It’s Sunday again and that means the Overview Of The Week’s back!

The markets are always uncertain, but lately, with AI and its (supposed) consequences, it’s more uncertain than usual. But sun or rain, bull or bear, up or down, the Overview Of The Week is here!

I’ve written a lot this week and I was happy with this comment from Multi Kamran:

Thank you Kris ... one of your very best analysis! All the analysis articles since you came back from Omaha have been beyond awesome!!! Something happened with you when you visited us in the US!!

And yeah, in a way, I feel the same. I got soooo much energy from Omaha. It was my third visit and by far the best. And the two previous ones were already so great! It feels almost like a rejuvenation process, haha. Talking to fellow investors, newsletter writers, portfolio managers, company management, people working at family offices and so many other professional and passionate investors really fed my enthusiasm.

On top of that, the event I organized with Pieter Slegers (Compounding Quality) and Brian Feroldi (Long-Term Mindset) also made me realize how much my articles mean to some people. I sometimes read that here (see Kamran’s comment above, for example), but hearing it in real life cranks up the good feeling for longer.

In Omaha, maybe 20 or 25 people also recognized me and wanted a picture with me. No, I’m not talking about my picture with Mohnish Pabrai, haha. Ordinary people whom I don’t know came asking for a picture with me, saying that they love Potential Multibaggers. That really felt great, and so, if you ever see me in real life, don’t hesitate to come talk to me.

On top of the wonderful experiences in Omaha, I had been on holiday in Egypt two weeks earlier. That definitely also helped.

And I see more opportunities now, which I like more than if stocks are expensive.

But enough about me, let’s dive into what you are here for.

Articles In The Past Weeks

This is the fifth article this week. Let’s look back at what you got before.

The first article this week was the earnings deep dive on TransMedics. The stock dropped about 40% over the last two weeks. You can read here if that means it’s a buy now.

Another stock that dropped a lot this year is Shopify. It’s down almost 50% fropm its highs in 2025. Same question, same approach: an earnings deep dive.

Friday, it was the 15th of the month and you know what that means: the Best Buys Now. This time, in a slightly new format.

Yesterday, you got my article about Mercado Libre. It’s another earnings deep dive that talks about the context of the margin compressions and negative free cash flow. You can read it here.

Memes Of The Week

There’s a good harvest of memes this week. It’s the longest selection since I started this.

This is the first one.

The second one laughs at the arbitrary nature of trade patterns.

For the third one, you have to read the text at the bottom first, the JPM assumption.

It’s funny to laugh with other people, but real intelligence shows when you can laugh with yourself. So, this is about many of us. :-)

And I think we all know this situation.

I made my own meme with this image.

And this shows that token costs hurt.

And we don’t stop yet. Here’s the next one already.

And the last one this week.

Source

Interesting Podcasts Or Books

The Compound and Friends is a podcast that is sometimes a bit chaotic, but the takes are always interesting. I listened to this week’s episode about the Nasdaq euphoria. You can listen to it here. I also listened to an episode of the great podcast series Founders. David Senra talks with Eric Jorgenson, the author of The Book of Elon, about, you guessed it, Elon Musk. It’s an interesting conversation on how Elon Musk functions.

The third podcast I listened to and that I want to recommend (I listened to more) was an older one that was still on my list. In the podcast In Good Company with Nicolai Tangen, the CEO of the largest single investor in the world, Norges Bank Investment Management, talks with interesting guests and Reid Hoffman is such a guest.

Hoffman was at Apple in 1994, founded a social network company called SocialNet in 1997 and was part of the Board of PayPal when it was founded. He became the COO of the company in 2000 and was part of the PayPal mafia, as the group was called. He then founded LinkedIn in 2002 and joined the Board of Microsoft in 2017, after Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016. He was also one of the first who gave capital to OpenAi in 2016 and joined the Board until 2023. Since then, he co-founded and funded several AI startups.

You can listen to the conversation here.

The markets in the past week

This is what the markets have done in the past week.

As you see, the S&P 500, up 0.13%, and the Nasdaq, down 0.08%, didn’t move much. The Russell 2000 dropped 2.37%.

The Greed & Fear Index remained in Greed territory.

Quick Facts

1. Why This Is Not Like The Dotcom Bubble

Last week, I wondered if the top was near. This week, I want to add some more thoughts about this.

First, I don’t think this is like 2000 yet. Markets are not as expensive as they were back then. I hear some people saying that. It’s nonsense. For example, Cisco traded at a forward PE of 150 at the time. Nvidia now? About 27. That’s a difference.

Maybe you think that this was the exception, but that’s not true. Look at this chart shared in the episode of The Compound & Friends I already referred to.

As you can see, the valuations were much, much more expensive back then. Now 59% of companies in the Nasdaq trade at a PE between 20 and 40. Back then, 76.4% was either unprofitable or traded at a PE above 60. So, no, this is not the same as the dotcom bubble.

This is another aspect of it, margins.

So, back then, 10% of the companies had negative margins. Now? None. There were no companies with margins between 50% and 100%. Now? 20.4%. If you look at 25% margins or more, then it was just 25.3%. Now 70.6%.

Things have changed. We live in the information economy now, not the mostly industrial economy of more than 25 years ago.

On top of that, there were hundreds of IPOs by companies that had one thing in common: they said they were internet companies and had no revenue yet.

Maybe you have seen this chart.

Source

It looks pretty scary, right? But with what you know now, it’s extremely unlikely that the market will drop 80% and take years to recover like back then.

Of course, a drop is always possible, but don’t be afraid of a dotcom scenario. Or at least not up to now.

Productivity is already scaling now, unlike then, the valuations are not like they were then.

For commodity products like memory, there will definitely be a bust at some point. I’m talking about Sandisk, Micron, etc. When? No idea. But if you look back at EVERY single infrastructure outbuilt in the past, that happened at a certain moment.

You saw the same in the infrastructure buildup for the internet. It’s not that we suddenly used less bandwidth in the early 2000s, to the contrary, but there was overcapacity because of efficiency jumps in internet delivery.

I think the same will happen now. I’m not worried about companies like Nvidia and AMD, as they have truly differentiated chips, but memory chips aren’t as high-tech as state-of-the-art GPUs. That’s just demand and pricing and if you look at the history of chips, especially those, they have always had a boom-and-bust cycle. Look at these charts and you will see what I mean.

This is Sandisk.

Look at revenue. It had a great jump, of course. But now look at net income. It was still negative in Q2 2025 and in Q1, it was already at $3.6B.

Ok, look at Micron.

Sure, Micron started at a higher income base. But, it’s the same pattern, revenue is up big, but net income much more. You can see that in the CAGR of 124.5% revenue growth, but 396.5% net income growth.

How is that possible? Simple. Pricing. Memory chip prices have ballooned because there is a shortage of memory chips. Once that imbalance is fixed, prices will drop by two-thirds or more. The question is when there will be more supply and/or when there are AI efficiency gains. I don’t foresee this going away anytime soon, so if you are a trader, I think there’s more juice in this lemon than you might think.

As for the market, I see two scenarios: the market will go down soon or it will continue to go up, haha. I’m making fun of it, but I mean it seriously.

Either the market lets off some steam soon (meaning in the next few months), which would be healthy, or the melt-up continues and that will only make the drop bigger.

But history seems to suggest that there will be a drop.

Beware: just because that’s what historically happened doesn’t mean it will now. But it’s possible. As always, we’ll have to see.

I get questions about where the system could break. Well, I don’t know. There are always many possibilities. Think of a black swan event, which is inherently unknowable. Or it could be spiking inflation. Or maybe it’s this.

Source

The earnings expectations for the S&P 500 for the next 5 years are now at 21%. That’s very high. Any disappointment there and the stock market tumbles. That’s how this game is played. And I don’t think it’s too crazy to expect lower EPS over the next 5 years. We all know about the gigantic capex the Mag7 and others are taking on now for data centers. You can’t extrapolate that line to the next five years and maybe some have, which could influence the average expectation.

Or will it be the new Fed Chair that causes pessimism in the market? I saw this graph.

Source

I should add again that I generally don’t draw too many conclusions from such charts. As so often, correlation is no causation. But still, it’s interesting to see.

I think that everyone who has followed me for some time knows I’m generally very optimistic. But I can’t close my eyes for certain things. That’s not optimism but pink glasses. I look at reality as it is and I believe things will turn out well. I do now as well, even if the stock market does not do great over the next few months or so. It will be a temporary hiccup. If it comes, that is.

2. Which Companies Are Interesting Now?

As you know, I invest in other stocks than the Potential Multibaggers as well. For newer readers, you could see that in the Best Buys Now article and in my portfolio, which is linked there.

In that context, I find this chart interesting. I had not seen it before I bought for my portfolio this week, but look, two of the stocks I bought are above the second line, the highest quality. Nvidia is, not surprisingly, the king of the heap.

I think if you look at the AI bottlenecks, you see that multiple big winners. And Coatue put that in a great visual.

Source

In the past 15 years or so, the Mag 7 has performed phenomenally, but will that continue? Their margins are no longer that high because of the huge investments they make and it’s very questionable if they will return in the first years, if they return at all.

On the other hand, they know that they have no other option. They have to spend to stay in the race. If they don’t do it, they will definitely be disrupted and that could cost them their existence as a relevant company.

Now, I know this still doesn’t really answer the question in the title of this paragraph. Which stocks are interesting now? Interesting and attractive are not the same, of course. I see a lot of interesting stocks that I wouldn’t want to touch now. On the other hand, there are also more attractive stocks because the AI trade drew money from elsewhere, mostly, but definitely not only, SaaS. Look at these two beauties, for example.

Just saying.

3. The SpaceX IPO

The new milestone for the market has a date: June 12. SpaceX will have its IPO on the Nasdaq on that day under the ticker SPCX. The company aims at a valuation of $1.75T to $2T.. That’s insane. It wants to raise $75B, which makes it by far the largest IPO in history.

Source

And no IPO without hype. After all, an IPO must be sold. Analysts called this a ‘Netscape’ moment. The Internet browser went public in August 1995. The shares were planned to go public at $14, were offered at $28 with a last-day change, opened at $71, reached $75 and closed at $58. It’s seen as the start of the dotcom bubble.

And yes, the peers of SpaceX immediately had incredible gains this week. Just look at these two: Rocket Lab and AST Spacemobile.

But the exceptional size of the IPO also has disadvantages. cut both ways. Some fear that the IPO will vacuum up even more liquidity from other places. SpaceX holds thousands of BTCs, and there is a fear that crypto traders will prefer SpaceX over crypto.

And talking about that, there’s a new Fed Chairman period. Look at this.

Now, as with so many things in the stock market, this is correlation, not causation. I think the SpaceX IPO could have a bigger effect on crypto than a new Fed Chair.

But back to SpaceX. MSCI and other index providers warn that SpaceX’s giant IPO will force big changes to benchmarks. Passive funds will have to buy massive amounts of the stock, and that could distort the market allocations for months. For months, meaning for six months, when the lock-up period ends. Then dozens of funds will dump SpaceX shares on the market.

Why? Because they are so overweighted SpaceX. They invested in private rounds and couldn’t sell. Scottish Mortgage Investment Fund (Baillie Gifford) for example, has a position of probably bigger than 15% of the fund and at this valuation probably more than 20%. They will want to take a big part of those gains. And they won’t be alone.

That could have effects for the market in another way. If all the money flows out of SpaceX, it could flow back into the market, into other stocks and that cause a new stock market impulse towards the end of the year.

Of course, that’s just theory. In theory, reality is easy, but in reality, it’s not.

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Tuesday afternoon, I got back home from Omaha (and fell asleep on the couch within 15 minutes of my arrival; jetlag is real).

That’s also the reason you didn’t get an Overview Of The Week last week, so this is one for two weeks. Shoutout to Mark for always being there to assist me with the OOTW!

An OOTW of two weeks means we’ve got a lot to cover, so let’s dive in right away!

Articles In The Past Weeks

Last week, I published my article on Celsius and you can expect a new one soon, as the new results are already out.

This week, this is already the fourth article.

The first one was about Omaha, Berkshire and 5 lessons. I hope to see you next year in Omaha, the festival for investors.

The two other previous articles were on earnings, both of stocks that have seen big declines recently.

On Friday, you got a deep dive into Duolingo’s earnings. And yesterday, I published my theory about the battle The Trade Desk is waging.

Memes Of The Week

Multi Flo is the Meme King, as we all know. And he proved that again this week by sharing this, asking what stage of the cycle we are in?

And Flo knows his classics.

I also had to laugh with this one. I sent it to some value investors. :-)

We all know about the Hanta virus by now. But we don’t have to worry about it, haha.

Markets are not the same anymore. Or are they?

Multi Dheeraj shared this funny one.

I laughed out loud with this one.

This is the last one of the rich harvest this week. You need some reading but it’s worth it.

Interesting Podcasts Or Books

I read Atomic Habits on the plane to and from Omaha. It’s a classic and maybe that’s why I had expected a bit more of it, but it’s still a good read.

The markets in the past week

As you can see, the Nasdaq was up 5.68%, the S&P 500 by 3.26% and the Russell 2000 by 2.66%.

More thoughts about this later in the article.

I don’t think it’s a big surprise that the Greed & Fear Index is in Greed territory.

It actually feels more like extreme greed.

Quick Facts

1. Are We Near The Top?

This is what I wrote two weeks ago:

This is a weird market. Despite Iran and the ensuing energy crisis, the indexes are at all-time highs. The fact that this is exceptional can be seen in this Bank of America chart.

Source

I want to point out a few other elements to show how exceptional this market is, and probably not in a good way.

While the S&P 500 is at all-time highs, just 42 of the 500 stocks contribute to the upside performance. Usually, that’s around 100. That means that the average stock in the S&P 500 has been struggling.

Just look at this chart.

Source

Based on the following metrics, US stocks appear expensive or very expensive right now. This is a Charles Schwab table.

Source

And this is another one that shows markets are expensive.

Source

As you can see, only Health Care trades at a normal level vs the 30-year trend. All the rest is expensive. As for the last decade, Materials, Health Care, Energy and Financials are more or less around the 50% mark. Again, everything else looks pretty expensive.

Now, we all know AI could boost productivity a lot and that could mean that what looks expensive could be reasonably priced in hindsight. But I think AI will need a breakthrough moment for that like DeepSeek was one. With the AI-related stocks, especially semis, going vertically, the stock market keeps frontrunning AI efficiency gains. That’s normal, but it also means the expectations could be inflated too much. But even if that is the case, it could mean there is another leg up.

Someone asked Grok a good question.

Someone asked an intelligent follow-up question, though. And that shows how hard market-timing is.

Something else that might illustrate the forming bubble is this.

Source

As you can see, the defensive sectors have the lowest market cap ever, even smaller than in 2000. And that is with Walmart at a forward PE of 45 and Costco at a forward PE of 49.

Michael Burry, who has predicted 27 of the last 3 bear markets, said that the markets feel like the last months of the 1999-2000 bubble. I don’t agree and this guy on X pointed out that Burry is often bearish.

This starts to feel like 2021, though. I even got questions from some Multis on “why I missed AI completely” while I’m long AMD, TSMC, Nvidia, ASML, Cloudflare, CrowdStrike, Broadcom, BESI, and others. I also pointed out the opportunity for Micron about 400% ago.

In 2021, the rise of meme stocks led me to make my worst investment ever: Skillz. It was a tiny position in my portfolio (less than 0.1%), but it still stings that I was fooled into believing the market conditions were normal.

But back to the market.

This is the Schiller CAPE ratio:

Source

At the same time, even if you only poured all of your money into the Nasdaq 100 exactly at the top of the tech bubble (which would be a pretty awful strategy), you would still have averaged a yearly return of 8.2% at this moment.

That is the power of long-term investing.

There are many warnings out there now. Look at this one, for example.

As everyone knows, correlation is not causation, but there are quite a few signs pointing in the same direction.

This is another one.

But this doesn’t mean you should time the market. There’s also this.

If so many people are hedged, that can have the opposite effect and there could be a gamma squeeze. When you buy a call, market makers (think of Citadel) sell it to you, but they have to buy the underlying stock or ETF. That drives up the prices, causing more calls and Citadel and others buying more stocks. That causes the gamma squeeze.

But at the same time, such high call volumes have often marked tops. And a lot of the calls are zero-day calls, which are the most volatile of them all. It’s not particularly a sign that the markets are healthy, but that there is a lot of speculation. But you probably didn’t need this explanation to know that. You can also see that in this chart. It shows that high-beta stocks hit an all-time high relative to the S&P 500. The “safest” stocks hit all-time lows.

Source

But there are counterindicators as well. If you look at the IPOs, for example, you don’t see a boom there yet. At the same time, I have already said multiple times I believe there is a bubble in private markets, with companies like SpaceX, Anthropic, OpenAI, Loveable, Stripe and other companies mostly linked to AI. That could explain why there is no surge in IPOs.

But with SPACs, NFTs, web3 and other crazy stories in 2021, it went pretty wild. I don’t have the feeling we are there yet.

But you can’t really know and the best thing is to keep investing. But if you are worried about the markets, you might have some bigger cash cushion now.

2. ServiceNow Dead? Nvidia Doesn’t Think So.

At ServiceNow Knowledge 2026 in Las Vegas, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang went on stage with ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott to show how the two companies want to partner to make enterprise AI more than just some chatbots.

Source

ServiceNow launched Project Arc, an autonomous desktop agent. The system can figure out tasks, write code, use enterprise apps, access files and terminals, and adapt when workflows change. Instead of using rigid automation scripts, the agent works more like a human employee who has to deal with unexpected situations.

Nvidia’s Jensen Huang said software is moving into a big new market. Factories, logistics, warehouses, and supply chains will all be automated with AI. He said that the entire factory will be a robot and it will be managed by AI agents. The partnership between Nvidia and ServiceNow is based on that vision. ServiceNow will take of the rules, approvals, and workflow management for AI agents, while Nvidia provides the chips and secure software environment that lets the agents run safely.

