That's kinda the point; something as important as this shouldn't be a casino.
I increasingly get the same feeling I did as back in the early 2000s when there were endless 'house flipping' shows on TV where somebody would go buy a house on an insta-improved loan, add some granite counter tops and mop the floor, then resell it within a couple of weeks for $20k profit and repeat. Not sure how people didn't see that was basically 'Bubble - The TV Show!'
Fwiw, I bought 100 shares when they were 19€/share and sold 80 when they reached 100 this summer, so I followed it's development somewhat.
The low was itself after it's share dropped by like 25+%. That's what made me buy them - I thought "no way is the USA government going to let them go insolvent, their losses are gonna get socialized for sure". One year later Trump announced a large injection into Intel, causing the stock price to overshoot my expectation massively.
This fall is just it's share going closer to a more realistic valuation after Trump blew it up, I think it's gonna settle around 40 in a year or so
Since you don't know if it's going to rain or not, you are going to value it based on how likely each of these events are. Now the weather report came out, and there's not going to be any rain.
The stock market has lots of guards against volatility, but the AI story bypasses all of them - they're saying that AI is the only thing that is going to matter economically, and AI value is exponential - meaning past performance can be discounted, since almost all value resides in the future.
This means that all companies valuations have been reduced to a single dimension - how much companies can contribute to AI, this increases volatility, since now their value is highly correllated with AI
Usually insiders just trade early (and push the market closer to the correct number).
It reflects people's perception of reality.
How exactly would you design a meter of actual reality, in the sense of where capital value is going to go in [delta-time]?
It's how everything always works. If you perceive that you have cancer, based on doctors' gathered and interpreted data, you will act on that perception.
With that attitude, sure.
There are real, objectively measurable signals that could be used to help moderate a purely perception-based market. But the “pure” “free” market system of US-style ultracapitalism doesn’t allow for that.
The scare quotes are because it’s not really a pure free market, it’s biased in favor of those who are most able to manipulate perception, and in general towards those who have the most paper wealth, which is not real economic value but rather based on those manipulated perceptions.
In other words, it’s a vicious cycle that pumps up valuations to continually move the market further and further away from any kind of reality. It’s a big part of why we see enormous boom-bubble-bust cycles.
Musk would be a good example: there’s no sane way to connect the actual economic value his companies have ever produced, or are ever likely to produce, to the market value that makes up his net worth.
The idea that “that’s as close as we can get” is basically a version of the Simpson’s quote, “We’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas.”
There’s plenty of existing work that focuses on these issues. Just one example is C.H. Douglas’ “Social Credit”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_credit, which is a good starting pointing for thinking more seriously about the subject.
Those are merely your perception of "facts". And, surprise!, you are not the first person to ever determine there are "real, objectively measurable signals that could be used to help moderate". There's an entire legion of workers out there trying to do that.
If you genuinely perceived "real" indicators the market was overlooking, you should implement them and become a billionaire. Go ahead.
Customers because a product they use from a company won't work because...?
Employees because they not only work at the company (I'm assuming they're paid for their labor), but also can buy stock in it?
Taxpayers because of bailouts?
When you have a small business, or even a large business that has a single owner, that person has to care about things like their own reputation and might sometimes have preferences for things other than maximizing returns. There is a significant difference in behavior between a profitable company that makes money by providing something people want and a company that makes slightly more money by turning the screws at every opportunity.
And typical funds only care about number go up. Even the ones that nominally exclude "bad" companies/industries have their rules, but then hold shares in Comcast rather than Exxon and still expect Comcast to turn the screws. Whereas to do the real thing, you would need funds with missions to do things like specifically fund companies who are new entrants to concentrated markets to increase the amount of competition. Which to most funds is a conflict of interest, because if the fund has that industry as a target then it already owns shares in the companies the new entrant would be competing with. Conversely, mergers they're all for, because they own shares in all three companies in that industry, so causing three to become two is higher margins for everybody.
So it produces market concentration and drives obsession with quarterly profits, harming customers and employees. The consequently larger companies then buy off the government to get subsidies and insist they're too big to fail whenever they screw up, use the nature of multinational conglomerates to arbitrage tax rates and shift tax incidence to purely domestic companies and workers, etc. All of which the funds like because they make number go up.
It's basically a paperclip optimizer which is trying to accumulate money rather than paperclips.
Maybe? Maybe not! Just saying it doesn't make it true.
