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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TobagoJack who wrote (216902)	10/2/2025 1:47:34 AM
From: Box-By-The-Riviera™	1 Recommendation Recommended By marcher Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 217556

bubble with 100 b's. would love to short it. but impossible to decide an entry point. this stuff is so hocus pocus in the end. The $100bn deal sparking fears of a dotcom-style crashNvidia’s eye-watering investment in OpenAI has experts worrying that the AI bubble is about to burst James TitcombTechnology Editor Related Topics Artificial Intelligence, Big tech, Nvidia, Oracle Corporation 24 September 2025 11:25am BST 170 Gift this article free At the height of the dotcom bubble in 2000, AOL was one of the world’s hottest companies. The internet pioneer had brought the web to millions of American households, and its advertising revenue was doubling year over year. In a bullish sign of the web’s future, AOL announced a $360bn (£266bn) merger with media firm Time Warner – the biggest deal in American history. It would take years after the bubble burst to discover the truth of AOL’s meteoric rise. In 2005, American regulators charged the company with propping up its revenues by using fraudulent “round-trip” transactions in which it secretly paid its customers to buy AOL advertising. “The company effectively funded its own online advertising revenue,” prosecutors said. AOL paid a $300m penalty to settle the claims. These circular deals were a common feature of the dotcom bubble. Telecoms and software companies paid each other to finance new networks and boost sales, boosting revenue and maintaining the illusion of growth – until the bubble finally burst. A quarter of a century later, sceptics of the artificial intelligence (AI) movement claim to be observing similar patterns and suggest a new bubble could be inflating. Spending spreeOn Monday, Nvidia, the semiconductor giant which has become the world’s most valuable company on the back of the AI boom, said it would invest $100bn in OpenAI, the AI company behind ChatGPT. Much of the cash could ultimately flow back to Nvidia: the deal also includes plans for OpenAI to spend billions on data centres likely to be filled with Nvidia’s chips. The investment will come in stages, with Nvidia investing more cash as OpenAI spends more. Jensen Huang’s Nvidia and Sam Altman’s OpenAI announced a $100bn deal on Monday Credit: Nvidia An Nvidia spokesman says the company was not giving OpenAI money to buy its products and that the deal was an investment opportunity. There is no suggestion that the deal is untoward. However, analysts concede that it will raise eyebrows. Stacy Rasgon, of equity research firm Bernstein, says the agreement “will clearly fuel ‘circular’ concerns … and – perhaps justifiably – raise concerns over the rationale behind the action”. Vivek Arya, at Bank of America, says: “The optics of such a large investment in a customer will raise questions until Nvidia clarifies the appropriate accounting treatment.” Nvidia’s $100bn deal is the biggest of the AI boom, but it is hardly the only relationship that has drawn questions. Earlier this month, Oracle billionaire Larry Ellison briefly became the world’s richest man on news of a $300bn deal with OpenAI that will involve copious purchases of Nvidia chips. The deal effectively sees OpenAI pay Oracle to spend money with Nvidia. Memes shared online on Tuesday suggested the three companies had invented an “infinite money glitch” – a situation in which a bug is exploited to create limitless funds. The AI boom that has turbocharged stock market valuations is replete with mutual deals. Amazon has invested billions in OpenAI rival Anthropic, which largely uses Amazon’s data centres to train its systems. Nvidia has backed a string of AI start-ups, saying last week that it planned to put $500m into British AI companies Wayve and Nscale, both of which rely on its chips. ASML, the Dutch tech company whose machines are crucial to microchip manufacturing, said earlier this month that it would invest €1.3bn (£1.1bn) in French AI start-up Mistral. The investments have led to an astonishing investment boom as AI companies pour money into data centres and the chips that power them. According to Gartner, spending on data centres will climb by 42pc this year to $474.8bn. The spending spree is big enough to affect the direction of economies. Analysts at Deutsche Bank say the US “would be close to, or in, recession this year” without the data centre boom. “AI machines – in quite a literal sense – appear to be saving the US economy right now,” they added. The extraordinary outlay may be unsurprising, given the technology’s lofty promises. Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said on Tuesday that 10 gigawatts of computing power – the level promised as part of the Nvidia investment – might allow AI to cure cancer. ‘Hope and pray’But any financial return on the investment seems a distant prospect. OpenAI’s revenues are $12bn on an annual basis. S&P predicts that worldwide revenues from generative AI, across all companies, will be $30bn this year. This is set to hit $85bn by 2029, but still well below the cost of investment. “Way too much is being spent on AI infrastructure, given that the market for AI products and services is still at a hope and pray stage,” says Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University. According to the management consultancy Bain, even under a rosy scenario for AI adoption in which the technology replaces huge portions of companies’ sales, marketing and R&D budgets by 2030, revenues would be $800bn below where they need to be to fund projected infrastructure spending. And that rosy scenario may not materialise. Last month, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said that 95pc of organisations that had deployed AI were seeing “zero return”. The study set off a brief market panic that knocked $1tn off US tech stocks. This week, researchers at Stanford and the consulting firm BetterUp Labs found that AI may actually be harming productivity. The study found that office workers were using AI to generate large quantities of “workslop” – presentations and reports that are polished but lack any real substance. Colleagues must then spend hours fixing this rubbish. Dom Rizzo, a tech portfolio manager at investment firm T Rowe Price, disagrees. “AI has the potential to be the biggest productivity enhancer for the global economy since electricity,” he says. However, he adds that “productivity cycles historically are accompanied by speculative bubbles”. Rizzo says the new round of circular deals as well as an explosion in debt used to finance data centres suggest we are entering “the next phase of the bubble”. Such deals have been common features of previous market manias, from Ireland’s Celtic Tiger property boom to the rise in energy trading at the start of the millennium, which collapsed alongside Enron. Altman has himself warned of an AI bubble. “Are we in a phase where investors as a whole are overexcited about AI? My opinion is yes,” he said last month. Not everybody is so worried. Dan Ives, a Wall Street analyst famous for his relentlessly positive forecasts, called the Nvidia deal a watershed moment. “While there are worries about an ‘AI bubble’ and stretched valuations, we continue to view this as a 1996 moment for the tech world and NOT a 1999 moment,” he said. In which case, set your watches for 2028.

To: TobagoJack who wrote (216902)	10/2/2025 1:50:38 AM
From: Box-By-The-Riviera™	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217556

LOL can't wait until this bitch shit is forever over. The crypto bros at risk of losing everythingInvestors are getting swept up by a ‘castle in the air’ that threatens to come crashing down Chris PriceMarkets Editor Related Topics Cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, Big tech, Regulation 01 October 2025 1:00pm BST 351 Gift this article free The first sign of trouble came last Monday morning as traders logged on to their laptops to check their latest crypto bets. Overnight, prices of Bitcoin and Ether had fallen sharply, wiping off an estimated $1.5bn (£1.1bn) from crypto markets in a fresh bout of turmoil. Investors were stumped about the sharp reversal. Without an obvious catalyst, rumour and conjecture began to swirl in the market, triggering a mini-panic that eventually pushed down the price of Bitcoin from more than $115,000 to below $109,000 in a matter of days. As the dust settled, traders finally found the culprit. Not a piece of bad economic news, but a new type of crypto-investing vehicle that has become the big ticket for investors: digital asset treasury (DAT) companies. In recent months, these bizarre new businesses have grown at a rapid pace. DATs are simple yet defy convention. They are vehicles listed on the stock market which use money pumped in by shareholders to buy Bitcoin or another specific cryptocurrency. All they do is hold these digital currencies in their treasury departments – hence the name – and as investors pour more money in, they buy more of crypto. Yet because of the exuberance around Bitcoin and its rivals, they have seen their share prices balloon well above the actual underlying value of the cryptocurrency. This has allowed them to raise more money to buy more crypto, thus pushing up the price in a virtuous cycle. ‘Castles in the air’So far this year, DATs – or Bitcoin treasury companies (BTCs) if they own Bitcoin – have drawn a record $15.4bn in fresh capital, giving them more firepower to buy Bitcoin and other currencies and further raise prices. It is perhaps the best example of John Maynard Keynes’s “castles in the air” theory – which says the value of something is based on what someone will pay and not its intrinsic value – and all seemed to be going so well until the mood darkened last week. As questions grew over whether these funds could maintain their growth, many DATS started to dial down their crypto purchases, taking the steam out of the market. The correction has fuelled fears about a sharper DAT crash and the impact on retail investors. Ed Hindi, investment chief at fund manager Tyr Capital, said the wobble had been driven by fears that the share price premium had been more and more out of kilter. “It was a bit too high. The whole thing has started to unwind. You could just feel that there was something brewing. Because of the sheer amount of DATs trying to raise money, the