Investment Gems

(Photo credit: Ehud Neuhaus) I don’t think so. Why? Inflation has several causes, and different factors have different weights at different times. Production capacity, production utilization, energy costs, productivity, and monetary cycle play a big role. Some of these are interdependent, and sometimes they work reflexively. In some ways, the…

Summary Illumina and its short reading technology pushed the sequencing costs down during the last decade. Long reads and artificial intelligence are improving the sequencing and will likely keep driving the costs lower. Several companies are building business models around these technological improvements. The past decades brought us the foundational…

(Photo credit: BTC Keychain) The Gamestop debacle showed us a couple of things. First, intermediaries in our centralized financial system might have been cheating. The number of short positions in Gamestop suggests that funds and brokers have been practicing naked short-selling. Meaning that they haven’t been selling loaned shares, instead,…

Photo credit: Mike Mozart The GameStop episode is not about valuation. It is about supply and demand. With 130% short interest and what seems to be a volume of puts issued way bigger than the available float, it seems like a bad case of an overcrowded trade that got squeezed.…

The monetary architecture that rules the world is one of the most important pillars of US dominance. And the US dollar is one of its most important tools. The reserve currency of the world has allowed the use of policies not permitted to other countries. The privilege of issuing currency…

Photo Credit: Open Grid Scheduler Prelude There are two sides to the Tesla story. The first is the stock price, and the second is the underlying business. They seldom seem to reconcile. For a while, it seemed like Tesla’s stock price was in a bubble. To my best knowledge, both…

Most market pundits take GDP and inflation statistics at face value. They shouldn’t. Likely, the economic scenario is more benign than anticipated. That leaves us looking for pockets of value in a market populated with overstretched valuations. Now that there seems to be a vaccine on the way, we should…

Photo credit: Masaru Kamikura The title kind of says it all. Intel (INTC) has kept profitability when compared with AMD (AMD) and Nvidia (NVDA). For instance, Intel is still more profitable than Nvidia and AMD. During the last couple of years, AMD and Nvidia were able to more than double…

Photo credit: Diogo Torres Silvestre During the last couple of years, chipmakers have been star stocks. In the same period that the S&P 500 rose 57%, AMD put on an impressive 2,576% run, Nvidia rose close to 2,000%, while Intel rose 59%. (Source: Seeking Alpha) This chart tells us that…

Photo credit: Fritzchens Fritz The narrative Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has been a star stock for the last couple of years. In the same period that the S&P 500 rose 56%, AMD put on an impressive 1251% run. Basically, AMD mixes a turnaround story with a growth narrative. (Source: Seeking…