Investments and Portfolios

.... and it's down nearly 30%! Another rubbish day in the markets.

It was a Trig moment, calling Rodders 'AL'

Nvidia now hold approved Purchase Orders from China customers and intend to restart H200 production. Quote from Jensen Huang. Interesting as the company holds 400K chips in stock so one can only assume the orders are for more than this. Analysts expect teh Chinese market to be worth at least $25B so another nice earner which is not accounted for, presently.

It's a great business albeit not that exciting-safe and durable. Their scale and reach opens them up to finding something to complain about-at the end of the day they are a business, they have millions of customers. Some won't be happy customers. Apple gets a lot of flack from some too. Ive always found them a pleasure to deal with. In saying that ive never had a piece of expensive hardware fail prematurely and tried to get some goodwill but I have dealt with their support relating to products many years outside warranty(without Apple Care) and always found them helpful.

Headline CPI(US) holds at +2.4% Y/Y in February, as expected. Solid gains today as a result

Oracle – Q3 FY2026 Earnings Call Highlights (Fiscal Q3) Overall performance Very strong quarter, beating expectations across the board. First quarter in more than 15 years where organic revenue and organic non-GAAP EPS both grew at 20%+ in USD. Business momentum is accelerating as Oracle shifts further from licences to recurring cloud revenue. Major strategic developments TikTok U.S. restructuring: U.S. data operations separated from ByteDance into a new independent company. Oracle holds 15% equity and a board seat. Existing technology-vendor revenue continues unchanged. Oracle will record its share of earnings from the investment starting in Q4 results. Capital raising: Plan to raise up to $50 billion in financing. $30 billion already raised via investment-grade bonds and mandatory convertible preferred stock. No further bond issuance expected in calendar 2026 beyond this programme. Cloud applications (SaaS) Oracle claims it has the fastest-growing and most complete cloud applications suite. Cloud applications revenue (constant currency) up 11%, reaching $16.1 billion annualised run-rate. Key product growth: Fusion ERP: +14% Fusion SCM: +15% Fusion HCM: +15% Fusion CX: +6% NetSuite: +11% Industry SaaS solutions: +19% Other points: Over 2,000 customers went live on Oracle cloud applications in the quarter. Implementation times are continuing to fall. Oracle won multiple deals against Workday and SAP. AI and the “SaaS death” narrative Management rejected the idea that AI will kill SaaS (“SaaSpocalypse”). Instead, Oracle says it is embedding AI directly into its applications. Over 1,000 AI agents already built into Fusion and industry apps. AI tools allow smaller engineering teams to deliver products faster. Two fastest-growing segments: Multicloud database revenue: +531% year-on-year AI infrastructure revenue: +243% year-on-year Multicloud strategy: Oracle database services now run across multiple clouds via partnerships with: Microsoft Google Amazon Region rollout: 33 regions live with Microsoft 14 with Google AWS growing from 2 regions to 8 in Q3, targeting 22 by Q4. AI infrastructure demand Demand for GPU and CPU capacity exceeds supply. Reflected in $553 billion remaining performance obligations (RPO). Oracle secured 10+ gigawatts of data-centre power capacity coming online over the next three years. Operational progress: Manufacturing sites tripled. Rack production up 4× in a year. Time from hardware delivery to revenue cut by 60%. Profitability AI infrastructure delivered 32% gross margin, above the company’s 30% guidance. Database services have much higher margins (60–80% range). Overall OCI margins expected to improve as scale increases. Sovereign cloud opportunity Growing demand for sovereign AI and sovereign cloud solutions globally. Oracle’s Alloy model allows customers or governments to run full OCI stacks in sovereign environments. Unlike competitors, Oracle says it can deploy the entire OCI platform and applications stack, not just limited edge services. AI database and enterprise data Enterprises increasingly want AI models applied to private data, rather than building their own large language models. Oracle’s AI Data Platform and AI Database aim to connect enterprise data (databases, lakes, applications) to leading AI models securely. Key message from leadership Oracle positions itself as an AI-driven full-stack enterprise platform combining: database cloud infrastructure (OCI) AI data platform SaaS applications. Management believes AI will expand Oracle’s role, enabling automation of entire industry ecosystems such as healthcare and finance.

Vertex have a good track record. We can't ever expect anything more that 'could, might, maybe'. It's still a drug trial. Nothing is certain until it's approved and commercialised. Vertex specialise in what is called Transformative therapies. Drugs which transform the pathway of a disease from mere managing symptoms to a long term cure/outcome. It's nice to know we invest in something that improves peoples quality of like. More specifically Vertex focus on genetic diseases (gene editing) In terms of success from drug trials. At phase 1 statistically, the odds of success sit at 10-15%. At the conclusion of a successful phase 3 trial-and the results were not just positive, they were extremely positive, the odds increase to 85-90% so I am confident they are onto something. There are many more drugs in their pipeline-Diabetes is the next potential break-through

I keep a close eye on growth (and margin). There is no point investing in companies with falling growth, tempered with the fact as numbers get very large you can't keep growing at the same pace. However PEG is a critical metric for a mature business. I'd never pay over 2. A decade ago the gold standard was 1.0 and today the experts would have you believe anything less than 2 is a good proposition-i strongly disagree. Palantir has a PEG of 4-5 and it's interesting that their management and many analysts will point to high growth, high margins etc. But Nividia beats it on all those key metrics and yet has a PEG of 0.5. So if anyone wonders how this comes about, I don't blame you because it makes no sense to me either. We don't hold the stock and won't, for precisely this reason. It's a good business but imo its valuation is obscene. As expected it's gone nowhere, in fact those that purchased mid 2025 are flat, which is exactly what happens at extreme valuations. And if management made just one misstep the stock will be cut in half. I say this purely to articulate that valuation always needs a sense check, never get caught up in FOMO, there are some simple numbers anyone can look at to get a rough guide on relative value. And investing is all about risk and return. A stock with a very frothy valuation can certainly move much higher but when you buy it you are taking on much more risk relative to the gains you might make.