I'll skip the step asking Claude to produce the lengthy list of examples where market concentration richly benefitted customers, employees, and taxpayers.
One difference: the longer your money is in a casino, the more likely you are to lose it; while the longer your money is in the stock market (especially in a total market index fund), the more likely you are to win:
* https://awealthofcommonsense.com/2023/05/the-stock-market-is...
After five years, you're up 90% of the time. Buy and hold for fifteen years, and you're up 100% of the time.
In a casino the house generally wins eventually, in the stock market you do.
Casinos are awesome! So welcoming. :) (/s)
I understand that at a lofty, ethical plane, it's a reflection of value, of growth and progress and confidence in all of that.
But in practice, it's not even gambling. It's humanity's hope bastardised by HFT and recurring insider trading. It's confidence for all the wrong reasons, institutional HODL.
It's a mugs' game.
Over the long term it’s the investment class most likely to grow capital.
Occasionally there are long periods where returns are low (or even negative), but in terms of risk it’s the least risky place to put your money compared to all the alternatives (if properly diversified).
(Not financial advice, just my rule-of-thumb understanding)
This is a very US-centric viewpoint, my recollection is that the FTSE didn't beat inflation for like a 20 year period.
That being said, index funds focused on equity are definitely a good way of getting reasonable returns over time (as long as you don't retire into a massive crash).
The systems are optimized for pumping more and more bits out. Not to measure/reduce noise and increase signal.
Individually its easier to tune it out.
Intel was at 15 bucks for multiple years post its peaks.
The bulk of the buying is done by people who use modelling to derive the valuation, not vibes.
Because Intel is a household names, it's subject to vibes, but it's mostly math.
Underlying swings is usually some kind of new data point that, because there is so much growth involved, implies greater swings in valuation. So the impact of the news is amplified.
Nobody knows what demand is going to be for AI in a few years, and that's causing this wild volatility.
It doesn't matter how well you understand the supply chain - that helps.
In many cases, it's literally trying to predict a herd: if the herd steers away from AI based on bad news about it not creating ROI, if the media sours, CEO's pullback, that could cause a slowdown in growth and therefore a crash.
Everything is highly leveraged.
An opaque input on Verizon forecasting model would not result in such a wild variation, they have more predictable operations.
I don't know much about forecasting models and all, are you saying opaque forecasting is some kinda standardized technique and anybody doing opaque forecasting with the same data will likely end up with similar predictions?
They arrive at different conclusions - then they go and buy and sell and their analysts separately report different 'targets' and then other investors do the same.
Then the market has to clear and find a new equilibrium.
During these time, people start top panic and do 'herd stuff' which gives everyone the jitters.
The 'herd' is always 'more correct' than any analyst.
It's like predicting how many people can walk through a tight walkway - if people start to panic, all predictions are off.
On this note it would actually be interesting to see percentage split of purchases/sales between retail and institutions during that 5 minute window. Anywhere such data would be available?
There are very different kinds of herds.
You have institutional investors with varying kinds of rules, covenants, leverage. They might be required to have certain kind of balanced portfolio, reflecting certain kinds of risk. They might be required to value companies certain way depending on their bond ratings even if they are not buying bonds. So they will be 'forced' into making certain kinds of moves which may not be specifically oriented around valuation.
Some hedge funds might be more levered, and might have to sell to cover that leverage.
Then you have a lot of family offices - professionals but they don't have access to all the 'inner goings on and research' - they are more risk averse and have their eyes on the main players.
You have massive sovereign wealth funds - some professionally managed like Noway, some on a whim and sometimes politically, sometimes 'on the whim of a guy' like Softbank. Recently someone said that Masayoshi is like a 'riverboat gambler' and I'm inclined to agree.
And retail investors who, in some cases, act like a cultish movement.
We can absolutely have a situations where very smart people using very smart math have a price, but maybe there is a lot more leverage in the system than we thought, and some funds are forced to sell to cover themselves. So - will this spook the herd? If 'everyone else runs' then you want to be the first to run. Obviously. But your 'running early' will help induce the movement.
I guess I should have used the 'Poker' Analogy - you can do the math on the cards that you have, what is on the table, and some knowledge about what other players are. But in the end, so much will depend on what other actors do, and they all have differing levels of risk tolerance, information, leverage, specific conditions and covenants.
When there is leverage in that, you get the big swings.
