Investments

The hardware trade has been investors’ preferred expression of AI deployment but has been under pressure since June, despite reported and expected earnings having never looked stronger. Orders continue to outpace supply, with scarcity leading to higher prices, but technology hardware companies are not leading the indices as they once were. Significant as Nvidia’s guidance

Like many companies, Samsung Electronics reported record Q2 profits on accelerating revenue growth in AI-related sales, yet it did not provide sufficient reassurance that the AI hardware trades were intact, with July proving to be a difficult month for the technology sector as a whole. Semiconductors led the decline, and the South Korean equity index,

The early period of enterprise generative AI adoption could be framed as a rush in which companies set aside some of the ordinary rules of good practice, treating speed as a necessity that excused thinking properly about where proprietary data went once it was fed into third-party models, or who actually governed it once it

The story of a week Last week the market movements were strongly bookended and characterised by a melt-up on Monday followed by a sharp fall on Friday. Regardless of the precise trigger on Friday, it is worth highlighting a couple of important developments given they tell a more important story than either day in isolation.

Last week, all the AI hyperscalers reported their earnings on the same day and each presented the same underlying tone – one of scarcity. Sundar Pichai, Alphabet’s CEO, said, “We are compute constrained in the near term,” and Amazon noted that capacity is being monetised as fast as it can be installed. Microsoft expects to

There is a particular kind of confidence that accumulates around an industry in its prime; a collective belief that what has worked will continue to work and that the mechanisms underpinning the success are not merely functional but structural. This has been the foundational investment view of software-as-a-service, or SaaS, where the moat could not

“Skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been” – Walter Gretzky (Wayne’s dad) Ennui is the word that best describes the end of 2025. It was a trudge to the finish line as investors, weary of the ongoing bubble talk and high valuations, shunned AI developments. The ‘oh wow’ moments had

The recent turmoil across global financial markets, marked by abrupt trading reversals and amplifying doubt, poses a critical question for investors: are we witnessing the unwinding of the exuberant artificial intelligence (AI) trade, or is it another episode in the cycle of market psychology? The answer is as elusive as it is consequential. Navigating a