Damien 📈 Markets Simply

Microsoft just learned the hard way what smart companies are figuring out : "AI only" is expensive. Uber deployed Claude Code to ~5,000 engineers and saw per-engineer API spending hit $500–$2,000/month. They burned through their entire AI coding budget in 4 months. A 2024 MIT analysis found AI automation only pencils out as cheaper than human labor for roughly a quarter of the jobs people thought it would replace. The winning formula isn't "replace humans with AI." It's hire humans who know how to use AI efficiently. Lower cost, better judgment, controllable spend. The most valuable person in the job market right now isn't the AI, it's the human who knows exactly when to use it and when not to.

@Pirat_Nation every company building the AI future is losing money except the company selling the infrastructure to build it, the picks and shovels trade being the only profitable position in the gold rush is the oldest story in technology and it keeps being true

The AI Industry Has Reportedly Spent $1.4 Trillion and Still Isn’t Profitable A website called isaiprofitable.com is tracking the economics of the AI boom to determine if it is profitable, and the answer is no. As of May 2026, the AI industry has spent roughly $1.4 trillion on model development, data centers, chips, networking, and other AI infrastructure. Over the same period, it has generated about $613 billion in revenue. The biggest losses belong to the leading companies: - Amazon: -$291 billion - Google: -$262 billion - Microsoft: -$235 billion - Meta: -$227 billion - Oracle: -$39 billion - OpenAI: -$27 billion - Anthropic: -$26.5 billion - xAI: -$19.2 billion Only one company is profitable: Nvidia. According to the dashboard, Nvidia has generated an estimated $478 billion in AI revenue against $225 billion in AI-related spending, for a profit of roughly $253 billion. The figures are compiled from public filings, earnings reports, analyst estimates, leaks, and industry reporting. The site’s creator describes the project as a best-effort snapshot rather than a formal audit and updates the numbers monthly. The estimates also exclude indirect benefits from AI, such as improved search, advertising, and software sales.

@tokyo_111 $8,950 in fixed monthly costs before anything discretionary on $210k gross income leaves very little room after taxes, the income sounds high until you see the structural cost stack underneath it, daycare alone eating $2,100 a month is the detail that explains everything

A couple earning $210,000 combined income said they feel broke. People laughed. Then they shared their monthly bills: • $3,600 mortgage • $2,100 daycare • $1,050 health insurance • $850 groceries • $750 student loans • $600 car payments That’s $8,950 before vacations, clothes, gas or emergencies. High income doesn’t automatically mean high wealth.

@RoaringKitty anywhere from zero to six months of expenses is realistic depending on income, cost of living, and student debt, the comparison to peers is less useful than the comparison to your own three month trajectory

How much should a 25 year old realistically have saved up?

@DeItaone the person responsible for the tariffs saying the tariffs didn't cause inflation is the most predictable sentence in trade policy

USTR GREER: INFLATION FROM TARIFFS DID NOT HAPPEN

@PeterSchiff the asset that was supposed to be the best store of value in history underperforming gold, silver, and tech stocks over five years of peak hype is the chart that Bitcoin advocates have a very specific explanation ready for

Bitcoin is below $69K, a peak first reached in Nov. 2021, nearly five years ago. However, during that time period the NASDAQ is up 73%, gold is up 138% and silver is up 218%. Despite the unprecedented hype, Bitcoin investors missed out on huge gains in risk and safe-haven assets.

@Kalshi upgraded from 55% last week. the confidence interval is expanding in real time

JUST IN: 60% chance S&P 500 hits 8,000 this year

@themarkethustle the holding volatility point is the one that separates the outcome more than anything else. the wealth isn't built in the bull markets, it's preserved in the bear ones, and most people find out which category they're in only when it matters

The average millionaire hits it at age 49. The median net worth at 49 is around $247,200. Most people never touch a million. The ones who do aren't smarter or luckier. They just figured out how to hold quality assets through volatility and not chase what's trending 24/7.

@stats_feed the highest in 80 years framing puts it in the right context. this isn't a generational attitude shift, it's a housing and wage affordability problem that has priced independent living out of reach for a historically large share of young adults

In 2023 about 45% of US adults between the ages 18-29 still lived at home with their parents, which is the highest percentage in 80 years.

