I hope you had a great Valentine's Day.
If not, don't forget that life is often like the stock market: when pessimism is at its peak, things might be about to change faster than you think.
It was another interesting week in the stock market. Let's dive in.
Articles in the past weeks
This is the fifth article this week.
Let's look at the four previous ones.
The first one this week dove into the Cloudflare earnings, while the second article explored if Cloudflare is still a buy now or not.
This week, I also introduced something new. I'm combining the Best Buys Now with my Forever Portfolio additions now. Thank you, Multi Anthony, for that idea. You can read about the Best Buys Now and my additions here.
Of course, the subject most discussed this week was the big drop in the stock price of The Trade Desk. You can read my article about the earnings here.
Memes Of The Week
Two memes this week. The first one is about Alibaba, which was finally up this week, although there's a loooong way to go to make this a good investment.
Anyway, here's the meme.
And the second one is one I've been emphasizing for a long time already.
Thanks, Multi Niko, for sharing this one.
Interesting Podcasts Or Books
This week, I started listening to the latest Lex Fridman episode. It's with Dylan Patel and Nathan Lambert and they talk about ‘the DeepSeek moment’, China and the US, OpenAI, Nvidia, X & xAI, TSMC, Stargate and much more.
It's always great to get deep insights into the thinking of the sharpest minds in this fascinating industry.
This episode is the length of an audiobook, more than 5 hours. I'm not even halfway.
You can find the episode here on Spotify.
The markets in the past weeks
Let's have a look at what the markets did this week.
All three indexes were up. The Russell 2000 barely moved, with a gain of just 0.01%. The S&P 500 was up 1.47%, and the Nasdaq was up 2.58%.
The Greed & Fear Index went up but remained in fear territory, albeit barely.
Quick Facts
1. CEO categories
For a long time, I have thought about CEOs and over the years, some sort of categorization started to develop. This week, I put it in a table.
I could have put this in the Meme section as well, as this is only half-serious. But when you think about it in these knucklehead categories, it helps you to bring back things to their essence.
Great Companies Don't Miss
A bit more about The Trade Desk missing its own guidance. In November 2018, Nvidia, a company you may have heard about, missed its own guidance as well. The stock dropped 28.5% in two days.
Since then, it has gone 32.8x (yes, 32,800%!).
Of course, it is never the same and only great companies can do this by proactively innovating continuously. But I happen to think that The Trade Desk is a great company. No way it will go 32.8x in the next 7 years (although I thought that about Nvidia as well) but the takeaway here should simply be: don't get distracted by negativity. Keep looking at the facts. And up to now, the facts are that The Trade Desk has done outstandingly for 32 of the 33 quarters since it's a public company. All the rest is speculation.