AI Tiers And Taking Profits In Tech With Joe Albano, Tech Cache

Summary:

• Tech stocks performed well in 2023, but there may be a short-term top coming in the near future.
• Joe Albano advises investors to start trimming and taking profits from their long positions.
• Different tiers in the AI industry, winners and losers, and why he believes Google has fallen behind in innovation.

Listen here or on the go via Apple Podcasts and Spotify

Joe Albano runs Tech Cache and gives his perspective on AI going mainstream and why he sees a short-term top coming (0:55). Quantifying tech stocks with fundamentals and chart analysis (7:35). Understanding AI’s different layers (16:40). Hot take on Google/Alphabet (30:15).

Transcript

Rena Sherbill: Welcome to the show, Joe Albano, who runs Tech Cache on Seeking Alpha. Great to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us.

Joe Albano: Hi, Rena. Thanks for having me.

RS: It’s a pleasure. So I’d love it if we could start with your perspective on the tech sector. Obviously, a lot talked about the tech sector. It’s been doing – well, some companies in the tech sector, have been doing extraordinarily well.

How are you thinking about things? Here we are nearing the mid-April section of 2024. How are you thinking about and looking at the tech sector these days?

JA: Yeah. Well, I’d say I’d start back in late 2022 when kind of the AI mainstream – kind of what mainstream and everything started picking up. It felt like a lot like the cryptocurrency boom back in like 2018 kind of era, where everybody suddenly talked about AI on their earnings reports and their conference calls. And it became one of those situations where you had to decipher who was going to really benefit and where it was going to show up in the financials. And then you had to separate things that were outside of AI.

So you had cyber security, which has always been something that had to be on the leading edge. And AI would always be a perfect kind of endpoint for cybersecurity to do things better and faster than humans to prevent threats, for threats to deal with all that kind of stuff. And then you looked at kind of the big tech side of it with Google (NASDAQ:GOOG) (NASDAQ:GOOGL), Meta Platforms (NASDAQ:META), all the social media aspect of it.

Everything was pretty much chugging along off that bottom in October of 2022, and things really hit their stride in Q1 of ‘23, going into Q2 of ‘23. And so 2023 has been a phenomenal year for tech.

My portfolio, us at Tech Cache, we were outperforming the NASDAQ and the S&P 500 by a good margin most of the year and wound up with a healthy return above them at the end of the year.

But as we entered 2024, we’ve had a nice run over a course of a year-and-a-half. And I think that run is going to start meeting some resistance, as things need to consolidate based upon all the returns that we’ve seen in the stock market across all the tech sectors, whether it be social media, cybersecurity, hardware, semiconductors, you name it. A lot has pretty much been at all-time highs or very well on their way.

And at this point, I’m actually kind of putting on the brakes a little bit and telling my subscribers that I think there’s more than a short-term top coming up here in the next month or so. I think by the time we get to June, I think, it’s going to become pretty apparent that we might have already topped, where we could see a quite healthy pullback of 15%, 20% within some of the individual names.

And the question is, where does it go from there? Is that just a medium-term correction, kind of a lull that we’ll have before we kick into another gear exiting 2024 into 2025? That’s really the question right now. But I’ve been telling my subscribers and my readers, my followers that now is the time to start trimming and thinking about taking profits from your longs after this year-and-a-half. It’s prudent to do that.

A lot of our positions are up 200%, 300%, some of them are up 450% in the case of NVIDIA (NASDAQ:NVDA) back when I was pounding a table on it in June of 2022 before the whole AI mainstream media caught the wind of that. And that’s really where we’re at now is protecting some of those profits and dealing with what to do with those winners.

And while some people will say, hey, let your winners run. That’s not always prudent. I don’t agree with that saying necessarily. I think we have let them run. And I think it’s now time to take those profits and not overstay our welcome.

RS: And does that go for all the tech stocks that you’re invested in?

JA: I would say that goes for probably 90% of them. Some of them I do see will have, like smaller corrections. A lot of my investing philosophy does revolve around technical chart analysis. So that kind of helps me gauge what kind of depth or what kind of rally, what kind of extensions we’ll see. And a lot of them – some of them, so for instance, you have the Intels of the world. They really haven’t moved into all-time highs. Over the last several quarters, they’ve been struggling.

