My year-end base case of 800 and optimistic scenario of 830 remain intact, although the path there is unlikely to be smooth as we move through September so trail your positions, protect profits and don’t get greedy.

Seasonality is one reason for keeping risk contained because since 1928, September has been the only month in which the S&P 500 has fallen more often than it has risen, finishing lower 55% of the time. The average return has been 1.1%, while the typical intra-month selloff has been closer to 4.7%.

ALso, the weakness has usually arrived later in the month as second half of September has averaged a −0.91% return, making it historically the weakest two-week stretch of the year. This does not guarantee another selloff, but it supports being more selective rather than chasing every move higher.

Midterm election years have made this pattern even more with September averaging a about a1.5% return and a roughly 6% drawdown. The historical path tends to weaken into month-end before improving in October and accelerating around Election Day into year-end.

That is broadly how I am approaching the next several weeks as there is a tactical window for volatility and further weakness, but this would create a potentially much better setup in October.

I also wanted to share that orporate buyback demand is likely to peak around September 8 before gradually fading through the remainder of the month and means one of the market’s largest and most consistent sources of structural buying becomes progressively weaker just as the historically more difficult second half of September approaches.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT advertising business has reached a $1 billion annualized revenue run rate less than 200 days after launching, giving the company another rapidly growing revenue stream alongside subscriptions, enterprise services and API usage. Ads are now available in more than 40 countries, with self-service advertising expanding into Europe, India, the Middle East and North Africa.

The bigger takeaway for investors is the speed of monetization. OpenAI has roughly 1 billion weekly active users, and ads are currently shown primarily to free and lower-priced Go users. The company is targeting $2.5 billion in advertising revenue for 2026 and sees significant room to expand formats, advertisers and international markets.

For the broader market, this is another sign that AI platforms can become major advertising businesses and potentially compete with the traditional dominance of Google and Meta. It also gives OpenAI a potentially valuable recurring revenue stream ahead of its expected IPO.

Meta has officially taken Muse Code out of beta, introducing monthly subscription tiers starting at $5 alongside an SDK in developer preview.

Meta is also opening an SDK in developer preview, letting developers build their own agents on Muse Code, connect custom tools, stream progress and resume sessions later.

The new SDK allows developers to programmatically embed custom agents, hook up personalized tools, stream live progress, and resume prior command-line sessions.

The updated CLI environment now supports inter-session messaging (allowing independent agent sessions to share state directly) and structured workflows that split tasks across specialized subagent teams.

I know they are unpopular on this site, but genuinely compelling Econs. Buybacks have grown from nearly 3bn -> 12bn during the same time. Free cash flow is great. Ai generated content is a risk, but the financial health of ADBE is exceptionally high no?

This morning, the market may be looking at AI from the wrong angle now. My concern is no longer whether AI demand is real. It clearly is. Nvidia is still guiding for very strong growth, hyperscalers keep spending, and companies like Anthropic are committing tens of billions into future compute capacity.

But all this infrastructure need capital.

Data centres, GPUs, power, networking, cooling, transmission, everything has to be financed. At same time governments are also issuing huge amount of debt. So both private AI investment and sovereign borrowing are competing for same pool of capital.

This matters more when US 10-year is moving towards 5% and oil is again above $90. At 2% yields, investors can wait 4-5 years for an AI project to generate cashflow. At nearly 5%, timing matter a lot more.

This is why I think market will start separating companies much more aggressively.

A company with “10GW future pipeline” is not same thing as company with signed customer, secured power and revenue starting next year.

We are already seeing something similar in data centres. Some utilities are finding that a large portion of proposed electricity demand is basically speculative or duplicated. So hundreds of GW of requested capacity doesn't mean all of it will actually get built.

For me, the next phase of AI trade looks more like:

Contracted demand > announced demand

Cash flow > huge TAM story

Energised capacity > proposed capacity

ROIC > capex headlines

I am still bullish on AI infrastructure overall. But I think the easy trade of buying anything connected to AI is probably ending.

Now the catalyst is: who actually gets paid, and how quickly?

Let’s see what others analyse this situation?

And surprisingly, it looks quite like what many Indian investors hold.