ServiceNow CEO Bill McDermott said many companies are deploying AI without proper controls, creating major security risks. The Project Arc platform is a safer way to scale agentic AI across the enterprise.

Huang also said agentic AI requires about 10x more compute than earlier generative AI systems because agents must reason, use tools, and execute tasks continuously in real time. Of course, that’s a huge driver for Nvidia chips.

FedEx was there as well. The company served as a real-world example of this. The company already runs millions of ServiceNow workflows monthly while building AI-driven digital supply chain systems.

This is interesting, as we all see the limitations of current AI applications at the enterprise level.

3. 1 In 8 Americans Now Use GLP-1 Drugs

I saw this graph this week.

Source

12.4% of Americans are already on GLP-1. That’s wild if you think that just over a year ago, in February 2025, that number was 5.8%. I think we are just at the beginning of this trend.

As usual, Fiscal ai has the data precisely.

This shows that Eli Lilly is winning the battle with Novo Nordisk. And with retatrutide, a so-called triple G receptor agonist (GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon) in Phase 3 trials and label expansions (think of alcoholism, for example), I think the stock is interesting here. “Reta,” as it is already known, showed even greater weight-loss effects (up to 28.7% of body weight), as well as type 2 diabetes (not surprisingly) and knee osteoarthritis.

Retatrutide may be even a bigger blockbuster than Zepbound and Mounjaro. Novo Nordisk might look much cheaper, I wouldn’t want it in my portfolio. Look at the revenue growth projections for the next two years.

Compare that to Eli Lilly:

And I think that the 2027 estimates will be way too low if the company can release retratrutide in 2027, which is expected.

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It’s Sunday and that means the Overview Of The Week again. On Tuesday, I am leaving for Omaha for the Annual General Meeting of Berkshire Hathaway.

It’s the first time without Warren Buffett, but I am still looking forward to it. To be honest, the Berkshire AGM is OK to follow live, but you can probably follow it better through the livestream. The really fantastic thing about Omaha in that week is that everyone who means anything in investing is there and there are numerous events in the days around the AGM.

I have the honor of inviting you to two of those.

The first is one I organize with Pieter Slegers and Brian Feroldi. On Saturday evening from 8.15 pm to 10.15 pm in the speakeasy Howard & Fine, inside Moe & Curly’s Pub And Grill.

Please register if you want to come.

You can do that here.

I hope to see you there!

Secondly, my friend Vitaliy Katsenelson organizes a FREE BREAKFAST in Omaha on Sunday, May 3. He allowed me to invite every single one of you. Important: if you want to go, you have to let him know. No registration, no breakfast. But it’s totally free. Don’t wait too long, because, while there is a big capacity, I think it will be full fast. I will be there as well. You can register here.

One last announcement: since I will still be in Omaha next week, there will be no Overview Of The Week next Sunday.

Articles In The Past Weeks

This is the third article this week.

The first one was about ServiceNow.

In the second one, I combined the Best Buys Now and the additions to the Forever Portfolio. You can read that article here.

Memes Of The Week

Four memes this week. The first one plays on Bitcoin’s weak performance over the last year.

Source

If you want to know why I’m a long-term investor, this is one of the reasons.

I also had to laugh with this one.

Flo shared this one about ServiceNow.

Interesting Podcasts Or Books

I listened to a very interesting Invest Like The Best podcast episode this week. The guest was Dylan Patel and if you want to have insights on the edge of AI and chips. You can listen to it here.

The markets in the past week

The Russell 2000 was up 0.36%, the S&P 500 0.55% and the Nasdaq 1.50%.

The Greed & Fear Index surged incredibly in the last weeks. It was at 9 on the 14th of April, now it’s already at 66, in Greed territory.

Quick Facts

1. An Exceptional Market?

This is a weird market. Despite Iran and the ensuing energy crisis, the indexes are at all-time highs. The fact that this is exceptional can be seen in this Bank of America chart.

Source

A portfolio of 25% in stocks, bonds, commodities and cash is up 26%. That is the highest return since 1933, when the stock market was still suffering from the results of the Great Depression. That shows that these are not normal times. On the other hand, are there “normal” times in investing?

But at the same time, the fact that there’s a fast recovery after a crisis is not that exceptional. Look at this overview.

Source

Investors often panic, but just focus on the long term, not the short term. Not that focusing on the long term is easy.

Now, just to be clear, the recovery has been remarkable. The S&P 500 is up 12.5% over the last four weeks and that was the 20th-biggest 4-week jump since 1950.

Source

2. Tech? Tech! Well, Some Tech.

The S&P 500 at all-time highs is not that crazy if you see that the earnings estimates for this year and next year keep going up. But the crazy thing is that almost all of the estimate upgrades come from three sectors: energy, materials and tech.

Source

As you can see, tech is very resilient, with EPS estimates up already 11% this year and 15.1% for next year.

But of course, tech is divided into multiple subdomains. If you look at the companies that

Source

As you can see, Micron alone is responsible for 51% of the EPS revision for the S&P 500. That’s totally nuts and it shows in what exceptional times we live. Add Broadcom and you already have 61%.

And it’s not just Micron. Semiconductors now make up 14% of the Total US stock market cap. That’s up 3x in three years and double as much as during the dotcom bubble. Crazy times.

Source

3. Charlie Munger and Howard Marks

I’m showing this X post completely, as it is important.

An overwhelming majority of people are focused on the short term, even if they think they are not.

One of the biggest investing mistakes you can make is selling winners too early. That’s why I always err on the side of holding too long, not selling too early. Selling too early can feel right over the short term but can be a huge way of missing out on the best investment of your life.

4. Earnings In The Upcoming Week

Normally, I do this at the end of the article, but this time, I put it here, as the upcoming earnings week is pretty crazy, especially on Wednesday, when Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Alphabet all publish their results at the same moment. Chipotle Mexican Grill, Brookfield, and KLA Corporation also report at the same time. Apple and Mastercard report on Thursday and Spotify, Visa and Robinhood report on Tuesday.

Source

What a week! In total, 172 S&P 500 companies report in the upcoming week, so I think it’s fair to say this is the most important earnings week for the market when it comes to Q1 2026 earnings.

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Did you check your calendar when you saw the Overview Of The Week come in?

It’s Saturday, not Sunday, but you already got the Overview Of The Week today.

The reason could already be deduced from the title. I’m going to Egypt with my family for a week. As a child of the 80s, I have to think of the great Bangles hit “Walk Like An Egyptian” every time I hear the country’s name. I know it’s maybe a bit immature and culturally not fair for a country with such a rich history, but it’s true.

Source

As a sidenote, the songwriter, Liam Sternberg, was a bit tipsy when he crossed the English Channel. The sea was choppy, and passengers and waitresses had to do moves to keep their balance. It reminded him of the postures of figures in Ancient Egyptian tomb paintings. But back to today.

The consequence of this very-last-minute holiday is that you get the Overview Of The Week on Saturday already, that you will hear me less often in the upcoming week and that there will be no Overview Of The Week next Sunday (no, not next Saturday either).

I have worked on part two of the new pick. I already have about 6,000 words, but I could cut or add words depending on my editing process. So, that’s one you might get in the upcoming week. Or, if not in the upcoming week, definitely in the week that follows. It depends on how much time I will dedicate to working there (don’t pity me, I still love what I do!) and how many hours the article still needs, which I never know exactly and chronically underestimate.

Articles In The Past Weeks

This is just the second article this week. The first one was, of course, on the new pick. You can read the full 7,600 words here.

Memes Of The Week

Three memes this week. This is the first one.

And the second one.

I always love it when people can break out of the current paradigm to mock it, like this one, for example.

Interesting Podcasts Or Books

One of the biggest influences on my investing was David Gardner. As long as he still talked about stocks himself, until 2021, I never missed an episode of his podcast. Now, I listen every now and then and this week, I did that. In this episode, David Gardner talks about little tricks that can help you in life.

The markets in the past week

For a while now, the market and tech stocks have been disconnected (more on that later), so if you are overweight tech (like I am), it’s now harder to assess the broader market by looking at your portfolio alone.

Let’s look at what the indexes have done this week.

As you can see, the markets were up substantially again, just like last week. The Nasdaq won 4.68%, the Russell 2000 3.97% the S&P 500 3.56%.

So, where does that leave us year-to-date?

So, after this week:

• The S&P 500 is down just 0.42% YTD,

• The Nasdaq is -1.46% YTD

• The Russell 2000 is up 5.99% YTD.

Remarkable. Because it doesn’t feel like that. But those are the numbers.

At the beginning of last week, the Greed & Fear Index dropped to 9 but it ended the week at 19. This week, it continued to zoom up, to 38.

That’s still in Fear territory, but the sentiment seems to be improving fast.

Quick Facts

1. Nasdaq 100 Replaces Atlassian by Sandisk

This week, the Nasdaq 100 has booted Atlassian (TEAM) from the Nasdaq 100. It is replaced by Sandisk (SNDK). There was not a single reason why Atlassian was replaced, but the fact that the stock is down the second-most over the last five years won’t have helped. Only “PainPal” did worse over the last five years.

But being removed from the index is not always as negative as it sounds. Sometimes those stocks have already had a big drop and the removal sometimes marks the bottom. On the contrary, the stocks that come in have often had a big recent jump, and that goes for Sandisk too. It’s up more than 25x over the last year.

But, as said, that doesn’t always mean it’s a good thing to “sell your losers” and “keep your winners.” In general, if the investment thesis holds, it’s often a good thing to hold the stocks that are out of favor.

Charlie Bilello gave an example of this with an index replacement. In August 2020, Exxon Mobil was removed from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and Salesforce replaced it. Exxon returned almost 4x since then, while Salesforce is down almost 40%.

2. Private Equity In Trouble? Or Opportunity?

For about a year or so, I have said every now and then that I saw a bubble in private equity. I couldn’t put my finger on it exactly, but I saw initiatives by people with questionable integrity that wanted to ‘democratize’ private equity. If that’s the case, you know something is fishy.

Private credit was the first problem for private equity. This story is still evolving, but it’s clear some private equity funds will get hurt. The second and simultaneous problem for private equity is the massive exposure to software. Only in the last few months of this year have software deals come down a bit, but they still account for 49% of all deals.

Private market managers poured hundreds of billions of dollars into software firms over this period, betting that software-as-a-service (SaaS) business models would produce strong growth and consistent cash generation. The private equity industry has never been this exposed to a single sector. But now valuations crash and don’t forget that private credit was also mostly given, probably much more than 49%, to software companies.

I’m very sure that some of the software names out there are babies being thrown out with the bathwater, but there will be AI disruption of software companies that only have a nice interface, but no proprietary data, insights, high switching costs or network effects. That means that this is a double whammy for private equity.

Now, the market has sold off many private equity companies and there too, some opportunities could spring up soon. I’m thinking of companies like Brookfield (not that far off its high) and KKR, both part of a cream-of-the-crop group in private equity.

3. Amazon’s Hidden Chip Giant

Amazon’s stock was up about 12% this week after its CEO Andy Jassy published his annual shareholder letter and gave a few interviews.

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Jassy shared that Amazon’s AWS AI revenue was already at a $15 billion annual run rate in Q1 2026. Evercore’s Mark Mahaney, a legend in tech investing, had forecasted somewhere between $5 and $10 billion. Three years into the AI wave, AWS’s AI run rate is nearly 260 times bigger than AWS was at the same point in its history. Not a typo. 260x.

The crazy thing is that AI revenue wasn’t even the best news. The chip business inside Amazon seems to have been underestimated for a very long time.

Amazon’s custom silicon division, which includes Graviton (’CPU’), Trainium (AI accelerator), and Nitro (networking), is now at a $20 billion annual run rate.

That doubled from $10 billion at last quarter’s earnings. On top of that, Jassy said if Amazon’s chip division were a standalone business selling to third parties like any other chipmaker, the annual run rate would be around $50 billion. That would make it comparable to Broadcom’s AI chip business.

The market assigns zero value to Amazon’s chip business because it’s buried within AWS. And yet it’s potentially a $50 billion standalone operation. That’s bigger than 82% of the Fortune 500.

Two large AWS customers asked if they could buy all of Amazon’s Graviton capacity for 2026. Amazon had to say no because, well, other customers exist.

On the Trainium side, Trainium 2 is completely sold out. Trainium 3, which just started shipping a few weeks ago, is nearly fully subscribed already. And a significant chunk of Trainium 4, which is still about 18 months away from broad availability, has already been reserved.

AWS CEO Matt Garman confirmed at re:Invent that all currently available Anthropic models were trained on Trainium. There are now 1.4 million Trainium chips deployed across all three generations, and Anthropic’s Claude runs on over a million Trainium 2 chips. Anthropic helped AWS co-design the chip from the ground up, working at the kernel level with Amazon’s Annapurna Labs team.

This all tells you something about the chip demand. For Amazon’s chips, but also chips in general. As I wrote last week, it may be time to buy Nvidia again.

Free cash flow dropped from $38 billion to $11 billion because Amazon is spending almost $200 billion in capex in 2026, mostly on AI infrastructure. That scares people. But Jassy said Amazon already has customer commitments for a substantial portion of this capex, with most of it expected to be monetized in 2027 and 2028. That includes the $100 billion-plus OpenAI commitment, on top of the Anthropic partnership.

In January, I made 5 bold predictions for 2026. I’m still confident that these two will prove to be true.

4. Anthropic: The Stock Destroyer (part 372)

At this point, Anthropic might be the single most effective stock destroyer on the planet. Every time it puts out a press release, dozens of stocks drop like a rock. The market sells first and reads the press release in full later.

It happened again this week. Anthropic announced Claude Mythos Preview, a new AI model it considered too dangerous for public release, and launched Project Glasswing, a cybersecurity initiative around it.

Mythos found thousands of vulnerabilities across every major operating system and browser, including a 27-year-old bug in OpenBSD, a system that’s famous for being unhackable and a bug that had been hiding in FFmpeg for 16 years and survived five million automated scans.

Sounds impressive, right? It is. But look at what happened before anyone even digested the details.

When Fortune first leaked the existence of Mythos back in March, cybersecurity stocks cratered. CrowdStrike dropped around 10%, Palo Alto 8%, Cloudflare 14%. The narrative instantly flipped from “cybersecurity spending is non-discretionary” to “AI will make all security software obsolete.” Billions in market cap gone in hours, all because of a leaked draft blog post.

Then, this week, the actual announcement came out. And guess what? CrowdStrike and Palo Alto were named as launch partners.

This is the pattern now. Anthropic says something, the market panics, software and cybersecurity names get slaughtered, and then people actually read the announcement and realize it’s more nuanced than “everything is dead.” But they have sold their stocks and then invent a rationally-sounding explanation like “more uncertainty.”

This fits into the anti-bubble I’ve been writing about. In the dotcom bubble, the biggest bubbles were in public companies. Think Yahoo!, Pets(.)com, Webvan and many others.

In contrast, this time, the biggest bubbles are in private markets: Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX, Stripe, ...

I’m not saying these aren’t phenomenal businesses; they clearly are. But the valuations are crazy. And the result is that money is being pulled out of public markets to chase these private names (see above in this Overview Of The Week for the percentage of software in private equity).

This puts more selling pressure on the public companies that are supposedly disrupted. Look at this chart that Michael Batnick shared:

This is about Wednesday and Thursday. The S&P 500 was never up this much with software down this much. This already shows you again that the movements are extreme.

Public shareholders get hit twice: once by the panic selling after every press release, and again by the capital outflows into private markets chasing the next hot AI round.

At the same time, forward earnings expectations for software stocks continue to go up.

Source

I’m not saying Anthropic is doing this on purpose, but it’s a hypemachine. An AI model too dangerous for public release? I don’t know about you, but damn, I want to try that out! I’m still frustrated a lot with the current models, for many use cases.

The model is clearly very powerful. It found four vulnerabilities that escaped for so long. Anthropic said these capabilities weren’t even trained intentionally. They just emerged.

But the market keeps pattern-matching “new AI capability = existing companies are dead” without doing the work. The companies inside Project Glasswing, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, CrowdStrike, Palo Alto, Broadcom, and about 40 others, are getting $100 million in usage credits and early access. They’ll be stronger from this, not weaker. Being at Anthropic’s table is probably better than being on its menu.

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Happy Easter if you celebrate.

I don’t always publish the Overview Of The Week on such special days, but I wanted to do it this week, especially because I have an announcement to make. And of course, as always, some thoughts about the markets. Let’s dive in.

Articles In The Past Weeks

This is just the second article this week. The first one was on Topicus. You can read it here.

A NEW PICK!

There were two reasons I published only one article this week.

The first one was private. On Wednesday evening, my good friend Michael Gielkens invited me to Maastricht to hear Sofina CEO Harold Boël speak.

(Source)

If you don’t know Sofina, it’s one of the best Belgian holding companies. It’s been run by generations by the Boël family, who made their fortune through steel.

While I was in Maastricht, I also took my bike with me and did two days of cycling, which really gave me the same feeling as a full week of vacation.

The first day, I did a relaxing and flat 50-km ride in Belgian Limburg, the second day was an 80-km ride in Dutch Limburg. There, I did some hills you might know from the Amstel Gold Race (if you like professional cycling): Cauberg, Geulhemmerberg, Bemelerberg, Looorberg, Camerig, Vaalserberg and several others that are not included in the race.

But there was a second, for you much more important reason why I only published one article this week: research.

Two weeks ago, I already wrote this:

I’ve been researching much more this week, as there are more attractive stocks with this pullback. There may be crystallizing something, but I’m not sure yet.

It’s that same stock that really convinced me in the last few weeks. I’m always careful to share anything because I want to have the option to withdraw at any step of the process. If I find something that impacts the thesis too much, I want to throw away my work. Without a doubt or without sunk cost fallacy. If I announce too much in advance, I feel too obligated to live up to my promise.