So their corrections, they’re probably going to feel it, but they probably have much shorter to go since they’ve already been beaten down. But you look at maybe the NVIDIAs, (NASDAQ:AMD) has already pulled back significantly. I closed my position out at around 194. I think it’s been trading in the 160s, 170s as of this week and it was up above 200 there for a little while.

And I said, you know what? I think this is going to be it for either a while or a decent pullback before we get one final rally maybe to peak above those previous highs from a few months ago.

But for the most part, yeah, it’s across all of tech. There’s really not much that hasn’t been affected. There’s a few like Arista Networks (ANET) or CyberArk (CYBR) that have still stayed fairly strong. They have not backed off of their highs. And those are the ones that I’m wondering if they might see a little bit less of a correction, a little bit less of a pullback. Same goes for maybe some of the Microsofts (MSFT), the Meta Platforms, the Amazons (AMZN).

So I think there’s – it depends. Every ticker is going to have its own analysis. And I always emphasize that with my Tech Cache subscribers that you have to look at each chart on its own. You have to look at each individual company’s fundamentals and story on its own, its management team.

There’s a reason why I really haven’t been bullish on Alphabet, on Google is because I don’t like the story. I think they’re a laggard in AI and I’m sure I’m going to get a lot of flak for that. But honestly, I don’t care. I think that’s how I see it.

And you have others like Meta Platforms that are using AI, probably leading the pack in terms of how they use it within their business, how they have shored up their advertising and their targeting abilities after the iOS privacy signals deterioration.

So I mean, there’s a lot to be specific about and it’s hard to say at a high level, all of tech or half of tech might pull back. But I’m seeing individual signals in each stock and they’re kind of adding up to show that tech might pull back. But I think they’re going to be on slightly different timelines.

RS: So maybe break it down a little bit and get into the nitty-gritty details for listeners, for investors. When you’re talking about June and kind of predicting or forewarning for some type of pullback, what are you thinking that you are going to be most focused on, like, which stocks might you be thinking about and how are you quantifying which stocks to look at?

Is it mostly, like you said, the fundamental story and that’s how you’re approaching things? Is it a combination of that and the chart? How are you quantifying this?

JA: Yeah, that’s actually a really good question because I see some of the ones that I’m starting to take profits on. So we’ll take NVIDIA, for example, which is one of the bigger ones we’ve been talking about. And that looks like it has one more rally in it that maybe can exceed $1,000 a share.

And so I don’t want to get too far, I don’t want to cut off our lead money on the table. Essentially, I don’t want to cut off our long position too early. Because I think there may be one last rally in there. So what I’m doing is kind of getting ahead of that and emphasizing that, hey, I’m going to move to a hold on NVIDIA, but it’s going to be in the future once we get to this target.

So at this point, it looks like it’s being constructive. It’s consolidated for the last several weeks, almost two months now. And I think NVIDIA has got one more shot in the Arm for it to rally. Probably depending on the timeframe, it reports earnings in May, mid-May depending on, I don’t know, they haven’t announced a day as of today.

But typically, I’m going to shoot out five to six weeks from when we’re recording this. And it could make that rally in that time and at earnings. While I expect the fundamentals to actually be fairly strong, I mean, it may not be as big of a beat. I think the market and analysts have started to close the gap on how big of a beat NVIDIA will have on revenue and margins and things like that.

I think that’s why I take a two-pronged approach using fundamentals and chart analysis because the fundamentals could be good, but the stock doesn’t have any obligation to follow fundamentals on a month-to-month basis, right?

A lot of people scratch their heads when they see good earnings and the stock drops 10%. And they’re like, how is that possible? They just blew out earnings once again for like the fifth straight quarter now and the stock is down 10%. People go, oh, it was baked in or they’re profit taking. Honestly, I don’t really care what the reason is, but the chart was showing me that was the case anyway. The catalyst just wound up being the earnings call, their earnings report.

And so I think that’s where I’m kind of in this bit of a paradox where I’m trying to get people a little less bullish, even though the fundamentals prove there’s a good reason to be bullish and I think NVIDIA will do well into 2025. I think as supply comes online, they’re going to continue to grow and, it may not be the 200% range that they’ve been doing last year, but still 80%, 75% at that $25 billion a quarter. That’s significant. That’s – you can’t – you get the law of large numbers coming into play, but that’s still significant.

