Called $NVDA bullish on Oct 27, 2023: $NVDA rose 133% in 5 months.
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Founder of Niles Investment Management, Tech Nerd, Bad Tennis Player, Proud Dad. Posts are for information purposes only & never investment advice.
Cite asCryptoQuant has tracked the directional calls on MU by @DanielTNiles on X since Jan 2018: not yet scored on MU (as of Nov 11, 2026).
Other assets covered (39)
3 MU calls on record, a thin history.
Relative view by default: fewer than 30 MU calls or days on record.
Sentiment timeline shows relative sentiment within this analyst's history. A perma-bull showing 8 bullish : 2 bearish in a bear market sets that as their baseline. If you notice any errors, claim @DanielTNiles to submit corrections.
Called $NVDA bullish on Oct 27, 2023: $NVDA rose 133% in 5 months.
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Last wk, $KBWB -1% despite low bank earnings expectations. AI was hit despite beat/raise from $ASML -8%, $TSM -9% due to AI financing concerns w/ AirTrunk IPO delayed, debt getting hit w/ $CRWV -25%, Anthropic rev growth slowing & valuation looking ~$1.5T vs $2T. Last Sunday I wrote that I was circumspect on the market. The KBWB (bank ETF) was sending a very different message than the S&P. “Any further sell-off despite trading at oversold levels last week would not be a great sign.” On Tuesday I posted on the KBWB getting hit despite these low expectations on mixed earnings results and therefore remaining circumspect. The Magnificent 7 eventually closed the week down 3.2% with the SOX Index (Semiconductors) down 11.4% driving the S&P down 1.9%. There was rising angst on the financing part of the AI trade later in the week. This was despite 5/10/30yr yields going down 15-17 bps last week despite hotter than expected CPI/PPI. After yields initially surged, this large drop was unexpected but this also coincided with the equity market sell-off from Wednesday through Friday. Massive external capital is needed to fund the AI infrastructure buildout. Therefore AI stocks got clobbered last week on questions around: 1) ability to raise AI public equity – Airtrunk IPO delayed till 2027 following the pulling of Firmus IPO last week 2) cost of AI debt increasing- CDS costs surging and face value of debt getting hit driving the yield to 15% for Coreweave debt 3) AI revenue growth slowing from ~145% q/q in Q2 to ~45% in Q3 for Anthropic 4) AI valuation now seen at closer to $1.5 trillion vs $2.0 trillion for some investors following Anthropic’s investor day 5) Gartner stating they expect greater than 80% of neoclouds to fold or face restructuring by 2030 6) Chinese DRAM company CXMT (-12% last week) ramping 4F technology before year-end being a threat to the current big 3 of $MU -15% last week, Samsung -18% and Hynix -24%. As for other important macro moves last week, US Oil was +10% last week with the US dollar down 37 cents but Gold declined 1% anyway. Thursday I posted the details around the historical precedent for a rally in the Korean Kospi Index over the following day and week given its extremely oversold levels. While the Kospi did rally on Friday +2.0%, the SOX Index was hit for 3.8% anyway and was down 11.4% for the week vs the Kospi -14.5%. While the Kospi, driven by the declines in memory stocks, is now down 40% from its 52 week high and is up 34% year-to-date, the SOX is down only 24% from its 52wh and is up 57% ytd. Looking forward, the first two of the Magnificent 7 report CQ3 earnings next week on Wednesday. For $META, while I see a beat and raise quarter, the stock is probably going to react to initial expense and capex guidance for 2027 coming in high, especially given the strong recent stock performance. The costs needed to support their hit Agentic product Muse and their recently released frontier LLM models, is likely to occur before their monetization. For $TSLA, the videos of their new “flying” Roadster were mind blowing. This is just a reminder why engineering god Elon gets mind blowing valuations for his companies. I also believe the Roadster is a physical example of why $SPCX (which also reports next week) buying Tesla makes sense. In summary, the recent correction made sense for reconciling some of the discrepancies between the bond market and equity markets. But I believe there is still a lot of infrastructure growth ahead to support the proliferation of personal Agents. As a result, I think it makes sense to invest some of the excess cash levels that I have been recommending. The SOX is now down 8 days in a row for a loss of 15.7% through Friday. The last time the index fell for 8 or more consecutive trading days ended on Friday October 10th 2008 for a loss of 19.8%, during the Global Financial Crisis. It then bounced for just one day the following Monday for 9.7% before continuing to much lower levels. The AI trade may be having some funding concerns today but it is not as bad as during the GFC. All the best in the week ahead.
