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We’ve all heard of FOMO by now, “fear of missing out.” Well, I’m going to invent a new one: FOBTE, which is short for “fear of being too early.”
I find myself not having enough FOBTE because time and again I see the completely obvious and it takes a year or two or even a decade to actually do the thing I can see. This problem is not quite so bad in equities but it is still a thing.
Let me list a few outstanding:
Platinum and the other platinum group metals: They simply don’t make much of it and its going to go into all that whizz tech stuff that is on its way.
AI: This will boil the ocean because AI is electricity and with AI the winner takes it all and all energy along with it.
U.K. takeovers: U.K. companies are as cheap as chips, you can pay for them easily from their earnings.
When you are in a position when the outcome is obvious but stubbornly refuses to go your way, you are left with two choices. Stick with it, prepared to walk the streets with a sandwich board stating your obvious truth, or give up on it and go where the market is starting to be in agreement with you.
The former mindset is the world that the gold bugs inhabit. Gold will go to the moon once the conspiracy holding it down collapses. The world is going back on the gold standard, etc. This is worthy of a sandwich board and I am acquiring gold because once Putin falls, Russia will stop dumping gold and up it will go. However, gold is never going to be remonetized, it’s just too volatile and rare a commodity.
The second mindset is to give up on that idea and if it starts to go the way you expected then take a look. This is where I place platinum. It has to, it’s got to, it must… but sadly it isn’t, so I’m dropping that “dead donkey,” for now.
AI boiling the ocean? No one is going to care, because the people in power are going to lust after it, so while you might be restricted from using plastic straws or priced out of winter heat and forced to separate your plastic, paper and metal, our overlords will be boiling the oceans fighting for primacy, burning gigawatts through tensor GPU silicon at a scale that will make bitcoin miners look like tree huggers. As such it’s long the hardware and software guys and you can brave Nvidia (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) right now. For me I’ll let the Nasdaq correction get past before I stray into the zone of highly valued tech.
U.K. takeovers. Yes please. This is about to kick off any minute. You name it, it’ll be under the microscope for a takeover. No one is too big. BP, BT, MNG, VOD, GSK; it’s all up for grabs. The market is on a run and the oncoming takeover wave must be helping it along.
The U.K. is up the creek on the financial services side, drowned in red tape, sloth and incompetence. The family silver is there to be had.
Make your list and stake it out. There will be nothing sacred.
Here are 10 of my favorites (disclosure: I own them all):
Now we are in a post-Covid world there is M&A catch up to do and as you may recall, the U.K. doesn’t buy foreign companies anymore, so it’s all going to be one way traffic.
As such I’m on the bus for that journey and once the U.S. secondary bank crisis is out of the way, it looks like the journey will begin.
David Van Bruwaene was pursuing his Ph.D. in philosophy at Cornell when he developed a passion for linguistics and natural language processing, the subfiel
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