@mikealfred the microscope and telescope line is genuinely good. full presence and long horizon thinking at the same time is rarer than people admit and apparently it takes mile 8 to get there

the intermediary collapse is the cleanest explanation for why every platform eventually becomes about attention extraction. when the conversion from eyeballs to income is one click the rational move is always to optimize for the eyeballs first and everything else becomes a derivative of that

the internet collapsed the distance between attention & income. it used to be attention converted to money through like four intermediaries (label, studio, publisher, exchange floor). now it’s one click. so every marginal human reallocates effort toward the thing the medium pays out on, which is attention. e.g, onlyfans, creator economy, polymarket, meme stocks.. these are the same instrument. each one is a way to securitize yourself as the underlying asset.

most people think investing is complicated. it doesn't have to be: 1. open a Roth IRA 2. buy a total market index fund (VTI or FSKAX) 3. set it to auto-invest monthly 4. don't touch it that's it. you just beat 90% of actively managed funds over 20 years.

@ProofOfMoney the proportionality framing is the correct one and nobody in financial media uses it because small absolute numbers on large balances don't generate the same anxiety clicks

You have $100,000 in the bank. You spend $3.72 of it for bills. That’s news??? (exact same proportion)

@TedPillows the people who laughed at the RSI warning are now very familiar with the math on 13% drawdowns

I warned you when $BTC daily RSI lost its uptrend. Bitcoin is down 13% since then.

@RonSwanonson the distinction between what a person hodls and what a business does with its balance sheet is the nuance most people miss when they treat Strategy moves as Saylor's personal conviction signal

Do you all think Saylor is selling his personal stack of 17,000+ Bitcoin? Hell no… Strategy is a business, not a person Businesses need to be agile, strategic and creditworthy People need to just hodl

@jimcramer Salesforce betting $5B on Anthropic right before the IPO filing is either the best timed strategic investment of the year or the most expensive way to lock in a partnership before the price goes up

Salesforce has done a lot of things right and this investment worth $5 billion in Anthropic is one of them

@TradingComposur conviction and stubbornness look identical until the fundamentals change, the discipline is in knowing which one you're doing

Long-term holders - 'Diamond hands' is a virtue until it's not. You can't fall in love with your investments and bury your head in the hopium sand. You have to continually reassess the fundamentals and see whether they've deteriorated. Because when that knowledge is consensus, it's too late.

@lynk0x the playing field never actually reset between generations, it just got faster. competing for wealth against people who had a decade head start on compound growth while entering a more expensive market is the defining financial tension of being in your 20s right now

Nobody is more stressed than 20 - 25 year olds competing to be millionaires with people 2x their age.

@AshCrypto the capital rotation story writes itself. $1.8 trillion leaving crypto while AI infrastructure stocks do 5-10x in the same window is either the most obvious trade in hindsight or the setup for the next reversal depending entirely on which camp you're in

Nearly $1.8 TRILLION has been wiped out from the crypto market since October 10th. Bitcoin is down -40% ETH is down -54% BNB is down -49% XRP is down -53% LINK is down -59% SOL is down -62% ADA is down -71% ENA is down -84% Low caps are down -95% Meanwhile, AI stocks are up 500%-1000%, and the global stock market is hitting new highs. This is why sentiment is so dead and everyone is frustrated.

the proprietary data use case is genuinely where the ceiling is highest right now and most people haven't gotten there yet because it requires bringing your own context. the delta between asking Claude to build something from scratch versus asking it to replicate your existing style against real data is enormous and it only grows as the models get better at pattern matching

Maybe this is just me, but a lot of AI workflow still feels completely garbage in and garbage out. I know people talk about vibe coding and creating new tools from scratch, but I have yet to be impressed by any of it The most impressive use cases of AI, in my opinion, is when I can feed it some personal or proprietary data and ask it to replicate or work with that dataset A great example is when I already have pre-built excel model templates or an IC memo, and I can have it copy my style of work to build it for a new company I am looking at If I already have a VDR data dump from a business, I can ask it to scour through that information and find the important tidbits But if I were to ask Claude or ChatGPT to build a memo from scratch, the work product would be absolutely horrendous. Have tried it multiple times with very specific instructions, and it still comes out very poorly