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.
accuracy score 50.2 on QQQ over 3 QQQ calls · 90 days of data · not ranked: too few calls on the asset · v20r-multi-sparsepen-strong-ss12m-20261012, computed Nov 7, 2026 · Methodology →
Cite asCryptoQuant has tracked 3 directional calls on QQQ by @DanielTNiles on X since Jan 2018: scored 50.2 on QQQ, not yet ranked (90 days of data) (as of Nov 11, 2026).
Other assets covered (39)
3 QQQ calls on record, a thin history.
Relative view by default: fewer than 30 QQQ 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, earnings had elements of all the AI issues I feared in my preview. $GOOGL – AI disintermediation fear for search and big FCF miss. $MSFT – neocloud partner pushing out capacity and 1st new fundraising bonds since 2017. $AMZN – AI growth miss in AWS and FCF miss. Tech took a beating last week with Nasdaq -2.0% and Mag7 -2.4% but with S&P down only 0.6%. However, the nine non-tech related sub sectors (out of the eleven total) were strong and up 1.0-3.1%. As a result, the equal weighted S&P was up 0.8%. The above three names all declined last week with Google down 12.6%, Amazon -3.1% and Microsoft -0.5%. The historic 28.6% stock decline by $INTC on Friday (-24.4% for the week) did not help. This helped drive the SOX Index down 7.2% on Friday though the weekly decline was only 0.8%. With all the hyperscalers now having reported, here are my current thoughts: 1) Microsoft has committed to staying FCF positive (with $18.6B in FCF in CQ3) and is the only name in this list that has committed to do so. M365 is likely to become the default option for enterprises that want AI in a safe environment through use of Co-Pilot. 2) Meta is using AI to improve the efficiency of their business as seen in their ad revenues compared to Google. Also Muse has been a hit with consumers for Agentic AI while they are appealing to enterprises with their strong open-weight models. An 18x CY27 PE for 28% revenue growth is appealing. Their major blemish is the future negative FCF expected with a $2.1B burn in Q3 driving them to raise ~$95B in equity financing following earnings results. S&P Global Ratings on cash flow concerns and AI spending revised their credit rating today from AA- stable to AA- negative. 3) Amazon despite missing buyside AWS expectations of ~42% y/y growth with 39% reported (official sellside consensus of 38%) expects 40% revenue growth for AWS in CY27 and CY28 despite being the largest public cloud vendor. Also their LTM FCF burn of $42.4B in Q3 vs $7.6B in June helped lead to a $80B supplier financing arrangement facility post-earnings. Also physical AI should benefit their e-commerce business. Both e-commerce and AWS were guided to be $1 trillion revenue businesses within the next 5-10 years. 4) Google’s new LLM model is back at the frontier with a low cost per token. However this miss in search revenues for the 2nd quarter in a row and first miss in both total revenues and EPS for the first time since late 2022 raises AI disintermediation fears. FCF burn of $9.1B was also more than expectations. But total search queries are at the highest levels in five years. As a result, as ad coverage and loads increase on their AI queries, these fears should pass much like in late 2025. Ultimately, I believe Google will be a winner in consumer AI through their distribution through Android phones. As for Intel, I did not see this coming. On October 20th, $SMCI (purely enterprise related revenues) pre-announced 27% revenue upside along with a raise to gross margins guidance to 12-12.5% from 10.4%-10.8% for their CQ3. I am not a fan of SuperMicro to be clear. For the processor vendors, I thought upside in server revenues due to Agentic AI would offset the downside in their PC business due to memory related price increases lowering demand. $AMD, which is gaining share, reports earnings on Tuesday. This will help investors understand whether this is an Intel specific issue or industry issue. I would note that Microsoft’s guidance for their Windows OEM & Devices business was down ~35% y/y for December vs -22% in September and -7% in June. Longer-term, I believe Intel will become a force in the foundry industry but in the near-term it may take some time for the valuation to reset lower due to their current microprocessor business. Looking forward, $AAPL reports on Monday after the close. The stock has been a beneficiary of investors looking to avoid AI companies with huge FCF burns. However, I would be wary into earnings that are likely to provide lower than expected guidance for the December quarter from a combination of higher currency impact, margin compression from semiconductor price increases, iPhone unit pressure from higher ASPs, a slowdown in services revenues and less than expected high margin TAC revenue from Google. Ultimately, I believe Apple will be a winner in consumer AI through their distribution through iPhones. I also believe their new foldable phone will drive a large upgrade cycle in 2027. But in the near-term I believe it is prudent to remove Apple (up 27% ytd) from my Top5 Picks that I put out when 2026 started. As a reminder this is meant to be a buy and hold list for the entire year for those that do not have time to be managing things daily which is what I do. I believe Apple is likely to be a Top 5 Pick at the start of 2027. We are now entering the seasonally strongest month of the year. Since 1957, which is the inception of the modern day S&P500, November is up +1.8% and tied for the best hit rate with April & December at up 71% of the time. This compares to an average return of 0.7% and hit rate of 61% for all months. Surprisingly, the returns for November in mid-term election years is even better with an average of 2.6% and hit rate of 82%. This might have to do with the ytd annual return being lower going into the elections at -1.8% through October with a hit rate of 53% so there is a relief rally on the other side. In summary, this earnings season has been more trick than treat for technology investors. Being more discerning and trading around positions has been the correct tactic. I think will continue to be the case. Let us hope November gives us something to be thankful for. All the best in the week ahead.