market just cooled down,” he said. Michael Saylor’s Strategy was the first company to convert its cash reserves into Bitcoin Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty The slowdown in the market has been sharp. Some 64,000 Bitcoins were bought by DATs in July, but that dropped 80pc to just 12,600 in August, and 15,500 so far in September, according to CryptoQuant. The people hit hardest by the downturn are not the billionaires who back these DATs, but ordinary investors who have bought shares in them. Eren Osman, from private bank Arbuthnot Latham, said retail investors were getting “swept up” by the DAT boom with huge potential consequences. “The risk with any asset bubble – be it crypto, commodities, tech stocks, energy – is that the larger that bubble is in terms of total asset size, the bigger impact it will have on the wider financial markets and the economy,” he said. “Crypto today is a much bigger piece of the total pie than it was 15 years ago.” DATs were pioneered by Michael Saylor in 2020, the American billionaire entrepreneur whose business, MicroStrategy, now known simply as Strategy, became the first to convert a substantial portion of its cash reserves into Bitcoin. It has proven to be a hugely successful venture for Saylor and investors in Strategy. Saylor converted the data mining software company’s cash reserves into Bitcoin when the world’s largest cryptocurrency was valued at less than $12,000. Since then, the price run-up has turned its holdings into a fortune worth $71bn, while the buzz around the company means it is now worth $92bn on the stock market – nearly 30pc higher than the value of its actual Bitcoin holdings. Michael Novogratz’s Galaxy Digital acts as a DAT and also finances other DATs Credit: Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet/Bloomberg Unsurprisingly, that has triggered a wave of copycats – around 85 and counting this year — such as Mara Holdings, which owns $5.8bn worth of Bitcoin but has a market capitalisation of $7bn. Britain’s biggest Bitcoin-buying business, The Smarter Web Company, has amassed a portfolio worth $282m, but has seen its stock market value climb to $300m. The concept of DATs has been backed by high-profile figures in the digital asset space, giving it added allure. These include Michael Novogratz, chief executive of Galaxy Digital, a giant in digital-asset financial services. A Goldman Sachs alumnus and a former partner at Fortress Investment Group, his company acts as a DAT, while also financing other DATs. The first cryptocurrency fund was launched more than a decade ago by Dan Morehead’s Pantera Capital Credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg Other notable figures include Joseph Lubin, a former Princeton roommate of Mr Novogratz who chairs SharpLink Gaming, as well as Dan Morehead, the chief executive of Pantera Capital, which launched the first cryptocurrency fund more than a decade ago when Bitcoin was worth $65. Wild rideWhile the DAT boom has captured the imagination, it has not been for the faint-hearted. The Smarter Web Company’s share price has plunged 80pc since its June peak amid concerns the market is becoming saturated as bosses seek to capitalise on this latest crypto craze. Lubin’s SharpLink, which holds Ether, saw its shares plunge 72pc in a single day in June. Its share price had surged by 409pc in the months after its launch in 2020, but it has since dropped by 98pc. These sharp swings have attracted the scrutiny of regulators. America’s main financial regulators, the Securities and Exchange Commission and Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, have started examining unusual trading patterns in more than 200 companies using crypto treasury strategies. Chris Beauchamp, chief market analyst at IG, said: “These companies are, in my view, a bit like crypto with the volatility turned up to 11 – they see outsized moves that have little regard for their actual valuation, or indeed the valuation of Bitcoin.” Amid signs of the sector cooling, there has been a shift towards consolidation. Strive, which had been backed by billionaire investors such as Peter Thiel and Bill Ackman before it switched to a Bitcoin treasury strategy in May, agreed last week to buy Bitcoin hoarder Semler Scientific. Peter Thiel-backed Strive agreed last week to buy Bitcoin hoarder Semler Scientific Credit: Eva Marie Uzcategui/Bloomberg Savvy investors might say they have seen this kind of volatility before. Real estate investment trusts, known as REITs, operate in a similar way to DATs. They own and finance investments in the property sector, trade at a premium to their underlying assets and issue new shares to raise capital to invest again. “DATs might seem new, but really they’re a new version of REITs, namely they can use rising prices to buy more crypto on the way up, but are likely to suffer more on the way down,” said Beauchamp. That leaves retail investors at risk of getting burned. Osman, from Arbuthnot Latham, said: “There’s plenty of companies out there that have leveraged bets on equity – private equity is a great example. “The difference that you’re seeing here is that these [DAT] companies are just buying assets through speculation with the expectation that they will go up as a sure bet.”