But I have done all the work now and found nothing about the new pick that worries me too much and a lot that makes me really excited. That’s why you will get the new pick this week, probably on Tuesday or Wednesday. I have the outline of the first article, but it still needs some work.

I’m very excited about this new pick. It has been on my Watchlist for a long time and because of the recent pullback, I think it’s the right time to invest in this company.

Memes Of The Week

Just one meme this week, but it’s a good one.

Interesting Podcasts Or Books

This week, I listened to the No More Investing Secrets podcast.

The episode was about Constellation Software, the SaaSmageddon, Wise and much more. You can find it here.

The markets in the past week

This week, the markets were up substantially. The Nasdaq won 4.44%, the S&P 500 3.36% and the Russell 2000 3.28%.

While the Greed & Fear Index dropped to 9 early in the week, it ended the week at 19. Still in Extreme Fear, but not as much as it was.

Quick Facts

1. Buy Stocks!

Ben Carlson wrote this on X this week:

No one knows how long a correction will last when you’re in it But buying stocks when they are down tends to be a good long-term strategy A look at what happens when you buy the stock market down 10%, 20% and 30%.

I keep repeating such stats because I know it’s necessary. I’ve seen it so many times before: people nodding when I point such things out, even saying “of course” when I show them the theory, but when it comes to action, they are still doing the exact opposite of what they theoretically know to do.

The difficult thing about investing is that we are used to immediate feedback, not delayed feedback. In that sense, investing resembles the long-term effort of building a business, training for a sports career, or anything else that takes years to build. There will be rough patches, like injuries in sports, but only with persistence, you will succeed.

This overview shows the same thing.

(Source)

As you see, in most of the years, 63% of the years to be exact (12/19), the stock market was positive from day 60 to the end of the year.

Now, to be honest (and long-time Multis know this), I don’t care about my returns for the year. I focus on the real long term, preferably decades.

2. Is It Time To Buy Nvidia Again?

This week, several people sent me this and today, Karan also shared it on Slack.

Quietly, Nvidia seems to have become very cheap again, at just 18.7x forward earnings, a multiple it has not traded at since 2018. That’s crazy, if you know that the stock is up 60% over the last year and 1,170% over the last 5 years.

The funny thing is that many people think Nvidia is expensive because it’s up so much. But you can see here, that it’s not multiple expansion, just sheer earnings power.

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So, how did our stocks do this week? This is an overview of all the stocks that moved 5% or more. There were 10 stocks this week, all up more than 5%.

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Yesterday, I was a speaker at the VFB Conference in Antwerp. You can see a picture here that Multi Frederic sent me. Thank you very much for that pic. It’s the only one I have so far. There were multiple professional photographers, but it takes a while before I will have those pictures.

There were 2,000 investors there and I spoke with many people. Overall, the sentiment is really negative now.

I also spoke to some Multis who were there and came to me. Thank you for those great conversations. And what stood out to me is that Multis are wired differently. While the general mood was one of negativity about the state of the world and investing, Multis can see through the clouds. They are more optimistic.

Now, that doesn’t mean it’s easy for Multis to invest now. We are all humans and that leads to conflicting feelings. On the one hand, many of you have seen this (and worse) before.

Sometimes, people seem to forget that in 2022, there was a crash for tech stocks. The Nasdaq as a whole was down 36%, more than during the Covid crash. Right now, the Nasdaq is down ‘just’ 12.5%.

But the problem, both then and now, is that many stocks are down much more. Here are just two stocks from then, for example: Shopify and Cloudflare. Shopify was down more than 85% from top to bottom and Cloudflare 83%. This chart doesn’t show you the exact numbers because the stocks bottomed at a different moment, but it gives you a feeling of what it was.

You see the same thing now. While the index isn't down much, some stocks are down a lot. There’s negative market sentiment for all that are down and some have real or perceived company-specific issues.

It’s always possible that some never recover. That’s inherent to investing. You can never have only winners. The only thing we can do is keep monitoring our holdings closely, look at the fundamentals (not the price) and have patience.

I promise I will do my utmost best to help you to bridge this period.

Maybe this stat can help you. This is a midterm year and many midterm years have negative returns but all the consecutive years have positive returns since 1950, with an average return of almost 40%.

Source

Of course, this is not a guarantee. Every situation is different and correlation is not causation. But don’t forget that the short-term market movements are emotional. But what will be the impact of the Iran war? We don’t know. We can only keep investing. Time in the market will always beat timing the market.

What we see now is a multiple contraction. The market dropped from a forward PE of 23.1 to 19 times in just a few times.

Source

And do you want more reassurance? I saw this post.

Again, be careful with these kinds of predictions. The markets are unpredictable. But overall, I think the sentiment is too negative now.

And you can see that from this as well. Nomura released a chart this week and I think it’s interesting.

It shows S&P 500 implied skew versus realized skew. In plain English, the red line is how much people are paying for downside protection (puts versus calls). The grey line is how much the market has actually moved down.

Look at the right side of the chart. The red line is spiking to high levels, even though I also want to point out that the period is short. But it shows that investors want protection against a crash. Many seem to expect the worst.

But if so many are already hedged, it actually protects the index from a big drop. After all, you won’t sell if you are hedged. I’m not saying we can’t go lower. We absolutely can. Duh! But it seems like a lot is already priced in. Maybe not in the index but in the hedges.

Also, don’t forget that the stock market just pulls back every now and then. Ben Carlson made this chart with an overview since 1928.

I also laughed with his description of what a bear market is:

Something that only lasts for like a month and happens every 3-5 years

So, don’t overreact. Just stay invested. Just look at this post.

I always see people who say that if you miss the worst days, the result is similar. Of course it is, but you won’t time the worst days well without missing the best days. In that context, this sentence is crucial:

8 of the 10 worst days happened within 1 week of the best days.

Ok, one more, to close this off. This chart.

Source

So, except for the mid-70s, the bottom was always very close when the stock market dropped 10 of the last 11 trading weeks. Again, correlation and causation are not the same, but maybe we are closer to the bottom than we might realize. Judging on the sentiment I hear from investors, which is very gloomy, that might be the case.

But the best thing of all is that you don’t have to predict this right. Just stay calm, keep investing and that alone will make you stand out.

And drink coffee or tea, if you like that. :-)

Articles In The Past Weeks

This is the fourth article this week.

In the first article, we analyzed TransMedics’ results and whether the stock is a buy now.

The second article showed that AI is a benefit, not a headwind, for CrowdStrike.

In the third article, I showed you which stocks I bought for my PM Future Fund portfolio.

Memes Of The Week

It was a bit calmer on the meme front this week, with just two memes I liked enough to include here.

The second one tells you something about perception. The S&P 500 is now at the same level as in September 2025, but it feels totally different.

Interesting Podcasts Or Books

I didn’t find the time to listen to an investing podcast or start a new book this week.

The markets in the past week

I don’t think I have to tell you that most stocks were down, but surprisingly enough, the Russell 2000 was up 0.46%. The S&P 500 was down 2.12% and the Nasdaq 3.23% this week. That’s quite a lot for indexes.

You won’t be surprised that the Greed & Fear Index dropped further, to 10.

Quick Facts

1. AI is not killing engineering jobs

Look at this chart from Trueup, shared by Lenny Rachitsky this week.

67,665 open engineering jobs globally. That’s 78% up from the low of 37,982. The most open engineering roles in over three years.

But yeah, of course, software engineers will be replaced by AI, right?

What we’re seeing here is Jevons Paradox playing out in real time. When something becomes cheaper to produce, you don’t use less of it. You use more. Way more.

Think about what’s actually happening on the ground. Companies outside of tech are realizing they can now afford software projects they would never have given the green light two years ago. Marketing teams at big corporations are bringing in engineers to automate workflows. Life sciences and healthcare companies are hiring engineers to automate research pipelines. Small businesses are hiring their first engineer ever to build better digital experiences. I could go on, but you get the picture.

Projects like this were too expensive or too complicated before AI made software incrementally cheaper.

Jevons Paradox means that if something becomes cheaper, the demand increases exponentially.

That means there will be much more software than ever before. And the people who understand how to build, maintain, and fix it will be wanted, just like they have been for years.

AI agents still require a human who understands what to prompt, how to review when an agent hallucinates, how to maintain the system that was built and so on.

All the advice floating around telling young people not to go into engineering is, in my opinion, very wrong. It sounds smart gets you clicks but data says the opposite. AI is currently not killing engineering jobs, no matter what you hear.

Of course, you might be shown this graph.

In that context, the rise of job postings looks minimal But you can see that the huge peak was caused by Covid, not by AI. Many people were fired during Covid, and, of course, job openings peaked when things normalized again.

2. Recession? CFOs Don’t Think So

This week, I saw this chart from The Daily Shot.

It shows the CFO Survey, tracking optimism about the US economy versus optimism about their own company. And there’s something interesting going on.

CFO optimism about the broader economy, the black line is down a bit. That’s what you would expect, with tariffs, the situation with Iran and its consequences, and the overall sentiment.

But look at the blue line. CFOs rate the optimism about their own company still very high.

Don’t forget that CFOs are well-informed. They see the order books and the margins. So, the difference in perception is interesting.

Now, this doesn’t mean everything is fine. CFOs can be wrong too. They can’t look into the future without fail. Orders can be canceled. But right now, CFOs, who have some of the best data points out there, are still confident about their own companies.

To me, that information is more valuable than a thousand doom-and-gloom X posts.

3. The US Market Concentration In Context

There’s been a lot of drama around market concentration in the US. The Mag 7 are too big, the S&P 500 is too top-heavy, it’s dangerous, it’s a bubble, etc. You’ve probably heard it all.

For context, look at his chart from Bloomberg Intelligence this week.

It shows countries ranked by the percentage of the market in the 10 biggest stocks. The US has only around 30%, one of the lowest concentrations. Some go to 80%.

Some concentration is completely normal. Great companies tend to keep growing. If you do well, it’s normal that your market cap keeps growing.

One of the things I see constantly in investing is people overcomplicating things. No, a slightly higher concentration in the top 10 stocks in the US doesn’t mean there’s a bubble or anything else. There’s too much noise out there.

4. Software Is Not Dead, Part 347

I know I have repeated this message in several forms multiple times already. But if I feel that everyone else says it differently, I think it’s good to keep repeating this to have a counterbalance to the noise.

Thoma Bravo just released their LP meeting slides. For those who don’t know, Thoma Bravo is the world’s largest software-focused private equity firm.

And what are they seeing? Fundamentals have improved while valuations have compressed. Look at this chart.

Source

The Rule of Profile (free cash flow margin plus 2x revenue growth) has been trending up since mid-2024, hitting around 34-35%. At the same time, EV/FCF multiples have dropped like a rock because “AI will kill all software.”

Thoma Bravo’s view is simple and aligns with mine: all software companies are created equal. Business durability matters more than sentiment and sentiment creates opportunity.

Thomas Bravo has more data, more due diligence, and more skin in the game than any influencer tweeting about how AI will replace all SaaS. Or even multiple times more than hedge funds trading on this theme.

The market is not distinguishing between software that will be disrupted and software that will adapt and thrive. It’s selling everything. That’s how you get opportunities.

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How are you doing? I hope you are not too stressed out about the markets. This week, I got a reminder that the markets are not the most important thing in my life.

Our daughter Romy (she’s 11) broke her little toe from jumping on a trampoline.

Of course, that’s nothing to really worry about, but every Multi parent will know that seeing your child in pain really affects you deeply and if it were possible, you would take over the pain without any hesitation.

Zack, who writes these great articles for you, is also very sensitive and he felt I was a bit less connected this week.

So, yes, I am OK. And I was indeed a bit less active this week. Next to spending a bit more time with our daughter, I’ve been working a bit more behind the scenes for long-term initiatives in the last few weeks. The results may or may not become visible towards the end of the year or early next year. We’ll see. I’ll update you asap if something starts to get more concrete. IF because it’s not certain, as many things in life and investing.

On top of that, I’ve been researching much more this week, as there are more attractive stocks with this pullback. There may be crystallizing something, but I’m not sure yet.

Having said that, let’s dive into the Overview Of The Week.

Articles In The Past Weeks

This is the third article this week.

In the first one, I gave you the five stocks I consider the Best Buys Now. Of course, because the whole market is down, these stocks are down as well and that’s why I see them as even more attractive. As always, I put my money where my mouth is and I bought these stocks, together with a few more.

The second one was a deep dive on Mercado Libre. I really invested a lot of time into the article. You can read it here.

Memes Of The Week

Scary times mean the number of memes shoots up, and we can appreciate them more.

This is the first one. I made it myself, based on this post.

Multi Julien did a big investment to beat the index this year.

And this one shows that AI is not always as productive as you would want it to be.

And Multi Julien, who lives in Belgium, where Meli is a brand of honey products, posted this one as well.

Interesting Podcasts Or Books

This week, I watched Drew Cohen’s deep dive on Mercado Libre. You can find it here.

The markets in the past week

While the Russell 2000 dropped the most the past few weeks, it now dropped the least, with 1.68%. The S&P 500 dropped by 1.90% and the Nasdaq by 2.07%.

Despite the alarm messages you hear and see everywhere, the S&P 500 is down just 6.77%. The Nasdaq is down 9.65% and the Russell 2000 is now down more than 10%. That’s a correction already.

That means there could be much more downside. Or not, of course. You never know in the markets. The stock market can drop hard and fast, 2020-style, or slower, 2021-2022-style. I don’t know which one is more painful. More about this later.

You won’t be surprised that the Greed & Fear Index dropped further, to 15.

Quick Facts

1. Bear Market Ahead?

I hear a lot of negativity from all sides, even with the main market indexes not even in a correction (a 10% drop) yet.

Sentiment is now at its lowest point since Liberation Day. But you don’t need graphs to see that all around you, sentiment is negative. You see posts like this one everywhere.

Well, to start with, this is utter nonsense. What if I picked the bottom of the 2008-2009 crash as my starting point and showed you these returns?

Of course, you’d call me out for cherry picking the bottom, right? At least, that’s what I hope. But picking the absolute top is not a problem all of a sudden? It’s as much cherry-picking as choosing the very bottom as your starting point.

Secondly, it assumes that you invested on one single day, the very top, and poured in all the money you had. You never invested a single cent in the markets anymore. Yes, in those circumstances, you’d have to wait for 13 years. But if you invested like “normal” people do, you would probably not throw in all the money you had on a single day. If you did, you could probably use the long waiting period to learn about how to invest better, and hopefully, you have some money to average down.

But back to today. Sure, there are reasons to believe that the current environment could trigger a bear market. I don’t have to name them, I think: Iran, expensive oil and gas, potential inflation or stagflation, a private credit crunch and probably some others.

But what if we looked at the data first? This is based on 105 5% pullbacks since World War II. Only 24.8% turned into a correction (so down 10%+) and 12.4% into a bear market (down 20%+).

Source

That means that 62.5% of all 5% drops are just that, 5% drops. But investors panic each time as if there will be a huge bear market. As you can see from the stats, chances are not that big, but of course, it’s not impossible.

Never forget that things can always change quickly. As fast as the conflict started, it can stop. Sure, there will still be some residual damage, but what I mean is that nothing is set in stone. There are no anchor points that are certain and that means it could change tomorrow.

Four years ago, Warren Buffett was asked about a potential World War. This was his answer:

Well, if you tell me all of that’s going to happen, I will still be buying the stock. You’re going to invest your money in something over time. The one thing you could be quite sure of is that if we went into some very major war, the value of money would go down.

I mean, that’s happened in virtually every war that I that I’m aware of. So the last thing you’d want to do is hold money during a war. And you might want to own a farm, you might want to own an apartment house, you might want to own securities.

I mean, during World War Two, you know, the stock market advanced. The stock market advances over time. American businesses are going to be worth more money. Now, dollars are going to be worth less. So that money won’t buy you quite as much, but you’re, you’re going to be a lot better off owning productive assets over the next 50 years, then you will be owning pieces of paper.

I’m preaching against everything you hear now. I know. But don’t forget that 99% of the information on the internet and in the media comes from traders, not investors. Everyone has their reasons to talk about the short term. Brokers want you to trade, the media want you to be hooked when things go wrong, using your strong fear emotions for interaction.

And don’t forget that many influencers just want to be seen as smart. Negativity makes you seem smarter. And you can repost a post later if a bear market comes. You add something like: “You see? I told you.” If the bear market never comes, you never talk about the post again, of course. That’s how most do it online.

I want to be the antidote and I want to show you that there’s still a sun behind the current clouds and it will always return. Sure, when it returns is impossible to know, but that it will is almost certain, unless the world is devastated and then we have bigger problems.

Often, when we least expect it, the market can go up.

Maybe we have already seen the bottom? I saw this chart today.

Negativity around events is always the biggest in the first few weeks. Then it’s seen as the new reality or a temporary hiccup.

That doesn’t mean I don’t see the potential for long-term disruption from what’s going on in the world. It means that we have always pulled through.

I don’t want to downplay what we are going through. If you look at what happened in the seventies, it’s pretty scary. A 5-month oil embargo in 1973 resulted in almost a decade of stagflation. That’s definitely a risk now as well.

Sure, the US has its own oil production now but it imports a ton of things from Asia. Probably, the device you are reading on is assembled in China. They have much higher oil prices, so the product becomes more expensive, and transport costs as well. That could cause inflation to spike if the Strait of Hormuz is not opened fast.

There’s also the bull whip effect. I made this years ago and this is the normal situation.

But it also goes the other way around. Even a small disturbance in the supply side, can cause big effects for the consumer.

Natural gas is essential for fertilizer production, which is an important input for food prices, as we all experienced in 2022. Helium plays a critical role in healthcare and chip manufacturing. Ukraine was already a bottleneck for neon, a critical material for chip lithography. This adds to the supply difficulties. And think about shipping and insurance costs, and so much more. If the problem keeps lingering, it could potentially cause a big shock. The longer it takes, the bigger the impact. Of course, Iran knows this.

That’s also the reason why President Trump has set an ultimatum for Iran to open the Strait of Hormuz. We will see how that ends.