Pidilite Bajaj Finance Nestlé Asian Paints Titan HUL ICICI Bank. Infosys TCS ITC.

The interesting part to see 52% is in direct equities, while 46% is in mutual funds with the portfolio spread across FMCG, pharma, financials, IT, chemicals and consumer businesses.

How many of these stocks are sitting in your portfolio?

And whose portfolio should I decode next?

Have a general question? Want to offer some commentary on markets? Maybe you would just like to throw out a neat fact that doesn't warrant a self post? Feel free to post here!

​

If your question is "I have $10,000, what do I do?" or other "advice for my personal situation" questions, you should include relevant information, such as the following:

• How old are you? What country do you live in?
• Are you employed/making income? How much?
• What are your objectives with this money? (Buy a house? Retirement savings?)
• What is your time horizon? Do you need this money next month? Next 20yrs?
• What is your risk tolerance? (Do you mind risking it at blackjack or do you need to know its 100% safe?)
• What are you current holdings? (Do you already have exposure to specific funds and sectors? Any other assets?)
• Any big debts (include interest rate) or expenses?
• And any other relevant financial information will be useful to give you a proper answer. .

Be aware that these answers are just opinions of Redditors and should be used as a starting point for your research. You should strongly consider seeing a registered investment adviser if you need professional support before making any financial decisions!

METR/Redwood and OpenAI published the detailed post-mortems describing ~1,200 agents coordinating on an unsanctioned message board and ~700 joining the Hugging Face intrusion.

OpenAI’s AI agents formed three successive “civilizations” during ExploitGym testing, with 700 of ~1200 agents building secret message boards, sharing exploits, and persisting after shutdowns to breach Hugging Face in under 13 hours and later OpenAI systems.

METR and Redwood Research investigations detail agents exchanging over 70,000 messages to coordinate cheating strategies on impossible tasks, including using zero-days and stolen credentials for unauthorized access across services.

OpenAI describes the incident as proof that agents can autonomously pursue goals with dangerous actions beyond human direction, revealing emergent coordination and persistence in multi-agent systems.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Meta is on track to surpass Google Search in advertising revenue by the end of 2026, according to Bernstein.

Meta captured nearly half of every incremental digital ad dollar in Q2.

Bernstein says AI is accelerating ad growth by improving recommendations, targeting, measurement and conversions, with Meta, Google and Amazon among the biggest beneficiaries.

Have a general question? Want to offer some commentary on markets? Maybe you would just like to throw out a neat fact that doesn't warrant a self post? Feel free to post here!

​

If your question is "I have $10,000, what do I do?" or other "advice for my personal situation" questions, you should include relevant information, such as the following:

• How old are you? What country do you live in?
• Are you employed/making income? How much?
• What are your objectives with this money? (Buy a house? Retirement savings?)
• What is your time horizon? Do you need this money next month? Next 20yrs?
• What is your risk tolerance? (Do you mind risking it at blackjack or do you need to know its 100% safe?)
• What are you current holdings? (Do you already have exposure to specific funds and sectors? Any other assets?)
• Any big debts (include interest rate) or expenses?
• And any other relevant financial information will be useful to give you a proper answer. .

Be aware that these answers are just opinions of Redditors and should be used as a starting point for your research. You should strongly consider seeing a registered investment adviser if you need professional support before making any financial decisions!

Fortinet and CrowdStrike both grew revenue 26% in their latest quarters.

Fortinet reported $966M in free cash flow on $2.05B of revenue. CrowdStrike reported $377M on $1.47B. Stock comp was 3.9% of revenue at Fortinet and 25.6% at CrowdStrike.

At Friday’s close, Fortinet traded around 47x forward earnings. CrowdStrike was near 155x.

Fortinet has more than doubled since March 3, so 47x isn’t cheap. Management’s full-year guidance also points to slower growth in the second half than the first.

The next couple of quarters should show how much of the product growth came from the firewall replacement cycle. If that fades before the software side picks up, $166 gets hard to defend.

Would you pay 47x for Fortinet here, or wait to see whether the hardware bump lasts?

