Happy Sunday. Chop and factor whiplash were front and center in Tech this week with QQQs dn 2-3%, Semis down 5.5% while Internet and Software outperformed.
The AI Semis narrative & sentiment has improved somewhat since the “Leopold Low,” but still remains significantly more mixed than during the vertical days of May and June, a beautiful and simpler time when stocks only went up and second derivatives had yet to enter the discussion.
Ok, let’s go through the debate in AI Semi land, where every datapoint now seems to arrive with its own bull and bear interpretation: Anthropic’s ARR bogey miss versus OpenAI’s reacceleration; open source, Grok and Chinese models taking share and narrowing frontier moats versus expanding the total inference pie; collapsing token prices versus demand elasticity; Sam Altman conceding that real-world adoption may move far more slowly than capability; memory’s 2nd derivative slowing vs. increasingly large buybacks; agents replacing software versus software rem…