2. Tech = Cheap?

Of course, I know. Many stocks are down much more from their highs and that can be painful. Especially tech is hit hard.

For a long time, the Mag 7 has dominated the markets, but now, they are all down more than the S&P 500 and the Nasdaq.

Microsoft, usually one of the less volatile stocks, is now down 29%.

Sure, you hear about the big investments companies must make for building out data centers and other AI-related costs and that could put pressure on the margins of some. But these companies have huge piles of cash and probably, they are spending it well to make sure they will have huge piles of cash in the future as well.

Many of the things you hear are stories and they are not all based on reality. I go further and say that most are not based on reality. Remember when Google was going out of business just about a year ago? Or Meta a few years ago? Tesal has probably been proclaimed dead over a dozen times and the story around Nvidia was initially that it had no moat. Now that it has proven it has, the story is that the moat will end (so less pricing power) or growth will drop or whatever other story.

But look at this graph:

As you can see, all of them except Amazon are expected to still be profitable on an FCF basis in 2026. Be critical when you hear these stories. Often, they are just someone’s very superficial opinion stated with too much certainty.

Is tech really cheap now? I would argue that many tech stocks are. But that doesn’t mean that they can’t get any cheaper, of course.

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Sometimes, it’s good to remember what investing is about. It’s not about the daily noise. I felt inspired yesterday evening, and I wrote this short story. It may help you when you feel stupid sometimes.

A Tale Of Two Brothers

Thomas and Lucas were 26 and 24 and they were in tears. Their father had just died. But he left them something. His two sons both inherited $150,000 and some words scribbled on a legal pad paper: “Buy stocks of companies that make things you understand. Be patient.”

Thomas took the words to heart and he bought Amazon first, as he saw that his wife placed several orders per week. Over the years, he bought several more companies that he understood.

His brother Lucas had always been brighter than Thomas, excelling in school, college, and university, and he had a good job at Google.

He made $40,000 on his first trade. At Thanksgiving that year, he told Thomas that patience was stupid and that he would help him make much more money. Thomas was tempted but decided to stay the course, remembering their father’s words. Not following that advice felt like not listening to his father’s last wish.

Lucas had a gift for reading the market, or at least that’s what he thought. So, the next year, Lucas started with leverage, and he made even more money. That Thanksgiving, he told Thomas he should have listened to him because he would have doubled his money.

But then, things slowly started to turn for Lucas. A trade went wrong but he was sure he was right. He had a special gift, right? So, he doubled down. A margin call came and he sold his winners. Each decision made perfect senseto Lucas. He just knew he was right.

Then the market dropped 30% and Lucas really started panicking, seeing his portfolio lose much more than the market because of his leverage.

Thomas did not do much. When a stock fell 65%, he read the annual report and decided to add a bit to his position. For the rest, he just didn’t look at his portfolio that often.

His inaction looked stupid to his brother Lucas. He told Thomas that he would lose all his money if he didn’t buy protection. Thomas considered it but did nothing.

Skip forward to thirty years later. Thomas’ portfolio is worth over $4.5 million. Unlike his brother Lucas, he never made a single trade that would impress anyone at a cocktail party. But he could retire rich at the age of 56.

Lucas was still working. He had $139,000 left of the $150,000. After 30 years. He finally understood, much too late, that trading was designed to keep him playing, not to get rich.

Lucas had sounded smart, but his brother Thomas had compounded the money at 12% per year and that turned $150,000 to $4.5 million. He had felt superior to Thomas all that time. He followed the market much closer than his brother; he was active, and he knew things better than most other investors. If he was honest, he had been looking down on Thomas for his inaction and underperformance when things went great.

But in the end, he realized that his brother and father had been right. Patience is the secret ingredient to successful investing. Not intelligence, action or sophistication, but patience. He had sold his stocks when he should have bought.

I hope this story helps you protect yourself from the people who sound so smart and only share their successes.

Articles In The Past Weeks

This is the third article this week.

In the first one, we looked at the Global-e results.

The second one was about the most volatile stock we have ever held: Hims & Hers. You can read that article here.

Memes Of The Week

Multi Karan shared this one this week about Fintwit (FinX?). It’s funny because it’s true so many claim to be specialists in everything.

I found this one very funny.

Multi Market Sense posted this one.

If this one is true, it looks good for the market.

This shows again that you can find patterns wherever you look. But it’s not because you see them that they mean something.

Interesting Podcasts Or Books

For the third week in a row, I listened to an episode of The Intrinsic Value Podcast. This time, it was an episode about Duolingo.

The markets in the past week

As you can see, the Russell 2000 dropped the most again, with 1.79%. The S&P fell 1.6% and the Nasdaq 1.26%.

Even if it may not feel like this, the S&P 500 is not even down 5% from its all-time highs set earlier this year. The Nasdaq is down 7.34% and the Russell 20000 8.78%.

Those are very moderate drops and that can be viewed in different ways. The positive reasoning is that the indices are remarkably resilient, and that may mean something. The negative reading is that there is a lot more room to drop. You can choose your side, but whatever you prefer, your opinion won’t change how the market behaves.

The Greed & Fear Index dropped again. It was on the border of Fear and Extreme Fear last week and it dropped from Fear to Extreme Fear. Strange, with the S&P 500, on which this is based, is not even down 5% from its all-time high.

Quick Facts

1. Growth & Value Valuations

This week, Meb Faber posted this very interesting chart.

It shows that expensive stocks have become more expensive and deep value stocks have become even deeper value.

At the same time, if you look carefully, you see that expensive stocks became more expensive already in 2016. There was a reset in 2022, as we experienced, but then valuations of the most expensive stocks started to rise again. Deep Value has already become cheaper since 2010.

Of course, the way this is measured also matters. As you can see, it’s a blend of Price to Sales, Price to Gross Profit, and Price to Economic Book. I think you know I love Price-to-Gross Profit, but I’m not sure it’s really that applicable to value stocks.

Even with the caveats, this remains an interesting chart.

2. The 5% Drop In Perspective

And more about the 5% S&P 500 drop. This is a very fascinating overview from Charlie Bilello.

The message is short: this too shall pass. You can point out that there has not been a big drop since 2008-2009, but a big recession like back then only happens about twice a century or so.

During this period, there were some steeper drops. And don’t forget that this is the S&P 500. The Nasdaq dropped quite a bit more (almost?) each time.

3. Nasdaq bends the rules for SpaceX

By Kris

Multi SS linked to a very interesting article earlier today. It’s written by Keubiko, of whom I had never heard before, but the argument is convincing.

Nasdaq is trying to change the Nasdaq-100 rules to make it possible for a giant IPO like SpaceX to get into the index fast and at a rich valuation. The consequence for passive investors: they could end up buying massive amounts of stock at inflated prices while insiders get an easy exit.

As we all know, index funds have attracted trillions of dollars in investments now. Overall, that’s a good thing, but that now means indexes can move markets. And that’s what SpaceX wants. And it’s clear Nasdaq wants SpaceX, which is expected to be the biggest IPO ever, to list on the Nasdaq, not on the New York Stock Exchange. It’s even willing to bend the rules to obtain that goal.

One proposed rule would let very large IPOs enter the index after just 15 trading days. Another would let low-float stocks get index weights way of a bigger part of the total shares, not just those that can be traded.

But if there’s a tiny float and forced buying from index funds, that could cause the stock to skyrocket even before passive money gets involved. Market funds don’t buy based on a valuation but accept whatever the market gives them.

That’s how Nasdaq wants to get a better pitch to win big IPOs and the stock gets early index status, boosting the demand. Passive investors will be the victim.

The Return Of The Potential Multibaggers

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It’s Sunday again and that means time for your weekly dose of news in the Overview Of The Week!

I’ve noticed that some Multis get a bit nervous from these markets and I understand that. But the equanimity I talked about last week can really make you stand out from the crowd.

As they say, staying calm when everyone is losing their mind, you will win in the end.

As you probably know, I have a background in linguistics and literature. I have never shared a poem before, but this time, I think it’s very useful. It was written in 1910 by Rudyard Kipling and it’s a father talking to his son. But I think it’s a useful poem for investors as well.

Try to be this and be an example for others.

Articles In The Past Weeks

This is the third article this week. The two previous ones were about two stocks that dropped hard after they announced their earnings and I put a lot of effort in them. I was very happy to see that was appreciated a lot.

In the first article this week, I dove deep into Duolingo’s earnings.

The second article was also a deep dive, this time into Sea Limited’s earnings.

Memes Of The Week

Multi SkQ shared this in our meme channel:

I also liked this one.

Interesting Podcasts Or Books

Last week, I listened to the Intrinsic Value Podcast episode about Constellation Software.

In that episode, I heard they also have one about Chapters Group. I listened to it this week. You can find it here.

The latest episode is about Duolingo.

The markets in the past week

What did the market do this week? I think most of you will know that stocks generally dropped quite a bit.

As you can see, the Russell 2000 dropped the most, by a whopping 4.07%. The S&P dropped 2.02% and, surprisingly, the Nasdaq dropped the least of the three, but it was still down 1.24%.

For months, I have been saying that the market felt like 2021, when growth stocks were already down 50%, 60% or more and the indexes remained at or near their top. Is this the point of surrender for the indexes? You can’t know, of course.

The Greed & Fear Index dropped. It was already in Fear but close to Neutral. It is now close to Extreme Fear.

Quick Facts

1. Most Protection Ever

This week, I saw this chart.

This chart shows that in the last 16 years, there has never been a period with more protection bought than now.

Historically, that has been a good counterindicator. In other words, if so many investors buy puts, the market usually goes up.

On the other hand, if this were a percentage of invested capital, it would probably look a bit different.

All in all, it’s like with all data points. It could be true in the short or long term, but I wouldn’t invest much money betting on it becoming true.

2. Higher Oil: Bearish for Stocks?

The most discussed theme of the weekend was the higher oil prices.

Ben Carlson always has interesting charts. This week, I saw this one on the relationship between higher oil prices and stock market returns.

As you see, the S&P actually goes up more with higher prices.

Of course, again, there are many nuances here. Maybe the speed of the climb plays a role, the impact on inflation if it persists and so on. Still, an interesting chart.

The futures, though, look bad for tomorrow, though.

So, tomorrow could be an awful day. We’ll see. But things can always change fast.

3. Nu Holdings

This week, I found this table, which compares Nu Holdings (NU) after 5 years in Brazil and 5 years in Mexico.

This is another data point that the company keeps crushing it.

The company also announced that it would first target Brazilians in its US expansion, which is coming soon.

4. This Is Getting Crazy

With some news, I have to take a step back and think: what on earth did I just read?

Cortical Labs, a small Australian biotech, just demonstrated something that sounds like it belongs in a sci-fi movie. They grew real human brain cells on a silicon chip and got those 200,000 cells to play Doom. It played the 1993 first-person shooter where you have to navigate a 3D environment, spot enemies, and shoot them in real time.

Even crazier: a developer with no neuroscience background did it in about a week. He used Python through a cloud API. The neurons figured out basic gameplay faster than traditional machine learning algorithms. It took just minutes, not hours.

Cool demo, but so what, you might think, but the implications over the medium-long term might be big. Your entire brain runs very efficiently, much more efficiently, like 50 times or more efficiently, than the most efficient chips right now. So, this could be a huge efficiency leap once this becomes applicable at an industrial scale, if that ever happens, of course. It’s still very early.

The CIA’s venture arm, In-Q-Tel, is an investor in Cortical Labs. The first 115 units shipped in 2025. And if you don’t want to buy the hardware, you can rent access to living neurons through their Cortical Cloud platform. It’s a subscription service where you deploy code to actual brain cells from your browser. The cells are grown from adult skin and blood samples and reprogrammed into neurons.

Read that last paragraph again if you need to.

Biological computing could eventually leave traditional silicon in the dust when it comes to energy efficiency and adaptability. Neurons learn from tiny amounts of data, adapt continuously, and consume almost no power compared to GPUs.

Also, this was just 200,000 neurons. The human brain has about 86 billion. So, you see the potential.

We’re at the absolute beginning of this. And honestly, I find it both fascinating and a bit terrifying.

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How are you? I hope you are not too troubled by the market conditions for our companies.

I know, it never feels great. But many Multis here went through 2022 and came out better.

Of course, there are also people who left then. They sold at or near the bottom and are still angry with me because they “followed” me. The thing is that they actually didn’t follow me. I didn’t sell in 2022, I bought more. I didn’t go on margin at any time, so I didn’t get margin calls. Multis who did what I did in 2022 were generally happy.

But that happiness is always delayed. That’s how the stock market works.

That also implies that the pain you feel now could go on for quite a bit longer. Will that be weeks, months, or years? Nobody knows.

Look, if you study all big investors ever (and I have done a big part of that), you see two things that stand out in all of them.

1. The emotional impact they experienced during a bad period was low.

2. They stuck to their strategy through thick and thin.

Let me illustrate boght points with arguably the best investor duo ever, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.

This quote by Charlie Munger is an illustration of the first point. It’s from a 2009 interview with the BBC.

I think it’s in the nature of long-term shareholding with the normal vicissitudes and and worldly outcomes and in markets that the long-term holder has is quoted value of a stock go down and then by say 50%

You can argue that if you’re not willing to react with equanimity to a market price decline of 50 percent, you’re not fit to be a common shareholder, and you deserve the mediocre result you’re going to get compared to the people who can be more philosophical about these market fluctuations.

In 1999, Warren Buffett was mocked in the press for underperforming the S&P 500 by 40%. But he stuck to his investing style and beat the S&P 500 by a wide margin every year of the next three years.

The approach we have here at Potential Multibaggers will outperform in bull markets and underperform in bear markets. The highs will be much higher, the lows much lower.

So, you will need equanimity to outperform. That’s easy during good times, of course, although there can be a feeling of FOMO then. But it can feel excruciating during tough times. And with our investments, we are in tough times already. Will the rest of the indexes follow, like in 2022? I don’t know. But I have repeatedly said that this feels a lot like the second half of 2021, when many of our stocks were down comparably to now but the indexes were still at or near all-time highs.

You can do two things to stay calm.

Potential Multibaggers can be a smaller part of your overall portfolio, so the volatility of the total is less. I know there are several Multis who have 50%+ of their portfolio in ETFs, for example, or who also invest in unrelated sectors like oil, or dividend stocks and who keep Potential Multibaggers to, let’s say, 20% of their portfolio. They like the excitement of that part but also or sometimes especially the learning part of Potential Multibaggers. You learn a lot about the future here.

The second thing you can do, is my approach. I have 72.4% of my investments in Potential Multibaggers. What do I do? I sit back, take a coffee or a tea, and relax, realizing that I don’t invest for now but for in 25 years or so and that short-term movements don’t mean too much, as long as the company keeps executing well.

That means that as long as I have great companies, they will outperform. And I also know that probably half of my holdings will not be winners, maybe even more. That’s OK. You can perfectly outperform the market by holding just 3 or 4 winners out of 10. The upside is endless, the downside 100% (which I never had, by the way).

Whatever approach you prefer, let’s agree to have a coffee, a tea, milk, water, or a Coke while reading this Overview Of The Week. I’m drinking a coffee while writing this.

Articles In The Past Weeks

This is the fourth article this week.

In the first article this week, we dissected Kinsale’s earnings and looked if the stock is attractive now. You can read that article here.

The second article was about The Trade Desk. The stock price dove 16% immediately after the earnings but that was just a bit over 4% at the end of the next day. I think the market may have realized the headlines were much worse than the actual numbers suggested. More details here.

I also added to the Forever Portfolio this week. You can find the stock I sold and the additions here.

Memes Of The Week

Let’s start with Elon. He posted this.

I think this is spot-on. It’s too early and too dangerous to give away too much of your personal details to something that looks very fragile when it comes to security. That may change in the future, but for now, safety first.

The next one is about DeepSeek, which was accused by Anthropic of having stolen its data.

Duolingo dropped a lot over the last few months and even more after its earnings. Here’s a meme about that.

Multi bep had a fantastic meme too.

He also posted this one.

Of course, the reason is what happens in Iran. We gotta talk about that later in this Overview Of The Week.

Interesting Podcasts Or Books

This week, I listened to the Intrinsic Value Podcast episode about Constellation Software after the big drop.

The markets in the past week

As you can see, the Russell 2000 dropped the most, by 1.18%. The Nasdaq dropped 0.95% and the S&P 500 dropped by 0.44%.

The Greed & Fear Index remained where it was last week: in Fear, at 43.

Quick Facts

1. Iran: What it means for your portfolio

Potential Multibaggers is not about politics but about investing. The reason I bring this here is that with every war, negativity creeps into the investing world.

On Saturday, the US and Israel launched airstrikes across Iran targeting nuclear sites, military infrastructure, and regime leadership. Trump explicitly called for regime change, and reports confirm that Supreme Leader Khamenei was killed. Iran reacted with missiles and drones hitting US bases across the Gulf: Bahrain, Qatar, UAE, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and attacked Israel as well.

That’s why the indices already dropped on Friday.

You read everywhere that Iran is closing the Strait of Hormuz. The IRGC broadcast radio messages saying “no ship is allowed to pass,” tankers largely stopped transiting, and three ships were attacked near Oman.

But I want to repeat what I wrote in July.

84% of crude oil passing through Hormuz goes to Asia. China, India, Japan, and South Korea take 69% of it combined. China is Iran’s biggest economic partner overall. India collaborates with Iran on the Chabahar Port project. A sustained blockade doesn’t hurt America or Israel. It destroys Iran’s own allies and suffocates Iran’s economy, since oil and gas exports are its lifeline. This is a good clip about this blockade.

Monday will probably be ugly. Probably the markets will drop, oil will spike and the headlines will be very negative.

But the companies I own don’t change because bombs fall in the Middle East. To put it differently, probably in a year, this will look like noise for long-term investors. Don’t let the headlines scare you.

Don’t believe me? Look at this chart. It’s an overview of geopolitical events and the stock market returns.