Usually crashes only happen when there is 'hidden information' that is truly bad, and it happens suddenly. Like Bear Stearns collapse, or 1929 mania etc. otherwise bubbles can 'unwind without the crash' kind of thing.
It was ~$22 back in August of '24. It is ~$66 today in November of '26. That's ~3x in a little over two years; that's fairly excellent.
If he had a magic looking glass and sold at the recent-ish July peak of ~$120, then that'd have been even better. But it's still a very good (potential) return if he still holds it today.
Their sales of CPUs for personal computers dropped because the huge prices of memories discouraged everybody to make upgrades.
On the other hand, they sold every server CPU that they could produce, despite the fact that the AMD server CPUs are much better, but AMD also could not produce enough of them, so both AMD and Intel sold every server CPU that they could produce.
So their earnings in personal computers dropped, but their earnings in server CPUs have risen like never before, bringing a profit instead of the losses of the previous years (when they had to accept great discounts when selling server CPUs, to prevent their customers to buy better AMD server CPUs).
I’m fully expecting Nvidia to see a P/E of under 10 within a year.
The AI boom is overstated but that is not the same as nvidia not having a business.
> Nvidia is positioned to own a serious fraction of the future global economy.
=> just how bad are you expecting global earnings to be?
also, my old boss thought Larabee was cool as hell when he got to play with it at MSR.
The hardware of the first Larrabee implementations was bad, being designed by some third-tier team in older technologies, without the resources used by the A-team that designed the Sandy Bridge CPU and its successors.
Nonetheless, after a couple of rebrandings the "Larrabee New Instructions" have become "AVX-512", and more recently "AVX10", and they are now the best part of the Intel-AMD instruction set.
Intel has tried to reserve the better instruction set for big spenders, but fortunately AMD has forced them to unify again their ISA, so starting next year, when Intel should launch the "Nova Lake" CPUs, Intel will have for the first time really competitive CPUs for personal computers, since the launch of AMD Zen 2 (mid 2019, so about 8 years before the launch of Intel Nova Lake; Zen 2 was when AMD switched to TSMC and they also doubled the computational throughput of their desktop CPUs in comparison with the best Intel desktop CPUs).
I’d even say what Intel is doing with Arc graphics is incredibly impressive. Coming out of nowhere to legitimately compete with a decent set of AMD/Nvidia consumer and workstation graphics cards is no small feat.
The great increase in price of Panther Lake is obfuscated by the fact that some part numbers that look like replacements for the corresponding part numbers of Arrow Lake H, and which do not have much higher prices, in reality are not replacements because they have much worse specs, e.g. a much smaller GPU, so for a real upgrade you must go to a higher part number, with a much steeper price increase.
I am among those who wanted to buy a Panther Lake based mini-PC, but I dropped my plans after analyzing the new prices, even those of the barebone systems, which have not been affected by the memory crysis.
The GPU of Panther Lake continues to be made by TSMC, in about the same technology as for the previous Intel CPUs. Because the greatest increases in Panther Lake prices are in the models with big GPUs, I assume that TSMC has increased the prices that it demands from Intel, due to the shortage of production capacity caused by the demands for AI datacenters, so it is likely that Panther Lake is also an indirect victim of the AI companies.
I really hope that Intel will continue to design ARC GPUs with good FP64 performance, because they are the only GPU vendor with good FP64 throughput, which has even increased in the Battlemage generation, while all the other GPU vendors attempt to reduce more and more all the "professional" features of their "consumer" GPUs, in order to reserve them for overpriced "datacenter" GPUs, which are not affordable for small businesses or for individuals.
> Intel engineers, to put to bluntly: suck.
It hurts, but it is true.
> I took voluntary retirement and went to work for a smaller instrument maker. I’m way happier.
I was not so lucky. I would have loved the voluntary separation package. They did get around to doing straight large layoffs one year. My manager got laid off, I was not so lucky. I wanted the layoff package. I told him I'd happily trade places with him. He tried, but was denied. I ended up leaving anyway. Now, like you, working for a small company and much much happier.
Intel engineers absolutely do not suck.
Those of us who've worked at less illustrious companies are all too familiar with that. It's definitely unpopular to mention, but it drives a lot of consulting sales.
Oh, it wasn't leadership?
> There just isn’t enough talent there because they don’t pay enough.
Ah, so it was leadership.
Intel ARC is not only impressive just for the mere feat of “almost catching up” this quickly, but Intel absolutely can be an AI GPU supplier of note.
