As the AI trade was heating up, in late 2024 and early 2025, I decided to broaden into other areas of the semiconductor industry. In doing so, I wanted to find stocks that were range bound and I zoned in on Micron. This was a company I knew about mainly because it had its headquarters in a very unconventional town: Boise, Idaho.

I bought my first batch in September 2024.

Then in October 2024, I bought three more batches spaced approximately a week apart.

In November 2024, I bought two more batches and finally in December I bought one last batch.

I wasn’t actually expecting this stock to do that well and simply figured it was part of the “drag along“ from the AI trade where semiconductor stocks all get lifted up by the rising tide that is Nvidia.

Architecturally though, I knew that every chipset needs memory and I simply expected this to be a linear factor as Nvidia grew. I did not expect that memory was not indeed a commodity and there was such a thing as HBM.

By tomorrow morning when the market opens, I expect my gains to be in excess of 1000%. I do know we are in an AI bubble but I haven’t yet decided at which point in time I’m going to pull the trigger and sell off my entire position.

I bought my first tranche of PLTR July 2025 at $141.08. I dumped it in march of this year for $151.77.

In a different brokerage account, I also sold another tranche of PLTR in March of this year for $151.68. Difference with this tranche is that it was an even shorter holding period. I bought it in February, just a month before for $144.92.

In yet another brokerage account, I bought PLTR in August 2025 for $180.50 and sold it in September 2025 for $182.54

Here’s the funny thing when I sold my September tranche, I kept monitoring the stock and it dipped after it hit $200.

That’s when I set a limit buy for $144.92. This was the only trench for which I set a limit buy - the others were all bought at the market. when I said it, I received a message before placing the trade that this price was more than 25% below the current price, and did I want to go ahead and set it at that level? The normal human brain would’ve thought twice and probably said it at a much higher level but I did not. I just had a feeling it would go down to that price. It was that same feeling that also told me to get out at $151.

Moral of the story: with stocks that have schizophrenic moves, sometimes it is better to be a schizoid when trading them!

I’m talking ETFs like EWY, EDEN, and EWT. EWY and EWT are benefiting from the AI semiconductor trade right now while EDEN has novo nordisk, the makers of Ozempic.

EWT‘s major holding is Taiwan semiconductor. EWY‘s major holdings are Samsung and SK Hynix.

If one thing goes wrong with any of the major holdings within these ETFs, the entire ETF gets dragged down. So in essence, you are not buying a diversified set of industries within a country but rather a very specific industry driven by a very specific stock.

The IGV ETF sector is down at levels not seen before. Adobe beat expectations and is still getting punished. Salesforce stock has fallen consistently every single day for the past couple of weeks. A Goldman Sachs analyst downgraded Intuit. I would love to know how much the investment side of the house had input options against Intuit. There is supposed to be separation of concerns between the analyst side and the investment side but I would not put anything past Goldman Sachs.

Look at the gross margins: Intuit 80%, Salesforce 76.5%, Adobe 88%

Look at the operating margins (GAAP): Intuit 54.7% (-133 BPS), salesforce 34.8% (+250 BPS), Adobe 44.5% (-100 BPS).

Salesforce actually has better operating margins despite the cost of AI. The other two are investing heavily in marketing spend and other AI related spend which is why you see the negative BPS. That should actually be seen as a positive by the market because they’re trying to grow their AI revenue.

Despite all of this, the stock keeps falling.

I think this is by design.

I believe that all the hedge funds and institutional investors are colluding to drive down the price of software stocks so that they eventually shed employees, shut down products, raise prices thereby churning customers, and then the PE firms can come and acquire these companies and further hollowed them out. It will then be ripe for the frontier model companies to take over these hollowed out software Titans.

I have been in and out of BAH. I originally bought at about $78 sometime last year and then noticed it go to $84 and then come back down to $80 and so I just sold everything because I sensed it would go down further. I was right.

And so I set another limit buy for around $75 and it triggered a few months ago. From that point in time the stock has gone up to the $80 range down to the $73 range, up and down, and now it is in the high 60s.

As for LMT, I set a limit buy sometime last summer in the $400 range which never filled.

You would think that with all these wars going around, that these defense oriented companies would do well but there are somehow range bound.

Why are the wars not helping these stocks?

My limit buy for Lululemon recently triggered at about $110. I knew they would have an earning miss and so the day before when their stock was $118, I set a limit by for $115. After they announced earnings, the very next day was gap down to $110 which is when my order filled. I am now a shareholder but don’t know how much longer to hang onto this stock.

I’ve actually been following these guys for more than 10 years and was incensed when I didn’t pull the trigger back then but I’m happy that I did not because it looks like the major value for the stock has already been captured.