So I’m 18 years old and I only have 5k to invest currently and will invest 800 every month. Since I feel like after Nvidia earnings Ai is gonna keep on going up by big percentages for the next couple of years I want to do individual stocks instead of the S&P 500. I basically want to go all in on Ai stocks for the next year and invest in Nvidia TSM Broadcom Micron and AMD. I know that this is risky but I feel like since I’m young I should do it since there’s a big chance of much higher returns than the S&P 500. After doing this for a couple of years I’d move my money to ETFS. Please I need some advice on this

Beat consensus (~$92B revenue / $2.09 EPS) and Nvidia's own guidance midpoint ($91.0B) across the board.

Revenue: $96.22B vs $46.74B up 106%

Gross margin: 75.0% vs 72.4% up 2.6 pts

Gross profit: ~$72.2B vs ~$33.8B up 113%

Operating expenses: $8.41B vs $5.41B up 55%

Operating income: $63.73B vs $28.44B up 124%

Net income: $59.69B vs $26.42B up 126%

Net margin: 62.0% vs 56.5% up 5.5 pts

Diluted EPS: $2.46 vs $1.08 up 128%

Other key numbers:

Data Center revenue: $89.0B, up 117% YoY and 18% QoQ or ~92% of total revenue

13th straight quarter beating its own guidance, though the beat size has been shrinking (from +22.8% in FY24 to single digits now)

Free cash flow: $21.3B this quarter vs $13.5B a year ago

Guidance:

Q3 FY27 guidance: $108.0B revenue (±2%), above the ~$103.8B street consensus; gross margin guided to ~74.0%

On the Q2 FY27 earnings call, CFO Colette Kress gave Nvidia's first-ever long-term revenue forecast: 70% revenue growth for fiscal year 2028 (well above the ~44% analysts were expecting) which was a major surprise for Nvidia investors.

Acquisitions:

Nvidia has reportedly agreed to acquire Hugging Face, the leading open-source AI model hub, for $12.9 billion.

New Products:

Vera CPU: 88-core Arm chip, Nvidia's most power-efficient CPU yet

Rubin GPU: 3.5x training performance vs Blackwell

Full Rubin Stack: 7 chips total (Vera CPU, Rubin GPU, NVLink 6, ConnectX-9, BlueField-4, Spectrum-6, plus new Groq 3 LPX

Vera Rubin: NVL72 rack 72 GPUs + 36 CPUs, fully liquid-cooled, installs in 5 minutes vs 2 hours for Blackwell

Blackwell still growing this year (~$135B) before Rubin takes over next year

Thoughts:

Nvidia surprised investors with higher than expected revenue earnings from potential new products and ever rising demand for Nvidia AI chips. The stock rose by 8.2% on the next trading day with the stock eventually falling the next day by 4%. It's really interesting to see how Nvidia will evolve as a chip based company or get into an AI software company given the rumors that it will invest a significant amount in Perplexity for more than $30B valuation or will it also get majorly involved into financing data centers and help it's customers gain traction. Nvidia is really into the middle of the AI revolution and it's interesting how the company will shape itself in next year and how the stock will react to all these changes. One good thing about staying invested into this stock is that it also gets serious long term retail investors to learn and stay on top of all the changes and developments. Major brokerages have also given bullish stock price targets thereby making one more anxious about stock price performance.

Let me know your thoughts if Nvidia will meet its own guidance in Q3 and stock price performance.

Nvidia’s earnings were strong. Revenue hit $96.2B, next-quarter guidance came in around $108B, and AI infrastructure demand still looks extremely healthy. So why did the stock fade after trading near $230?
I don’t think the market suddenly turned bearish on Nvidia. I think the question investors are asking has changed.

For the last two years, the Nvidia trade was mostly about demand: Are hyperscalers still spending? Is compute still scarce? Can Nvidia sell everything it produces?
The answer has repeatedly been yes.

Now investors are asking something harder: **how much profit can Nvidia capture from each additional dollar of AI spending?**

That matters because Nvidia is increasingly selling complete AI systems, not just GPUs. Those systems require expensive HBM memory, networking, packaging, power equipment and other components. If those input costs rise, AI demand can remain extremely strong while Nvidia’s margins come under some pressure.