View original →8x Kospi has declined 5%+ in 1 day w/ closing 14 day RSI <23. It has gained on avg 3.4% the next day and been up 88% of the time. Over 5 days, it has gained 10.0% on avg and been up every time. This includes 3x during 2000-2002 internet bust, 1x during GFC and 2x during Covid. As a reminder, nearly 50% of the Kospi (the Korean stock market) is Samsung Electronics and SK Hynix, two of the three biggest memory companies in the world with $MU in the US being the third. My longer-term concern remains that China is on a path to get to at least 20-30% market share in memory over the course of the next several years and that the current market leaders are being much too optimistic. I continue to believe that China will do to the memory markets what Japan did to the US companies in the early 1980s and the Koreans did to the Japanese companies in the early 2000s. But even if that is the case, history would suggest at least a near-term rally is coming in the semiconductor sector. This would seem to be true even if we have seen THE TOP in the overall AI trade much like during the bursting of the internet bubble in 2000-2002. To be clear, I do not think we have seen THE TOP in the overall AI trade. I believe the advent of Agentic AI in January with formalization of OpenClaw and the follow on innovations should give the overall AI trade room to run into 2027. Call it Agentic AI for the non-techies. That started in September with Muse from $META followed by Dots from OpenAI and the Co-Pilot revamp by $MSFT in October for enterprise. I expect most LLM vendors to have their own easy to use Agent out before too long. The bottom line is even if we have seen THE TOP, the odds based on history are high for at least a short-term rally.
View original →Last wk, S&P +1.2% & hit new ATH. 10/30yr ylds down 2-3bps despite WTI +1%. Impressive given semis -4% w/ $MU -4% despite solid earnings. Negatives were OAI actual ARR rev of $50B vs prior $70B belief & pulling of $NVDA backed Firmus neocloud IPO. USD +$0.23. Breadth remained poor with just 35% of the S&P above its 50dma (though this was up from 25% at the end of the prior week.) The heavy weight Magnificent 7 did their part up 1.6% on average during the week. But their small cap brethren in the R2K declined 0.9%. Different asset classes and different segments of the equity markets are sending mixed messages. On the positive side, the 10-year auction cleared at a lower 5.30% than the 5.32% it was trading at right before it closed. Dealers took only 2.5%. There was real demand at this rate which makes me more bullish on the sectors of the market that reached oversold levels earlier in October on the move higher in yields. This brings me to bank earnings that start on Tuesday morning. The $KBWB (Bank ETF) is down 12.1% since its closing peak on August 14th. This is a very different message compared to the S&P up slightly (+0.3%) over that time. I am a big believer that credit is the lifeblood of the economy. Any further sell-off despite trading at oversold levels last week would not be a great sign. For those that believe strong upcoming AI related earnings results will continue to drive the market higher, the 4% decline in Micron Technology last week is a strong counterpoint. As for the AI trade, $GOOGL is finally getting themselves back into the conversation. This belief is why I wrote optimistically on the stock in late September. After roughly 10 months without releasing a new frontier model, two weeks ago they announced Argon which put them back into the frontier LLM conversation. Then last week Google announced the Gemini agent, a "single, universal agent for work." Google’s stock gained 2.4% this past week despite this being more of an enterprise product. Given Google already has 14 products with over 1B users each, a personal assistant product that competes with Muse from $Meta is what I am really waiting for. I continue to like Google in anticipation of such an event. I also continue to like NVidia in semiconductors, especially when paired with shorts in the space. The stock declined 2.0% last week but this was far better than the 4.3% decline in the semiconductor index. Nvidia believes that given access to power is becoming a bigger issue, their higher token production per watt will enable them to gain share going forward. The market, however, is anticipating further share loss to ASICs which is partly why the stock has a 