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birb_cromble  2d ago (text post)   402 thread views

Qeekly Finance Thread - 2026-10-17

A weekly thread to discuss financial matters - from personal all the way up to global.

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When it comes to improving personal finances, it is worth paying attention not only to investments, but also to the daily control of small expenses. If you have accumulated a lot of trifles at home, using services like Coinstar allows you to quickly convert coins into digital gift cards for daily purchases. This is a great example of how to turn indepent petty money into real favour for the family budget. The main thing is to start with small actions and regularly take care of your financial resources.

You mean beyond the roboadvisors that are out there? I assume there will at least always be a human to rubber stamp the AI's decisions, for accountability purposes.

It's so dumb how the entirety of the 2026 AI rally was compressed into 4 weeks between April-May . The Nasdaq has otherwise been flat. This meant changing my strategy to selling long-dated covered calls.

I did this for space-x and then for other tech stocks. This was 3 months ago. This has worked well given that market has done nothing since then. If you sell a long-dated at the money cash covered SPY call (expires in 800-900 days) you can capture most of the upside in a rally and gain 1%/month of theta decay in flat market.

I would have expected a stronger and more consistent rally given all the AI hype.

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AI has been in the financial news a lot this last week, and the vibe shift feels like it might indicate a rotation out of the sector.

Coreweave is down 24% over the last five days, and its bonds briefly flirted with 16%. Other neoclouds like Nebius are taking similar poundings. Firmus, an Australian neocloud company, recently pulled its IPO offering from the Australian stock exchange after a tepid response from both institutional and private investors.

Farther down the stack, Nvidia and AMD are seeing fluctuations that might as well be noise, but Cerebras is having a bad time (down 35% this month).

Memory, represented by Samsung, Sk Hynix, and Micron, are seeing 15% or higher fluctuations over the week, but it's memory, and Koreans are involved, so who knows if that's even relevant.

With the exception of Oracle, hyperscalers are all seeing small 2.5%-3% hits to their stock prices. In contrast, SCHD, the most boring belt-and-suspenders ETF there is, is up almost exactly the same amount.

On the bond front, the Financial Times reports that Anthropic has secured a BB+ rating from KBRA, who issued the rating on incomplete financials that exclude free cash flow, and EBITDA. Kroll and Anthropic declined to comment for the story. The financial times also reports that Anthropic has privately issued a bond to Blackstone with a yield that exceeds 10% in order to secure a lease for Google TPUs.

On the consumer side, Accenture has announced a pullback on their token spend, with the default budget for employees now sitting at $29/month.

Anthropic itself (per The Information) has disclosed that 5-7% of its revenue comes from distillation attacks. This puts them in the unenviable position of having to choose between training their competition or hurting the top line number that's driving their IPO hype.

All together, this looks like the "smart money" is on its way out. Am I seeing an actual pattern here, or am I over fitting on noise?

If it's the former, where is the money actually going? I haven't figured that part out yet.

If it's the latter, how do you separate actual signal from noise in cases like this?

The AI rally gassed out in May. disappointing

It was also reported that Anthropic is looking to IPO at $1.5 trillion instead of $2 trillion, in part due to concerns that its (still dramatic) revenue growth had slowed over the quarter.

Supposedly another AI hedge fund ran by a 20 something blew up again. All of the AI funds seem to trade to be a trillionaire or homeless. The thing is if AI works it’s likely long term deflationary as labor costs go to zero so you don’t even need trillions. You just need to be the poorest rich person that can afford some status goods like a house in Palm Beach.

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