RufusT 🇺🇸

I've been around this business for a while now. For the first time though the AI madness really feels like the heady days of 1999, when both the Internet- and I- were young.

To everyone with a dial up connection. That happened in 1995 with the broad availability of Netscape navigator. I mention this backdrop to put today in some context. The Information Age was a mostly slow burn from the home pc to the web browser. Massive great things happened

People keep confusing a bubble with “stocks go up and get overvalued”. A bubble is when when a prevailing trend and a prevailing misconception about that trend interact reflexively, each reinforcing the other until the gap between perception and reality becomes unsustainable. A bubble is not when everyone realizes that right now every iota of AI demand eventually, at some point upstream, must move through memory OEMs. Nor is it when estimates continue rising because things are better than expected. And it’s not just when stocks trade expensive to historical valuations. The reason behind the moves in the AI infrastructure layer so far have been simply that we don’t have enough. They’ve been driven by the fundamental reality more than the perception of the future. It’s why the bulk of the most bullish parts of this cycle have been lumpy and centered around earnings season when companies uniformly come out and confirm there’s still not enough. In the bubble, the reality is driven by the market - not the other way around. Everyone keeps saying “people are gonna freak out if it’s not a bubble!”. I think that’s silly, we have a transformative new technology that needs crazy capital to fuel it coming to fruition, that has and always will result in a bubble as long as we have financial markets. But if you want to call the top in a bubble, you need a much stronger view on what the misconception is and what negative catalyst forces broad perception to align with realizing it than you do on valuation.

Actions like the one planned for tonight by PAL-Awda outside Park East Synagogue are intended to create fear in the hearts of Jewish New Yorkers and stigmatize our community. This is part and parcel of the rising antisemitism that we are facing. Whatever your politics, whatever your views, this is not the New York way and should be condemned.  The right to free speech, even when it is condemnable, is sacrosanct. So, too, is the safety of New Yorkers. I am grateful to the NYPD for the work that I am confident they will do this evening to protect those entering Park East Synagogue and make sure that a protest does not turn into a gauntlet of hate through which Jews must pass.

Today will be the 2nd consecutive day the S&P 500 $SPY closes at a record high, with more than 4% of its stocks hitting 52-week lows. Anyone wanna guess the only other time in 100 years this has happened?

Being a VP is really the sweet spot of banking and private equity jobs You are just senior enough to avoid most of the grunt work that blows up your late nights and weekends And you are also just junior enough to not have any real pressure to generate P&L and chase clients right away Most friends I know who have gone through it all tend to agree that your VP years are the golden years on the finance career track