15x CY27 PE. It would not take much of a sentiment shift to see the multiple expand much like with Meta in September. I continue to see Nvidia's stock outperforming the overall semiconductor sector between now and their earnings release on November 19th. For the overall market, an optimist could say that the bond market was not priced correctly and now has closed that gap given the solid 10 year treasury auction to end the week. There is a rule of thumb that over the medium term, when there is no financial manipulation (for example QE), that 10 year bond yields (currently 5.25%) should equal nominal GDP. With real Q2 GDP at 2.2% plus recent core PCE at 3.0%, 10 year bond yields after their recent rise could finally be at appropriate levels. While trailing PE multiples are high, so is S&P earnings growth at roughly 35% y/y for Q3. I broached the possibility last week that this could be the new normal for bond yields vs the stock market PE and US dollar. While I am not there yet, I have to respect the new all-time record high set in the S&P last week in the face of rising bond yields and a rising dollar with a backdrop of high oil prices. Is this the new normal or the calm before the equity storm? I look forward to the market reaction to bank earnings this upcoming week to add more facts to the equation. As John Maynard Keynes once said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?” In summary, I prefer to remain circumspect at the portfolio level given what I view as mixed messages on a shorter-term basis. That means being more selective in stock selection (such as AI infrastructure), having smaller position sizes and a greater than normal amount of cash. Playing for at least some short-term reversion to the mean in stocks that were hurt by rising bond yields is also interesting.
View original →Last wk, Muse from $Meta (+12.9%) & co-Pilot overhaul by $MSFT (+4.5%) drove AI infrastructure strength (SOX Index +6.3%) led by processor vendors, $INTC/$AMD/$ARM all +13%. Agentic AI flips GPU:CPU ratio from ~8:1 to ~1:4. SOX+Meta+Microsoft was all the S&P gain. WTI dropped 7.9% last wk while Brent was +0.4% but bond yields surged 10-17 bps across the 3m/30yr curve hitting levels not seen since July-2007 for the 10 year and June-2004 for the 30 year. Yield drivers included: 1) multiple Fed governors messaging higher-for-longer, 2) strong economic data like PMI & capital goods, 3) AI financing concerns following $ORCL (-7% last week) invoking force majeure for their New Mexico datacenter for OpenAI, and 5) weak treasury auction. One of the big use cases for Muse seems to be in cutting monthly bills. This renewed disruption fear for businesses with friction or inertia including telecom $VZ ( -2% last week), insurance $KIE -4%, banking $KBWB -2%, wealth management $SCHW -6%, shopping comparison platforms $AMZN -2% and banned Muse, travel $BKNG -2%, ride-share $UBER -1%, fitness memberships $PLNT -14%, ticket resale $STUB -8% and digital advertising- $GOOGL -2%. These names above have a median return of -1% year-to-date with half of them down ytd. In the disruption fears category above, Google is the one that I am most bullish on. I believe they are very close to launching a new model that will challenge the frontier leaders of Anthropic and OpenAI. In addition I believe all LLM companies will launch their own competitor to Meta Muse including Google. OpenAI DevDay 2026, is taking place on Tuesday. I ultimately believe that consumers will use an AI agent sitting on their smartphone from $AAPL or the Android ecosystem from Google while enterprises will default to the "safety" of co-Pilot on M365 from Microsoft. I believe the AI agent will pick the underlying LLM most suited for the task and commoditize that layer with the value accruing to the infrastructure layer. On a fundamental basis, CQ3 earnings appear solid, especially for AI infrastructure companies. Implied S&P revenue/EPS for Q3 remains strong at 14%/35% y/y with the Atlanta Fed GDPNow forecast at 5%. The question will be how companies react to widely expected beat and raise quarters. Q2 results were not taken well with the Nasdaq -3% and Semi Index -21% during the month of July. The stock reaction to widely expected strong quarterly results/guidance from $MU on Wednesday should give us some clues. From a bigger picture standpoint, the R2K, which is the most sensitive to rates, was down 0.8% last week. While I am impressed