r/investing

Literally every countries market on earth has gone up since 2024 or at least stayed flat - except Indonesia, which has fallen by quite a bit. It's fallen by 30% in the last year - which includes a 10% dollar decline so it really fell by 40%.

Indonesia is also the only developing / developed country that has population growth so that should be a long term tailwind.

I have been doing this seriously for about three years. I read 10-Ks, build my own DCF models, and listen to every earnings call for the names I follow.

The problem I keep hitting is that once I am mentally invested in a name (before I am financially invested), I can construct a beautiful narrative for it. The bull case feels airtight. Then six months later something breaks the thesis and I look back and realize I was selectively weighting evidence the entire time.

For people here who have been doing this longer, how do you actually keep yourself honest? Do you write a pre-mortem? Do you keep a dedicated section in your thesis doc for 'what kills this'? Do you only buy after a peer has poked real holes in the reasoning?

I am asking about the actual mechanics, not the principle of 'be objective.

Anthropic is experiencing such explosive growth that it is expected to report its first-ever operating profit in the second quarter of 2026, according to internal financial projections reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Anthropic generated $4.8 billion in revenue in Q1 2026.

It expects revenue to jump to $10.9 billion in Q2 2026, a 130% increase in just one quarter.

Anthropic is projected to earn $559 million in operating profit for the quarter.

This is significant milestones because most AI companies are still losing large amounts of money due to the enormous cost of computing infrastructure.

Much of this growth is being driven by strong enterprise adoption of Anthropic’s Claude AI models, particularly coding and agentic tools that help businesses automate software development and complex workflows.

At the same time, Anthropic’s operating efficiency is improving, with computing costs expected to decline from 71 cents to 56 cents for every dollar of revenue, showing that the company is scaling while becoming more cost-effective.

This performance marks a major turning point for the AI industry, demonstrating that generative AI companies can reach profitability much faster than many investors expected. It also strengthens Anthropic’s position as one of the most formidable competitors to OpenAI and has fueled speculation that the company could soon command a valuation approaching $900 billion, placing it among the most valuable private technology firms in the world.

Mind-blowing growth is about to propel Anthropic into its first profitable quarter

A little background first: I'm 50 and I only in the last 3 years actually did a forensic analysis of my own portfolio and took full control of it. I blindly contributed to a TDF for years in my 401k, then when I changed jobs years later, I just rolled that all into a Wells Trade account and worked with an Advisor (I still contributed to 401ks after that too). After my advisor retired and I started to learn more about investing (as I got older and actually started thinking about retirement), I finally opened up the portfolio to get my hands around it. Let's just say, it wasn't horrible but I cleared the table, moved everything to Fidelity, adopted a mostly Vanguard-y 3 fund strategy (of sorts). It's been a really good 3 years. I'm in a great spot, I was smart to start at 22! But I could have a hell of a lot more if I owned this process on my own from the start. But on to the primary story:

So I shared all this with my mom the other day and she was impressed with my results and allowed me to look into their own Portfolio. It was set up by an old "friend" in AZ years ago that worked at Schwab. Let's just say on initial inspection, I was kinda shocked by what I saw because I didn't recognize hardly any of the symbols. I ran it all through Claude and it basically told me their 'friend' designed a portfolio beneficial for HIM, not for THEM. It pointed out investing for retirees doesn't have to be that complicated, a few low-cost funds is all you needed. It provided an interesting analogy around going to a car dealership and asking for reliable transportation, but getting upsold into a fancy SUV with bells and whistles no one needs.

So what was in their portfolio? Well it was full of Mutual Funds with Class A shares, CEFS (never even heard of these until today and I worked on Wall Street!), and 12b-1 buried fees (these are massive upfront fees paid when the security is purchased). In short: an overly complicated and overly engineered portfolio designed to confuse them. We estimate roughly a 7-10k fee drag on this per year!! Imagine all the compounding they missed out on.

Needles to say, they are pissed but also grateful I did this analysis. So, much like myself, we're going to wipe the table and start with a simple 3F Portfolio of sorts, with low cost funds. Luckily their remaining pot is still relatively healthy.

Be careful out there folks. There are crooks and dishonest people everywhere. An 'advisor' isn't always taking your best interests into account. You HAVE to stay on top of it and them. Read the statements! Ask the hard questions, press them on fees (if you must use one of them), and consider learning about investing and doing it on your own. All you need is out there to easily learn.

Cheers

Been tracking the gap between SPX (cap weighted) and RSP (equal weight) for about two years. Last week the trailing 12 month return spread widened to 13.8 percentage points in favor of cap weighted. That level has only been reached twice before in the modern era: March 2000 and November 2021.

Both of those times, mega caps went on to significantly underperform over the next 18 months. Which, you know, doesn't prove anything on its own. But it got me curious enough to dig through the full history.

Going back to 2001 I found six distinct periods where this gap exceeded 10 percentage points. In five of those six, RSP outperformed SPX over the following 24 months by an average of 14.3%. The lone exception was right before COVID, which was its own kind of black swan that scrambled everything.

