The expected capex growth of hyperscalers from 2025 to 2028 is c. 29% per year. Never in the history of the US has tech investment growth exceeded 21% on a rolling three-year basis.

What’s going wrong in Germany? Guess…

The market has become a one-sector casino. If you are not building AI chips, renting out data centers or selling the fantasy of infinite automation, Wall Street treats you like a dying business. Meanwhile some of the strongest cash-flow machines in the real economy are trading like unwanted leftovers because investors became addicted to hype instead of valuation. Look at the absurdity. Danaher is getting punished because biotech growth slowed after years of excess optimism, even though the company sits at the center of diagnostics, lab equipment and healthcare infrastructure the modern medical system cannot function without. Zoetis collapsed because pet spending cooled after the pandemic boom, as if people suddenly stopped caring about animal healthcare permanently. The stock market always extrapolates temporary trends into eternity - on the way up and on the way down. McDonald’s is being hit because lower-income consumers are getting crushed by inflation and fuel prices. But that says less about the strength of McDonald’s business than about the condition of the economy itself. When even fast food starts reflecting consumer exhaustion, the problem is purchasing power destruction, not burgers. Yet the company still controls one of the most powerful franchise and real-estate systems ever created. Then there is Abbott Laboratories - a global healthcare giant selling diagnostics, cardiovascular products, nutrition and medical devices, suddenly treated like a broken company because of temporary weakness in infant formula and acquisition fears. Or Republic Services, which owns scarce landfill infrastructure with recurring revenue and near-irreplaceable assets. Nobody gets excited about garbage collection during a tech mania, even though civilization literally stops functioning without it. This is how late-stage bull markets always behave. Investors stop pricing businesses and start pricing narratives. In 1999 everything outside dot-coms looked obsolete. In 2007 old-economy cash flow was boring compared to leverage and housing speculation. Today capital behaves as if AI alone will replace the real economy, while healthcare infrastructure, waste management, food networks and defensive cash-flow businesses trade near recession multiples.

Manche Dinge ändern sich nicht.

Europe is the same as the S&P 493. Chart: Duncan Lamont

A guy slipped a prompt injection into his LinkedIn bio, and now recruiters address him as “Lord” and write to him in Old English. Peak AI-era absurdity: HR departments feeding resumes straight into LLM pipelines without even realizing candidates have started optimizing for the machine reading before the human ever does.

India looks like a good buying opportunity now.

Some thoughts of caution on bottom-fishing in bombed-out names like Nike and Adobe: - You might need to be patient. Very patient. - You need a plan beyond buying what's gone down in price. What's the company worth? Maybe it's down for good reason. - Unless you get extremely lucky you're never going to time the bottom perfectly. Plan accordingly. - Being a contrarian investor can be lonely because other investors love piling on the worst names and telling you why it's dead money. - Not all individual stocks come back. In fact, most stocks aren't great over the long run. - Trends can last much longer in both directions than most investors assume possible. Jeff Bezos once said, "Contrarians are usually wrong." That's not a bad baseline.

On small caps:

PRESIDENT TRUMP'S Q1 STOCK DISCLOSURE COVERS 3,800+ TRANSACTIONS. THE LARGEST: $5M-$25M SALES EACH OF META, AMAZON, AND MICROSOFT ON 2/10. The OGE 278-T was filed May 8 and certified by the Office of Government Ethics on May 13. The largest disclosed sales ($5M-$25M each): - Meta Platforms $META (2/10/2026) - Amazon $AMZN (2/10/2026) - Microsoft $MSFT (2/10/2026) - Vanguard Dividend Appreciation ETF (1/12/2026) Additional $1M-$5M sales: - Netflix $NFLX (2/10/2026) - Palantir $PLTR (2/10/2026) - Vanguard S&P 500 ETF $VOO (1/6/2026 and 3/19/2026) - iShares Core S&P 500 ETF $IVV (1/23/2026) - State Street SPDR S&P 500 Trust ETF $SPY (1/29/2026) The largest disclosed purchases ($1M-$5M each, 15+ names): - NVIDIA $NVDA (2/10/2026) - Apple $AAPL (3/2/2026) - Oracle $ORCL (3/17/2026) - Broadcom $AVGO (2/10/2026) - Adobe $ADBE (2/10/2026) - ServiceNow $NOW (2/10/2026) - Workday $WDAY (2/10/2026) - Synopsys $SNPS (2/10/2026) - Cadence Design $CDNS (3/17/2026) - Microsoft $MSFT (3/19/2026, after the 2/10 sale) - Amazon $AMZN (3/19/2026, after the 2/10 sale) - Vanguard S&P 500 ETF $VOO (multiple) - iShares Russell 1000 ETF (3/27/2026) Important context per the OGE form itself: - The 278-T discloses transactions over $1,000 made by the filer, spouse, or dependent child - Many entries are flagged "Discretion Exercised" or "Your Broker Acted As Agent," indicating a managed brokerage account placed the trades - Some are "Unsolicited" (filer initiated) and others "Solicited" (broker recommended) - All amounts are disclosed in ranges, not exact figures - The reporting period covers January through March 2026

no comment.

