My job is to make money for clients. Full stop. In order to accomplish my goals, I have to navigate through economic data, macro data, and corporate micro data, aka company earnings and trends. Ultimately, its earnings and growth that drive equity prices but prices of all assets can fluctuate wildly during short periods of time. As we start 2025, we must all remind ourselves that algo’s and other systematic investors drive the day to day volume on exchanges. This reality is just as important to consider as the other factors I stated above. When I got into this business 30 years ago, investors drove markets. Today, trading and very short-term thinking drives markets. We live in an A.D.D. world where a new get rich quick theme seems to develop daily. These are distraction folks, do not lose sight of the real price: having a solid nest-egg for retirement. My daily mantra is: “we trade the market we have, not the one we want”, this will forever be true. A few days before the inauguration, the reality of Trump became completely clear; their camp intends to be in the news daily and fully intends to monetize their power like no other politician has in history. Welcome to the meme coin mania folks, the daily dose of Trump is akin to our daily vitamins, we don’t want them but we are going to get them! In crypto, the Trump & Melanie meme coins are backed by air, fart coins air is particularly foul, and more meme coins for every one of Trumps family are incoming. Will the Barron coin smile? I mean the kid needs to smile once in a while. He’s got the world by the short-hairs!
This week, we had the AI revolution get a big boost by, you guessed it, a Trump announcement. It’s these kinds of announcements that get the algo’s moving aggressively, I enjoyed jumping on the ORCL train and selling the stock the next morning at the open +13%. That’s how we make money in an ago-driven world! Sam Altman of OpenAI could be this generations biggest cheerleader of a new era in tech. We shall see how it all ends but the dude knows how to tell a story and get massive amounts of funding. AI will cure disease, solve every problem, do everything humans do today, never takes a vacation, and never asks for a raise. AI will change the world and everything in it…Now how much money would you like to pledge to invest in the new revolution designed to put us all out of work? Here’s the details on Project Stargate: The Stargate Project is a new company which intends to invest $500 billion over the next four years building new AI infrastructure for OpenAI in the United States. We will begin deploying $100 billion immediately. This infrastructure will secure American leadership in AI, create hundreds of thousands of American jobs, and generate massive economic benefit for the entire world. This project will not only support the re-industrialization of the United States but also provide a strategic capability to protect the national security of America and its allies.
The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI are the key initial technology partners. The buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements. Color me skeptical on the ability to raise $500B but crazier things have happened. I’m the consumer brands guy so thankfully, I can generally watch from the sidelines while focusing on brands that will have massive productivity gains by implementing AI and tools to drive sustainably higher margins and better profitability. All of this allows a stock to have solid multiple expansion. So maybe stocks in general aren’t as expensive as they appear today?