You can see that the first month is negative in 53.5% of the cases but anyghing further out looks very healthy.

2. Citrini’s Article: Not Very Ethical

Last week, I commented on the ultrabearish Citrini science fiction story. The stocks mentioned in the article dropped quite a bit.

Billions in market cap disappeared.

This week, it surfaced that the preface about the co-author was changed. This is what I read.

Cosy, two friends brainstorming and a resulting article. Right?

But this is what was initially published on Citrini’s blog.

LOTUS is Lotus Technology Management LP, an investment advisor with $262 million in assets under management.

That “friend” Shah is a fund manager, and on Bloomberg, he acknowledged that he held short positions in the companies that were named in the science fiction story.

Even worse, the acknowledgement also changed, as the same author pointed out. In the first one, it was a collaboration; in the second one, it is just Citrini.

To me, this doesn’t look very ethical. Again, it’s an example of what Charlie Munger has said so often:

To me, this doesn’t look very ethical. Many investors lost their minds and it turns out they were manipulated, as I said immediately when the article came out.

Still, there is a big market for negativity. Just look at the three top-selling Substack bestsellers.

Three doom-and-gloom accounts. That says something about human nature.

People often think that optimism is naive. Optimism sounds like it comes from an untrustworthy salesman. Pessimism sounds smart, even if it’s wrong. Negativity sells. If you know that, you will become a better investor.

I’ve known this for a very long time. Don’t forget that my very first job was as a TV journalist for the local TV station.

When I started Potential Multibaggers, optimism was a very deliberate choice. Optimism usually wins over the long term. Probably, I lose some sales because of that, but as the saying goes, optimism is a moral duty. And I like optimists. They are generally happier.

3. Warner Bros goes to Paramount, not Netflix

This soap could make a good series on Netflix: the bidding war around Warner Bros Discovery. This week, the final curtain seems to have fallen.

So, first, Paramount approached Warner Bros Discovery for a takeover, but Netflix offered a higher amount, and a deal was made.

Paramount then issued a higher offer, raising it from $30 to $31 per share. Netflix offered $83 billion for only the studios and streaming (HBO, Warner Bros. studios), while Paramount offered $111 billion for the entire company. Warner Bros Discovery’s board then declared this a “superior proposal.”

Netflix declined to match and walked away. That means that Netflix gets a $2.8B breakup fee.

OK, this is a simplified version that leaves out the trial and the drama (hence the potential for a series).

What do I think of this? Look at Netflix’s stock over the last 5 days.

Up 26.7%. Crazy.

But I’m on the side of the traders this time. I think Netflix dodges a bullet here. The cable channels are declining every year and Netflix can stay lean and mean and keep its balance sheet clean.

On top of that, Netflix knows that Paramount now has a ton of debt. If there are negotiations for, let’s say, HBO content, Netflix knows Paramount needs the money, so Netflix might get a better deal.

4. Software: Disconnected From Reality

I have already called the anti-AI bubble. As the most important AI companies are private, the market overreacts by selling off all the stocks that might be impacted by AI. This creates opportunities.

In that context, I like this information.

As you can see, software now trades at the valuation of the S&P 500, based on the 12-month forward PE. That’s for the first time since 2015.

Despite this, software’s EPS are expected to outgrow the S&P 500 for the next few years.

Source

Of course, there’s a bearish story attached. There’s always a story if there’s a sell-off or a bubble. Is that story true? Well, sometimes it is and that means you will hear everyone say how they predicted that. But most stories turn out to be false. Nobody talks about those anymore later.

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It’s good to have you back here for the Overview Of The Week. Take your morning coffee or evening tea, because it’s about to start!

Articles In The Past Weeks

This is the fourth article this week.

In the first article of the week, we looked at the Best Buys Now XXL.

Adyen’s stock price dropped about 20% after earnings. In my article, I analyzed whether that was warranted.

The third article of the week focused on Shopify’s earnings.

Memes Of The Week

Let’s check the meme harvest of this week.

This one hits home recently.

This is not a meme, but still funny.

This one is not about investing, but nowadays, you can bet on everything. That brought this funny situation to the light.

Interesting Podcasts Or Books

At ValueX Klosters, I got to know Bogumil Baranowski better. Here you see us together.

Bogumil is the host of the outstanding investing podcast Talking Billions. This week, there was a rerun of an older episode I had not heard yet, with the organizer of ValueX Klosters, Guy Spier.

You can listen to the episode here.

The markets in the past week

It may not feel like that for some, as several Potential Multibaggers have not been doing great lately, but this week the indexes were up. The Russell 2000 was up 0.65%, the S&P 500 1.07% and the Nasdaq 1.51%.

Despite the jump, the Greed & Fear Index remained in Fear territory.

Quick Facts

1. Mega-Cap Tech: Most Under-Owned In 17 Years

Morgan Stanley put out an interesting note this week. After reviewing fourth-quarter 13F filings, they found that mega-cap tech stocks are the most under-owned by institutional investors in 17 years. The gap versus the S&P 500 widened to -155 basis points by the end of the quarter.

Source

Nvidia is the number one most under-owned name. It shows a -2.57% gap between its S&P 500 weighting and the holdings of active funds. Apple (-2.16%), Microsoft (-2.13%), and Amazon (-1.37%) follow.

These are the biggest, most dominant companies on the planet, and active managers are still underweight them. That’s remarkable.

What’s even more interesting is where institutional money went. There’s a clear bias toward AI picks-and-shovels names: SanDisk, KLA Corp, Western Digital Corp, Lam Research Company, Seagate Technology are all semiconductor hardware companies and overowned. Software names like ServiceNow, Palo Alto Networks, and Adobe are notably under-owned too.

So institutions have been chasing the AI infrastructure picks while having a lower exposure to both the mega-caps that actually generate most of the AI revenue and the software companies that will integrate AI into their platforms.

The results of this behavior are clear in the YTD chart of the Mag7 vs. the index.

Now, the year is only about a month and a half old, so don’t take this too serious. But it is a pattern I’ve seen before. Fund managers are afraid to have big positions in the obvious winners because they want to show they’re “different.” Nobody gets fired for underweighting Nvidia, so to speak.

It also ties into what I’ve been writing about the anti-bubble. The narrative is so strong that AI will destroy everything that isn’t a chip or LLM, that money flows into hardware and out of everything else. This is a data point worth keeping in your head. When the crowd is on one side of the boat, it’s usually worth checking the other side.

2. Individual Investors Are Buying The Software Dip

Vanda Research released this chart that shows that individual investors invested a record $176 million in IGV, the iShares Expanded Tech-Software ETF, over the past month. That’s more than double the previous peak from late 2024 and 12 times higher than where it was at the start of 2026.

It shows the opposite of what my previous point showed. Unlike active funds, individual investors are backing up the truck on software stocks.

Software stocks dropped about 33% from their October 2025 peak and had their worst January since 2008. So this is classic buy-the-dip behavior, and it’s happening at a scale we haven’t seen before in this ETF.

Software is getting thrown out like it’s worthless because AI will supposedly replace it all. If you believe, as I do, that the best software companies will adapt and thrive, then buying at -33% from the peak is probably a good idea.

What’s also interesting: Amazon has overtaken Nvidia as the most purchased stock by individual investors over the last few sessions, after Amazon’s post-earnings decline.

I know that many look down on “retail investors” (a term I hate because it’s so condescending). But is it so irrational to buy now that tech trades at a lower forward PE than industrials and consumer staples?

This illustrates this market perfectly. Of course, the market can remain irrational for a long time, so don’t hold your breath on the tech return. But eventually, buying the best tech companies at lower multiples looks like a great strategy at this point.

3. Too Much Capex?

Bank of America’s Global Fund Manager Survey had a chart that caught my attention.

For the first time in 20 years, a positive percentage of fund managers say companies are overinvesting. 35% of them now think capex is too high. For 20 years, fund managers have asked companies to invest more. Now they want them to stop.

The reason is obvious: AI spending. Meta, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon... they’ve all announced massive capex budgets for AI infrastructure and it seems that Wall Street is getting nervous.

On top of that, 30% of the fund managers see AI capex as the most likely source of a credit crisis. And 25% view the “AI bubble” as the top tail risk to markets.

On one hand, I understand the concern. When every hyperscaler is spending nearly or more than $100 billion to build data centers, you can’t help but wonder if they are not overspending.

On the other hand, I’ve been saying for a long time that I think AI spending will be justified. The difference with the telecom bubble is that AI is already generating real revenue and profit.

Jensen Huang likes to say that the cost of being too late is much higher than the cost of being too early. He’s obviously talking his own book, but that doesn’t mean he’s wrong.

4. The AI Bubble Reminder

Someone posted this Google Trends chart comparing search interest for “WordPress” versus “Claude Code” over the past 12 months.

He added: “Reminder that you’re in a bubble.”

WordPress powers about 43% of all websites and it has been around since 2003. Many of us are in a bubble, thinking AI is omnipresent, but this shows that we are the exception, not the rule.

Don’t think the entire world has moved to AI coding tools yet. The real world doesn’t work like that. It’s slow to adapt to new changes. Of course, implementation speed is getting faster with every new technology, but it still takes time. The early adopters are loud but they are still in a bubble.

This chart shows all the people who have never used AI.

Don’t get caught up too much in your own bubble. Just 0.3% pays $20 per month for AI. This shows you how early we still are.

5. The Put-Call Ratio Nonsense

This chart is going around on X, and the comments around it are hilarious.

People are sharing it with scary captions about how the put-call ratio is spiking and therefore a big sell-off is coming.

There’s just one small problem. Look at the chart. Every single time the put-call ratio spiked above 1.0 (circled in red), it marked a bottom, not a top. The S&P 500 rallied after each spike.

And yet people are sharing this as a bearish signal.

A high put-call ratio means more people are buying puts (downside protection) than calls (upside bets). In other words, they are scared. Historically, that has been a good time to buy, not to sell.

Now, does that guarantee the same thing will happen this time? Of course not. These indicators are just data points and should never be looked at in isolation.

It also tells you a lot about the current mood. People want to be bearish right now. The AI-will-kill-everything mood, the Mag 7 sell-off, the capex worries... People will take anything and interpret it negatively. Fear sells, but it doesn’t always make you money.

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Last week, you got the Overview Of The Week on Monday, but we are back to Sunday. Hooray!

Mark is on a mini-cruise with his wife (Valentine’s Day!) so it will be only me this time.

I know many of you read this on Monday morning. So, grab your cup of black gold (wait, did you think that was oil?) and enjoy the OOTW.

Articles In The Past Weeks

This is the third article this week. Let’s look at the two previous ones.

The first one analyzed the Datadog earnings. Is the stock a buy now?

In the second article, I analyzed the Cloudflare earnings.

Memes Of The Week

Let’s check the meme harvest of this week.

I made the first one myself.

Multi Fabian posted a great one.

My friend Pieter at Compounding Quality posted this one, shared by all-star Multi BK Lee.

This was a great one on X.

Interesting Podcasts Or Books

This week, I listened to Ben Horowitz, the co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z. He was in Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s outstanding podcast Invest Like The Best. I liked the open and wide-ranging conversation.

You can listen to the episode here.

The markets in the past week

I wrote this last week:

The markets continue to feel weird and divided. Just look at this chart of the indexes over the last week.

I can just repeat that here for this week.

As you can see, the Russell 2000 did best again this week, albeit with a lot of volatility. The Nasdaq dropped by 2.10%, which is quite a lot for one week.

The S&P 500 was down 1.39%.

So, what does this mean for the Greed & Fear Index? It is now firmly in Fear territory.

Quick Facts

1. The Anti-AI Bubble Is Entering The Ridiculous Stage

We are officially entering the ridiculous stage of the anti-AI bubble. I have already written this multiple times before here, but there is no AI bubble. In the dotcom bubble, there were many companies that were ridiculously valued. You don’t have that now. Of course, you could point out a stock like Palantir, which is still very much overvalued, but it’s more of an exception than the rule.

This time, there’s an anti-bubble. With that term, I mean that everything that is not AI is sold off because it’s seen as worthless.

And we are officially entering the ridiculous phase there.

Algorhythm Holdings (RIME), which I’m sure nobody had heard of before this week, is a microcap. Before this week, it traded on a market cap of $5.8 million. It was involved in, of all things, karaoke machine imports.

That company announced a new AI-powered tool or platform called SemiCab that claims to dramatically improve freight efficiency. It talks about boosting shipment volumes by 300–400% without adding headcount, or reducing empty miles by over 70%. The results?

First, this.

Ok, it’s not the first penny stock that gets such a pump. But the really crazy thing is that the industry giants of transportation dropped like a rock because of that. The Dow Jones US Trucking Index as a whole was down 5% because of the announcement.

This is very ridiculous. One former karaoke machine importers’ press release triggered this? If it was a movie, you wouldn’t believe it.

This perfectly illustrates the ongoing anti-AI bubble. It’s so ridiculous it’s comical.

2. Crash Coming?

For weeks, I’ve been saying that this starts to feel like 2021, when a lot of tech companies were down a lot 50%-60%-70% or even 80%. The same is happening now. And just like in 2021, the index barely moved.

Michael Batnick pointed this out in this chart.

It’s the first time since the dotcom bubble that the indexes are so close to all-time highs and there’s a red dot, meaning 115+ stocks that declined 7%+ on a single day.

Could it be that a crash is brewing? Yes, but it’s the same as ever: we don’t know. As humans, we have an almost pathological need to see patterns and this could be one of that’s either useful or useless. You can’t know. 99% of patterns are unuseful but when there’s one that proved to be right, many are very loudly beating the drum about the one that worked.

The two things could easily be tied together: the AI-inspired anti-bubble and the crash could be the same.

There’s uncertainty and markets hate that. That’s probably the main reason for the SaaS sell-off and the ridiculous trucker companies’ sell-offs, driven by a tiny former karaoke machine importer. There’s certainly a strong exaggeration happening here.

So, yes, this is lunacy. But at the same time, the markets can be irrational for much longer than you can stay solvent, to paraphrase John Maynard Keynes. Put differently, even if you are correct about the long term, the market can act irrationally for a long time. If you don’t pay attention in that case, you may run out of money.

Since the start, I have emphasized that I never use leverage, as it can make you insolvent faster than anything else in investing. With leverage, crashes work seriously against you. If you are not leveraged, drops don’t harm you; they can even create great opportunities if you have cash coming in.

3. SaaS Multiples Lowest Ever

On X, Sergey posted this interesting chart.

It shows a reacceleration in revenue growth for SaaS companies, while the multiples keep dropping.

The reason why revenue is (slightly) accelerating? Probably the AI layer put on top of the software, the very thing that is supposedly killing it.

Now, that doesn’t mean you should buy software indiscriminately. There are a few filters you should go through:

* Is this a point solution (solving just one problem) or is it a platform that runs through companies? The first could be in danger, the second probably not.

* Is this in a regulated business or not? If not, the barriers to enter are lower.

* Is the pricing seat-based or usage-based? It could be that seat-based pricing faces pressure as fewer people work on a project due to AI.

J.P. Morgan put out this chart.

That means it’s clear: SaaS will continue to grow until 2027 and then will decline, while AI agents will take off.

This means there are two takeaways here.

1. SaaS as a whole won’t disappear but there will definitely SaaS companies that will disappear.

2. The best SaaS companies will be easily recognizable soon. While now, it’s still a bit harder, the SaaS companies that add their own agents as a complement to the software will win. That’s part of the reason I recently bought ServiceNow for the Forever Portfolio. Investors sell it off, even when it will benefit from AI. It’s hard to rip it out and its AI solution is growing fast.

There’s a saying: “The baby is being thrown out with the bath water.” It means that valuable things are lumped are labeled worthless just because they are in the wrong context. That’s exactly what’s happening here. Many babies are thrown out now. Of course, there’s bathwater, but many babies wait for you to save them. :-)

4. Google DeepMind’s Paper

DeepMind, acquired by Google in 2014 and a pioneer in AI, released a new paper this week.

The paper talks about “AI agents,” arguing that they are not real AI agents yet. They just split tasks and call tools, that’s all.

Real delegation means assigning authority, tracking performance in real time, and replacing agents mid-task when they underperform. That’s a fundamentally different game.

The biggest risk the paper flags is accountability. When agent A delegates to B, which delegates to C, nobody owns the failure anymore.

Humans end up as victims. They get the blame for outcomes they never actually controlled.

Another risk is monoculture. If every agent ecosystem depends on the same few foundation models, one mistake will be everywhere.

Delegation needs smart contracts, verification protocols, and permission frameworks. The companies building those for agent-to-agent commerce are positioned like payment processors were in early e-commerce. In other words, that’s where the real innovation should come from.

5. Duolingo appointed a VP of AI

This week, Duolingo (DUOL), one of the biggest victims of the “AI will kill everything” hype, appointed Andrew Hogue as VP of AI.

Duolingo was one of the first companies to partner with OpenAI and it is one of the biggest users of tokens from that company, but it’s still good to see a VP for AI.

Last year, I put Duolingo in the ‘great company but too expensive’ category. I’ve been pounding the table since the big drop and I will continue to do that at these prices. Companies don’t die if they adapt to a new reality. Blockbuster didn’t lose to Netflix because it was simply disrupted but because it didn’t adapt to the new reality of streaming. You can’t say that Duolingo doesn’t adapt to the new AI reality. This is another data point that shows this.

6. Constellation Software’s AI Agents Platform

Too many investors see the world too simple. “AI will kill Constellation Software!”

Are you sure? What if Constellation actually has a platform that develops AI agents for the 1,000+ companies it has in vertical market software? This X post shared that.

If you are a customer of one of Constellation’s (or Topicus’) companies and you have been using the software for decades, will you want a vibe-coded new AI agent that has proven nothing when it comes to security, reliability, uptime, and so on? Or will you be happy to pay a bit extra for the AI that your long-time partner offers you?