What actually made me take this more seriously was the earnings picture. I had MuleRun pull constituent level earnings and revenue growth across all 500 names going back to 2001, then spot checked the outputs against Bloomberg. The numbers lined up, so I kept going.

The pattern that jumped out most clearly: the concentration premium tends to unwind fastest when top decile earnings growth decelerates relative to the median. And Q1 2026 is showing exactly that. Top 10 names posted 11.2% year over year growth, down from 22.4% a year ago. Meanwhile the median company posted 7.8%, up from 4.1%. So the gap is compressing from both directions at once.

Now the immediate pushback is "this isn't 2000" and that's completely fair. Today's mega caps are genuinely profitable with massive free cash flow. Nobody with a straight face is comparing NVIDIA to Pets.com. But profitability alone doesn't save you from multiple compression when growth rates converge. Cisco was a legitimately excellent business in 2000. Still took 15 years to see that price again. The lesson from that era was never really about business quality. It was about what happens when the market prices in perfection and then perfection stops accelerating.

Random tangent but this also connects to something that bugs me about how people talk about "passive" investing. If 38% of your index is concentrated in 10 names, up from about 27% just three years ago, you're functionally running a momentum strategy whether you signed up for it or not. That's been phenomenal for three years. But at what point does "I just buy the index" become a thesis that deserves the same scrutiny as any active bet?

Anyway. I've shifted about 20% of my equity allocation from VOO into RSP and IVOO over the past month. Still majority cap weighted. Fully possible I end up underperforming if concentration keeps expanding. Last two times the gap was this extreme, RSP beat SPX by 18% and 11% respectively over the next two years. Combined with the earnings convergence it felt like enough to act on, but I realize I could be reading too much into historical patterns that may not repeat in a structurally different market.

Could be wrong. Probably overthinking it. But 13.8% is 13.8%.

Rep. Tim Moore disclosed a new purchase of $T today.

His track record in the Communication Services sector is very strong when you copy his buy trades when publicly disclosed and sell 90 days later:

• +19.1% median return
• +15.8% median SPY-adjusted
• 85.7% win rate (7 trades)

Worth watching if you're bullish on telecom, communication services right now.

Who here actually trades off congressional/insider disclosures?

I want to get moderately leveraged exposure to the S&P500 index in my retirement accounts (125%) and hold for 25-35 years.

I’ve looked into a few strategies and I’m hoping to get a gut check.

Strategy 1: CME Index Futures

This seemed like the most efficient strategy with low overhead. Pay roughly the risk free rate for leveraged index exposure, keep the position backed by short term treasuries like SGOV or an interest bearing money market account to offset the cost of opening positions and roll the contracts quarterly. *Except* brokerages that offer futures trading in an IRA require the positions to be backed by settled cash, and that would not be earning interest. The requirement is about 20% of the total position. Once I take that dead cash into account, the effective cost of leverage is actually quite bad. That strikes futures out for me

Strategy 2: DITM Leaps

The key advantage I see DITM calls is having a cap on losses. I would roll the positions a year before expiration re-open new ones. They seem to offer efficient leverage, but potentially wide bid-ask spreads make and calculating future “theta decay” make it difficult for me to understand what my effective cost of leverage actually is. With $115,000 in one of my IRAs I’d have to open one 350 C SPY contract to get the exposure I want at basically the risk free rate.

Strategy 3:

2x long LETFs. Great, but I don’t love the uncertainty of volatility drag. I’d hold 75% of my account in VOO and 25% in SSO and just let it rip. The biggest pro is that it’s easy to manage and easy to rebalance to maintain my target exposure.

Is my understanding of the cost of index futures correct?

Am I overestimating the complexity and impact of options pricing algorithms?

Am I too afraid of volatility drag? The LETF route is nice and maybe the simplicity is worth it.

$GOOGL I/O felt like $GOOGL saying Gemini is moving from chatbot to action layer across Search, YouTube, Workspace, Chrome, Android, shopping, dev tools, and eventually glasses. The important numbers were scale and speed: AI Mode is now over 1B monthly users, queries have more than doubled every quarter, and Google claims Gemini 3.5 Flash is much faster on output tokens. That matters if cheaper/faster inference lets Google run agents at massive scale. But the stock reaction was muted because investors still need the financial answer: does this protect Search ads, drive Cloud/TPU demand, and offset higher AI compute costs?

Recent research on listed Bitcoin miners argues they are quietly morphing into AI infrastructure plays, not just leveraged bets on BTC anymore. The analysis highlights roughly 3.7 GW of capacity tied to around 90B USD of announced or potential AI data center deals, with miners emerging as key partners thanks to their pre-secured power, land and permitting. The core idea: miners can repurpose part of their existing sites for AI/HPC workloads while still keeping optionality on Bitcoin if economics shift back in their favor.

