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They stick to their knitting on stock portfolios. They know where they want to enter and where they want to exit. There's a farm league of other companies that they'd like to put into the portfolio when they exit something.

Some of the magic they add is on the hedging. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. With the recent volatility in the market, they're finding that the hedge can actually contribute profits (rather than just acting as an insurance policy). They had dialled up the hedge to 80-90% of the notional value of stock portfolios (last time they did that, was in Spring 2020 going into Covid). This past Tuesday, they took almost all of it back.

The US Fed disappointed the market today by not raising or commenting on raising interest rates, even though it's clear that inflation is here to stay and needs to be taken seriously. Markets sank, with the Dow down 2.19%. The 30-year bond yield topped 5.212%, not this high since 2007. The bond market was telling Fed Chief Warsh, "Show more gumption." The bond market fears an inflation comeback. The President isn't concerned with inflation. Warsh should have promised to tighten rates today to battle inflation. Meanwhile, we're stuck in an intractable war Iran that keeps raising the price of oil--and inflation.

In the US, the economy is doing fairly well. In Canada we're in a technical recession, but looks as though we're starting to come out of it. He's fairly optimistic on the economy for the next 2-3 years.

October highs and relative performance resembled the peak of the Tech Bubble. Now, we're breaking down from critical levels where the tech bubble cracked. Moving has been and will rotate into growth and value. He's looking at the beneficiaries of AI like biotech, which has lagged but is overperforming this year. AI tools are benefiting their R&D.

They're trying hard to turn around, but there's lots of competition. It's just okay. He sold it.

Investing in AI -- Bull Case vs. Bear 
He came across a new index put out by a group called Silicon Data, which tracks the cost of LLM tokens. In recent weeks and months, there's a high correlation between the cost of the tokens and cheaper alternatives becoming available. Updated daily. Larry's provided a link to this index in his blog.

In general, buy the dip. We're in the early, early stages of what's going to be a multi-decade bull trend. 

Lots of talk about AI bubbles, so he's gone back to look at three of the stock darlings of the late 1990s. At one point, Nortel was over 35% of the Toronto 60 Index. We know what happened there. CSCO and INTC are still around. Pre-crash returns were in the magnitude of 1000% and 2000%. Today's AI stocks have run up 50% and 80%, so we're nowhere near the intensity of the dot-com bubble.

Lots more to come. Be comfortable buying the dips in AI names, but not sure he'd do that today. Thinks there's more correction risk here. But if we get back to where we were a few months ago on some of these names, it'll probably be a good opportunity (especially if you feel you've missed out).

Q3 is off to a shaky start. Q1 was good and Q2 great. Everybody is excited by earnings growth with the S&P up 30%+ based on Google's report last week of $98 billion of profit, but that came from Spacex shares. Investors ask what is the AI picture for the next 12-18 months? Uncertainty over the Fed's interest rate policy (will they hike and when?) is concerning investors. What's driving that is the uncertain US-Iran war. So, investors are stepping back from the momentum trade of the last 3 years to wait. AI is half the US GDP growth, but meanwhile, China is building new AI models that will drop the pricing of AI.