On the other hand, when I look at American Eagle outfitters, they have done really well. My thesis in focusing on Lululemon is that consumer sentiment is really low right now and Lululemon‘s market segment is primarily upper middle class women. As consumer sentiment improves, they should spend more on Lululemon clothing.

I see it as a quick trade and not a long-term hold but not sure which key metric I should focus on beyond just the usual financial metrics which I know how to assess.

MOD has returned over 200% for me.

They recently even announced a deal with an unnamed hyperscaler, and spun off one of their business units in to focus only on HVAC cooling for AI data centers. This is why I am pretty sure that this stock will crash at some point in time but just don’t know when.

We have all read many stories about AI data center projects getting blocked and all the debt that’s been taken on by the hyperscalers.

This is another example of a stock which I had on my watchlist once it started getting hot, and I simply bought it on weakness when the stock dipped. Besides the fact that they are involved with HVAC data centers, I don’t know anything else besides that about their key metrics.

What is the trigger signal as to when to sell off these “picks and shovels“ stocks?

There are a ton of banks in Poland but it’s difficult to know which ones are investment banks versus consumer banks versus commercial banks. Which one of these would you choose to put your savings in and to do some brokerage trading? I guess if you need some life insurance as well, not sure of these institutions would offer it.

PKO Bank Polski
Bank Pekao
PZU
Erste Bank
Mbank

I first bought this Polish ETF back in 2020 for about $16 a share in my IRA knowing absolutely nothing about Poland. This was just part of a massive diversification strategy.

I then DCA in late 2024 in the same IRA because I noticed it was at 52 week lows. I am up over 140% if you count my 2020 batch with these set of batches. If you take just my 2020 batch, I’m up about 150%.

I bought my first batch in my after tax brokerage in January 2025. This batch is up over 95%.

After Vance made his Munich speech about how the Europeans had to defend themselves, and after the April 2025 liberation day tariffs, several European funds repatriated their money to Europe as the dollar weakened.

I still don’t know anything about Poland except that it is a fast growing country in Europe. I am happy that I was able to get enough alpha instead of just putting my money into a generic European ETF but I’m wondering where do I go from here? I literally had no other thesis except massive diversification. I hadn’t touched this ETF in more than four years before adding to it and only because I noticed it was a 52 week lows.

What do I do now?

Many years ago during the 2015 to 2016 China slowdown when most stocks were down, including Tech, I thought we were on the verge of another dotcom bubble 2.0. I also wanted to buy something that had to do with the real economy instead of tech and had Deere, Caterpillar, and Boeing on a watchlist. I eventually got rid of Boeing and Caterpillar to hedge against being too deep in industrials.

If you asked me what caused me to pull the trigger on a large chunk of Deere in August 2016, it would make your eyes roll and it would make any financial advisor fall on the ground with a heart attack.

The Warriors had come back from a 3-1 deficit and the Western Conference finals and the Cavaliers then came back from a 3-1 deficit to win the NBA finals. Then, Portugal won the euro 2016 when they were not favored at all. Later on, I saw this news segment of Trump talking to farmers and something clicked in my mind that this was a strange year and that he wanted to give them some money if he won. If he won, the Tech bubble would burst so it was better to buy industrial stocks, especially John Deere because the farmers were going to buy more equipment with the subsidies.

I did absolutely no financial, company, or sector analysis at all. This was just a cockamamie theory.

And then, I got busy and totally forgot about it and one fine day I noticed I had gained over 100% in that stock a few years later. I now sit on an almost a 600% gain.

I bought this in my IRA and it is the largest holding within my IRA consisting of 60% of that particular IRA account (I have many IRA accounts).

What should I do with it? It looks like a good long-term, “never sell“ type of a stock, and arable land is always a problem, but the population is also declining all over the world.

We know that Amazon recently opened up its supply chain services to other companies. Right after that happened, UPS and FedEx stock dropped although it has recovered since then.

I’m no expert in freight, transportation, and logistics, but I do have FedEx shares that I have held for quite a while now.

How serious is the threat from Amazon?

What could they do to completely disrupt both FedEx and UPS?

How likely is it that they might acquire one of these two companies?

What metrics do I need to look at for FedEx to know whether this is affecting them or not?

I remember back in 2018 when interest rates were going up and the average SFH was $750K, it took over 80 days to sell a home. The pandemic changed all of that with ZIRP and out of towners moving here due to remote work. 2023 and 2024 was still strong because of the gains from the stock market. Then, the market softened in 2025 with the layoffs. Now, things are much worse, and I can't believe the investors, hedge funds, and private equity firms are buying up real estate here. So who is?