And even with that, I have to say it’s like, it’s not going to run forever. And again, the fundamentals don’t or the stock chart doesn’t owe the fundamentals anything. It may pull back on what is perceived as great earnings. But I think it’s time for the chart to kind of feel, to move towards a consolidation and deal with the run up that it’s had over the last year.

RS: And what about the stocks that you’re most worried about going forward?

JA: Some of the stocks that I look at, Super Micro (SMCI) might be one of them. I think it has a great future on the back of NVIDIA. I think the stock has run up. I don’t even know how to describe that kind of run up.

I can’t even tell my subscribers, hey, you want to take a put position and do a scalp or just swing trade. It’s just – it’s all over the place and it’s just so volatile that I can’t deal with that kind of stuff on a day-to-day basis. And that’s not what Tech Cache is about. It’s not trying to find those day-to-day day trades. It’s about seeing what’s a few months ahead and dealing and discounting that into a trade or strategy.

So there’s some like that where I kind of just have to like put off to the side and be like, unless you were in it, it’s hard to – that’s like I’m trying to step on a bullet train at this point and you just don’t know when it’s going to stop or when the end of the line is.

There’s others. I’m bullish on Zscaler (ZS), for example, but it’s pulled back and I closed my call out. I think it was around 235. I’d have to double check. But it’s down in the 180s now. And that was based on a bit of a slowing fundamental picture. It was still strong, but that was based on a chart topping kind of analysis that I saw.

I was like, “You know what? I don’t think it’s going to push much higher than this. I think it needs to pull back and correct. And I’m still trying to decipher whether it’s just a correction or if it’s the start of a new trend down. And a lot of times it doesn’t make sense when you put it up against the fundamentals in that growth.

But again, this is why I do a two-pronged approach because just doing fundamentals or just doing technical chart analysis doesn’t get me the whole picture.

For example, one of the recent things that proved that was with Micron (NASDAQ:MU), the chart showed that it could have gone either way. There was actually a setup which said, hey, it could drop down to the 60s again or even 50s, or it could head to 130. And I’m looking at the chart going, well, these are probably 50% probable each scenario. So there’s a 50-50 shot that it goes up or down.

But what do I fall back on? Well, what are the fundamentals saying? The fundamentals are saying, Micron’s memory cycle had just gotten started, right? They – and it proved it with the last earnings report where the market and analysts, even management was expecting negative returns, negative profit for the quarter and wound up going full swing the other way to a decent $0.40 or 40 some odd cent earnings per share.

So that was able to give me the edge and be like, I’m favoring the upside on this chart because the fundamentals are just getting started as opposed to just peaking right? So I use that to kind of push me into the bullish camp and told my subscribers, hey, now’s the time to get some of those calls and those leaps packed away because if it heads up it’s going to head up fast, and that’s exactly what happened. It went from 70s and 80s to 130 this past week, talking just in a two short months.

So again, it really comes down to specifics on each chart, each story from each company. But as far as the ones that I’m worried about, it’s mostly the ones that don’t have the greatest fundamental or growth picture. This is where I worried about Google.

Even Microsoft a little bit, I think it’ll be strong. They have a big AI presence, but as I’ve been telling my subscribers this past week, there’s different tiers to the AI camp and who benefits. Just because Microsoft houses it and has it in their cloud doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re benefiting off of the AI run as much as an NVIDIA who’s the pick and shovel of it or AMD or Micron with high bandwidth memory, stuff like that.

So it’s difficult to pull them out. It’s a very case-by-case basis as strange as that sounds because of the variety in AI and the different levels of investment you could have in them?

RS: No, I think it’s a smart point to make because I think a lot of what is missing from so many investment discussions, especially as it pertains to tech and AI and all the excitement and hoopla and kind of hopium to borrow a term from the cannabis industry that’s happening over there I think it behooves investors to think about the nuance and the specificity of different stocks and the different tiers in AI.

So speaking to the different tiers, if we could click out kind of a couple layers back, how would you think about or how do you define the different AI tiers?

JA: Yeah. So I mean, it’s a great thing to visualize or at least mentally understand as you go to invest that AI has different layers. You have the players who are in the hardware business, who are driving. So you have to think about artificial intelligence. The name implies it’s artificial, right? You require some kind of silicon to run these data computations. You need a compute platform.

