No jinx. If anything, my proprietary gauge of things says this is going to run for a while yet.
This is a big one.
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Will be interesting to see when (if?) Intel’s much-heralded investment in Ohio actually starts producing chips. The date may keep getting pushed out.
Intel seems to have become overpriced and underperforming in recent years for it’s CPUs. They are just simply losing the game right now against AMD.
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It’ll get kicked out. Even if it breaks ground tomorrow, it’s going to be years before it’s up and running and the cost of construction has gone up significantly courtesy tariffs - and, there’s no guarantee Trump won’t change the rules a dozen times along the way.
I expect a lot of companies are going to hit pause on new major projects for the same reason. Even those in progress are going to have to be budgeted higher, and that may make some of them suddenly cheaper to stop than to continue on.
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Worth a look.
The PE ratios from various bourses. The US is certainly an extreme. So it’s worth pondering why, and how that might change in this “new world order”.
Anyone have a preferred muni ETF? The Fed is going to start dropping short term rates so I need to shift away from TBIL into something more tax efficient. At 4.5%+ it was still a good place to park some money but below 4% other options quickly become much more attractive. I have been drawn towards the ones from VanEck previously but I am guessing there are comparable options with better expense ratios.
https://www.vaneck.com/us/en/blogs/municipal-bonds/municipal-bond-etfs-expect-more-from-your-munis/
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Yes. Even if AI is extremely useful, I’m not sure how it will make tons of money.
Lately, people like to say that LLMs are like “having your own Jr. Developer.” If that were literally true-- we would hire fewer devs, and save enormous amounts of money. But that doesn’t necessarily translate to profit.
Same if LLMs (or other AI) comes for other white collar jobs. If OpenAI or Google or X could charge 50% of what you would normally pay for services (legal, accounting, medical, financial, insurance, customer, etc.) they would certainly be rich. But what they offer right now is $1.00 per a million tokens, and seemingly no way to charge more than that.
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VTEB and MUB are some of the big ones with low expenses.
I think you’re hitting on the issue. It’s an amazing tool if you’re not having to pay for it. I’m not sure how much my employer would be willing to pay for it if they have to pay the actual cost for it. From what I understand many of the big companies are still losing money providing AI services to the masses.
I know some of our more heavy users are blowing through their monthly allotment of AI in a week or less. Others aren’t even touching it.
How to think about XMPT which has a 6.2% yield and 2% expense ratio with something VTEB that yields 3.8% and has .03% expenses? I still seem better off in the higher expense fund even if that is a ridiculous expense ratio?
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I do not think prices are being subsidized much by the big tech companies.
And, in the long run, I think customers would pay loads of money for white-collar services.
Where I have my doubts is how the AI companies will charge large amounts. Those services are worth so much money because they can only be performed by a limited trained labor force. By contrast, the promise of AI is having unlimited supply, so that the prices approach nothing.
This has odd knock-on effects as well. We might already be at a point where AI can offer valuable medical advice (as much as that’s possible through a chat interface) but it doesn’t make enough money to pay for the lawsuits we use to hold doctors accountable.
To get the juiced yield, you’ll be taking on a bit of leverage and added duration.
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4609000-xmpt-municipal-bond-etf-invests-cefs-hold
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Intersting, thanks for the article!
I shifted some TBIL to VTEB. Going to sit on the rest for a bit and see where the market goes for other opportunities.
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The other risk with municipal bonds may be default - but I suspect if you see munis default it’ll be Meredith Whitney’s 2011-hyped meltdown across all munis that never happened. Which … given how much federal spending is getting slashed and states are being told “figure it out yourselves” on disaster relief, it’s possible it finally comes to fruition but it’s going to be like all the other predictions about how changes since 1/20 flow across the country and into the budget: you won’t know for a while, and if it happens by the time we all realize it it may be too late to get out of the way.
Yeah, i guess I’m hesitant to go after individual bonds, so just looking at etfs.
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I just added some VCIT and VWOB
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Sounds like Intel is getting state backing. Perhaps worth buying?
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Not for me. They need to fix their process first.
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I like this new strategy, where corporations hand over a percentage of the stake in the company to the government simply because the government - here, specifically the President - demands it.
Democrats should embrace this and demand that every publicly-traded company with a market cap over say $50 billion forks over a 49.99% of the stake in the company. Same for any private company considered to have a valuation over $50 billion. Same for any company where the owner is a billionaire.
I know, this sounds a whole lot like some government scheme where the means of production are controlled by the government, and that’s really bad and people should take up arms against it, but this is completely different because … look, if I have to explain it because you don’t understand it, then fuck you.
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