Down goes the Dow

What country is she writing about?
I thought our economy was doing pretty well, better than expected, and rebounding much better than most first world countries post-pandemic, not to mention inflation is moderating.

But then again, I only get my info from trusted and established news sources...

What % of NVDA's sales are from China?

NVDA's 2024 Fiscal Year ended Jan 31, I believe he is referencing Fiscal Year 2025 which ends 1/31/2025. What are analyst's projections for sales and earnings?

Felder is quoting Rob Arnot of Research Affiliates, a quant firm. What's his expertise in semis, AI? He brings up AMD, well here was an interview on Bloomberg's Odd Lots with Brannin McBee, co-founder of CoreWeave (Yes that CoreWeave, the one you fell for the canard that they alone would be responsible for an increase of NVDA chip sales). He's talking his book, but he makes a valid point, there's more to this than making a faster chip. How long has AWS and Azure dominated the cloud? It isn't for lack of competition; GOOGL, IBM, ORCL.

"You know, you keep mentioning – or we both keep mentioning – the H100 for obvious reasons, but do you look at other chips? Or, what would happen to your own business if, for instance, a new chip was developed that could do the same thing or better than an Nvidia H100? Like for instance, I hear a lot of excitement about some of the stuff that AMD is developing. And I'm not a chips expert, except maybe when it comes to Fritos or Lays, but how big a difference would that make to you if we suddenly got a different chip manufacturer gain prominence in AI?

Sure. So I'd offer kind of two broad responses. One, typically when you train a model, you're going to use the same chips for inference on that model as well, right? So GPT-4, for example, it was trained on A100s, they're predominantly going to use A100s going forward. You might fit in some kind of newer generation hyper efficient chips into there, but it's not like you need a GPU with more VRAM on it, right? Like you're going to need your 40GB or your 80GB RAM chip, because that's the size of the model that you trained, right? You're not going to need like next multiple generations.

You're not going to really to be able to adopt them to change the efficiency of serving that model. So what we view is that a chip's lifespan is, like, its first two to three years is spent training models, and then it's next four to five years is spent doing inference for those models that it trained. And then within there as well, you do this thing called fine-tuning, which is updating the model with new information, right? Like how do you keep a model up-to-date with what's happened on Twitter or what's happened in the media, right? You have to keep retraining it, right? And you'll use those same chips to do that.
So your question on other chipsets — and this is something that we have a particularly interesting view into because we have, you know, call it 650 AI clients, right? — and we're having conversations with them daily to ensure that we are meeting or scaling their demands. So it gives us a look into six to 12 months into the future what type of infrastructure they expect to need. And it's overwhelmingly people still want access to Nvidia chips. And the reason for this is something that dates back, I think it's nearly 15 years, when Nvidia and Jensen made the decision to open source Cuda and to make this software set accessible to the machine learning community.

And you know, today, if you go to GitHub and you search a machine learning project, they just all reference Cuda drivers, and he's established this utter dominance of ecosystem around his compute within the ML space, really similar to like the X86 instruction set for CPU versus ARM, right? Like X86 is used predominantly. ARM has been trying to find its way into the space for a while now, and it has just really struggled because all the engineers and developers are used to X86. Similar to how all the engineers and developers in the AI space are used to using Cuda.
So it's something that like, obviously AMD is highly incentivized to find a way into the sector, but they just don't have the ecosystem. And it's a huge moat to deal with and, you know, kudos to Nvidia for establishing themselves and having the patience to stick with it and to continue to support that community over the last 15 years. And it's really paying off for them in spades today.

You know, if the demand comes for that infrastructure at some point, we can run other pieces of infrastructure within our data center. But I also find that Nvidia has such an advantage on the competition with not only its GPUs, but all of its components that support the GPUs like the InfiniBand fabric, that it's going to be a really difficult company to displace from the market in terms of the best standard for AI infrastructure."