So you start at the ground level and you say, I need chips, silicon, storage, memory to even think about processing the data that AI requires. And the data is immense. We’re talking tens of billions of parameters for these AI models, especially generative AI.

But there’s going to be more than generative AI and there already is. There’s plenty of other facets of the end result. You got anything from recommendation systems to machine reading, healthcare, and diagnostics, and things like that, reading images, and trying to diagnose things using machine learning.

So you have a lot of different facets of it, but it all starts with the hardware aspect. It all starts how do you process all that data, and there’s a lot of players in it. So you have the NVIDIAs, the AMDs, and the Intels (NASDAQ:INTC). They’re all competing for the GPU side of it, the accelerator part of it.

But those accelerators are made up of chips, which are made by Taiwan Semiconductor. It has memory made by Micron and SK Hynix and Samsung. You have networking in the interconnects that go with them, Mellanox, which is an NVIDIA subsidiary and makes the InfiniBand.

But you have others like Arista Networks who are creating that build-out capability of an entire data center, not just linking two GPUs or eight GPUs together, but linking servers and linking nodes of servers together. That requires fast switches, that requires hardware. But what Arista is finding is that it requires a great software stack.

So while they’re in the hardware business, they have a great software stack. And that goes back to NVIDIA too. And which is one of the reasons I tout NVIDIA over AMD or Intel is that they have the software stack. They have everything from the operating system all the way down to the libraries and the frameworks that are run for these AI applications. You can’t exclude any one thing.

But on a high level, those are the guys that are building the foundation. They’re the ones essentially selling the picks and the shovels of a gold rush to borrow an analogy. And just like in a gold rush, the ones who are making the most money were the ones selling those foundational tools to go and dig out the gold or in this case to go and compute the data or provide it with data.

So – and I’d be remiss to miss like a Western Digital (WDC) also who provides solid-state drives on top of Micron, on top of several other companies. So you have the GPUs, you have the motherboards, you have the interconnects, you have the networking, you have the memory, you have the storage. So that all comes together.

Now you go one level to the right, and somebody’s got to put all that together. So you have what I call the AI middlemen. You have the Super Micro who are putting together these servers into racks, you have the Dells, Lenovos, I mean, HP Enterprises, they’re all then building all those into a product that gets shipped off and actually installed in a data center.

So you have this layer that is basically the supply chain further down the line, not the one supplying necessarily the chips and the silicon like Taiwan Semiconductor (TSM) might be. But you have these guys who are then taking all that, putting it together and making a product. They may be overclocking some of these components, the memory, the other side pieces of the systems on the chip.

And – but they’re packaging it together and then providing the AWS side of things, the cloud providers, but more importantly, even the enterprise and the private cloud providers because NVIDIA can contract and get their own servers built. That’s not a big deal.

But somebody, a company, take a global company that does IT work, so a Deloitte or something like that, or a General Dynamics (GD) IT. And they have many data centers that they own that run their own products. They’re going to need to purchase those racks on those servers for generative AI or whatever AI they’re looking to use or get out of.

So these middlemen provide that product, right? So it had – it contains the AMD chip or it contains the NVIDIA chip or the Intel chip. And it goes into this ready to slide into a rack, plug in the networking, configure it and you’re good to go. So they serve a purpose. They can’t be left out because without them you don’t get from point A to point C. They’re kind of that point B to carry those products across.

And then finally, you get to what I call the retail side of AI, which is really the end user where you get the output, the data output and the result that you would expect with Microsoft Copilot or Bing or Gemini with Google.

And that’s how the whole story comes together is now you take it, somebody has to create this application, run this model, decide on data, generate the output, the inferencing that then has to happen to give you the answer or the result to the end user, somebody like us sitting on the other side of the screen, typing in something to Google.

But then you have others like I talked about before, Meta Platforms that are using it mainly internally as a recommendation system. So that they have better engagement with their users, that the users are seeing stuff that’s relevant to them that they keep scrolling. And whether you agree or not, their business is to keep you glued to that screen. And from there, it’s to serve advertisements.

So they not only recommend more content that keeps you engaged, but it then provides great targeting for advertisements that are relevant, and then providing the analytics of those ads for the marketer who wanted to run those ads.

