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  • When A Week Feels Like Ten Years - Sunday Reads And Listens

When A Week Feels Like Ten Years - Sunday Reads And Listens

Amd The AI Six - Netflix, Spotify, Reddit, Google, Apple and Meta

Good morning…

That was a long week.

Tragic plane crashes, hostage swaps, AI Deepseek drama, Tarrif wars, the egg bubble, and of course degeneracy galore.

In tribute to the degeneracy Stocktwits.com has brought back weekly trading competitions that are easy to play. Just head here and share an idea

If you follow me you know my strategy/trick/policy is to try very hard not to watch or listen to news. So, I know if it was a big week for news if it seeps through my filters into stock prices and of course the tariffs and Deepseek news did. I will get to these.

This week is the Phoenix Open in town and it will be a zoo. Lucky for me on Thursday, I am headed on my twice yearly boys cycling trip - this time to the Canary islands, specifically Tenerife, a famous volcano island. I had not heard of the island until this trip and Netflix made a pretty good show about it where of course the volcano did indeed erupt and destroy the island.

Here at home right now and this week, Ellen is busier than ever working four listings right now. Max is bringing a bunch of buddies home this week for the Phoenix open, there is a PGA caddies tournament at our Grassclippinngs.com par 3 course Monday under the lights (I am going to go and watch) and on Wednesday eve the ‘Good Good Golf’ crew are having a ‘Desert Knockout’ tuournament at Grassclippings.com which will be live on YouTube where 100,000 plus people will be tuning in…

Ok onward…

Because this is an investing newsletter I will start with AI where here in the United States the many BILLION dollar AI companies were too busy spending money on their ‘butthole’ logos that they missed Deepseek…

After all the coverage and hand wringing and media noise, it was $NVDA that took it on the chin the most as the week ended, down about $600 billion.

As the yelling and volatility continues, my take is this is all good for the consumers of the applications (the other winners) that will come from the commoditization of the technology that brings down prices (hardware, software and LLM’s).

You can read thousands of takes or do what I do, keep it simple and follow my friend Michael Parekh and the extremely talented semiconductor analyst/money manager Gavin Baker

As I have been sharing in this newsletter, the markets have been pricing in this next chapter of AI for at least a year. ( I am measuring since 2023 when Open AI was launched). I have finally organized my favorite public AI companies into one group I call the AI 6 - Netflix, Spotify, Reddit, Meta, Google and Apple. I imagine it becomes 10-15 companies this year.

So far, the clearest winners have been the purest ‘creators and aggregators of content’ - Netflix, Spotify, Reddit and Meta.

I also have Google in my portfolio and this AI Six - which this week closed at an all-time high- mainly because of YouTube, but it does not hurt to have Maps, Gmail and Android.

The biggest winner that seemed furthest behind last week might be Apple (also in my AI Six). In a world of 1,000 Deepseeks ahead, owning the device and iOS is not so bad. This Apple data point that portfolio company Finchat.io shared in their great weekly newsletter is remarkable:

Not owning Netflix, Spotify, Meta and Reddit has been a huge miss for me in my ‘Degenerate Economy Index’, but it is still up 6 percent on the year beating the averages and at an all time high - up 122 percent in the last 19 months.

Next up…

The Conan Ben Stiller podcast was excellent. Because Conan loved Ben Stiller’s show ‘Severance’ so much, Ellen and I started watching it again last night on Apple +. I still don’t like it. I doubt I make it through. It does not help that even Ben Stiller even says I did’nt think anyone would watch it…

I will end with the hostage swaps between Israel and Hamas/Palestine.

While it is wonderful to see smiling faces of civilian Israeli hostages returning to families, Israel is releasing hundreds of terrorists back into the streets. The Free Press covers one such terrorist and tragic story.

Enough for today.

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