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 →Given a couple of my friends misunderstood my short tweet yesterday, let me clarify. My post on Hynix was to acknowledge a datapoint for those calling THE TOP of the AI cycle. I believe it is important as an investor to not just focus on what is supportive of your investment case but even more so to focus on what is directly against it, especially if it is a universally acknowledged loved idea like AI. Having said that, let me be clear. I still strongly believe this is a “speedbump” which is what I have been writing about since my original post on June 20th. But a “speedbump” can be ugly as I have pointed out before. Starting in both late 1995 and 1997 there were drawdowns of over 50% in the semiconductor index. But the semi index finished up roughly 850% from the end of 1994 to the peak of the internet buildout in March of 2000 despite this. Also back then, those drawdowns had fundamental drivers. In 1995, Windows 95 did not lead to the upgrade cycle expected and companies were sitting on a bunch of DRAM inventory. Intel wrote off about $1B in DRAM inventory as an example. There is no excess memory inventories on balance sheets today. In 1997, the Asian currency crisis forced a slowdown in end-demand. The Iran war and continuation of the Ukraine conflict are both disruptive but there is no general slowdown in demand being caused by them that I can see. From a technical standpoint, I believe forced liquidations and margin calls in both retail accounts and hedge funds that typically run with leverage over the past couple of weeks is leading to a technical bottom. From June 22nd, the peak of the momentum trade, the S&P is down only 2.1% and the Nasdaq is down 6.6%. But the SOX index (the tip of the spear in the AI trade) is down 28.6%, the Morgan Stanley Momentum Index is down 38.0% and their Momentum TMT (tech, media and telecom) Index is down 53.5%. The ferocity of these moves in roughly one month has never been seen before in some cases. I believe this has sped up the cleansing process with prime brokers not wanting another Archegos situation. From a fundamental standpoint, the advent of Agentic AI started arguably at the end of January 30th with the formalization of OpenClaw. This requires 10-100x more tokens than chat-based AI. No question that token minimization is going on at the top 1% of companies which was the main reason for my speedbump concerns but the other 99% are still ramping. In summary, my view is that we could have seen at least a short-term bottom today with a strong rally ahead of us in the sectors most caught in the latest speedbump. Time as always will tell.
View original →Last wk, S&P/Nas/Mag7 were +1.2%/+1.7%/+4.0% despite oil +4% & bond ylds +7bps on Iran flare-up. 2 days remain during this seasonally favorable time from the last 3 trading days of June through first 9 days of July. Earning season starts w/ big banks on Tuesday. As I first posted about on June 28th and reiterated on July 5th, the seasonality is historically very favorable from the last three trading days of June through the first nine trading days of July during which the S&P/Nasdaq have advanced 1.6%/2.5% and been up 78% of the time since 1985. The S&P/Nasdaq is up 3.0%/3.6% during the first 10 trading days of this time period in 2026 already. But for the heart of the AI trade, the Semiconductor (SOX) Index is down 7.0% during these last 10 trading days on fears of a “speed bump” that I have been posting about since 6/28. For the AI trade going forward, two separate thoughts with two different implications are beginning to coalesce in my mind. The first thought is that AI revenue growth for the leading LLM models is likely to hit a “speed bump” and slow in the September quarter. Last week, $SPCX and $META released new LLM models that both closed much of the gap with the leading edge models from OpenAI and Anthropic. But Meta plans to price their model at roughly 1/4th the cost of the two leaders with SpaceX aggressive as well. This is particularly relevant as companies switched from token maxing in March to token minimization in June. As an example, the CEO of Coinbase posted on June 26th, “How to keep AI spend flat while token usage grows exponentially... Putting this into practice has cut our AI spend nearly in half, while our token usage continues to grow.” Sam Altman on Thursday: “we have heard enterprises on their concerns about AI costs, and 5.6 sol is a huge step forward for dollars-per-task, as are terra and luna”. But on a positive note, two more public cloud providers have been recently added to the four that already existed of $AMZN, $GOOGL, $MSFT and $ORCL. SpaceX in the past month raised over $100B in equity plus debt and plans to spend hundreds of billions to attack the $28.5 trillion TAM they talked about in their IPO prospectus. News surrounding Meta last week seems to imply that they are launching a cloud offering not because they have excess compute but so 1) they can double their compute spend from 7 MegaWatts in 2026 to 14 MegaWatts in 2027 and 2) have capacity to sell their Muse Spark LLM. So in summary, with this seasonally favorable period of time for the overall market coming soon to a close, I believe cutting back excess exposure is prudent. Reaction by investors on Tuesday to bank earnings which should be strong, may give us a good tell as to the risk vs reward at current levels over the shorter-term. As for the AI trade, I believe selectivity is key as we work our way through the “speed bump” and the positive implications of 4 aggressive public cloud vendors now becoming six versus the negatives of token maxing in March turning to token minimization in June. 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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