So, what’s the brilliant plan? High-protein bowls. Eighty-one grams of protein. Who needs eighty-one grams of protein in a single bowl? It’s excessive. It’s…it’s a statement. And an Adobe Chicken Taco for $3.50. $3.50! It’s like they’re trying to undercut themselves. And the whole thing is predicated on…on people taking drugs. Weight loss drugs. GLP-1s. It’s…it’s a bizarre strategy. A truly bizarre strategy.
Many chase this share, blinded by the sheen. They see potential, I see a gamble. A perilous one, for those who don’t understand the currents beneath the surface. It’s a fool’s errand to leap before looking, especially when the stakes are so high.
For those unfamiliar, Supermicro assembles the boxes2 that house the glowing, humming brains of the digital age – servers and such. They’re the chaps who make sure all the bits and bytes have somewhere to live. They’re rather good at it, too, and are, as one might say, “partners” with Nvidia, mostly by taking Nvidia’s rather expensive components and fitting them into those boxes. A perfectly reasonable arrangement, provided one doesn’t dwell on the implications.
According to the wise folks at Santiment’s ETF dashboard, a whopping $11.9 million decided to take a hike in a single session. That’s right, the second-largest daily outflow since these products started keeping tabs. Imagine the embarrassment! It’s like being stood up at the prom, but with more zeros.
CoreWeave began, rather humbly, as a miner of Ethereum (ETH +0.36%). A pursuit, one might say, akin to chasing moonbeams. The cryptocurrency crash of 2018, however, proved a bracing corrective. They wisely abandoned the ephemeral realm of digital coinage and repurposed their graphical processing units – those glittering engines of calculation – to the far more profitable task of tending the burgeoning AI gardens. A shrewd pivot, indeed. In 2022, they invested a cool $100 million in Nvidia’s (NVDA +3.41%) H100 GPUs – a rather extravagant purchase, but one, it appears, justified by results. They then, with a touch of financial legerdemain, leveraged these acquisitions as collateral, securing further funding to expand their empire of silicon and electricity.
Micron Technology (MU 0.87%) occupies a critical position within this landscape as a supplier of memory solutions essential to AI hardware. Prior commentary has addressed the company’s historical trajectory. This analysis focuses on recent financial performance and the potential for continued growth, acknowledging the inherent cyclicality of the sector.
Alphabet, a behemoth casting a long shadow, has declared its intent – a disbursement of $175 to $185 billion this year. It is a spring thaw of investment, following a long winter of cautious restraint, a signal that the fever of artificial intelligence has taken root and now blossoms, demanding sustenance.
Archer Aviation, they called it. A name that suggested a swiftness, a grace, that seemed to mock the laborious process of bringing a novel aircraft into being. They spoke of Midnight, a vessel intended to liberate the city dweller from the tyranny of traffic, to carry them aloft on currents of electricity. A beautiful vision, certainly, but one that had already begun to fray at the edges, like a handwoven tapestry exposed to the relentless sun. Seven years they had labored, building not just a machine, but a legend, a story told in balance sheets and regulatory filings. And yet, the stock, that fickle barometer of hope, had offered a meager return to those who had dared to believe, a 35% decline from the initial offering price of $10. The S&P 500, that stoic giant, had doubled its value in the same span, a silent rebuke to the more audacious venture.
The market, naturally, has been twitchy. Down over 10% this year. Below $500. A dip. A flicker. Is it a steal? A trap? Let’s be honest, “bargain” and “biotech” rarely occupy the same sentence. It’s like trusting a politician with your life savings. Possible, but profoundly unwise. I’ve seen too many “sure things” dissolve into vaporware. But this…this is different. This is surgery. People will always need their innards tinkered with. That’s a fundamental truth. A grim, lucrative truth.
SLVP, you see, doesn’t actually hold the silver. It holds shares in the companies that do the digging. Which introduces a delightful layer of inefficiency. They have to pay people, maintain equipment, and occasionally deal with geological surprises. IAU, on the other hand, is simpler. It’s essentially a very large, heavily guarded vault.2 This comparison is less about finding the ‘best’ investment and more about understanding the different flavours of hope and despair on offer.