Context
Now, today was one of those days where the complex of Micron, Seagate, Lumentum, Corning, Western Digital, and SanDisk all took off and they're all at the top of the S&P 500 leaderboard. ... First thing they do, okay? Well, they buy the stocks I just mentioned.
Context
Now, today was one of those days where the complex of Micron, Seagate, Lumentum, Corning, Western Digital, and SanDisk all took off and they're all at the top of the S&P 500 leaderboard. ... First thing they do, okay? Well, they buy the stocks I just mentioned.
Context
Now, today was one of those days where the complex of Micron, Seagate, Lumentum, Corning, Western Digital, and SanDisk all took off and they're all at the top of the S&P 500 leaderboard. ... First thing they do, okay? Well, they buy the stocks I just mentioned.
Context
Now, today was one of those days where the complex of Micron, Seagate, Lumentum, Corning, Western Digital, and SanDisk all took off and they're all at the top of the S&P 500 leaderboard. ... First thing they do, okay? Well, they buy the stocks I just mentioned.
Context
Now, today was one of those days where the complex of Micron, Seagate, Lumentum, Corning, Western Digital, and SanDisk all took off and they're all at the top of the S&P 500 leaderboard. ... First thing they do, okay? Well, they buy the stocks I just mentioned.
I want you to buy the stock, Craig, of IBM. You buy some now, and then it's been having these kind of panic fits, just panic attacks. You buy the rest then.
Context
Craig in Texas asks whether he should buy, sell, or hold IBM. The response is:
Full Transcript
Lot to talk about the biggest companies on Earth. But we need to stop making endless comparisons among them. Just because they're all colossal in size and many of you own them. On a day where the averages rolled over the map with the Dow advancing 139 points as beginning 28.1% and the Nasdaq jumping 1.3%. I think we need to accept an old adage that my grandma Mary always told me, comparisons are odious. Especially comparisons involving the trillion-dollar giants that dominate the daily discussion of the stock market. >> So that that we can't. So I don't know >> Because comparisons are only useful when the companies really have something in common beyond their scale. And often they are considered to be carbon copies of each other. And that's just not true. Consider what each of these companies really is. Hey, why don't we start with Meta? Okay, that's been a common real mystery. This morning it was reported that Meta has a new chip production with Broadcom. That caused an instant panic. Because it meant that Meta was going to spend a ton of money to keep up with Google, Amazon, and Microsoft in the cloud computing business. And throw in Meta's acknowledgement that it's going to spend a lot more money on capital expenditures. A dreaded strategy from Wall Street's perspective. Jerry, someone to say and the stock got slammed right out of the gate. Meta can't possibly go up against those other companies, right? Their expertise is advertising, correct? How do they defeat Google, Amazon, or Microsoft in cloud infrastructure? But hold up here for one moment, just one moment. And forget about the other trillion-dollar companies and just think about Meta. Stop comparing, start thinking. Mark Zuckerberg is a genius. He's demonstrated that time and again. Perhaps, just perhaps, he's thinking that his web service business could be huge because it can cross-reference with all the data from Meta's 3 and 1/2 billion users. >> Alex. >> Maybe that could be a huge new revenue stream. Maybe he has plans to monetize WhatsApp in some way that needs the agents that a data center creates. We don't know. But we can approximate that Meta might get a gigantic return on its investment here. It's only because we think of how much everyone else is spending that we don't consider maybe Zuckerberg's got profitable plans. He isn't just some cowboy throwing up expensive data centers all over the world purely because he can afford to. This is a man who take that who really would he would take the same money and use it just to sit there and buy back stock if he thought that was a better use of cash. He's done that. There are a ton of investors who'd happily buy a stock if Zuckerberg would simply cancel these expensive plans. But maybe we should lean in and recognize that he knows more about his company's prospects than we do. Maybe that's why Meta ultimately rallied like crazy after that initial decline. It finished up $28. Zuckerberg's not a bozo. You can quote me on that. We should stop considering him as one. What a stand. Or how about Google? All right. Now they raised a ton of money recently and basically kept the server rally in their stock. In the old days everyone loved Google cuz it was spewing cash. Now it seems like it's trying to raise any money any amount of money that it can just to stay in the AI rat race with the other magnificent seven. But wait 1 minute. Sure there's a race to get market share in what seems like an increasingly commoditized market with ChatGPT Claude Bard Perplexity Gemini. It's entirely possible that we only will have one winner in this whole game. And if that's the case, it's going to be Google. Because it's Gemini. Why? Because it's at the forefront of Apple's installed base of 2.5 billion devices. If I were Alphabet, all I'd be thinking about is how to make the best product for Apple, how to please them, how to come up with a better Siri. That was enough to wipe out all comers once before with Google Search. Now it could be the same with Gemini. Meanwhile, we no longer spend much time pondering the worth of YouTube or Waymo. Ridiculous. You think YouTube may be the most profitable large-scale business ever invented? And all we care about is Google spending money