So they have like a three-pronged approach where it’s we got to have more better content that’s relevant and surface that to the user. So we keep them engaged and on the app longer, or Instagram, Facebook, across all their family of apps. And then we have to recommend relevant ads that are going to get clicks and that are going to be seen.

And then we need to analyze how – what did that do? Did that lead to a sale? Did that lead to a visit? How long did they look at it? How many impressions was that? Where did they come from? And provide that analytics back to the marketers.

And they’re using AI to provide that in a better, faster – and this is why Meta Platforms was able to lay off, not only just moderators of content, but people who are manually going out and working with like the Coca-Colas or the Pepsis or the General Mills of advertising and building manual ad products or manual ad campaigns, the AI is now able to do that and understand and provide marketing content in the sense of, hey, we run around an ad, it looks like this, it sounds like this, it’s going to have this. AI can generate. So they have the generative AI on top of it for content creation for advertisers.

So you go through these three tiers, and you see how everyone has a benefit and everyone – like for example, the Microsoft, the Meta Platforms, they’re paying the NVIDIAs and the Super Micros and the Dells that money. But then they’re turning around and selling a better product, so that they can get more money from their user base or their advertisers.

And you have this own AI economy that has sprung up. And this is why I tell my readers and my subscribers, you can’t listen to people saying that AI is just hype or that it’s vaporware or it’s going to go away. No, this has truly revolutionized it and everybody goes, well, this time can’t be different.

Yeah, but once every couple of decades, there is that situation. You have the Internet onset, you have the iPhone (AAPL) moment, and now you have the AI moment. It’s just that next one of those three in the last three decades to bring about this new revolution that we only can go forward at this point.

We can’t back out of it because too many other competitors are now doing the same thing where if you don’t do it, you fall behind, you risk going out of business. And if you want to get in business, you better have a better AI approach than the next guy. So this isn’t something that’s just going to be fleeting or going to go away.

Now, will it digest? Sure. Yeah, I think it’s going to digest. I think there’s going to be tons of spending, hundreds of billions of dollars of spending over these next two years and even in the past year. That’s going to have to get digested.

But without going too far into the weeds here, we’re also cannibalizing other aspects of the same data center environment. We’re not going towards CPU-based computing anymore. We’re going to GPUs-based computing. And the CEO of NVIDIA is right, that this is the time that we go to a different compute mechanism where this is why AMD is struggling, even though it has more AI revenue, especially across this year, its CPU side is hurting.

There’s a reason why Intel’s CPU business is hurting. And it’s because nobody wants to admit it, but there is a cannibalization going on. And I think that’s going to mitigate some of that – some of the cooling down or some of the consolidation of this capital spending is that we’re actually taking over another – it’s taking over another industry in and of itself, and that’s the CPU-based industry.

So yeah, there’s a lot that goes in there. It’s a long-winded way of saying, there’s – I have built out three tiers where you have the hardware guys, the middlemen, and the retailers. And there’s winners in everyone, and there’s losers in everyone. It’s the ones that are going to get left behind because they didn’t keep up or they didn’t find the next big thing or they didn’t skate to where the puck is going as opposed to where the puck already is.

RS: Yeah, there’s so much to digest here, as you say, when life changes so radically, there’s good parts and there’s bad parts, speaking to the cannibalization of the sector that it finds itself in.

Is there going to be a time in the near future where you will favor some of the tiers over others in terms of where we are in the cycle?

JA: I’m not sure I will favor one tier over the other necessarily. To your point though, I mean, if people, if companies stop spending on hardware and want to digest what they’ve already built out and these data centers need some time to consolidate that volume, yeah, maybe the semiconductor side is not going to be where you want to be.

The hardware side may be a better cooling off, while the retail side cuts back on spending and increases profits. So you might have that give-and-take across both of them.

But I mean, again, I would be more specific on – it’s a ticker-by-ticker basis – on, and who’s benefiting like. So even in the worst of times for the semiconductors NVIDIA might be still doing better than the rest and might correct less than the rest as far as stock returns go.

Just as Meta Platforms might be better than the rest, it might correct less than the rest because it has the best approach to AI and it’s taking market share hand over fist from Google and whoever else, big competitors in taking advertising market share. It cuts back on capital expenditures and investors are happy because they’re not spending as much.

But again, it really depends on where it is in the cycle on the stock chart as well to as much as what individual winners and losers you’re going to see in each tier.

