The market is supposed to hit $100 billion. A hundred billion! It’s obscene. And the demand is so high, they can’t even keep up. It’s like toilet paper in 2020 all over again. And now everyone thinks they can just waltz in and grab a piece of the pie. It’s infuriating.
The upshot is that Oracle, alongside Silver Lake (a private equity firm, which sounds terribly sophisticated) and MGX, an Abu Dhabi-based entity, now collectively own 45% of TikTok U.S. It’s a rather unusual alliance, a bit like finding a badger sharing a picnic basket with a flamingo. The remaining 20% stays with ByteDance, TikTok’s Chinese parent company, bringing the total non-Chinese ownership to 80%. It’s a carefully constructed arrangement, designed, one assumes, to satisfy everyone – a feat rarely accomplished in the world of high finance.
Now, before everyone starts building bunkers and hoarding parchment, let’s consider this. The Guild of Alchemists and Venture Capitalists (Wall Street, to the uninitiated) is, by and large, still optimistic. They’ve revised their prophecies (price targets, they call them), but even after the recent tremors, most see a considerable upward trajectory for the stock. A median prediction of $225 suggests a potential 76% rebound. That’s a rather substantial return, even for those of us accustomed to the frankly ludicrous valuations occasionally seen in this sector.
But here’s the twitch. A flicker in the dying light. Year-to-date, they’ve actually… risen. Eleven percent. Ahead of eighty percent of the S&P 500. Which, frankly, says more about the general state of things than it does about Target’s brilliance. It’s like watching a slightly less diseased patient outrun the rest of the lepers. Still sick, just… slower to rot. And the P/E ratio? A measly 13. Cheap. Dangerously cheap. Like a used car with a suspiciously low price tag. You know something’s wrong. But you check the engine anyway.
The price of Ethereum, that nimble performer, hath risen by 0.36% in the past day. A trifling flourish, yet enough to stir the audience.
Buffett’s reign, spanning six decades, was not merely about accumulating wealth; it was about the deliberate, almost ascetic, avoidance of its loss. Berkshire’s portfolio, a behemoth exceeding $300 billion, is a testament to this principle. Let us, therefore, examine five holdings that exemplify this philosophy – not as a mere list of stocks, but as a curriculum for the aspiring investor, a guide to surviving, and perhaps even thriving, in this rather chaotic marketplace.
The CAPE, or Cyclically Adjusted Price-to-Earnings ratio, is a simple thing, really. It takes the price of the market – the S&P 500, a broad measure of American industry – and sets it against the earnings of those industries over a decade. It smooths out the bumps, the lucky years and the lean ones, to give a truer picture of value. It’s a way of asking whether the price being paid for a share reflects a reasonable claim on the future earnings of the company behind it.
The stock, once soaring at $542, now languishes at $160, a shadow of its former self. Billions in value have evaporated, leaving shareholders to ponder the wisdom of their investments. Ah, the irony! The company, in its quest for Bitcoin, has diluted its shares, a move as ill-advised as a protagonist’s misguided passion.
The total stands at about 4.243 million ETH – roughly 3.52 percent of all Ethereum – a figure that makes the clock tick louder and the photocopier cough with envy.
Observe, if you will, the spectacle of a company chasing the glittering phantom of artificial intelligence, while simultaneously neglecting the rather mundane necessity of, shall we say, profit. I am reminded of a certain Monsieur Jourdain, who, upon learning the art of rhetoric, insisted on speaking in prose without realizing he had been doing so all along. SoundHound, it seems, is similarly preoccupied with the appearance of innovation, while the substance remains… elusive.