in another place. Now, today was one of those days where the complex of Micron, Seagate, Lumentum, Corning, Western Digital, and SanDisk all took off and they're all at the top of the S&P 500 leaderboard. These are all companies that make products where there's intense demand right now, mostly from the data center, and there's not enough supply. This rally got triggered by an analyst who raised his price target for SanDisk from $1,200 to $2,000. Where was that guy? Was he like hiking the Andes for a while? I don't know. Come on, wake up. There was a clarion call that there are plenty of price increases still to come for their data storage products. When traders see that, they do three things, okay? They do three things. >> [snorts] >> We're going to get them in the order that they do them. First thing they do, okay? Well, they buy the stocks I just mentioned. Two, they put in orders for SK Hynix, the giant Korean memory chip maker, seeking to raise something like $26 billion in ADR offering on the Nasdaq. They start trading tomorrow morning. Stay tuned for more about that. And three, well, what do they do? This is their favorite thing to do. Sell Nvidia. Because they think it's too big, too played out, and too too lumbering. Me. What do I do? Well, I look at Nvidia as a company onto itself with a management run by Jensen Huang, who seems like a smart fellow to me. I say it's at the heart of the data center with a the that's still the envy of the industry. Doesn't matter, though. All I see is people endlessly comparing chips by Amazon, by Alphabet. Hey, maybe it's owned by Sandisk, by Micron, and maybe by Nanao, by SK Hynix, by SpaceX. We never stop to think that all these companies, what are they really? At least the hyperscalers. They're They're are They are customers of Nvidia. And just like the the commodity semiconductor doctor companies, Nvidia's on allocation, too. We just don't talk about it. They can't make enough of their product, either. But some of the commodity chip companies, like Sandisk, now have price earnings multiples that are higher on next year's earnings than Nvidia. I regard that as insulting. Insulting to Jensen Huang. Insulting to me. I'm insulted. Sandisk is a commodity chip maker. Nvidia's the most proprietary chip company in the history of the world. You know what held back Apple for ages? It's lack of data center spending. Lack of it. That's what's That's all this comparison stuff. Ooh, they're not spending enough. Yeah, it was constantly under fire for not shelling out fortunes on an AI strategy. Even the other guys were under fire cuz they were constantly shelling out fortunes on an AI strategy. All right, this comparison scheme's got to stop. No, Apple didn't build its own AI. It's not in that business. The crazy thing, though, is that they have a superior consumer product. Now, Google's Gemini is basically the default AI on your iPhone. Are they given the benefit of the doubt on it? No, because Siri isn't smart enough. I say don't sell Apple. The company has a product that's unusually uh maybe it's just not the best for them, okay? It's not the best. Typically, everything they make is the best, but history says they will eventually get there. All these companies suffer by the compares. Amazon's not good enough because it keeps borrowing money to build data centers that it won't be able to monetize like Anthropic can. Microsoft has a suboptimal AI product versus the others, Copilot. What if it has a new one we don't even know about that's going to blow us all away? Maybe it's got something secret. see what he just asked. The competition's so stiff and amounts of money that they're spending make them second-rate investments in the eyes of the market. You can't raise numbers on them. Not now. And if you listen to the zeitgeist of Wall Street, not ever. But one day, one day one day one of these companies is one of these companies is going to announce on a conference call that it's raising its forecast because of the AI products it is making. And you're going to see a rally in all of them. A rally that'll be so powerful that you'll never stop kicking yourself from missing out on it. How do I know this? Because unfortunately they all trade together. Right now, we're in a sync one sync them all situation. But the bottom line, we get one. Just one of these heavy hitters saying its AI business is now profitable, then you can forget about owning a commodity semiconductor stock. Instead, you'll go for the hyperscaler that's spewing so much cash flow you that it won't even know what to do with the money. And you will be left holding commodity companies that can't hold a candle to any of these giants, even if they are decidedly not from one big happy family. Craig in Texas, Craig. Oh. Ooh, Craig, I kind of miss Craig. >> Ooh yeah, Jim. >> Ooh yeah, what's happening? >> Jim, let me start by thanking you for sharing your wisdom with us listeners over the years. >> Aw, thanks. >> I've done very well because of you and I feel indebted. >> Well, I like that. No, do not feel indebted. Watching is good enough. Go ahead, I'm sorry. >> Okay, no worries. I'm a second-time caller, club member. And I have your most recent book. I love it. >> Thanks. >> is IBM. I wanted your opinion so I can decide whether I should buy, sell, or hold. >> I want you to buy the stock, Craig, of IBM. You buy some now, and then it's been having these kind of panic fits, just panic attacks. You buy the rest then. I think IBM's terrific. It's inexpensive [music] and Arvind Krishna is doing a fantastic job. All right, guys, I'm a little fired up about this idea that all these stocks should trade together cuz they should. One day you're going to see
Comments 0
Sign in to join the discussion.
Sign inNo comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!