RS: Would you say that Google, Alphabet wasn’t – didn’t have enough foresight to know where to get into? How would you articulate where they’ve gone wrong or why they’ve gone wrong?

JA: Yeah. Some might say this is a hot take, but I’ve looked at it long enough and I analyzed the industry and brought enough a light to know that Google was caught with its pants down when OpenAI released ChatGPT. And I know that because they were cutting their capital spending the quarter before and not investing nearly as much in hardware and infrastructure. And a quarter later, they do a 180 and say, oh no, we’re going to do that.

That tells me they didn’t see where – what was coming. And it’s proven it with their difficulties going from Bard, renaming it to Gemini, trying to rebrand, and they just don’t have a great cohesive product. And I think there’s a culture problem at Google, quite honestly. And I see it using the apps that I use now for Google.

I have an Android phone. I’ve seen the deterioration of how well their software works. And I think they have a poor culture. They’ve moved away from what made them great, which is innovative software and doing it fast and doing it well. And I think they’re doing it fast and breaking things and turning around and kind of running their place like a startup. And I know a lot of Alphabet, Google bulls will hate on me for that.

But look at the returns on the stock chart compared to the rest of them. It’s one of the biggest laggards. Even if it’s pushing into all-time highs, Meta Platforms is killing it against returns over the last year, two years and the proof is in the pudding.

So, I think Google has really kind of moved away from where they’re, as a matter of fact, as I’m sitting here talking about Google, my phone starts jumping and saying, “Oh, what did you mention? Not that that is a bad thing, but maybe that needs to understand I’m talking to someone and not talking to it. Maybe there’s a new improvement there.

So there are things that Google needs to focus on and needs to get out of the business. There’s a reason why they have the Google Graveyard where things go to die that software never took off. And that’s not to say that you can’t try new things and you’re going to have to put a whole bunch of stuff off against the wall and see what sticks.

But I think there’s a culture problem, I think it needs a management change, and it needs to get somebody in there who’s going to innovate and provide leadership in AI. They are not leadership in AI as far as I can see.

RS: To me, the most shocking thing that you just said was that you’re an Android guy and not an iPhone guy.

JA: You know what? So a lot of people ask me that, they’re like, oh, you like Android? I was like, I don’t like it. I don’t like either of them. I don’t think either platform is great. One locks you in and you wind up with all their stuff and you just handed over $10,000 of your money over 10 years and now you’re stuck with that walled garden. Or Android, it’s like it’s open source and I could do other things. I could sideload things. I could root it. I could have a great time. My background is software engineering, so I like the freedom.

But it doesn’t have some of the greatest usability anymore or UI/UX kind of integrity that Google once was known for. And I’m noticing even things like maps, where it’s like just things are not laid out well, like you’re covering captions on top of things I need to see in order to drive. And those are very basic mistakes and that makes a difference. When you get down to the basics, you have to be good at the basics. And I think Google has gotten away from that.

But yeah, I’m an Android user because I don’t like dealing with things that are more or less locked down. My wife had an iPhone before we got married. And I was like, listen, we get married, I’m not supporting your iPhone because you can go to the Genius Bar and they’ll take care of it for you. At least with Android, I can munge around on it and break stuff and fix it. So, yeah, that’s kind of a personal take.

RS: Yeah. It’s a personal take with the phones and I get it. Empirically speaking, Apple Maps is vastly improved. So good on them for continuing to iterate.

I’m curious how you see consolidation going as we move forward.

JA: As far as mergers and acquisitions or as far as…?

RS: Yeah.

JA: Okay. Yeah, I think there’s not a lot that I see on the horizon. I mean, I don’t – I wouldn’t be surprised, for example, to see an NVIDIA buy an Arista Networks. That would be a rather large purchase.

But again, they tried to do with Arm and it failed. I think the market in this area, especially on the hardware tier, is about as consolidated as it can be. They’ve all grown tens of billions of dollars and it’s all gotten expensive, and especially with a higher interest rate environment. The acquisitions at this level are not quite as accretive, I think, as they would have been once before.

But looking at the retail side, you look at like the Palantirs (PLTR) and the Snowflakes (SNOW) and things like that. There might be some – like an Alphabet might be interested in acquiring one of those types or maybe even on the cybersecurity side where one of those bigger names wants to have in-house cybersecurity.

