bubbles

All posts tagged bubbles

The tone of AI stock behavior has changed in important ways this spring.

Until March, they were clearly undervalued, and were quietly and somewhat patiently being accumulated by the minority of investors who realized the significance of AI. Recent buying has been less patient, occasionally mildly panicky, and indicates that awareness of AI is steadily spreading toward mainstream investors.

In a normal year, closing the Strait of Hormuz would impact the stock market much more than any other problem. But for the past few weeks AI has clearly been having a bigger impact on the market. Almost big enough for markets to forget about Hormuz. It’s weird that rising oil prices haven’t much hurt non-AI stocks.

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I’ve been shifting my investments to more AI-focused bets.

Here’s an overview of my larger positions, in descending order of how eager I am to recommend further purchases now:

  • MU – AI is memory hungry, and MU is in a good position for almost NVDA-like growth
  • CSIQ – solar, for AI-related power demand
  • ASML – semiconductor equipment
  • SCIA – semiconductor equipment
  • GOOGL – for TPUs, DeepMind, and Waymo
  • SMCI – datacenter
  • NVDA
  • AMPX (and AMPX.WS) – batteries suitable for drones
  • TSSI – datacenter
  • CLS – close to half of its business involves datacenters
  • PDEX – a fairly safe way to diversify my portfolio
  • MTG – a fairly safe way to diversify my portfolio
  • ASTS – expanding cell phone coverage; I’ll likely sell when I can get long-term gains

Short positions:

  • SP500 futures – hedging against risks such as tariffs
  • SOFR futures dated 2029 through 2032 – betting that interest rates will rise due to AI
  • WMT – it’s got a high PE ratio, and little sign of growth

[This is not at all a complete list, as I have smaller positions in something like 150 other companies.]

AI stocks are likely to form a bubble someday, but I’m guessing the peak of that bubble is more than a year away.

I still have some concerns about tariff-related damage causing some declines sometime this year. I’m optimistic that the courts will strike down the per-country tariffs this fall. It shouldn’t take long for the country to recover from the tariff damage once the tariffs have been removed.

Beware that even in a strong bull market, there will be periodic scares, such as January’s DeepSeek-trigger panic, that cause sharp drops in leading stocks. AI-related stocks had a big rally in June, and are likely to consolidate for a while before the next such rally.

In 2015, I posted some investing advice for people who only spend a few hours per year on investing.

I intended to review it after five years, but a pandemic distracted me. It looks like this whole decade will end up being too busy for me to write everything that I want to write. But I’ve become able to write faster recently, maybe due to the feeling of urgency about AI transforming the world soon. So I’m getting a few old ideas for blog posts off of my to-do list, in order to be able to devote most of my attention to AI when the world becomes wild.

My advice worked poorly enough that I’m too discouraged to quantify the results.

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Book review: Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation, by Byrne Hobart and Tobias Huber.

Hobart and Huber (HH) claim that bubbles are good.

I conclude that this claim is somewhat true. That’s partly because they redefine the concept of a bubble in ways that help make it true.

Boom is densely packed with relevant information. Alas, it’s not full of connections between the various pieces of information and any important conclusions. Nor does it excel at convincing me that its claims are true.

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Book review: The Accidental Superpower: The Next Generation of American Preeminence and the Coming Global Disorder, by Peter Zeihan.

Are you looking for an entertaining set of geopolitical forecasts that will nudge you out of the frameworks of mainstream pundits? This might be just the right book for you.

Zeihan often sounds more like a real estate salesman than a scholar: The US has more miles of internal waterways than the rest of the world combined! US mountain ranges have passes that are easy enough to use that the mountains barely impede traffic. Transportation options like that guarantee sufficient political unity!

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This week we saw two interesting bank collapses: Silvergate Capital Corporation, and SVB Financial Group.

This is a reminder that diversification is important.

The most basic problem in both cases is that they got money from a rather undiverse set of depositors, who experienced unusually large fluctuations in their deposits and withdrawals. They also made overly large bets on the safety of government bonds.

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Book review: The Money Illusion: Market Monetarism, the Great Recession, and the Future of Monetary Policy, by Scott Sumner.

This is the best book on macroeconomics that I’m aware of, with a focus on the causes of the 2008 recession.

Most of the book’s important points are based on ideas that economists respect in many contexts outside of macroeconomics, but which seem controversial in the context of macroeconomics.

It’s ironic that Sumner finished writing this book during one of the few recessions that could not have been prevented by better monetary policy.

Note that this review is primarily for people who already know something about monetary policy. It’s hard enough to do that well that I don’t want to attempt anything more ambitious.

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Book review: Shut Out: How a Housing Shortage Caused the Great Recession and Crippled Our Economy, by Kevin Erdmann.

Why did the US have an unusually bad recession in 2008, followed by years of disappointing growth?

Many influential people attribute it to the 2004-2006 housing bubble, and the ensuing subprime mortgage crisis, with an implication that people bought too many houses. Erdmann says: no, the main problems were due to obstacles which prevented the building and buying of houses.

He mainly argues against two competing narratives that are popular among economists:

  • increased availability of credit fueled a buying binge among people who had trouble affording homes.
  • there was a general and unusual increase in the demand for homes.

Reframing the Housing Bubble

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