I have no opinion on NVDA's or AGI's future. I'm not going to seek out Bears or Bulls to confirm my bias. I will read people that write neutral, informative articles such as this;

reactionwheel.net

AI and the Structure of Reasoning

Jerry Neumann

Generative AIs can do some things better than people: they can code faster in many instances, they can write junior high school level essays faster, they can create detailed images on demand no mat…

Open link

Re-upping this from reactionwheel as a word of warning for the Bulls;

"Look, here’s what I know, after 17 years of investing and 13 years of
lie-awake-at-night-thinking-neurotically-about-my-mistakes
soul-searching: picking is BS. No one can pick.
What about Sequoia, or Union Square Ventures, or Andreesen Horowitz?
Can’t those people pick? They probably can, a little bit. But that’s my
point. Imagine going to a bar at 2am on a Saturday night and meeting a
financial analyst who spends eight hours a week in that bar and 156
hours a week trying to figure out if AAPL is going to trade up or down
over the next year. What do you think he thinks when you tell him you’re
buying the stock because you really like Apple’s wearables strategy? He
thinks you’re an idiot. He has to put up with armchair quarterbacking
every time he glances away from his Bloomberg. He traded on that news
30ms after it was announced. He traded on the probability of that news
four months beforehand. And even then, he probably only moved his odds
from 50/50 to 51/49. That matters when you have half a billion dollars
in the stock; it doesn’t matter to you. He spends his life doing this.
He talks to Luca Maestri on the telephone, on a freakin landline
probably. He has people stand on line at the Apple Store for him to get
the new products first and then take them apart and test them for rare
metals so he can corner the world supply of indium. And what do you
have? You have a good feeling about wearables. Who do you think is
selling the AAPL stock you’re buying? He is. Why is he selling it to
you? Because you’re the greater fool.
Don’t compete with that guy.
What about the angels in Twitter or Uber? Can’t those people pick?
How about that monkey that typed Shakespeare? Can’t that monkey write?
Recognize survivorship bias. (That doesn’t mean those angels did it
wrong, they probably did it pretty all right, but it wasn’t picking they did right.)"

P.S. from gente

Or, why is he buying it from you?

I do like a lot of blues, having played in some blues bands in the past, so my favorite style of blues would be more on the blues rock side, so people like Jonny Lang, Walter Trout, Anthony Gomes, and even Stevie Ray Vaughn.

My favorite music though is classic rock. My favorite band is Queen. The Beatles would be second, and then a ton would tie for the next place...Boston, Yes, The Rolling Stones, The Doors, Supertramp, The Doobie Brothers, Steely Dan, Rush, ZZ Top, Led Zeppelin, The Who, Journey. Might be missing some.

My favorite solo artist would be Elton John, then Steve Winwood, followed by Stevie Wonder and then probably Billy Preston and Bob Seger.

Very interesting.

I don't want to drive off any further off topic, so I will post something later today on the thread "What are you Listening to Now" about a couple of my favorites in that vein, which you didn't mention but I consider in high regard.

Good stuff, though!

My post was more just a tongue in cheek response to agip. Mike Wilson is a credible analyst, with convictions for his views, and I feel it is shameful that Morgan Stanley has turned on him. In regards to NVDA I think there is plenty of hype around AI, and take the view that it is years down the road to deliver meaningful profits, and in the meantime corporations are paying a premium for NVDA products, which I assume can be replicated in some form, by someone. Currently I would not short NVDA directly, but prefer to exercise my view through SOXS which overall has been profitable for me. However, on the current lot down about 5.94%, but some shares up at high as 13%, but I was positive on all earlier in the week. These are trades, and would sell as things change. I did this when the S&P 500 approached new highs, reentering the trade recently. And I would sell aggressively again if I perceive the AI momentum sustainable.