Historically, whenever credit growth starts shifting from traditional banks toward shadow lenders, from the US before 2008 to China’s shadow-banking boom, it initially looks like economic strength, but often signals that risk is quietly migrating outside the safest part of the system. India’s banks slowing to 11% growth while NBFCs surge above 20% suggests the same pattern: formal banks are becoming more cautious while higher-risk credit creation moves into the shadows. That can fuel growth and asset prices for years, until liquidity tightens and the weaker parts of the credit chain are tested. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/financial-services/our-insights/indian-banks-navigating-through-the-turbulence

Rate hikes are absolutely not priced into the stock market and that will be the shock that pushes overvalued growth stocks down by 20% or more.

Germany once sold the world cars. Now it is preparing to survive by selling war. A struggling Volkswagen plant in Osnabrück, built for civilian industry, jobs, mobility and exports, may soon be repurposed to produce components for the Israeli “Iron Dome” missile defense system together with Rafael Advanced Defense Systems. Think about the symbolism: Europe’s industrial heartland no longer sees enough future in middle-class consumers buying German cars, but suddenly discovers “growth” again when missiles, air defense systems and military contracts enter the equation. History shows that when civilian industry loses profitability, governments increasingly turn toward militarization to absorb industrial overcapacity, preserve employment and justify massive public spending. Tanks replace sedans. Missile systems replace family cars. And citizens should ask themselves one question: if war preparation becomes one of the few remaining profitable industries capable of keeping Germany’s industrial machine alive, what incentive does the political system have to pursue de-escalation? The danger is that once an economy becomes dependent on fear, conflict, and defense spending, peace itself starts looking economically inconvenient.

So basically the Indian government is telling citizens not to buy gold in order to “protect FX reserves” and support the rupee, while at the exact same time Indian banks quietly resume bullion imports after paying the new 3% levy. If gold is supposedly such a national problem, why are banks restarting imports the moment the tax issue is settled? Looks less like “don’t buy gold” and more like: ordinary citizens should stop accumulating hard assets while the financial system keeps doing exactly that behind the scenes. So who is supposed to be the fool here? https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/boards-policy-regulation/indian-banks-resume-bullion-imports-after-month-long-halt-over-3-levy-sources-2026-05-12/

When a Prime Minister starts asking citizens not to buy gold, not to travel abroad, and to reduce fuel consumption “to save foreign exchange,” you are looking at a government trying to slow capital leakage and defend a weakening currency before the pressure becomes politically unmanageable. India imports roughly 85% of its oil and about half of that normally moves through the Strait of Hormuz. Since the Iran escalation disrupted regional shipping, Brent crude jumped above $100 again, the rupee collapsed from 85.6 to above 94 per dollar in less than 5 months and India’s FX reserves dropped by almost $40 billion in just 9 weeks. That is the important part, but not the speech itself rather the speed of deterioration behind it. Historically, these kinds of public appeals almost never appear during periods of strength: - Nixon’s “save fuel” campaign came during the 1973 oil shock. - Carter pushed energy conservation before inflation and recession accelerated. - Countries from Egypt to Pakistan to Bangladesh started issuing similar warnings shortly before currency stress, import restrictions and inflation spikes intensified. And the market lesson has been remarkably consistent: when governments start discouraging citizens from buying gold or moving money abroad, it is usually because too many people already understand what is happening to the currency: - Gold imports hurt the current account because Indians buy gold in exchange for dollars. - Foreign travel drains FX reserves for the same reason. The government is effectively asking households to stop converting rupees into external assets while the RBI is already burning billions defending the currency. Politicians frame this as patriotism. Markets interpret it as stress. The irony is that the assets governments discourage during these periods (gold, foreign assets, dollar exposure) are often exactly the assets that outperform while inflation rises and the domestic currency weakens further. People should pay less attention to the advice itself and more attention to why it suddenly became necessary.

Warren Buffett: The market is a Church with a casino attached ... and the casino has gotten very attractive.

"Buying parabolic moves isn't investing. It's gambling on the greater fool. Patience is free. Performance chasing is expensive." The current rally has likely already fully priced in 2026 earnings. From here, you are paying for 2027 and 2028 growth in a sector where the cycle has not been repealed. Semiconductors are still cyclical. Always have been. The day the AI capex cycle hiccups, even briefly, is the day this chart breaks.

Pump and dump