Investments and Portfolios

It looks like another nosedive day again today. Still, we've had a few of those recently and things seem to move back up again. Shame they don't move up as quickly as they move down, but I guess that's the way that markets work.

TSMC reported record earnings for their quarter ended March and made some comments regarding CoWoS packaging-a positive. CEO C.C. Wei stated that CoWoS demand remains extremely strong. He noted that TSMC is working diligently to double its CoWoS capacity in 2025 to meet customer demand, but supply is still expected to fall short of demand. Wei expressed optimism about achieving a better supply-demand balance by 2026. Takeaway-no change to the plan and demand supply balance still shows constraint. Targeted capacity is 80k wafers per month by end of 2025 and 125K by end of 2026. Nvidia has secured 70% of total output We know that 1 wafer yields 16 good chips. Below is estimated quarterly 'Blackwell' chip supply [image: 1744880939192-screenshot-2025-04-17-at-10.07.26.png] [image: 1744881186085-screenshot-2025-04-17-at-10.12.39.png] This number is the fundamental revenue driver. We expect around 800k chips being available to ship in Q1(ending April 25) up from around 250k in the previous Q(Q4)

Hi D, Netflix is set to drop its Q1 2025 earnings after the market shuts on 17 April. Analysts expect earnings per share (EPS) will hit $5.74, up 8.7% from $5.28 last year, with revenue expected at $10.54 billion, a 12.5% jump year-on-year. That’s pretty close to Netflix’s own forecast of $10.46 billion in revenue and an operating margin of 28.2%. They’ve got a history of smashing EPS forecasts, beating expectations in all four of the last reported quarters, like Q4 2024 when they pulled off $4.27 against $4.20 expected. That said, it's hard to know but their numbers should be solid. Everyone’s eyeing their ad-supported memberships, which made up 55% of sign-ups in ad markets last quarter, and their content line-up, with several content hits. They won’t disclose subscriber numbers anymore, focusing on revenue and margins instead.

Here is a complete list of ALL notable Robotics players. See the common thread? [image: 1744622289650-screenshot-2025-04-14-at-10.15.51.png]

SK hynix raises its 2025 CAPEX from $15 billion to $19 billion. SK Hynix has decided to increase its planned CAPEX this year by 30% due to the surge in demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM), which was already high. The chipmaker initially planned to spend 22 trillion won this year in expanding its facilities but this has been upped to 29 trillion won, sources said. The decision was recently finalised and SK Hynix has also sent memos to suppliers to deliver the equipment to the M15X fab in Chungju by October, two months faster than initially planned. These moves are all responses from its customers requesting SK Hynix deliver more HBM chips faster. The company’s main customer is Nvidia, which is using HBM with its AI accelerators. The GPU giant is requesting SK Hynix deliver HBM faster than planned. SK Hynix will also be supplying HBMs to Broadcom starting this year. We are reading the room, folks. Demand is off the hook and I would speculate, supply is also improving. Whilst the market is distracted by and shunning everything due to tariffs speculation, these businesses are clearly articulating a shift.

[image: 1744362110917-screenshot-2025-04-11-at-07.59.44.png] Bodes well. We will find out in a week or so

Transcript from an interview with Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer and Satya Nadella to celebrate 50 years of MSFT(Friday April 4) Nadella: What we are really supplying is intelligence. It started in 1975 with Bill and software was the thing. And today nobody is going to get up and say, hey, we need less of it. I need more of it and I need it daily. One thing is certain, the world needs more compute in the future. We will adjust to the geopolitical shifts and see how that shakes out.(Nadella). Bill Gates- I’d like to say that the biggest trend in the world today, way beyond any political shifts is the arrival of AI. We just turned 50 as a company but the next decade will probably be the most profound. Asked about potential over supply of AI compute, Nadella: Do we have to be matched up to it, perfect matching of demand and supply every second? No. So is this something we are absolutely committed to to building our data centres across 60 regions? We are absolutely going to do this. Sure there are always adjustments. Steve Ballmer: There is a bright future in intelligence and the biggest mistake we could make is to slow investment due to a short term hiccup. Bill Gates: you will always go through periods of having a bit too much supply but over the next 10 years you will probably find we are always going to be in a shortage vs demand so what is key is having a large capital budget to maintain the investment build out. Nadella: Heres the interesting thing. We have found the thing (AI) I am not looking for any other things. Intelligence will power everything . I am building our infrastructure to support the need in the future. The need from a robotics company, an autonomous driving company, a medical research and drug company.

