Investments and Portfolios

Shares in Corning jumped more than 14% in premarket trading after it announced a major long-term partnership with Nvidia aimed at massively scaling optical connectivity. The deal is pretty significant, with plans to boost capacity tenfold, which says a lot about just how fast demand for AI infrastructure is growing. As part of the agreement, the companies will build three new manufacturing plants in the US, creating over 3,000 well-paid jobs. Corning will also expand its fibre production capacity by more than 50%, helping meet the needs of hyperscale data centres that rely on fast, efficient connectivity to run Nvidia’s advanced computing systems. Jensen Huang framed the move as part of a broader shift, calling AI the biggest infrastructure buildout of our time. Meanwhile, Corning boss Wendell Weeks highlighted the manufacturing angle, stressing that this isn’t just about tech innovation but also about rebuilding industrial capacity. In simplistic terms-Optical fibre sends data as light, allowing far higher bandwidth and much lower signal loss than copper. It carries more data over longer distances with minimal interference. Latency is lower in practice, and scaling is easier. Copper is fine short-range, but optics handles massive, high-speed data loads far better.

Meta def. looks 'cheap' considering what they're up to, MSFT also cheap, but not in the same way️

Fantastic results

And some say AI isn't being monetised Anthropic has reportedly agreed to spend around $200 billion over five years on cloud infrastructure and AI chips from Google, highlighting the intensifying race for computing power in the artificial intelligence sector. According to the report, this deal would position Anthropic as one of the largest customers of Google Cloud, potentially representing more than 40% of its revenue backlog. The scale of this commitment reflects rapidly growing demand for high-performance computing, driven by the expansion of Anthropic’s Claude AI models and increasing enterprise adoption of generative AI tools. Businesses are relying more heavily on such systems for automation, analytics and customer-facing applications, which in turn requires vast processing capacity. The agreement, signed in April, also includes access to advanced tensor processing units, with contributions from partners such as Broadcom. Deployment is expected to begin around 2027, signalling long-term strategic investment in AI infrastructure.

Some analysts comments Apple grabbed attention on Friday after posting better-than-expected results for its fiscal second quarter, with the iPhone 17 range still clearly landing well with customers. That said, it was the outlook for the next quarter — especially on gross margins — that really caught even the most bullish on Wall Street off guard. In a good way. Margin worries ease Morgan Stanley analyst Erik Woodring said Apple’s forecast of 47.5% to 48.5% gross margins for the upcoming quarter — despite “significantly” higher memory costs — came as a nice surprise. “Revenue and profit strength are holding up, including a standout June quarter margin outlook, which makes us more confident Apple can handle record cost inflation,” he wrote in a note to clients. He added that the latest results were likely the turning point investors were waiting for, setting the shares up to perform well heading into the September iPhone launch. Woodring kept his Overweight rating and lifted his price target to $330 from $315. For the next quarter, Apple expects total revenue to grow between 14% and 17% year-on-year — well ahead of the 9.3% analysts had pencilled in. Services revenue should come in roughly in line with the March quarter, even after stripping out favourable currency movements. On rising memory costs, outgoing CEO Tim Cook said on the earnings call that Apple would “look at a range of options” to manage the impact. Product momentum and supply chain edge While margin concerns seem to have eased for now, J.P. Morgan analyst Samik Chatterjee pointed out that Apple’s product momentum is pretty exceptional at the moment. “Despite investor concerns, the bigger challenge for Apple looks to be on the supply side — particularly getting hold of advanced processors needed to keep up with stronger-than-expected iPhone demand, and increasingly for Macs too,” he said. He noted a recent spike in demand for the Mac mini, Mac Studio, and the newly launched MacBook Neo. Chatterjee also said the upbeat guidance suggests Apple is gaining market share across its product lines, thanks to strong customer demand and better supply chain management — especially when it comes to memory — compared with rivals. He raised his revenue forecasts, stuck with an Overweight rating, and kept a $325 price target. Citi analyst Atif Malik said so-called “agentic” AI is boosting demand for Macs, putting Apple in a solid position to benefit from the AI wave. During the earnings call, Apple highlighted strong demand for the Mac mini and Mac Studio tied to AI use cases, while MacBook demand has been “off the charts”. Given Apple’s sheer scale and buying power, Wells Fargo analyst Aaron Rakers said that’s turning into a real competitive advantage — particularly versus other PC makers. “We see Apple’s economies of scale as a major plus in the current environment,” he said, pointing to a big jump in long-term purchase commitments, which could signal major supply agreements, including for memory.

The Amazon<>Anthropic deal looks interesting ! Happy to see Anthropic forking nicely from openai....

When the 'news'(fake) dropped I was highly sceptical...also the rumour Nvidia was buying DELL-makes no sense at all. DELL is a low margin capital intensive business -the exact opposite environment that Nvidia operates in. JPM says reports that MRVL won Google TPU business are false, arguing Google is talking to multiple parties while AVGO remains the clear incumbent.

Just had a look at my numbers and I’m pretty much back to where I was at the start of the year, including >10% in the past two weeks. So, whatever sorcery it is you’re up to over there - keep it up!

Oracle has expanded its partnership with Bloom Energy to secure up to 2.8 gigawatts (GW) of Bloom’s fuel cell systems to support the growth of its AI data centre infrastructure. For perspective, 2.8GW is enough to power 7 million UK homes! A staggering amount of energy.

In a blog post today Meta Platforms (META) has increased the investment for its data centre campus in El Paso, Texas, to $10B from $1.5B. They aren't playing.

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

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.

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

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!

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.