General Chat

Adam You have further email

Hi Mike, These 'headline grabbing' numbers are spending over many years. For example the Open AI/ORCL deal, $300B over 5 years. The Stargate deal, the UAE deal. Once these projects get started, some allocate quickly and some stall. In many cases the physical infrastructure needs to be build. This could be the power source, the data centre itself or the compute hardware. I would think anyone announcing a new project today, would be waiting a long time for silicon. Case in point: Xai +800K GPU expansion of Colossus, which is being installed now. The chips were ordered a year ago and paid for at least 9 months ago. We must be at a $trillion YTD in planned projects, but as we have discussed, companies like Nvidia, AMD, TSM can only supply so much compute, today(CoWoS-L/packaging constraint), why, because the tools of production take > 12 months to build. It's a fallacy- give me 1m chips more and TSM can magic them up. And TSM isn't going to 10X their production because who will pay for it. There is a demand supply imbalance of anywhere from 5-10X:1. CC Wei has said he is on a 50% CAGR trajectory. Very strong but planned growth trajectory over 5 years to 2030. What I am saying here is regardless of the 'spend' on AI Nvidia is locked in to a 50-60% growth rate pretty much over the next 5 years because they are inextricably linked to TSM capacity. I can live with that. Personally, that is what I think it will be-in that range. In terms of valuation. If you look at the market you see hype for sure, some warranted, some not(imo). AI mania has caused almost everything in the space to appreciate materially. The Tesla effect if you will. Remember every kind of crypto imaginable, NFTs. Nothing but Tulips! Greed makes otherwise sane people do very silly things I have no idea what the stock price of palantir will be next year but I can look at its valuation today, its past growth, and take a view. It's interesting, their 5 year avg growth rate is 31%. It's good but many companies can match that. Nvidia's number is 65%. So in my mind, here is a company with half the growth rate(historical) and if anyone says that 31% is going to accelerate, id say show me the evidence(there isn't any). Faith. Sorry I need more than that. So Palantir has a PEG of 8 vs Nvida < 1. Palantir also gives almost all its earnings to the directors of the company. As we have all seen, at least for a while anyway, stock prices can diverge from all reality-that is until reality bites. I personally think this stock is grossly overvalued-good luck to anyone holding it. They will need a bull market, perfect execution and to smash estimates every quarter like clock work. Even if growth does accelerate-I see some 'experts' are saying their growth rate is actually 65%-double. OK so it's now only 4X more expensive than Nvidia. Why would I buy Palantir for $1 when I can buy Nvidia for 25c?.There is no margin of safety-none whatsoever. I would be buying 2030 earnings, which actually means the stock will flatline for the next 4-5 years as the business grows into its extreme valuation. I could be wrong, but as said the metrics are so off the charts it's just not worth taking the chance. And by that I mean what is the future upside. It might add another 50% but that would take its multiple to 400 and as we have seen there are alternatives with far better 'numbers'-this is what I mean about risk vs reward. It's literally gambling and we aren't in that business. I would bet if you asked the avg shareholder why they hold it, they would say 'to the moon' but could not articulate anything rational about their decision and the actual business fundamentals. In other words the-greater-fool-theory in play. So to answer your question. No I am not worried about a crash. We don't hold anything with a materially stretched valuation. Multiples in the 70-200 range. Some of our holdings are probably fully priced. Oracle might be short term. It's not easy to value because of their $300B DC deal with OpenAI. Lots of moving parts and contingent elements. But that is the basis of the stock market(auction based). We are not traders so if I have an opinion a stock is over/under on any particular day, we would not act on that. However we did act on Colgate when for no good reason(a flight to safety?) the stock moved up materially to an ATH. Range bound for 5 years 70-80 then pops to $105 in a very short period. The investment committee took a big chunk of weight out of that one and it was absolutely the right thing to do. The stock fell back and is now back in its multi year range @ $81. In conclusion, one shouldn't take a view 'when is the next crash'. Why would the broader market crash as opposed to be choppy- the US economy is ok. I wouldn't say great but it's doing well enough. But more specifically look at big techs earnings. It's at a record and healthy and they have had many quarters of growth with continued higher guides. GOOG still trades below a 22-23 multiple and its growth is still very strong, for example. There are pockets of extreme valuation for sure-best leave that to Cathy Wood

quai undertaking maintenance.

It’s probably just anticipating Trump being Trump every few minutes

FYI: PNL changes for yesterday: Equity +2% Tech +0.18% Lifestyle +0.67%

Cheers Nik No urgency at all, I have another question, I shall ping off an email to you in the morning again no urgency on it

Working tonight

I'd expect significant tinkering with pension allowances and relief rates and some kind of cap on ISAs - possibly a cap on maximum lifetime contributions or a cap on allowed value after which you can't make any more contributions. Too many people have too much money for themselves and large numbers of people are in need of (more) state support, or so our political overlords think. The money therefore needs to be taken from the former and given to the latter.

Ok sure, send it over

@Adam-Kay said in Dashboard performance charts.: J, I wish you’d mentioned this a while ago. [image: 1740153593731-screen-shot-2025-02-21-at-15.56.38.png] Crumbs. That's not shabby.

Touche, I would expect the main focus to be 'Jensen Huang sporting a Tom Ford lizard skin effect jacket which retails at £8,000 and recently purchased two new G650 jets which retail at £60M each before options'

@Adam-Kay Thanks, the immediate problem (in my mind) has been resolved. It's now a different problem, which I trust that Nik is resolving off line. Thanks for lowering my blood pressure with the reassurances about the legitimacy of the e-mail. That was my main concern. G

I'll second that - good video. Thanks for the link.

Thanks both

All in sync today

@Dangermouse The current indication is that beneficiary pensions within a DB scheme will be classed as outside the estate. Given that they are paid as income and taxed in the hands of the recipient as income there is already tax claimed on this benefit. It is also likely that an annuity with ongoing beneficiary payments after death would also be treated as outside the estate. The main "target" is unused pension pots that at the moment pass as a tax free lump of cash on death before 75. Cheers

Noted. We will put it together

Hi All. Aggregating threads/data from third-party sources is not really within the scope of this forum. However you can accomplish this quite easily yourself with an RSS reader. Feedly is probably the easiest and most popular option, free to use up to 100 feeds. However, there are plenty of other free and paid options. Most forums, including this one; have multiple RSS feeds you can subscribe to (look for the [image: 1726570922525-screenshot-2024-09-17-120153.png] icon). If you want to further customise your experience you can do so from your user profile.

@nilamac said in Is there plans to improve the forum structure?: @Renmure-Jim I hope this never happens. Or that the moderators block/remove them ... Can’t believe you can have a serious forum about pensionzzzzzz and investmentzzzzz and savingzzzzz without a few cats thrown into the mix for a bit of balance. Hey ho.

FWIW, it seems to me that in the world of investing then taking our hands off the wheel is often the route to the best results. On that basis then a slight hiatus is perhaps no bad thing, presuming that we all remain invested in the things that we thought worthwhile in the first place.