Tik-Tok-their US business might be sold by tomorrow. I wonder if Oracle could scoop them up. They already run their servers. Msft/Amzn/Blackstone, mrbeast (really?) and only fans founder are bidding.

MU asserting their leadership. Interesting that Samsung, a formidable force in technology hasn't even validated their offerings. Left in the dust. Amid the intensifying HBM race, Micron has secured a spot with its HBM3E 12H designed into NVIDIA’s GB300. Notably, according to its press release, the U.S. memory giant is also the only company shipping both HBM3E and SOCAMM memory for AI servers, reinforcing its leadership in low-power DDR for data centres According to the Korean Herald, Micron has surprised the industry as it announced the mass production of SOCAMM—dubbed the “second HBM”—ahead of SK hynix Baird hiked its price target from $130 to $163, signaling growing conviction that Micron's high-bandwidth memory (HBM) chips are about to play a much bigger role in the AI boom. That sentiment is spreading fast. Rosenblatt now sees the stock hitting $200, and Wedbush, UBS, and others are sticking with bullish calls. Why? Simple: Micron isn't just riding the AI wave it's building the surfboard. HBM sales topped $1 billion last quarter, beating internal forecasts and jumping 50% sequentially. More importantly, demand is sold out for the year, and the TAM forecast for 2025 just surged from $20B to $35B. Internally Micron today say they meet 9% of the HBM market of $20B(Dec 24) and already appear to be on an annual TTM of $4B and say they anticipate their market share to reach 25% of a $100B market. This suggests Micron could grown HBM sales from zero 12 months ago to $25B annually by 2030 effectively doubling their total revenue. This is a classic-look at the game being played out not the score board! HBM isn’t just important—it’s foundational to AI servers, acting as the high-speed circulatory system for data-intensive AI workloads. For a chip like “Feynman” with “huge amounts” of HBM, it will be the backbone enabling breakthroughs in model size, training speed, and inference efficiency. As AI servers evolve, HBM’s role will shift from critical to utterly indispensable, driving both technical and economic outcomes in the AI race. This is why we invested in MU-the HBM is the iPhone moment

That gain is point to point. The actually gain will be more because we were selling it in the 400’s too

Here is the compute comparison. One rack = the entire DC. The DC cost 3b usd to build and 150m annually to operate excluding the land/lease The single rack costs 30m and 12m to operate annually. Could live in a broom closet [image: 1742381904418-screen-shot-2025-03-19-at-10.52.08.png]

We will be making two changes to the portfolios next week(2 new stocks)-not sure of exact timing. Treat this as aheads up of an impending rebalance across Lifestyle/Tech

Great to hear Ron. That portfolio has been very productive. I’m very proud of it and very pleased for anyone who put their hard earned money into it.

It's interesting that Meta is working with Figure AI, a company which Nvidia along with MSFT and Amazons's Bezos invested in last year. Again Nvidia is providing the chips to train the models and the robot-brain, Jetson Thor (JT), the most powerful platform for AI vision and autonomy every created. Pre trained with Isaac-sim(simulation) on a wide number of tasks, the machine is deployment ready-launching mid 2025. It can also support level 4 FSD in cars and trucks and has already been adopted by most car manufacturers. Other companies developing robots are: Boston Dynamics-parent Hyundai Tesla Optimus bot APL Robotics PAL BMW Honda Foxconn Mercedes Jetson will be a significant new opportunity for the company in the years ahead. The common denominator-Nvidia. It doesn't matter who makes the machines, they will win the dominant share of hardware and software solutions to make it work.

Thanks for the replies and sorry I missed your call earlier Adam. I'll give you a bell in the morning. Cheers all, have a good evening.