This is through RAIA, one of the companies acquired. It acquired offrs(.)com in 2019. Rich Swier was a co-founder of that company. In 2022, he built the first version of RAIA (a real estate AI agent) within the Constellation Software ecosystem in 2022. It became an AI agent platform for Constellation (and Topicus) companies. (This is taken from this post).

RAIA even shares that TSS (read Topicus) uses it for its core activity: mergers & acquisitions.

But yeah, of course, Constellation and Topicus will be killed by AI, right?

Do you want to read the rest of this article?

Become a paying member of Potential Multibaggers!

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• 📈 The Best Buys Now every month

• ✍️ The Overview Of The Week each Sunday

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It’s Sunday and...

Oh, no, it’s Monday, haha. I’m so used to that Sunday rhythm and many of you as well, of course.

But yesterday, I was traveling. That means I write this from Malta. I’m here for business. I know that sounds vague but nothing is sure yet, so there’s not much to communicate about now.

Next to me traveling, I know many of you will have had friends over to watch the Super Bowl. The Seattle Seahawks beat the New England Patriots and, thus, won the 60th Super Bowl.I hope you enjoyed the game.

I hope you can still grab a cup of Joe (if it’s not too late where you live) and enjoy the Overview Of The Week.

Articles In The Past Weeks

Last week, I only published one article because of Klosters. We had a preview to the upcoming week of earnings releases of Potential Multibaggers stocks. You can read that article here.

Memes Of The Week

The times are a bit tougher now for software investors and usually, that results in more memes.

This one already shows that. It’s a meme, and at the same time, it’s true, which makes it always more fun.

Source

Multi Frederic shared this one.

Meme King Flo shared this one:

The Trade Desk keeps getting punches and Zack posted this meme about it.

This is one for the developers and programmers to think about:

And the last one this week is a pun, which is always fun.

Interesting Podcasts Or Books

While I was in Klosters this past week, I didn’t have time to read or listen to podcasts. I added a few to my waiting list, so probably you will get those next week.

The markets in the past week

The markets continue to feel weird and divided. Just look at this chart of the indexes over the last week.

As you can see, the Russell 2000 jumped by an impressive 2.17% this week. But at the same time, the Nasdaq dropped by 1.84% and it was even down 4% before the rebound on Friday.

The S&P 500 was down 0.10%.

So, what does this mean for the Greed & Fear Index? It dropped from slightly in Greed last week to slightly in Fear this week.

Quick Facts

1. Capex = Bad?

You saw a consistent pattern in Big Tech's earnings so far. The earnings were good to very good, but investors still sold the stock because of the high Capex plans. This is the chart for Microsoft and Amazon over the last month.

Even Google’s stock price dropped after very strong earnings and overall bullishness on Gemini.

Worries about the huge Capex are understandable, but sometimes, it makes sense to go a bit deeper.

First, you can see that cloud revenue growth for all three increases, but it accelerates for Google Cloud (especially) and AWS, not as much for Azure.

If you look at RPO, though, you see that Azure also accelerates. RPO is the abbreviation for Remaining Performance Obligation. It’s the amount that is already contracted but cannot be recognized as revenue because the services have not been delivered yet.

By the way, if you want to gain such great insights through Fiscal, grab my 15% discount through this link.

So, yes, you can point out the huge Capex spending. But how about this?

Of course, for Microsoft and even Google, that’s not just cloud, although most of it is for Google. For Microsoft, there’s also Windows and Office.

But the point is that while the investments seem crazy, the RPOs look crazy too, and are higher than the Capex. If companies see that their investments generate more revenue than they cost, it would be crazy not to invest.

Of course, you could wonder if there will be overcapacity at a certain moment, when AI gets more efficient, but I think the demand will explode even more at that point, so investing such huge amounts right now is exactly what you should do if you don’t want to be disrupted. As Mark Zuckerberg said, the risk of not investing enough is now much bigger than investing too much.

2. Molbook: FAKE!

There was quite a bit of controversy last week about Moltbook, similar to a Reddit for Moltbots (previously Clawdbot). This is what I wrote about this last week in the Overview Of The Week:

This week, there was a lot of controversy around these bots getting their own Reddit-like social media platform. You saw issues such as threads where people were shut out, trading places for stolen identities, and other alarming trends.

Don’t get me wrong, I can see the dangers of such platforms but up to now, the bots are just emulating behavior. In other words, if people don’t program like that, they won’t get out of control. That doesn’t mean that with AGI (artificial general intelligence) this can’t become a real problem. But AGI is not here yet.

This week, what I wrote turned out to be even more true than I thought. Just read this.

So, there’s a lot of hype right now. I don’t say that this can’t become a real problem in the future, but right now, it’s not.

3. Kom Zaterdag Naar Gent

On Saturday, I will speak at an investment event in Ghent. I speak in Dutch, so I will write this in Dutch. You can scroll to the next thing if you don’t understand Dutch.

Op zaterdag 14 februari ben ik één van de sprekers op het beleggersevent Een Hart Voor Beleggen in Gent.

Dit evenement wil je niet missen! Niet alleen vanwege the topsprekers (zei hij bescheiden), maar ook om een praatje te doen met je medebeleggers.

Praktische informatie

Prijs: €25 voor leden, €50 voor niet-leden, €25 voor studenten

Broodjes en frisdrank voor ‘s middags zijn in de prijs inbegrepen.

PS: als je nog geen VFB-lid bent, dat kan voor €75. Daarvoor krijg je kortingen op de bijeenkomsten en krijg je ook 10x per jaar het prachtblad Beste Belegger. Je kunt je hier lid maken.

Locatie: HoGent, Valentin Vaerwyckweg 1, 9000 Gent

Aanvangsuur: 9 uur

Kaarten kopen kan hier.

Tot in Gent!

4. Claude Legal AI: Not the SaaS Killer

This week was another dark week for VMS companies. Just look at the drops in the last month alone. Constellation Software, Topicus and Chapters Group all lost about a quarter of their market cap.

Chapters in particular had a big drop this week (see later). The reason? The Claude Legal AI plugin for Claude Cowork was launched this week. The stocks of many SaaS companies working in that area fell.

Now, let me make it clear up front that I really like the great work Anthropic is doing. It has much more progress than OpenAI in the last year or so.

But if you look at what’s underlying this Legal plugin, it’s... SaaS.

Tae Kim, author of the great book The Nvidia Way had a great post about it. He fed the Claude Legal AI GitHub to... Claude 4.6. This is what it said:

It’s basically a prompt engineering guideline that USES software from Microsoft, Slack, etc. as its “real power.”

“There’s no custom code, no legal database, no proprietary engine. It’s a structured way to give Claude the right context and procedures for legal tasks.”

“The real power comes from connectors. The plugin works best when connected to your existing tools via MCP. Pre-configured servers include Slack, Box, Egnyte, Atlassian, and Microsoft 365.”

“But it’s still fundamentally prompt engineering and workflow design, not traditional software”

So, just as with the Moltbook hype, this is not as futuristic as it looks. It’s still prompt-engineered, which means it’s unreliable for autonomous work. For legal work not exactly what you want. If there’s any sector where you need 100% correct output, it’s in legal matters. This will help lawyers to increase their productivity, but not replace them. Let alone it would replace their software.

JP Morgan agrees. In its report this week, it wrote:

It feels like an illogical leap to extrapolate from Claude Cowork Plugins, to this expectation that every company will hereby write and maintain a bespoke product to replace every layer of mission-critical enterprise software they have ever deployed.

There is a strange AI bubble going on: it’s more an anti-non-AI bubble.

Do you want to read the rest of this article?

Become a paying member of Potential Multibaggers!

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• 📚 Full access to our entire library of deep-insight articles

• 🔎 Full investment cases

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• 🎥 Regular Webinars

• 📈 The Best Buys Now every month

• ✍️ The Overview Of The Week each Sunday

• 🔎 Deep earnings analysis

• 📊 The 10 Best Stocks for 2026 (the selection for 2025 beat the S&P by 54%!)

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Go to this page.

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It’s Sunday.

So, here’s the Overview of the Week again, best enjoyed with your drink of choice and zero distractions.

In the upcoming week (in a few hours, actually), I will be traveling to Klosters, Switzerland (not far from Davos) for ValueX.

Robert Karas, one of the other participants, wrote about ValueX Klosters on LinkedIn:

Why ValueX is a community, not a conference.

It all started in 2011, when Guy Spier organized his first gathering of investors in Switzerland. Over the past fifteen years, a level of deep trust has developed among participants that is hard to find anywhere else.

Everything traces back to a small set of principles that have shaped ValueX from the very beginning.

1. Sharing of knowledge
We learn from each other in a supportive, open environment.

2. Strict confidentiality
It’s all about trust. Nothing is shared unless there is explicit permission.

3. Non-solicitation (no pitching)
No one wants to be sold to. It’s a clear no-no.

4. Exclusive and focused
It’s a private, invitation-only event.

5. Work and play balance
We are in the mountains. It would be a sin to spend all our time in a room. The greatest value often emerges through conversations while walking, hiking, or skiing. And it doesn’t cost an arm and a leg either. Guy’s approach is generous. It’s about covering costs, not building a business around it.

These principles were inspired by the format of TED talks, specifically the “Ideas Worth Spreading” mission.

The secret sauce of ValueX is Gestalt. We don’t tell others what to do and give advice. We only share our personal experiences. It helps to remove ego and judgment from the room.

For fifteen years, this framework has worked remarkably well, fostering intellectual honesty, humility, and a genuine sense of community.

It’s always great to talk to so many extremely smart people and get new ideas.

Articles In The Past Weeks

This is the third article this week.

In the first article this week, I took advantage of the software sell-off and bought shares for my Forever Portfolio. You can read all about that here.

We also looked at CrowdStrike. Is it a buy now on AI or not?

Memes Of The Week

Two memes this week. Neither is directly related to investing, but funny enough, and still related enough to share them here.

As I mentioned in the article about my additions to the Forever Portfolio, I fooled around a bit with what used to be called no-code coding. Now everyone calls everything vibecoding.

But, while the start looked extremely promising, we are not there yet. While you hear that anyone’s grandmother can vibecode enterprise-level software before lunch now, we are still far from that dream.

That’s why I found this meme so funny.

The other one is from last year, but Multi Market Sense shared it in our Stonk meme channel and I thought it was funny.

Source

Interesting Podcasts Or Books

This week, I listened to a few private podcasts, meaning they are not generally available to the public, so I can’t share them.

But I have added a podcast episode to my watchlist and want to share it. It’s in the Founders podcast, and it’s with Kevin Kelly.

Kevin Kelly is the thinker behind the “1,000 True Fans” concept: the idea that creators don’t need millions of followers, just 1,000 dedicated fans who want everything they make. In 1994 already, he wrote the classic Out of Control, on decentralized systems, and how complex organizations work like beehives rather than top-down hierarchies. Now, many think that idea has always been there, but it was Kevin Kelly who introduced it.

He has written books like The Inevitable (2016) and a few years ago Excellent Advice for Living, which he started writing for his children on his 68th birthday. The title says what it’s about.

Kelly also co-founded Wired magazine. So, enough reasons to listen to this episode.

The markets in the past week

Sometimes, we focus so much on our own holdings that we lose sight of the market. That’s why I give you this overview every week.

As you can see, the Russell 2000 dropped quite substantially this week. This was probably a reaction to President Trump’s nomination of Kevin Warsh as the next Federal Reserve Chair. Warsh is seen as more hawkish than other candidate names that were circulating. Because Russell 2000 companies generally have higher debt, that’s seen as a negative.

The Nasdaq was down jus 0.17%, which may be surprising if you only look at the software sell-off. The S&P 500 was up 0.34%.

The Greed & Fear Index surprisingly jumped from Neutral to Greed.

Quick Facts

1. RPO = $0?

I have written about this in my article on Friday, but no, I don’t think software’s dead.

There’s a new story now, that RPO (remaining performance obligations) should be discounted to $0. Chamath Palihapitiya, aka Scamath, launched that story.

The man is one of the guests of the All-In podcast, together with Jason Calacanis, David Sacks & David Friedberg, and he’s a venture capitalist. He was an early investor in Facebook. He was also behind multiple SPACs (Special Purpose Acquisition Companies), which bought Virgin Galactic, Opendoor, Clover Health, and SoFi.

Chamath is partly a good businessman and partly a clown, probably in equal parts and this proves the second part.

Now, don’t get me wrong, there will be some contracts that will be renegotiated. But discounting all RPO to $0 is just laughable. There is a lot of software out there that you buy because you need reliability, regulation-approved, solid software that can’t be replaced with in-house vibecoded software. You don’t want your cybersecurity to be coded with an LLM. Or your procurement, invoicing, HR, and so much more.

Chamath may be on to something, but not what he thinks. I have a feeling that he’s an indicator of peak tech negativity.

2. Moltbot Hell?

Last week, I wrote about Clawdbot. It had to change its name already because Anthropic (with Claude) didn’t like it. The new name is Moltbot.

This week, there was a lot of controversy around these bots getting their own Reddit-like social media platform. You saw issues such as threads where people were shut out, trading places for stolen identities, and other alarming trends.

Don’t get me wrong, I can see the dangers of such platforms but up to now, the bots are just emulating behavior. In other words, if people don’t program like that, they won’t get out of control. That doesn’t mean that with AGI (artificial general intelligence) this can’t become a real problem. But AGI is not here yet.

Still, we need to monitor the evolution closely.

3. De Winnaars zijn...

As with last week, this section is for Dutch speakers only, as it concerns an investment event in Ghent where I will be a speaker. You can scroll to the next thing if you don’t understand Dutch.

Op zaterdag 14 februari ben ik één van de sprekers op het beleggersevent Een Hart Voor Beleggen in Gent.

Ik mocht van de organisatie twee tickets weggeven, goed voor een waarde van €50 elk. Dank je voor jullie massale deelname.

Ik stak alle namen in een randomizer en die pikte er twee uit.

De winnaars zijn...

Jef Megens

&

Wido Tancer

Proficiat! Jullie krijgen verdere info via mail.

Niet gewonnen en je wil er toch nog bij zijn? Dat kan, uiteraard.

Praktische informatie

Prijs: €25 voor leden, €50 voor niet-leden, €25 voor studenten

Broodjes en frisdrank voor ‘s middags zijn in de prijs inbegrepen.

PS: als je nog geen VFB-lid bent, dat kan voor €75. Daarvoor krijg je kortingen op de bijeenkomsten en krijg je ook 10x per jaar het prachtblad Beste Belegger. Je kunt je hier lid maken.

Locatie: HoGent, Valentin Vaerwyckweg 1, 9000 Gent

Aanvangsuur: 9 uur

Kaarten kopen kan hier.

Tot in Gent!

4. Nvidia’s $100B OpenAI Deal In Jeopardy?

According to rumors, Jensen Huang has questioned the deal with OpenAI, citing both competition from Google and Anthropic and OpenAI’s lack of discipline.

Source

I don’t think Jensen Huang should be surprised by OpenAI’s lack of discipline, as it has been my concern for over a year now, and anyone following this area, even from afar, can see it.

It would also be one reason the rumors that OpenAI is rushing to go public may be true.

As always, I will definitely not invest in an OpenAI IPO. I never invest in IPOs. Of all IPOs, only a handful traded below their IPO price. On top of that, I want companies to prove themselves over time before I invest in them.

As an Nvidia shareholder, I think it’s prudent to show some restraint. There are others, like Softbank, that will support OpenAI and for Nvidia, $100B is a ton of money.

There’s still the potential that OpenAI will be the MySpace of AI. Both Claude and Gemini have taken market share from OpenAI, and I don’t see any sign that will stop anytime soon. Just look at this chart.

(Source)

Do you want to read the rest of this article?

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Aaaaah, it’s Sunday again!

That means a fresh Overview Of The Week. It’s still a bit warm as it comes just out of the oven.

So, grab your Sunday evening tea or Monday morning coffee and indulge yourself.

Articles In The Past Weeks

This is the fourth article this week.

In the first article this week, I looked at Constellation Software after the 50% drop.

Now that Shopify has dropped, is it a buy already? That was the question that was answered in the second article this week.

I also bought shares for my Forever Portfolio. You can read all about that here.

Memes Of The Week

Just one meme this week. Thanks for sharing, Zack!

Interesting Podcasts Or Books

David Gardner, co-founder of The Motley Fool, is one of the people who influenced my investing the most, together with Phil Fisher and Peter Lynch.

There was a time I listened to every episode of David Gardner’s podcast and while it’s still interesting today, I don’t listen to every episode anymore since he stopped picking stocks for The Motley Fool.

But this week was a very interesting episode that will probably interest many Multis as well.

In the most recent episode of Rule Breaker Investing, David Gardner goes over his risk score system and uses Etsy and Duolingo as examples.

You can listen to the episode here.

The markets in the past week

So, what did the markets do in this turbulent week?

While the Nasdaq and the S&P 500 were down substantially on Tuesday after the Greenland issue and associated tariffs for European countries, this turned out to be another TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out). Fortunately.

The Greed & Fear Index dropped back to Neutral.

Quick Facts

1. Greenland & Canada

This week, President Trump’s claim to Greenland was all over the news because of the World Economic Forum in Davos.

As I already said, this was another TACO (Trump Always Chickens Out). This is actually a classic negotiation tactic. It’s called the door-in-your-face technique.

If you want something, and you shock the other person by asking something outrageous. Any concession from that person to something that stays far from the brutal proposal is seen as a minor concession to avoid the extreme initial ask.

I don’t claim that Trump doesn’t want Greenland, but I don’t believe he’s willing to blow up NATO over the issue by attacking an ally.

But I’m not here to talk politics. Politics divides, and there are already more than enough people who divide others. So, let’s not discuss this. Of course, you and I have our own opinions, but I don’t feel tempted to vent mine on everything.

The reason I bring it up here is that the markets did very badly because of the threat to impose more tariffs on European countries. In the end, this threat was not pursued.