Birds of a feather…

Have a nice day,

I won't be wasting any of mine on things which don't deserve it.

ndtv.com

Layoffs In US Soared 98% In 2023 And It Could Get Worse This Year, Report Claims

US companies planned 721,677 job cuts last year, a 98% jump from 363,832 layoffs reported in 2022, a new report published by professional outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas has revealed.

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Layoffs up 98% in 2023.

Bidenomics

Wilson is stepping down as chair of the Global Investment Committee, he remains MS's top rated US equity strategist and CIO. I've always found his commentary informative, balanced and nuanced. The problem is that most on social media or financial media place everything on an extreme Bull-Bear spectrum (they know their followers and listeners want bias confirmation). Hence, one usually sees a quote that amplifies these extremes and not the qualifiers. Watch this clip of Wilson on Bloomberg, then tell me if he's Bullish or Bearish.

bloomberg.com

Morgan Stanley's Wilson on Stock Picker Opportunities

bn

Mike Wilson, Morgan Stanley's chief US equity strategist and chief investment officer, says investors should buy high-quality growth stocks, and opportunities go far beyond the megacap tech companies that propelled equities h...

Open link

Seattle,

Sorry, couldn’t help myself. I apologize.

I did trouble shoot the pressure washer, replaced a kinked supply line from soap dispenser to pump. Used a heat gun to soften up the tubing. Works fine now. The lawnmower is 18 years old and I have to modify the air filter to make it work. The blade I bought at Home Depot appeared to be a match, but the two rigid mounting holes were were too small. I reinspected the blade, and opted to wait a year to replace.

I have the chair caning on my list, but I am procrastinating.

Igy

My impression was that Mike Wilson worked hard to be balanced. James Gorman as well. May not be coincidental that Wilson downgrade came on Gorman’s retirement.

I believe on the last earnings for Morgan Stanley fee based revenue was down. I would assume there was a push to replace a balanced Wilson with someone slanted to the Bull like Andrew Slimon. A lower allocation to stocks was impacting fee based revenue both for advisors and the firm.

OFF TOPIC;

ok, not a problem

Did you try sharpening the old lawn mower blade on a grinder or with a file? That can often work wonders except in cases of blade being badly bent.

Chair caning was for me the worst outcome of a job I thought I could do, but.... As you know, I ended up hiring it out. Good luck and I would be impressed if you can pull it off.

I wish you hadn't said that about the pressure washer since I had forgotten that I have a similar job on my to-do list for later this afternoon. Going to treat my walks that need it with a granule that kills the moss, then hose off, in lieu of pressurewashing. Small area.

And btw, why don't you just keep your trash info sources to yourself?

SHE IS A DOCTOR.

And as such, she is a doctor issuing a statement about public health concerns, of which she presumably would know a lot about and be perfectly right to inform others of, as one might expect.

Furthermore, your site you linked to omitted the important part about her being a doctor, while listing all of her other credentials.

This stuff you pull up is pure sh_t.

What a f'g waste.

And I post this from her page on X (Twitter): "
"Professor, Doctor, Air Vice-Marshal (Ret’d), Adelaide Crows (AFL & AFLW) supporter.

Off Topic:

And furthermore, she is not even from this country.

She is in Australia.

And she was, get this, ""former Surgeon General of the Australian Defence Force."

I thought about sharpening, but it looked better than the new one that did not fit. So just went with it. The biggest issue I have with this older mower is late summer, with higher temperatures it is harder to restart when dumping bags.

On the chair I stopped when it got tough on the weave. I checked into caning locally with no luck. There is a retailer that deals in woodworking that I will call for suggestions, but I will give it one more try before then.

If you guys had to pick 5 stocks to invest in tomorrow, who would you choose?

Any of the Mag. 7 except Tesla.

Of that group, I particularly like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, and probably Apple, though it really seems like Apple may have plateaued in the near term. Meta, too, though I haven't been so fully committed to that one.

I like Berkshire Hathaway, too, if seeking a little diversity.