Need to contact Cobens Direct? Please visit our contact page: cobensdirect.co.uk/contact or you can call us on 0203 301 1242. Our office hours are: 9:00AM - 5:30PM Monday to Thursday 9:00AM - 5:00PM Friday We are closed on UK bank holidays.

Myself and Nik will be around next week but I'll be away for a few days before Xmas to recharge the batteries before the madness starts Just wanted to say we at Cobens wish you all a very happy holidays. Here's to a productive 2026.

Hi JQ74, Ive discussed how markets move when uncertainty flares up and how quality rebounds. I would say that there hasn't been a noticeable dip and YTD overall we are doing very well. Nearly all other external portfolios im looking at are red and most of ours are positive. On communication, unless we have a specific need to contact you we generally don't, rather, relying on any Direct Clients to use the forum, the dashboard and contact us if they need assistance, guidance etc. No one can say what the market will do day to day however over decades when wars start, volatility increases for a period. As mentioned we have, so far been relatively unscathed. This is due in part to the USD which is seen as secure in uncertain times. I can also say with confidence that the businesses we invest in are largely unaffected notwithstanding longer term impacts from inflation and energy costs if the situation persists but even so that would be very small. It would be a concern if we held hospitality or infrastructure assets in the Gulf-we dont have any exposure. If you want to discuss anything I'm happy to set up a call, alternatively you can email us: support@cobensdirect.co.uk Regards Adam

[image: 1773489986401-screenshot-2026-03-14-at-11.57.18.png] Validation Milestone Microsoft Azure became the first major cloud provider to power on and begin validating a Vera Rubin NVL72 rack (announced by Satya Nadella on 13 March 2026). This is a significant engineering win: the full rack (72 Rubin GPUs + 36 Vera CPUs, NVLink-6 fabric, liquid cooling) is integrated and undergoing qualification in Azure datacentres. It positions Microsoft ahead for early deployments, with broad availability still guided for the second half of 2026 (H2 2026, i.e., July–December).Rack Cost Estimate A Vera Rubin NVL72 rack is likely priced in the $3.5 million to $5 million range (most analyst estimates cluster around $3–4 million, with some supply-chain views up to $5–5.7 million). This represents a premium over Blackwell GB200/GB300 NVL72 racks (around $3 million). The uplift stems from advanced components: HBM4 memory, denser NVLink-6, Vera CPUs, and enhanced liquid cooling (cooling alone rises from ~$50,000 on Blackwell to ~$55–56,000 on Rubin). NVIDIA doesn't publish official prices, but the economics favour rapid payback through vastly higher efficiency. Performance Improvements Rubin delivers massive leaps, especially for inference (the dominant AI workload now): Vs. Blackwell (GB200/GB300 NVL72): Up to 5x higher inference performance per rack (e.g., 3.6 exaFLOPS FP4 vs. ~0.7–0.8 exaFLOPS equivalents). Per-GPU gains include ~50 PFLOPS NVFP4 inference (5x vs. Blackwell), plus better power efficiency and features for agentic/long-context models. Training MoE models needs ~4x fewer GPUs. Cost per Token Shrinking This is where Rubin crushes economics—driving the cost of intelligence off a cliff for inference-heavy workloads (e.g., agentic AI, reasoning, MoE models): Vs. Blackwell: NVIDIA states 10x lower cost per million tokens (official claim on specific MoE/reasoning benchmarks like Kimi-K2-Thinking). Vs. Hopper: Blackwell cut costs by up to 10x (real deployments saw drops from $0.20/million tokens to $0.05 or lower with NVFP4). Rubin stacks another 10x reduction → potentially 100x lower effective cost per token over Hopper in optimised cases. Providers already realised 4x–10x drops moving Hopper → Blackwell (e.g., 20¢ → 5¢/million tokens for MoE). Rubin positions sub-1¢/million at scale once volumes ramp in H2 2026. The upfront rack cost ($4M average) is offset by far more useful compute per dollar, lower power/token, and fewer units needed—making massive AI scaling dramatically cheaper. In short: Validation is a big early win for Microsoft/NVIDIA, racks cost a hefty $3.5–5M each (premium justified), performance jumps 5x over Blackwell (20–25x over Hopper), and token costs plummet another 10x vs. Blackwell—paving the way for agentic AI at unprecedented scale and affordability.

Try this [image: 1773073791510-screenshot-2026-03-09-at-16.29.26.png]

A shame you can’t ’back-date’ your ISA contributions, but at least a reminder to fill them now & moving forwards

@n5tew Good morning, to answer your questions, yes there are a handful of lenders that still offer offset mortgages, though they’re relatively niche now. With these, you only pay interest on your mortgage minus what’s in a linked savings account, which can significantly reduce your interest costs if you hold a large savings balance. There are indeed fixed rate products although they will tend to be notably higher than your conventional fixed rate products. If you would like to discuss this in further detail, please let me know, my email is michael.searle@cobens.co.uk, or we can arrange a meeting to dive into specifics.

Okay.... Darrell has sent two forms: Accessing Pension Benefits Advice Declaration Points to Consider when taking benefits from your pension She has managed to edit them (no easy feat with a pdf!) & sent them back .... but a slight concern remains that his letter ended with "Once we have received this confirmation, we will issue you with a My Choice of Pension Benefit Form and a Points to Consider form." ....it feels like those are the two forms he sent her?! Hopefully it can all proceed with no issues. It's a piffling amount really, but she does want to get the maximum she can for FY25-26!