Of the $180B 2026 Capex, $110B will do towards racks scale build out, split roughly 50/50 GooG/GCP. I would estimate the following recipients of this cash pile. The clear winners being NVDA/AVGO [image: 1770287999075-screenshot-2026-02-05-at-10.39.28.png]

Apple results-and I have to say they really surprised me. Very strong. Take a moment to think about these numbers. Just under 144B $85B just iPhones segment $30B in services which is almost pure profit $42B tax paid profit deep double digit growth and guiding for continued strength It will take NVDA next Q to beat this sort of earnings with GOOG hot on their heels no doubt. [image: 1769870213092-screenshot-2026-01-31-at-14.34.56.png] [image: 1769870225272-screenshot-2026-01-31-at-14.35.08.png] [image: 1769870230283-screenshot-2026-01-31-at-14.35.48.png]

KLA delivered above expectations The result overall was solid, fundamentally — AI‑driven semiconductor tool demand continues. Analysts have been positive and even raising targets. KLA’s share price dropped (~7–8% in extended trading) despite that beat/inline result. The stock had already run so far, so fast, that nothing they reported was going to be good enough. This echoes a classic “sell the news” dynamic: The stock was frothy heading into earnings — up big recently (nearly +40% in the last month alone and 130% 1 yr! That run priced in very high expectations for the print. Net it only moved the price down to what it was on Monday!

[image: 1769673527882-screenshot-2026-01-29-at-07.57.36.png] Ad impressions +12% YoY; average price per ad +9% YoY. Capital expenditures: $72.22 billion. The net income dip was partly due to higher income tax provisions. Guidance for Q1 2026: Revenue $53.5–$56.5 billion. Full-year 2026: Expenses $162–$169 billion; capex $115–$135 billion (heavy AI infrastructure focus).Commentary Highlights from Mark Zuckerberg- Zuckerberg focused on strong 2025 performance and accelerating AI in 2026:Overall Performance: "We had strong business performance in 2025. I'm looking forward to advancing personal superintelligence for people around the world in 2026." He noted ending 2025 with over 3.5 billion daily users across apps (more than 2 billion each on Facebook and WhatsApp; nearly that on Instagram), driven by record holiday demand and AI performance gains. AI Acceleration: Described 2026 as a year of "major AI acceleration." In 2025, Meta rebuilt AI foundations; now shipping new models and products. First models expected to be good, with rapid improvement throughout the year. Vision: "building personal superintelligence" — AI that understands users' personal context (history, interests, content, relationships) for uniquely personalised experiences. Agents are starting to work effectively, unlocking new products and transforming work. Integration and Future: Merging LLMs with recommendation systems for Facebook, Instagram, Threads, and ads. Current systems are "primitive" compared to future potential. Excited about upcoming launches but limited details (only six months into rebuild). AI as "the next big media format," evolving feeds to more immersive/interactive (video as stepping stone). Monetisation and Investments: Opportunities for Meta AI via subscriptions and advertising. Justified aggressive spending (capex up to $135 billion in 2026) to catch up in leading AI models after trailing in 2025. Focus: improving core products, accelerating business via AI, exploring new opportunities like Meta AI monetisation. VR/Horizon Worlds investments will pair with AI advances.

Amazing! Can it continue....who knows! Out of interest, when do the formal summary sheets get updated? (The ones at https://www.intelligentmoney.com/portfolios#comp-livoaycf2)

Anyone who holds a portfolio and has questions can contact either myself and or Nik. Many have. Discussions around suitability are very individual specific due to goals, age, risk appetite and time to retirement/time to draw down.

Hi Ollie, I don't follow 'Defence' stocks generally as they rely on wars being waged. My area is growth/tech which has outperformed defence over any meaningful time frame. If you want to seek out defence funds there are a couple of global ETFs you can google.

@SiriAlexaAl Yep, that's what's happened.

@mikeiow I'm in a similar boat. Too much time on my hands and with a few pennies to spend at the bookies (I mean stock market). I used a spredsheet to come up with the chart, but couldn't produce anything other than dots on a scatter chart. There were no labels next to each dot, other than their value. I, also, couldn't produce the curves on the same chart. @Adam-Kay thanks for the steer. I'll do some googling at SD and beta.

Hi R, Yes it's a display gremlin. Ive notified admin to fix it. Ive looked at the Switch and that has been processed. Being two legs to the transaction , one out and one in the DB shows one but not the other. Regards Adam

Ok thanks.

It's a bit more nuanced than that, G. And glad you did something nice with your gains, that's what it's all about, benefiting through investment. People will always take profit into new highs, we've discussed the psychology What are 'expectations'? You could say even higher than what was delivered so is it the first point or the second? For example MSFT X, I posted those numbers(official market expectations) and they comfortably beat, all the reporting entities did. However different reactions. You might also have noticed after hours RED/GREEN/RED(same company) and then at the open big Green. Derivatives in play again. You will often hear the cliche 'it's priced in'. I'm not a fan of the catchphrase. It's largely nonsense. The PH resident IFA will say 'you don't have an edge against the pro' just word-salad. You don't need an edge, just don't chase meme stocks, chase quality and have some patience. That is why we simply stay the course. A drop yesterday and looks like(given 300+ futures) gains today.