Michael Santoli
CNBC talking head. Markets, mostly. Maybe some baseball and movies.
- What is more likely - an enterprise rips out all its software replacing it with something someone built with a chatbot. ORRRRRR....AI chatbots help coders make existing software do more and run better. A or B?
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View full threadAnyway, this morning I added to Toast and ServiceTitan, which have both been absolutely nuked back the Bronze Age. I just don't believe diner owners and swimming pool maintenance guys are gonna sit around fuckin vibe-coding a replacement with all that spare time everyone has. Maybe I'm a dummy.
- Shopping on the 52-week low list? I thought that was for hopeless dreamers...
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- I bring up the COST blowoff because the stock peaked right as the quant deleveraging/momentum unwind destabilized the tape in mid/late Feb. 2025. That little storm tends to get lost in retrospect as people assume all the weakness of Feb-Apr last year was the tariff panic. Not true.
- Utter buying panic in Walmart. The stock now topping 43x forward earnings for the next 12 months. Echo of last year's momentum stampede into Costco (which peaked on Feb. 13)?
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- Other parts of it too are that their deregulatory wish list is being implemented, private credit no longer seems as much competition and the Warsh noise about "privatizing the Fed's balance sheet" somehow works in their favor. Those are at least cover stories for the pure rotation/hiding play.
- Why would a bailout be necessary when "one bitcoin still equals one bitcoin," as the acolytes like to say?
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- Only if you leverage it with convertible preferreds
- The way the market continues to remain supported through rotation is creditable for sure. And I know everyone finds it somehow virtuous to see a less-concentrated tape with value over growth, cyclical beating tech and equal weight outpacing market-cap weight....
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- The market is positioned for the E to go up. More than at any time in recent history.
- But the torque's getting extreme, with 1/3 of S&P 500 stocks moving 5% this week and 1/12 Nasdaq stocks making a 52-week low yesterday. And every day of this pro-cylcial action means non-tech gets more expensive, pricing in the expected "run it hot" theme. S&P 500 Value now ~19x forward earnings.
- It's not near the top of the list of concerns about AI, but the way the buildout has everyone using "compute" as a noun is so grating. A new hill to defend (futilely).
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- Lost causes are the only kind that interest me