by the S&P, the gains were narrow and powered by the AI infrastructure names I am particularly bullish on: microprocessors within semiconductors on the advent of Agentic AI (see initial post on 3/31) and Meta (see initial post on 9/7.) Microsoft which I posted about last Sunday is also a favored name as a “safe” way for corporations to access AI though their 27% OpenAI ownership concerns me. Looking back at history, 20% or greater drawdowns in the S&P have been preceded by or accompanied by the combination of 1) surging bond yields, 2) surging oil prices and 3) Fed tightening cycle. This includes: 1) 1973–1974 OPEC Oil Embargo and Stagflation, 2) 1980–1982 Volcker Rate Shock, 3) 1990 Gulf War, 4) 2007–2009 Global Financial Crisis, and 5) 2022 Post-Pandemic Inflation Crisis. It is possible that the massive AI infrastructure spend & resultant S&P EPS growth of 35% y/y can offset this. It certainly has so far. However, the three middle episodes above had the following positive technological developments as well: 1) the PC revolution started in the late 1970s, 2) the Internet in the mid-1990s and 3) smartphones in the late 2000s. As a result, until bond yields stop their surge, I am remaining very selective on the individual names & sectors I favor. I am therefore watching closely the datacenter pushouts, the developments in Iran and the impact on oil prices. All the best in the week ahead.
View original →Last Saturday, I posted my “speedbump” concerns. This past wk, the negative news flow escalated quickly. The Semi Index was -7.9% despite $MU beating EPS by 16% & guiding 21% higher than consensus. Micron finished the wk -0.1% while S&P -2.0%, Nasdaq -4.6% & Mag7 -5.4%. The news flow included: 1) $SPCX $20B bond offering & signing Reflection AI 2) $MSFT potentially hosting lower cost DeepSeek 3) GLM-5.2 being a credible alternative to Anthropic 4) Star AI researchers leaving $GOOG for competitors 5) $AAPL raising prices ~17-25% due to memory prices 6) US restrictions on US LLM model releases 7) Investment ramps from Samsung & Hynix 8) Stock market circuit breakers triggered in S. Korea 9) OpenAI potentially delaying their IPO into 2027 10) Big Private Credit redemptions at $APO $MS $ARES On a positive note: 1) Headline PCE/core of 4.1%/3.4% were roughly inline 2) WTI Oil fell 10% to $69 3) 2/10yr bond yields declined 8 bps each My concern is that equity markets were bad over the past week despite oil declining substantially along with bond yields. But a lot of position unwinding also occurred with the Morgan Stanley Momentum Long Index down 4.2% last week while their Short Index was up 3.2%. This upcoming trading week is shortened with the July 4th holiday with no major earnings reports but several important economic reports could move rates and therefore the market. The JOLTS survey, non-farm payrolls report and to a lesser extent the ISM report could have an outsized impact given lighter than normal trading volumes. Fed Chair Kevin Warsh’s appearance at the ECB symposium on Wednesday is also likely to be scrutinized for clues around future Fed policy. From a seasonality standpoint, while not as famous as the Santa Claus rally at year-end, statistically we are entering a strong period for stocks. This is probably caused by the inflow of funds into 401K plans at mid-year. The "12-Day Midyear Rally" as talked about by @AlmanacTrader encompasses the last three trading days of June and the first nine trading days of July. Since 1985, Nasdaq has gained 2.5% and has been up a solid 78% of the time. Having said that, it will be interesting to see how the market responds to the flare up in hostilities in Iran this weekend. In summary, my short-term “speedbump” concerns outlined last week in my posts on 6/20 and followed up on 6/22 remain about the upcoming mega-cap tech earnings season that starts in late July due to: 1) Token minimization 2) Competitive low cost open-sourced LLM models 3) Rising semiconductor cost impact on Q3 guidance Longer-term, I am hopeful for a solid finish to 2026 due to: 1) Over 25% EPS growth for the S&P 2) Advent of Agentic AI requiring 10-100x more tokens 3) Torturous winding down of the Iran war 4) Kevin Warsh pushing back on rate hike expectations But a series of short-terms make up the long-term and remaining flexible in thinking is important. All the best in the week ahead and Happy July 4th!
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