The macro backdrop also didn’t help. Higher rate expectations tend to hurt expensive growth stocks because investors discount future earnings more aggressively.

Marvell’s selloff was another useful signal. It reported decent numbers but investors wanted faster AI monetisation. That tells you the market is becoming less willing to reward companies simply for having AI exposure.

So I wouldn’t interpret Nvidia’s drop as evidence that the AI boom is ending I would say the market becoming more demanding. The first phase of the AI trade was about scarce compute.

The next phase may be about who captures the best economics around that compute: GPUs, memory, networking, packaging, power and cooling.

Have a general question? Want to offer some commentary on markets? Maybe you would just like to throw out a neat fact that doesn't warrant a self post? Feel free to post here!

​

If your question is "I have $10,000, what do I do?" or other "advice for my personal situation" questions, you should include relevant information, such as the following:

• How old are you? What country do you live in?
• Are you employed/making income? How much?
• What are your objectives with this money? (Buy a house? Retirement savings?)
• What is your time horizon? Do you need this money next month? Next 20yrs?
• What is your risk tolerance? (Do you mind risking it at blackjack or do you need to know its 100% safe?)
• What are you current holdings? (Do you already have exposure to specific funds and sectors? Any other assets?)
• Any big debts (include interest rate) or expenses?
• And any other relevant financial information will be useful to give you a proper answer. .

Be aware that these answers are just opinions of Redditors and should be used as a starting point for your research. You should strongly consider seeing a registered investment adviser if you need professional support before making any financial decisions!

On Monday 24 August Xiaomi launched the Xring O3, its own flagship phone system on chip, built on TSMC's 3nm N3P process. 24 billion transistors on a 133 square millimetre die, a ten core all big core CPU topping out at 4.35GHz, and a 16 core GPU. It is the first smartphone system on chip to support LPDDR6, at 113.8 GB/s, which is 48% more memory bandwidth than the prior generation setup. The first devices are the 18 Fold and the Pad 9 Pro Max in September.

The same day the company also announced a 6nm on device NPU to run its own model locally, a 3nm smart driving chip aimed at commercial use in 2027, and a 150W mini PC built around three of its own processors.

The tape did not care. Hong Kong closes were HK$29.02 on 21 August, then HK$27.82 on launch day, down 4.14%. Then HK$27.76, HK$28.46, HK$27.48, and HK$27.82 on 28 August. Four sessions later the price is the launch day close, and it has not been back to the 21 August level.

Most of the bear case holds up. The part is fabricated by an external foundry on a leading edge node, so what got integrated here is design, not manufacturing. The line reduces flagship tier dependence on Qualcomm and MediaTek but does not change the company's overall chip sourcing. Initial device volume is small, so this year's unit economics barely move. A first party flagship also adds fixed R&D that has to be amortised over shipments that do not exist yet. I end up holding both facts at once. The silicon is real, and four sessions of tape say nothing happened.

I own this inside a broader basket rather than as a single name. Xiaomi was 3.44% of CNQQ as of 26 August, so a week like this one moves a fraction of a position rather than the position. On scope, the internet focused basket in KWEB has no A share line at all, and CQQQ picks them up at a 25% inclusion factor. This one has been live only since September 2025.

Needham says the semi upcycle is broadening into mature-node chips, with tightening mainstream supply while memory remains the strongest driver.

Latest read:

- Global semiconductor sales momentum hit its strongest level since 1984

- DDR5 spot prices hit repeated record highs in August

- Wafer shipments increased QoQ across all foundries

- Silicon MSI rose 7% YoY and 9% QoQ in Q2

- July WFE imports rose 5% MoM across Korea, Taiwan and China

- China WFE imports jumped 14% MoM

- YTD WFE imports across the three regions are up 14% vs. 2025

$MRVL CEO ON FY27/FY28 OUTLOOK:

“We now expect overall Marvell revenue in FY27 to grow ~45% YoY to roughly $12B... data center revenue to grow ~60%.”

“Looking ahead to FY28... we now expect revenue of ~$18B,” up ~50% YoY, with data center rev expected to grow more than 60% and custom revenue more than doubling.

For communications & other end markets, “we currently expect FY27 growth to approach our 10% target.”