But a new threat started, this time with Canada. Canada and China would make a small trade deal to lower tariffs on specific goods. For example, China would reduce duties on Canadian canola/rapeseed oil from 85% to 15%, and Canada would cut tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles from 100% to around 6.1%.

This is not a full free trade agreement. Initially, Trump reacted quite positively to the deal, but then Canadian Prime Minister Carney gave a speech at Davos. In that speech, he said the deal is part of Canada’s preparation for a “new world order” with diversified partnerships. President Trump didn’t like that at all, and he shot back that the US would impose a 100% tariff on goods from Canada. His reasoning is that the deal could lead the Chinese to use Canada to circumvent American tariffs on Chinese goods.

Again, I’m not commenting on this situation, but it all shows that there’s a lot of economic uncertainty.

In my 5 Bold Predictions for 2026, I wrote:

The Nasdaq, S&P 500, and Dow Jones indexes will all drop at least 20% at some point.

I think this kind of uncertainty about where the world is heading could be the reason. Of course, there could always be a black swan, something really nobody could see coming (like the pandemic), but my guess is that it will be macroeconomic uncertainty. And of course, that’s just an educated guess.

2. The week ahead

It looks like it’s going to be a bad start to the week. These are the futures.

The reason is that investors see a 75% for a government shutdown (again). What happened in Minneapolis, the Democrats will not want more money to go to ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement).

I know it’s probably tempting for some of you to post political comments, but once more, please don’t do this. I’m just pointing out why the futures are down.

3. Only if you speak Dutch

This part is for those who speak Dutch only, as it’s about an investing event in Ghent where I will be one of the speakers. It will be in Dutch, so it makes little sense to write this in English, as you won’t be able to understand me (and the rest of the speakers). You can scroll to the next thing if you don’t understand Dutch.

Beleggingsevent: Win tickets ter waarde van €100!

Op zaterdag 14 februari ben ik één van de sprekers op het beleggersevent Een Hart Voor Beleggen in Gent.

De organisatie (Lynx en VFB of de Vlaamse Federatie van Beleggers) heeft me twee tickets ter beschikking gesteld om uit te delen aan jullie. Een ticket kost normaal €50 (€25 voor VFB-leden).

Maar jij kunt dus een gratis ticket winnen. Meer daarover op het einde van dit bericht.

Zoals jullie zien komt er een brede selectie van onderwerpen aan bod: financiële onafhankelijkheid, de meerwaardebelasting, maar vooral heel veel beleggen.

U ontmoet meer dan 450 medebeleggers, breidt uw netwerk uit en versterkt uw financiële kennis.

Voormiddag

Jan Longeval opent de dag met een sessie over internationale macro-economie. Jan Longeval is de auteur van God Dobbelt Niet Op De Beurs en Heavy Metal. Volgende week komt zijn nieuwe boek Bitcoin Of Shtcoin uit.

Daarna volgt mijn goede vriend Michael Gielkens. Hij zal spreken over familieholdings. Als je vragen hebt over Constellation Software, Topicus, of Chapters Group, naast vele andere holdings and seriële overnemers, dan is Michael je man.

Gert De Mesure bespreekt buitenlandse vastgoedspelers, terwijl Kristoff De Turck in technische analyse behandelt. Ann Van Dingenen (The Money Mom) spreekt over persoonlijke financiën.

Ikzelf heb de eer de voormiddag af te sluiten met een lezing over raketaandelen. Ik zal hierbij iets meer focusen op selectie en waardering van groeiaandelen. Ik zal ook tien aandelen selecteren die ik op dat moment interessant vind.

Tijdens de middagpauze kun je eten, ontspannen en netwerken; je krijgt namelijk broodjes en frisdrank (inbegrepen in de prijs).

Namiddag

In de namiddag bespreekt Toon Cuypers (FIRE Belgium) hoe je geld onttrekt uit een beleggingsportefeuille. Dieter Plas (Beleggersuniversity) praat over interessante posities voor 2026 en Pieter Vandervelde licht de belangrijkste principes van vermogensfiscaliteit toe.

Daarna spreekt Pierre Huylenbroeck (Mister Market Magazine). Ook Pierre mag ik een vriend noemen. Hij is de voormalig hoofdredacteur van de krant De Tijd en is een vat vol beurswijsheden. Qua stijl (en humor) is hij de beste auteur die in het Nederlands over de beurs schrijft, zoals zijn vijf beursboeken bewijzen.

Dit zijn de meest recente. Iedereen Belegger is een klassieker, Onsterfelijk Beursadvies gaat te rade bij de beste investeerders ooit en Altijd Belegger is Pierres nieuwste boek.

Ik heb deze alledrie met heel veel plezier gelezen en kan ze iedereen aanraden.

Een Hart Voor Beleggen wordt afgesloten door Nette Buyens die zal spreken over meerwaardebelasting en fiscaliteit.

Praktische informatie

Prijs: €25 voor leden, €50 voor niet-leden, €25 voor studenten

Locatie: HoGent, Valentin Vaerwyckweg 1, 9000 Gent

Aanvangsuur: 9 uur

Kaarten kopen kan hier.

Het evenement vindt plaats in twee zalen met elk een vaste presentator: Zaal A onder leiding van Ben Granjé (CEO van de VFB) en Zaal B onder leiding van Justin Blekemolen (beursanalyst bij LYNX).

Broodjes en frisdrank voor ‘s middags zijn in de prijs inbegrepen.

Jij kunt een ticket winnen ter waarde van €50.

Ik heb twee tickets ter beschikking.

Wat moet je daarvoor doen?

Er zijn maar liefst drie manieren om deel te nemen. Je kiest gewoon de manier die het best bij jou past!

1. Je deelt dit programma via je sociale media. Deze afbeelding, dus.

Je deelt deze afbeelding op je Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, LinkedIn of om het even welk ander platform.

of

1. Je stuurt deze mail door naar iemand die geïnteresseerd kan zijn.

of

1. Je stuurt mij je beste vraag door. Ik zal één of enkele vragen behandelen tijdens mijn lezing in Gent.

Hoe doe je dat?

Alles gaat via dit formulier.

Deadline: Vrijdag 30 januari. Maar doe het nu maar al, anders vergeet je dat. :-)

Tot in Gent!

4. Duolingo

This week, I wrote two somewhat longer posts on X about Duolingo. I want to share them with you here as well.

Here’s why AI is a tailwind for Duolingo, not a headwind.

Duolingo used vibe coding and generative AI to launch 148 new courses in 1 year. That’s more than they built in the previous 12 years combined. Content scaling at marginal costs.

But doesn’t that make it easier for others to make that content? Yes, of course. But the difference is NOT in the content. If you wanted to learn a language or anything else, you could already have done that on the internet for free since, let’s say, 2010.

The difference is in the most challenging part of any learning process: consistency. Duolingo has 50.5 million DAUs (daily active users). I’m one of them, with a streak of 1,460 days. During that time, I learned Italian, music, Latin, and chess. No way I would have the discipline to be so consistent with anything else.

Of course, improvement is still possible. At a certain level, you get to a boring part (take verb tenses) that doesn’t stimulate you enough, and the algorithm should pick that up and interlace it with content you do like more or even cross-promote other courses at that moment.

Also: I’m waiting for courses like Python, C++, make-up (not for me personally, but our 11-year-old daughter would LOVE it), personal finance & investing (that would make a huge difference globally!!), mindfulness, Excel mastery, negotiation, statistics, productivity, etc.

And this is the second post:

Duolingo’s Rule of 40.

For growth companies, the Rule of 40 is often helpful. It adds the revenue growth percentage to the FCF margin. If the number is above 40, you have quality growth. So, we check Fiscal AI.

Revenue growth in the last quarter? 41%

FCF Margin? 29.2%

That means a Rule of 70%, which is very strong.

Revenue growth is expected to drop (Fiscal shows the expectations on the chart as well). So, let’s look at the low point here, 21%. The average FCF margin over the last 8 quarters was 36.3%. So, if Duolingo an just keep up that FCF margin, you look at a Rule of 57.

I know what some bears will say: Stock-based compensation! Ok, let’s weed it out. In the ttm, there was $131M in SBC and $272M in FCF. That means $141M in FCF-SBC. That results in 15% SBC-adjusted FCF.

Now, you can’t take the Rule of 40 anymore. That rule comes from VC and there, SBC is a normal part of business. For years, I have used the Rule of 25 in that case. And for Duolingo, it would mean 36%, which is outstanding.

You can always follow me on X: @fromvalue

5. Clawdbot: The New Shift

This weekend, I’ve been reading about Clawdbot and I’m definitely impressed already with what I see. I have no first-hand experience yet, but I want to try it this upcoming week.

Clawdbot is 24/7 personal AI assistant you run on your own devices. You can communicate with it through multiple channels (Discord, Signal, WhatsApp, Slack...) and it remembers everything about you, unlike LLMs. Even in projects where you trained them thoroughly, the model still deteriorates.

Unlike standard LLMs that only “chat” in a browser, Clawdbot is an active agent that lives on your hardware and manages your local files and folders directly.

While ChatGPT “forgets” or stays in the cloud, Clawdbot builds a permanent, private knowledge base from your personal information. Anything you feed it, actually.

Do you want to connect it to your Strava account and act like a coach based on the data that come in automatically? No problem.

Do you want it to check all incoming contracts on anomalies and send you a WhatsApp message if one comes in your mailbox? No problem.

Do you have 15 hours of meetings recorded somewhere? Great, now you can get real insights from that.

These are just a few examples I’m thinking of now. I’m sure we will see a huge number of applications coming out. This almost feels like a second ChatGPT moment.

It made me realize that I have to think through my investments again. This changes everything again, I think.

My very first thoughts: this will be great for Apple (many want the Apple Mini Mac to run it on) and for DRAM memory (the Micron party could just be starting).

But there will be many more implications. I have to think through these in the upcoming week.

What do you get as a member?

• ✍️ Multiple high-quality articles per week

• 📚 Full access to our entire library of deep-insight articles

• 🔎 Full investment cases

• 📊 Access to the Private Community

• 🎥 Regular Webinars

• 📈 The Best Buys Now every month

• ✍️ The Overview Of The Week each Sunday

• 🔎 Deep earnings analysis

• 📊 The 10 Best Stocks for 2026 (the selection for 2025 beats the S&P by more than 40%!)

Many Multis say that the community alone is already worth the price, but you get so much more.

Go to this page.

Subscribe to the annual plan.

Read more

Another Sunday, another Overview Of The Week! I’ve written 300 before this one and still, I like it each and every time, also because I know that many Multis have a ritual of reading the Overview Of The Week, before going to bed on Sunday evening or even more often on Monday morning with a cup of coffee.

Articles In The Past Weeks

This week, this is just the second article, as I focused on my health this week, with some hospital visits. For those who missed it earlier, I was diagnosed with lung-COVID, which had triggered severe asthma. This week, I had to have some tests in that context. Those tests were

In the article that was published, you got the Best Buys Now.

Memes Of The Week

Two memes this week. This is the first one. It’s actually a clip, but the caption is funny.

You can watch the clip here.

It’s indeed true that Software-as-a-Service companies have suffered recently. The “AI will kill everything” narrative is very strong right now. For a part, that will be warranted but for quite a substantial part, it won’t. That’s always the case. The market overreacts to both extremes. Some very interesting SaaS companies could become very attractive soon. We will follow this up, of course. But we are in the meme section of this article, so not too serious here. :-)

And we talk about memes, we can’t pass our Meme King, Flo;

Interesting Podcasts Or Books

This week, I listened to an episode of Invest Like The Best from early December. It’s an interview with David George. He’s General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz, aka A16Z, where he leads the growth investing business.

This was a good interview if you want to get an insight into early companies.

You can listen to the episode here.

One that I have not listened to (it only came out today) but definitely will listen to in the upcoming week is David Senra’s interview with Tobi Lütke. As you probably know, Tobi Lütke is the founder and CEO of Shopify (SHOP). I’ve followed him since I made Shopify the first Potential Multibaggers pick on May 2, 2017, at $7.74.

Tobi Lütke is whip-smart, and maybe because English is not his native language (that’s German), he often formulates things differently, but (like a real German) very precisely and authentically.

As David Senra is a great interviewer, I’m looking forward to this episode. You can listen to it here.

The markets in the past week

Let’s look at the markets this week.

You see the same pattern as last week. The Russell 2000 outperforms the two other indexes. The Russell 2000 was up 2.04%, and the other two indexes were down. The S&P 500 was down 0.38%, and the Nasdaq was down 0.66%. For why the Russell 2000 is up while the others are down, I will repeat the reasons from last week, but add a third one.

Why was the Russell 2000 up so much? Well, there are always multiple explanations out there. One is the “overvalued megacaps” story. I’m not a big believer here. While I see some overvaluation in some megacaps, that’s definitely not the case overall. But hey, it’s a story that sounds knowledgeable, right?

A second explanation makes more sense, I think. The Russell 2000 had quite a few losers in 2025. Investors sell those at the end of the year for tax purposes and then buy them back in January. It’s the so-called January effect, supported by the lower interest rates, which are favorable for small caps.

The third explanation is what we have seen from Jay Powell. It felt almost like a hostage video. The market sees that and assumes Powell will have to bend, which means interest rates would drop. For the more debt-heavy Russell 2000 companies, that would be good news.

Weirdly enough, the Greed & Fear Index went from Neutral (51) to Greed (62).

Quick Facts

There wasn’t much stock market news in the last few weeks, so no Mark this week. But here are the Quick Facts.

1. The SaaScopalypse

We already touched on it earlier: the big software and SaaS sell-off. I have heard this been called the SaaScopalypse. That’s at least the third time already. It was used in the last quarter of 2018 and in 2022. Did you still remember both? Probably not, only 2022, and that’s great. It probably means there’s a big chance you will not remember this one in 7 years.

But I want to spend some time on the subject here.

First, as I already said, the market always overreacts. Before this big sell-off, many software stocks were priced as if the sky was the limit. If you throw in AI coding, which has the potential to disrupt certain software players, that extra uncertainty makes the market nervous. That’s why it often sells off all names in the space, no matter what.

Let me give you the examples of Topicus and Constellation Software. Before now, Constellation had never dropped by 30%. Right now, it’s down 45% from its high. For Topicus, the same goes.

But the funny thing is that the main business of both companies is buying software companies. So, that means the big drop in software valuation is actually a boost for Constellation and Topicus, as they can buy software companies at much lower valuations now.

Both have very strict hurdle rates that they use for the acquisitions, and if they deployed less money (Constellation) and a bit differently (Topicus), that’s mainly because of the high valuations. I don’t think you should expect substantially more deals already in the upcoming quarter, but over the next year if this continues, it might be a great year for both.

But for Constellation, the stock had become expensive because ‘it only goes up.’ So, a part of this is a fair rerating to more normal valuations. But, as often, the market overshoots both ways.

Some software names are already looking more attractive. They are not cheap enough to buy right now, but I’m watching them. I think of a great company like HubSpot, for example. You can’t just replicate that whole platform with AI in a very short amount of time. Another one that starts to look interesting is Monday(.)com.

It’s clear that building software is getting much easier and faster with AI. No doubt about that. But the fact that you can make it doesn’t mean you can distribute it. Or, in other words, it’s not because you can make a damn good coffee that you will disrupt Starbucks. The product is not the hardest part and it never really was. The hardest part is still to find customers, to make them pay more and more, to hook them into your ecosystem etc. It seems like many forget that right now.

Of course, some really talented people will develop faster than ever with AI and AI will open the doors for people who can’t code. That will be a big talent pool for new applications, as creativity is not always the strongsuit of developers. Now, I don’t want to overgeneralize here, as I know many very creative developers, too. But the influx of creativity from new people will turn the industry around and let new ideas flourish.

But concluding from that context that the entire software industry will be disrupted is an exaggeration.

How can you see the difference?

That’s a much simpler question to answer than you might think. The companies that have the data will be the winners, it’s as simple as that. Many of the software companies will even thrive because they will use AI to accelerate their own product development. That could result in fast growth, not decline.

If you still don’t understand what I mean, let me give an example. Microsoft started in the eighties and it was not the best operating system. First, you had the cassettes, floppy disks, hard disks, and CD-ROMs, and later delivery via the internet or preinstalled. At each stage, there were companies trying to disrupt Microsoft. With the internet, you could have thought that Microsoft would die. The fact that Steve Ballmer missed the mobile phone revolution completely didn’t help.

Fortunately for Microsoft, Satya Nadella came just in time to drag Microsoft into the cloud era, so it didn’t miss that train either and now Microsoft is as dominant as it was in the nineties.

This shows that a company has to adapt to the new platforms. If not, it can be disrupted. But if it can, it can give its position a big boost. So, who will adapt the best, do you think?

I want to end this with an interesting post of one of the companies I just named, HubSpot. The co-founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah, wrote this on X.

To be continued, of course. We live in very interesting times!

2. Shopify

Shopify (SHOP) is building the foundation for agentic commerce. The company calls it Universal Commerce Protocol, and it’s co-developed with Google. It’s an open-source protocol, so others can use it as well.

This release is important because it allows AI agents and retailers to integrate. Agents can handle everything: product discovery, customer support, discounts, subscriptions, loyalty programs, etc. It can be used for all types of commerce.

Shopify founder and CEO Tobi Lütke says that some major retailers are already using it.

If you are not on the paid Potential Multibaggers plan yet, this is the ultimate chance to get your free upgrade worth $800. From now on, I will only show my portfolio in the $1,200 VIP-plan. But everyone who is a subscriber before Tuesday (when I do the upgrade) will be upgraded for FREE FOREVER!

What do you get as a VIP member?

For $399, here’s everything you’ll get:

• 📈 My Personal Portfolio, the Forever Portfolio

• ✍️ Multiple high-quality articles per week

• 📚 Full access to our entire library of deep-insight articles

• 🔎 Full investment cases

• 📊 Access to the Private Community

• 🎥 Regular Webinars

• 📈 The Best Buys Now every month

• ✍️ The Overview Of The Week each Sunday

• 🔎 Deep earnings analysis

• 📊 The 10 Best Stocks for 2026 (the selection for 2025 beats the S&P by more than 40%!)