I don’t claim to fully understand the business especially on the enterprise side but I don’t think it’s the sort of company to count out.
Tomorrow, they'll report the Dow is up 1572.
Stocks are valued as the sum total of all the profits they ever make (net present value of future earnings).
So even at $1 profit/year - technically worth infinity.
But due to 'time value of money and risk' (aka some risk free discount rate you can put your money elsewhere at get the same return for zero risk, like your bank account), then the infinite sum of those $1/year becomes some finite sum.
The problem wit this math is when profits grow perpetually higher than the cost of borrowing - the net present value goes to infinity.
A P/E ratio = 1/(cost of capital - growth rate). Assuming no dividends.
An investor with 8% cost of capital, a company growing at 3% per year woudl have a P/E of 20.
At 7% growth the value is p/e 100x ...
Any growth over the 'cost of capital' and the P/E goes to infinity because the infinite sum of all future cash flows does not converge.
What this means is that the valuation math breaks down when there are gigantic swings of in growth at rates of even like 30% more for any extended period; it's extremely hard to value.
Verizon is valued as it is because they have an operational lock on a system; they will never grow that much but their returns are predictable. You can spreadsheet their valuation.
All this AI stuff is 'inherently wild' because growth is high, but opaque. Yes, there is a lot of hyperbole and speculation but this is very different than Space X which is a 'Musk Meme' stock, upheld be retail investors.
Edit: this is the most rudimentary articulation of how stocks are valued. It's not made up hunches, and companies that invest a lot in these things have a lot of numeric justification they have to use to make the assessment - and NPV is at the core of it. That 'math' is the first order concept that underlies valuation and it's the hyperbolic nature of growth beyond cost of capital that makes the it come undone which is the mechanical basis for the wild swings. It's what happens to valuation when you make small adjustments in only a few parts of the model.
A country must feed itself, power itself, and in 2026 it must be able to manufacture its own chips (from ore, to refining, to the foundry).
Watching China push its weight around earlier in the year with REM and REE was crazy. The US, and the rest of the world for that matter, were brought to our knees. Germany's auto industry and weeks of chips left, the US started shipping F35's to allies _without_ radar. Truly astounding trade power to see.
Made it very clear to every nation that you must have a sovereign story to tell about chip manufacturing.
Alarm bell here: are you sure it's legal for the F35s to contain Chinese parts?
But there will come a day when that country needs to choose between China and the US.
This is only possible if you (a) fudge the definitions of "everything" a bit and (b) are one of the largest countries in the world. This is only ever going to be possible for US and China. And even then the US really is the "lucky country" with which natural resources it has ended up holding within its borders.
The reason is that AMD could not make enough server CPUs to satisfy the demand for datacenters, due to limited production capacity at TSMC, so Intel, who makes server CPUs in their own fabs, could also sell everything they got.
So as you say, even the older fabs of Intel, which use the somewhat obsolete "Intel 3" CMOS manufacturing process, with which the old Intel Granite Rapids server CPUs are made, have been an important asset in these circumstances.
And keep in mind that Intel literally still holds the rights to issue x86 licenses.
Sure, losing Apple was a huge deal, but ultimately Apple still only has ~20% of the consumer PC market and far less in enterprise, and even less than that in more niche applications since their form factors are so limited, and 0% marketshare in data centers.
I’m not sure how hard Intel is trying to get into the enterprise AI data center scene but Intel ARC cards are definitely floating around in the local LLM scene for their stellar value and I’d be surprised if Intel doesn’t see a massive opportunity to take advantage in that area. They are one of three companies who have reasonably modern GPU designs.
Only Intel and AMD make x86 chips.
If Intel loses marketshare to AMD that means they can eventually take it back.
The competitive pressure of AMD versus Intel is mutually beneficial, as long as they don’t totally crush each other into bankruptcy, their small leapfrogs of each other’s x86 technology keeps x86 relevant and dominant.
And yeah, as a millennial I know lots of people who had a shared desktop at home, probably had a laptop in college, used a work laptop, and hasn't had a personal computing device outside an iPad and iPhone for a decade or more. Outside of those who play PC games or other niche hobbies it's getting more and more rare, at least for the people I know.
[1] - https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2024/computer...
I would expect that "all laptops dematerialize" would be worse.
I'm pretty confident, sitting here on a different continent, that I wouldn't have that problem at all.
you miss at least several other niches