It appears Oracle has just delivered a quarter that can only be described as ripping. Earnings per share and total revenue both shooting up by more than 20% year on year! Management assures us this hasn’t happened in fifteen years. A positively dazzling performance, and one that has understandably brightened the outlook.
This, as you might imagine, has given a bit of a boost to oil stocks. Occidental Petroleum (OXY 0.91%) is up over 9% since the…events began. Which, on the one hand, is good. On the other hand, it feels a bit…fraught. I mean, are we really expecting this to last? I’ve been trying to be sensible, you see. Sensible and diversified. It’s not going brilliantly.
Presidential assurances of a swift resolution, delivered with the customary optimism, ring rather hollow. One suspects Mr. Trump’s pronouncements are calibrated more for domestic consumption than based on any genuine intelligence. The simultaneous pronouncements from various cabinet members only serve to muddy the waters, a tactic as old as diplomacy itself.
For a while there, it looked like Carvana might become a cautionary tale, a sort of automotive Blockbuster. They’d loaded up on inventory, convinced everyone wanted contactless car buying (a concept that, frankly, felt a bit dystopian even then), and then…well, the numbers started to look less like progress and more like a slow-motion disaster. Debt piled up. Cash evaporated. I remember reading a report and thinking, “Okay, this is it. They’re going to start accepting payment in Beanie Babies.”
Now, the prevailing narrative favors artificial intelligence, a field brimming with promises and, shall we say, inflated valuations. But to attribute Bittensor’s ascent solely to this macro trend would be… simplistic. The currents run deeper. One must always search for the source of the spring, not merely admire the ripples.
For those playing along at home, Micron makes memory and storage chips. DRAM, NAND flash… it’s the stuff that lets your phone not forget everything the second you turn it off. They’re also crucial for, you know, artificial intelligence, which is currently the tech world’s favorite imaginary friend. Everyone’s throwing money at AI, and someone has to actually store all that data. Turns out, that someone is Micron.
So, they’re upgrading the facility because a new fried chicken product is flying off the shelves. Good for them. It’s the corporate equivalent of your kid finally learning to tie their shoes. You’re pleased, but you’re not rewriting your will over it. Every company needs a “thing” right now, a little dopamine hit in a world of shrinking grocery budgets. But one successful fried chicken variety doesn’t suddenly turn Conagra into the Warren Buffett of breaded poultry. It’s a single data point in a portfolio that, let’s be honest, feels a little… dated. Like a pair of mom jeans that suddenly became fashionable again, but everyone knows they’re still mom jeans.
The indices bear this out. A substantial portion of the S&P 500, and an even greater share of the Nasdaq Composite, is now comprised of technology companies. This concentration, fueled by enthusiasm for artificial intelligence and related fields, creates a precarious situation. The assumption that technological innovation will continue at its current pace is, at best, optimistic, and at worst, a dangerous delusion. Diversification, therefore, is not merely prudent, but essential.
The incident itself, the targeting of data repositories in the Gulf, is less a novelty than a logical, if unsettling, progression. One might have anticipated such a development, given the increasing reliance on these digital fortresses and the inherent vulnerability of any centralized system. It is not the destruction of servers that is concerning, but the realization that these facilities, these seemingly neutral arbiters of information, are, in fact, deeply implicated in the theater of conflict. A truth, one suspects, known to those who designed the systems, but conveniently omitted from the prospectuses.
And lately, it’s been doing rather well. Gold’s gone above $5,000 an ounce. Which is…a lot. I checked my account. It’s…better. Not life-changing, but enough to justify another oat latte. This is the second part of a series for the Voyager Portfolio, and I’m starting to suspect that ‘portfolio’ is just a fancy word for ‘collection of anxieties’. It hasn’t been a straight line upwards, though. Far from it. There have been periods where it’s just…sat there. Like a very expensive paperweight.