Many Multis say that the community alone is already worth the price, but you get so much more.

Go to this page.

Subscribe to the annual plan.

You will be upgraded to the VIP plan for free

Read more

Last week, we had the first Overview Of The Week of 2026.

This inspires me to thank you from the bottom of my heart. Without you, dear Multi, I would never have come this far. Your feedback, your words of appreciation and your kindness are the fuel that keeps me going.

Before I get too emotional (I could), let’s dive into this Overview!

Articles In The Past Weeks

This is the third article this week.

In the first article, you got an earnings analysis of Celsius. I also updated the Quality Score and Valuation.

The other article was also an earnings analysis and an evaluation to see whether the stock was a buy right now. The company is one that’s under the radar: Global-e. You can read the analysis here.

Changes at Potential Multibaggers

Something will change at Potential Multibaggers.

Starting next week, the Forever Portfolio will only be visible in the $1,200 subscription plan.

But don’t panic yet, dear Multi. If you are already a paid subscriber, you will be upgraded for free! So, nothing will change for you. You will get a free upgrade.

If you are not a subscriber yet, now is the time to switch!

Because today, your price isn’t $1,200. It’s not even the regular price of $499.

It’s $399, as you get a 20% discount.

I want that discount!

For a bit over $1 a day, you get:

• 🚀 The Full 10 Stocks for 2026: the list that returned 54.16% last year is off an a great start already.

• 📈 The Real Money Portfolio: My personal trades and allocations (Value: $1,200).

• 🎯 Best Buys Now: 5 curated picks every month (Beating the S&P by 25%+).

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Memes Of The Week

Two memes this week. This is the first one.

The second meme says a lot about how many people feel right now, I think. It’s from Flo, aka our Slack Meme King (yes, capital letters!).

Thanks for being Flo, Flo!

Interesting Podcasts Or Books

Some weeks, I have to think hard about what to include here. For example, because I only listened to one podcast or didn’t start or finish a new book. Other weeks, I have to select because there was so much. This week is in that second category. These are the three most interesting podcasts I listened to this week.

The first one was with James Clear, the author of Atomic Habits. It’s a thoughtful conversation about how changing our behaviors can change our lives.

You can listen to the podcast here.

The second was with a famous founder. Sometimes, that means expectations are blown up, but in this case, the reality was better than the expectations, which is not easy. I’m talking about an episode of Invest Like The Best with Patrick O’Shaughnessy, and the guest was Netflix founder Reed Hastings. You can listen to that episode here.

The third and last podcast episode I want to share with you was with Gavin Baker. It had been on my list for a few weeks but with all the holidays, I hadn’t found the time yet before this week.

There are few analysts who are as knowledgeable about AI, tech, chips, and software as he is, and it’s always a pleasure to listen to him. You can listen to this episode of Invest Like The Best here.

The markets in the past week

Let’s look at the markets this week.

It’s remarkable that the Russell 2000 is up 4.62%. The S&P 500 was up 1.57% and the Nasdaq 1.88%%.

Why was the Russell 2000 up so much? Well, there are always multiple explanations out there. One is the “overvalued megacaps” story. I’m not a big believer here. While I see some overvaluation in some megacaps, that’s definitely not the case overall. But hey, it’s a story that sounds knowledgeable, right?

A second explanation makes more sense, I think. The Russell 2000 had quite a few losers in 2025. Investors sell those at the end of the year for tax purposes and then buy them back in January. It’s the so-called January effect, supported by the lower interest rates, which are favorable for small caps.

The Greed & Fear Index remained in Neutral territory.

Quick Facts

There wasn’t much stock market news in the last few weeks, so no Mark this week. But here are the Quick Facts.

1. Fiscal Slashes Price of Top Tier Plan to $79

Many will know that I have a partnership with Fiscal AI. And I have great news. Fiscal just dropped the cost of its most advanced plan from $199 to $79, making high-end analytics tools far more accessible. These are intended for industry experts but are now sold at consumer prices.

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Fiscal has its own data, which sets it apart from everyone else. It uses AI, while big data providers often rely on people in the Philippines to manually enter the data. What do you think has the fewest errors? And usually, Fiscal has the earnings data within a few minutes. For smaller companies, with the other data providers, that takes a day, sometimes two. That’s how it can offer accurate, institutional-quality fundamental data for over 100,000 global stocks, ETFs, funds, and other investments,

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2. Does Amazon Wegovy Kill Hims & Hers?

This week, this post went viral on X.

A million people saw this and there was a slew of comments, mostly very negative.

I’m long both Amazon and Hims & Hers and I’m pretty sure both will be OK. 2026 could be a bit of a harder year for Hims & Hers because of the tougher comps but I’m OK with that. A lot of negativity is already in the price, which doesn’t mean that it can’t go down more, of course.

But I also think that too many people see this as a GLP-1-only company. It’s much more than that and it’s changing very fast. Just look at what the company achieved in 2025 alone:

• Hims & Hers Health Labs (diagnostics & longitudinal biomarker testing platform)

• Menopause & perimenopause specialty care (Hers

• Automatic refill & continuity-of-care subscriptions (replacing one-off prescriptions)

• Condition-specific long-term treatment plans (hair loss, ED, mental health, weight)

• Ongoing clinician messaging & follow-up embedded in subscriptions

• Hair growth gummies

• Cross-sell of additional conditions into existing subscriber accounts

• AI-driven personalization & care automation initiatives

• Planned acquisition of Zava (UK, Germany, France, Ireland)

• Canadian market entry (via Livewell acquisition)

• Biotin + Minoxidil Gummy (hair growth)

• Women’s daily wellness supplements (multivitamins, hair, nails, skin...)

• Expanded OTC wellness formulations (non-prescription, preventative)

On top of that, management was elaborated and strengthened with many new faces.

But that doesn’t mean that there’s no downside pressure. Just look at this, for example.

3. X Will Even Become Better For Finance

X, formerly Twitter, is one of the best platforms for getting stock information. And that will become even better. This was announced this week by Nikita Bier, Head of Product of X.

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Welcome in 2026! I want to wish you the very best for 2026. I hope you may have many dreams in this new year. As they say, people who are healthy have many wishes, people who are not healthy have only one, so that’s why I wish you many dreams in 2026.

My promise for 2026: I’ll keep digging for those rare companies worth holding for years. I’ll continue to be honest when I’m wrong, and I’ll continue to be totally transparent.

May 2026 become your best year ever!

Last week, there was no Overview Of The Week and I also published fewer articles. I took some time off with my family. It’s often said as a cliche but this time, it’s definitely 100% true: I’m really revitalized from this break and ready to rumble!

But first, let’s look back at the three articles in the past two weeks. But first, grab a cup of coffee (or tea if it’s too late or you prefer tea).

Articles In The Past Weeks

The first article you got in this two-week period was my article on what I added to the Forever Portfolio.

I have to add context here. Normally, the second addition for the month would have been based on the top 10 stocks for 2026. But the article took longer than I thought, and after the article was published, I had to hurry for New Year’s Eve preparations.

That means that I will buy those stocks in the upcoming week. I will classify them as December 2025/2 in the portfolio, nonetheless, so everything remains consistent. As most of you will know, I add to my portfolio twice a month, and while that will be three times in January because of this, it doesn’t really matter and will only confuse Multis in the future if I don’t classify it as the second buy in December. But here are again too: full transparency on this.

The main thing is that you can see all the buys I make in my portfolio and the exact prices.

The second article was a special one, as it featured my friends Michael Gielkens (Tresor Capital) and Pieter Slegers (Compounding Quality). We all looked forward to 2026 from our own angle.

Last year, I published my Top 10 Stocks for 2025. These did very well. They were up 54% on average.

On December 31, I published my Top 10 Stocks For 2026.

Memes Of The Week

Just one meme this week. I hope ‘PainPal’ shareholders can laugh with it.

For those who didn’t know or don’t remember, I used to be a PayPal shareholder for a while but sold it years ago. The reason were some deeply negative personal experiences. My account was blocked three times. Each time, they said I had to give them my ID, which I had already given before, when I opened my account. It took weeks to reach customer service. They admitted it was their mistake and deblocked the account. I’m a patient guy, but after the third time of waiting for weeks to be deblocked, I swore never to use PayPal again.

A friend of mine had his business account blocked for almost 3 months. The reason they gave him was that the monthly amounts were too irregular. He works in cybersecurity and sells courses. Every two or three months, he sells a course (next to his direct cybersecurity work) and in those months, the amounts he earned were (obviously) much higher. That was enough for PayPal to block him. It took him more than 10 weeks before he could use his own money again. In the meantime, in the last weeks before the deblocking, he even had to borrow from his mother to pay his rent and to buy food.

When I say this to Americans, they almost always don’t believe me, saying they have never had a problem with PayPal. That’s possible, as Europe definitely has stricter money-moving policies. But why does PayPal fail where others (Wise, Revolut, for example) have outstanding services that don’t have this as often as PayPal does?

Just to be clear, I think PayPal as a stock is undervalued here. For me, that’s not a reason to buy it, though. Buying purely based on valuation is market timing and I don’t want that. I want time in the market. Will PayPal be a bigger business in five or ten years? I can’t answer that one but the answer I lean towards is no. That’s why I stay away from it.

Interesting Podcasts Or Books

As so many people, I start the new year with good resolutions. My health will be my number one priority in 2026.

The reason is that there were many days in 2025 I didn’t feel great. Starting in May, I felt extremely tired, with a culmination in the Summer. That got better at the end of September but I still had problems breathing. I had already been to the doctor two times before, but they found nothing. Blood tests were good; no parameters were off.

But finally, I visited a lung specialist, and she found that I had lung-COVID. Hence the fact that I was ill multiple times in 2025. The lung-COVID also triggered asthma and sensitivity to all sorts of things: pollen from grass and trees (that’s why I was so tired in Summer), perfume, dust mites, animals, etc.

In the last weeks of December, I got proper medication for that and that has finally made me feel better. That’s also why I really feel revitalized after this short break. I can work out better and that makes my concentration go up. Good times ahead!

That’s also why I started reading a book about health. I’m not far yet, as I only started it two days ago.

It’s Outlive by Peter Attia and I’m eager to learn what can make my health even better. In September, I will turn 50, and if I want to double that number, I’ll have to pay attention to my health. Just like with the stock market, there are no certainties when it comes to health. You can improve your chances for success, but you can not force it into existence. Knowledge is often the basis for both health and investing. The best investment remains one in yourself.

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The markets in the past weeks

Usually, I have a pretty good idea of what the stock market did, but now I don’t have a clue about the movements over the last two weeks. Not that I didn’t check things at all, but I have no overall take. So, I’m curious to find out. We take the returns from the last Overview Of The Week, December 21.

The S&P 500 was the only index that was up, by 0.35%. The Nasdaq lost 0.31%, and the Russell 2000 was up 0.84%.

All in all, no big movements and that also explains why I didn’t have an idea. When there are big gains or big losses, I usually know.

The Greed & Fear Index remained in Neutral territory.

5 Bold Predictions for 2026

Usually, there’s a Stock Market Lesson here, but for this first OOTW in 2026, I want to do something special: 5 bold predictions for 2026.

Don’t take these too seriously. These are just my thoughts and I think if just 3 will become a reality, it will be a lot. Probably, it will be more like 2, 1 or even none.

1. The Nasdaq, S&P 500, and Dow Jones indexes will all drop at least 20% at some point.

Markets have gotten faster, both on the way up and the way down. I think we’ll see a very short but intense crash in 2026. It could look similar to the Liberation Day selloff, where the S&P 500 and Dow Jones both fell just short of 20%, while the Nasdaq dropped almost 25%. This might happen just before or after the midterm elections. By year-end, though, all indices will still be up more than 10%.

2. Mercado Libre will do a 20-for-1 stock split.

As of January 1st, founder Marcos Galperin is no longer CEO. He’s being replaced by Ariel Szarfsztejn (what a spelling on that last name!). I think he’ll want to make Mercado Libre’s share price more accessible for individual investors. The stock price is currently sitting at $1,974. Could be a 10-for-1 split too, of course, but let’s keep things exciting and go for a 20-for-1.

3. Palantir will drop by 60% (to around $67).

The stock has been overvalued for about a year and a half now, way longer than short sellers can stomach. That’s why shorting a stock is so dangerous. There’s an infinite downside, but only a limited upside.

Don’t get me wrong: I think Palantir is an excellent company. But overvaluations always correct at some point. I think 2026 is when it happens. The same could happen for CrowdStrike and Cloudflare. If it happens, I will take advantage of it.

4. Amazon will be 2026’s Google.

In early 2025, everyone was bearish on Alphabet/Google. AI was going to make it obsolete. The narrative around Amazon is pretty much the same, and I could see things getting worse before they get better. But Amazon has more intelligent robots than any country in the world except China. In the second half of 2026, that’ll get a lot more attention and that’s why Amazon’s stock will shoot up.

5. AI infrastructure spending will continue to be much higher than everyone thinks

I see predictions everywhere that say that in 2026 investors of the Mag7 will demand profits from the big investments in AI infrastructure spending. I will take the other side of that. I think this spending will continue to grow in 2026. I could see Nvidia and AMD having a great year, despite the skepticism.

Quick Facts

There wasn’t much news in the last few weeks, so no Mark this week.

1. Venezuela

As you probably all know, something happened in Venezuela. As always, I don’t want to go deeper into politics. I just want to look at the investing side of things. But let me tell you that I do understand the footage of the people of Venezuela celebrating. Just look at this.

The GDP per capita in Venezuela is lower now than it was in 1945. What a disgrace, for a country full of oil, gold and minerals! This is what communism does.

Someone I know is married to a Venezuelan woman. She says her aunt hasn’t been able to buy feminine hygiene products for over 5 years, simply because they are not available.

You can discuss whether the way this operation was conducted is legal, but I prefer this to war. The Chinese and Russians who were in Venezuela were there for the oil as well.

But the real question here is what it means for my investing. For me? Nothing changes. As always, I don’t know what the markets will do, but I’m OK with that. If the markets drop, I’ll buy more.

Some Multis ask me about Mercado Libre and Nu Holdings. Both are in Latin America, but not in Venezuela. For the short term, that means nothing changes. For the long term, it may open a new market for them. So, I only see this as positive. Again, if the market sees this differently, I’ll add to my positions.

2. Are American Stocks Expensive?

Last week, I saw this chart.

For at least a decade now, I have heard that American stocks are excessively expensive. And for at least a decade, I have argued that you should take growth into account. In the last three years or so, American stocks have been clearly more expensive than historically. but as you see, the gap is shrinking. If you add the longer period of higher expected EPS growth, I think American stocks are a tad on the expensive side (especially Palantir, haha, no that’s a joke). But they are not extremely overvalued compared to growth. A premium of about 20% is not that big for me. But of course, it could be enough for some to be bearish about American stocks and call the market overvalued.

3. Nvidia & Groq: It’s Complicated

Nvidia “acquired” Groq, but you can’t call it an acquisition, even if Nvidia’s shelling out $20 billion. Relationship status: it’s complicated.

Nvidia has signed a non-exclusive license for Groq’s inference technology and is bringing over founder Jonathan Ross, President Sunny Madra, and other top talent to Nvidia. Groq will continue independently and it will be led by Simon Edwards. But key pieces are clearly going to Nvidia.

Nvidia is buying nearly all of Groq’s assets for $20 billion, excluding its early-stage cloud business. If accurate, it would be Nvidia’s largest acquisition ever. The previous one was the $7 billion Mellanox deal. It makes it clear that Nvidia is preparing for a new phase in AI: ultra-fast, low-latency inference.

AI models now run in two steps. First, they take in information. Then, they generate responses one piece at a time. Groq’s chips are especially good at that second step, making answers appear almost instantly.

Nvidia already makes chips for the other parts of the process. One type handles training and big batches of responses. Another is built to hold large amounts of data. Now, with Groq’s help, Nvidia is adding a third kind of chip focused just on fast replies. This will be useful for real-time chat and AI agents that need to respond quickly.

This looks like the deal Nvidia needed to help it stay ahead of the competition.

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It’s the 21st of December, and that means Christmas is just a few days away. Up to now, I have caught the coziness of Christmas: the lights, the warmth, the Christmas songs, but it should be about more than that.

The Christmas-New Year period is a period to look back on the year, to reflect, to be with your family and I didn’t have time for that yet.

In the upcoming week, I will, though. That doesn’t mean that you will probably get fewer articles in the upcoming week, maybe even none. Just so you know.

Articles In The Past Week

This is the third article this week.

In the first of this week, we looked at the Best Buys Now for this month.

The second article was about Sea Limited. You can read about deep insights into the earnings, the Quality Score and the stock valuation here.

Memes Of The Week

Two memes this week. This is the first.

The second one could be a conversation with my wife, haha.

Interesting Podcasts Or Books

This week, I listened to William Green’s interview with Howard Marks.

Howard Marks is the co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management.

To Marks, great investing is not about big wins or bold bets, but about being consistently good over a long time. He compares investing to tennis: avoiding mistakes matters more than hitting spectacular shots.

He stresses the importance of knowing your risk limits, staying disciplined, and focusing on what you understand best.

Marks is cautious about popular trends like AI stocks, Bitcoin, and gold, warning that many will disappoint.

You can listen to the episode here.

The markets in the past week

Last week, the S&P 500 lost 0.63%, the Nasdaq even 1.62%, but the Russell 2000 was up 1.19%. This week, we see the reverse pattern. The biggest winner of last week, the Russell 2000, was down 0.86%, the S&P 500 was up 0.1% and the Nasdacq was up 0.48%.

The Greed & Fear Index inched up from Fear to Neutral territory.

Lesson Of The Week

Sometimes, people ask me how I can flip through so many stocks. Over time, you develop a process that you go through very fast without making it explicit. In this visual, I tried to make it explicit.