But again, I don’t think there’s quite the synergy. I think a lot of that stuff has been, we’ve distilled it now to here’s the cream of the crop and I don’t think you’re going to have too many of those merging at this point. And with this administration, I don’t think you’re going to get a lot past the antitrust side of it either.

RS: Do you look at ETFs in this space at all?

JA: No, I’m pretty single ticker kind of aspect. I’m not an ETF kind of fan. That’s not how I invest. I don’t own ETFs. I do track them as far as stock charts to keep track of the overall industry kind of feel.

And if all of semiconductors, if (SOXX) is going to contract or it’s looking for another leg in a rally, I’ll look at it in that perspective, but I don’t invest or strategize around it.

RS: And just because it’s too broad and it has too many winners and losers, and you’d rather get specific and detailed?

JA: Yeah, it’s a watered down kind of situation. And I think that’s great for some – an investor who wants to just stuff it away in a 401(k) or their taxable account and not worry about it. But that’s just not my style.

RS: So I’d love it if as we come to an end of a really great conversation. And I thank you for sharing so much insight with our listeners, with investors, because as we’ve talked about, there is so much misinformation in general, certainly about AI and the tech space. And there’s been some great success stories and it’s important to parse out fact from fiction.

So thank you for helping us do that. And if you could share with listeners what you have going on at Tech Cache and what they may expect if they’re interested in the tech space and tech stocks and what you have going on there.

JA: So on a weekly basis, I have two ideas, actionable ideas a week, and they range things from software like Adobe, all the way to fuboTV (FUBO), all the semiconductors, you got Micron, Intel, AMD, NVIDIA.

I try to keep it moving along, so that we get a variety of ideas and strategies. Mainly what you get at Tech Cache that you don’t see from my public side is an ongoing conversation with a lively chat room. I’m always posting updates and week-to-week, day-to-day kind of stuff.

But I have tools there that I don’t have available on the public side just because of the infrastructure that I have automated spreadsheets for my subscribers, there is no – my buy, sell, or hold, my stock ratings, my portfolio is available there. And it gives you a more holistic look of what I’m looking at. And as somebody wrote on one of my Micron articles the other day, they got a feel for how I think about the investment.

And that’s really what you get at Tech Cache is how I think about all those different investments and the calls that I make. You get a more holistic, ongoing approach. And that sometimes takes a couple of weeks to wrap your head around and read up on what I’ve been writing about because it’s ongoing and it’s much more frequent than I do on the public side of Seeking Alpha.

And it’s really getting, extracting information or extracting knowledge for me from my subscribers when they ask questions, things that I may not even be thinking about that they’re wondering about and you get that interactivity of, hey, what do you see with high bandwidth memory with Micron? Is 2025 going to be a peak year? And I may not be able to put all that into a public article that I write two or three times a month and you just, you get a better grasp on where I lean on a lot of stuff.

So all that to say, Tech Cache members are getting my unabated knowledge without reservation there. And what you see on the public side is just the tip of the iceberg. And hopefully with some of the articles I’m coming out in the last week and this coming week, you get a better feel for a lot of my conversation and what I think about, especially with the – within the AI sector.

So yeah, we’d love to have you there. You’re more than welcome to join us. There’s a free trial, so there’s no risk if it’s not for you, but have a look at it and we’d love to have you there.

RS: Yeah, I was going to say there’s – speaking of tiers, there’s two tiers for your subscribers also and the full access tier has that free trial, so really nothing to lose.

JA: Yep, absolutely. Yeah, the basic is great if you just want to have a few extra exclusive articles a month. And then the full tier is great if you want to have everything that I got and it’s at your fingertips, including all my stock charts that you can look at live.

I think that’s one of the big draws is that I have a library of stock charts that I annotate and that they’re there and you could see the live stock chart movement on top of all those annotations.

Related Articles:

AI Hardware Stocks At A Peak: 2024 Growth May Not Translate To Returns

Micron: Gnashing Of Teeth As The Best Upcycle Develops (Rating Downgrade)

AI, data companies likely to benefit as manufacturers integrate AI tech: survey

Editor’s Note: This article discusses one or more securities that do not trade on a major U.S. exchange. Please be aware of the risks associated with these stocks.

---

---