Smart money, as they say, often anticipates the punchline. And this, my friends, feels less like a gamble and more like a calculated assertion of faith. Or perhaps, a rather public demonstration of confidence in the face of… well, let’s call it market fickleness.

Units of Cryptocurrency Lost (so far): 12. Hours Spent Watching Charts: 9. Number of Panicked Texts to Friends: 24. I keep telling myself there’s still time. That it could bounce back. That I’m not destined to become a cautionary tale whispered in dimly lit investment forums. But the numbers… they’re not encouraging.

But now, a tremor. The distant echoes of conflict in the lands of Persia, a region steeped in history and sorrow, threaten to disrupt this carefully constructed equilibrium. The recent engagements, a regrettable yet predictable consequence of human ambition and the relentless pursuit of dominion, have brought with them a tightening around the throat of the world’s oil supply.

For a time, the great engines of our digital age – Meta Platforms, Alphabet, Amazon, Microsoft – seemed to defy gravity, their valuations ascending on a tide of optimism. These hyperscalers, hungry for the raw materials of artificial intelligence – data centers, infrastructure, the very sinews of a new computational epoch – drove a surge in capital investment. Yet, the bloom, it appears, may be fading. These very titans now trail the broader S&P 500, a quiet testament to the market’s capacity for recalibration.

Peter Lynch, that grizzled old fox, once said the best stocks are the ones you already know. The ones you understand. He wasn’t wrong. This isn’t about chasing rainbows; it’s about recognizing a freight train when it barrels past. Nvidia isn’t just a company; it’s a goddamn force of nature. And I’m betting on the force.

Starlink provides internet access via satellite. It’s useful in places where regular internet isn’t, which is a surprisingly large number of places. They have subscribers. A lot of them, actually. Around 10 million now, if you believe the numbers. That’s more people than live in some countries. They added almost 5 million in a year. It’s a growth rate that makes you wonder what’s being sold, exactly. Not just internet, that’s for sure. So it goes.

Let us consider, then, two digital estates that, while exhibiting considerable vitality, appear, at present, to offer a degree of sensibility – a balance, if you will – for the discerning eye.

The market had a cough, a nasty one. Expensive valuations, whispers of trouble in the software sector. Some new AI kid on the block, Anthropic, rattling cages. But Palantir? They weren’t going down without a fight. The question wasn’t if they could hit two hundred again, but if the game was even worth playing.