A solid result from Vertex, meeting expectations and guiding higher for the current year. The main focus being their newly approved pain therapy. Here are some notes taken from the conference call. It's a very big market and this drug will be a 'Blockbuster'-revenue greater than $1B and annually, once it gets known/established. We have a holding cost of $256. The current price is $470, as such the IC is very pleased with the company performance. Vertex has a bright future ahead of itself-improving patients qualify of life and earning shareholders healthy profits along the way. A win-win as they say. JOURNAVX in acute pain as we are currently 10 days post the milestone approval of this first selective, oral, non-opioid pain signal inhibitor. The approval is so critical because JOURNAVX represents the first new class of pain medicine in over 20 years. It combines effective pain relief with a favourable safety profile. And based on its MOA(mechanism of action), it does not have addiction potential. It is indicated for use across all types of moderate-to-severe acute pain. For example, post-surgery, broken bones, sports injuries and has the potential to establish a new standard of care for the 80 million patients, who seek a prescription therapy to treat moderate-to-severe acute pain each year in the U.S. Half of those seeking help for their acute pain or approximately 40 million Americans each year are prescribed opioids, which although effective have significant safety and tolerability concerns and addictive potential. In fact, tragically, an estimated 85,000 people each year will develop opioid use disorder within the first year of being prescribed an opioid for acute pain. We believe we now have the opportunity to transform how acute pain is treated in the U.S. and to build another multi-billion dollar franchise for Vertex. We are launch ready and have now begun commercialisation of JOURNAVX. Our focus for 2025 is to engage with healthcare professionals, decision-makers and payers to establish the conditions for rapid patient access that will deliver long-term commercial success for our pain franchise. To that end, while still just a few days into the launch, we believe that the incredibly broad positive media coverage JOURNAVX has received since approval is one measure of the high unmet need and an indication of the societal importance of providing both physicians and patients with a new non-opioid option for the treatment of acute pain. We've already seen tremendous interest and requests for information from both doctors and patients, and we look forward to being able to serve them. Our 150 person sales force is actively engaging with healthcare providers and physicians on the compelling efficacy and safety data of JOURNAVX and its role in all types of moderate-to-severe acute pain. In the institutional setting, we are engaging with roughly 2,000 high-volume hospitals and approximately 150 related health systems. We have line of sight to accelerate the typical P&T (pharmacy & therapeutics) committee processes in many networks to support the use of JOURNAVX in this setting. We are advancing our discussions with national and regional payers and group purchasing organisations to provide access to JOURNAVX, building on our work pre-approval to accelerate formula reviews and limit inappropriate utilization management controls. And lastly, with retail pharmacies, we are working to secure broad stocking agreements at national retail pharmacies and regional chains to ensure availability of JOURNAVX for patients across the country. We have also now begun our non-personal promotional initiatives to physicians and patients to promote broad awareness of the first, oral, non-opioid pain signal inhibitor for moderate-to-severe acute pain, such as embedded content in relevant websites like Medscape for physicians and WebMD for consumers, along with point-of-care marketing.

Over 50% of the value of the company is AWS-maybe 65% AWS generates approx 28.7b and earns 10.5(quarter) Azure generates about 24.5b(less than AWS) but also earns 10.5b Similar money makers similar growth. Msft earns significantly more money overall-circa 50%+ more.

The drug cost > $1B to develop so the price (in the US $3.1M) needs to recover this cost and make a profit. Sickle Cell disease is a terrible illness(genetic) often leading to poor quality of life and shortened life expectancy . Many who suffer from it have regular hospitalisation so you need to factor in the large cost over a number of years vs the upfront cost now coupled with the pain and suffering. The reality is, you've read the headline. They will probably only process a handful of patients a year-there will be a budget. Vertex is not like most drug companies. Their charter is to work in the field of transformative medicines. Medicines that improve healthcare outcomes through discovery and technology. The hard stuff.

Just to add to Adams description and detail, the name is an indicator of your intention for access to the funds. If you intend to take it all, or a big chunk at a given date in the future, you may choose withdrawal, as you intend to withdraw the funds, and so we progress to a defensive position to stabilise the funds ready for withdrawal. If you intend to access the funds in chunks over time or draw an income, then you may chose income. In this case we look to stabilise a proportion of the funds ready for you to draw as income while allowing the rest to continue to seek growth ready to be accessed at a later date