For equity investors, that raises an interesting question: do we keep valuing names like MARA, RIOT, CLSK, IREN, HUT or CORZ purely on hashprice and halving cycles, or do we start thinking of them as early‑stage AI data center operators that might deserve a closer multiple to traditional DC/REIT comps? Curious how r/investing is underwriting this – are you buying these stocks as crypto miners, power‑rich infrastructure plays, or avoiding the sector altogether?

Is there any smoke around Stripe, Apple or Google buying parts of this business. I don't have a lot of confidence in paypal growth, I still use it on some checkouts because it's easy but apple/google pay probably have taken a good chunk.

But at a 7.5 PE there doesn't seem to be a lot of downside risk vs a lot of high flying tech stocks.

Seems like it's worth a small flyer at this price (again I don't see how they capture a bigger market or grow besides venmo but zelle, apple cash, cashapp many other competitors) but the price after earnings seems ok to take a small position.

EDIT: even if you look back into the worst times of the Iran conflicts, tariffs, this stock doesn’t seem to drop much below $43 (but I’m sure many of thought it wouldn’t go lower than X price)

So IRA portfolio has risen 80k since January and would like profits. Is it better to DRIP the Q2 dividend and then take profits or is there a better order to do that? Hopefully the market won’t crash before then.

Some of the bigger positions are 10-15% of portfolio while others are around 5-15%. But some are up 15% and the profit would be nice to hold for a dip.

Also are small caps like VXUS VBR and SCHA worth dripping now at their current prices? thinking it might be awhile before rates are lowered and they rise again. Small caps and utilities XLU are my defensive plays.

Thank You.

When CP2 comes online in late 2027, VG becomes the nr 1 LNG exporter in the US and nr 2 globally. So head of Qatar. And ahead of Australia.

The valuation gap makes no sense: Cheniere trades at 40x PE with ONLY 4% production growth. VG trades at 15x PE with triple-digit revenue growth and CP2 not even priced in. Nearly equal revenues, half the market cap.

Yeah but gas is going out of use... Shell projects global LNG demand up 60% by 2040

Russia getting hammered by Ukraine drones so their infrastructure is killed. Iran and Qatar offline and EVEN post-peace-deal their infrastructure needs years to rebuild. Qatar's Ras Laffan Gas facility needs few years to be rebuilt. The world needs a reliable western supplier at scale. VG is becoming exactly that.

So I don't actually know why it's hammered. Ofc some will say yes but they were sued. The litigation is capped at 1 billion. Sure there are mixed results, Shell lost, BP won, damages hearing pending. But its not like they are hammered in the court.

They also signed 20-year deals with counterparties like Hanwha and Trafigura. And first ships are arriving in China.

And yes they have debt, because they need to build out super complex structures

What do you think?

I’m kinda tired of working my body to its limits 6 days a week, i don’t want to do it forever. I have heard lots of good (and bad) things about the stock market. i definitely want to learn to navigate it and what marks a good investment vs a bad one, is anybody willing to give me some advice ? I also hope all of yall are having a great evening

just turned 17 last week and opened a youth fidelity account and am going to put in 260 tomorrow, I’m planning on saving money to open a plumbing business in the near future, that’s about 6 years time until now where I would aim to get my class 2 master plumbing license in the state of Georgia. I plan to get a job during the summer and all throughout senior year to invest in the market also plan to save 300-500 a week right when I turn 18 trough the money I get from being a plumber apprentice, obviously investing more money a week as I earn more

I plan to live with my parents during my apprenticeship and ended up buying a cheap truck around a year ago from money I earned working side jobs. so now that I have that set up for me my main focus is to save money and invest I’ve made a plan to put 75 percent of my money into SPAXX and 25 percent in to VOO so by the time I’m ready to start my business I have around 80-90k saved up.

But I’m having second thoughts and seeing if I should put it in money in to Individual stocks, while putting less money into SPAXX but still most of it, but I’m wondering if the risk is worth it as if let’s say the market crashes right before I’m planning to start my business I wouldn’t have time to let the market recover and worse off but it could also pay off into bigger money compared to 3 percent a year from SPAXX

Everyone’s calling AI a bubble, but I think that misses the bigger picture.

A lot of what looks like “overvaluation” could just be the dollar losing purchasing power, pushing nominal asset prices higher. That doesn’t mean there isn’t speculation, but expensive doesn’t automatically mean irrational.

Also, real bubbles rarely burst when everyone is expecting them to. Curious what people think is AI actually overvalued, or are markets just pricing in both a real tech shift and a weaker dollar?

This is rough estimate taking into the account that investing was done over those 6 years (thank you AI).

It is a tough pill to swallow, but I just ran the numbers and sticking with VTI instead of VOO cost me so much in lost gains over the last six years. It really goes to show how much of a drag those extended mid-cap and small-cap periods can be on a portfolio compared to the S&P 500. Has anyone else looked back at their own allocation and realized they missed out on major mega-cap tech growth by betting on the total market?

The point isn't that we KNOW that VOO will continue to outperform. The point is that it DOES make a difference, despite what everyone says.

For about a year I've had my medium term savings in VTIP, which is short term inflation-protected securities (<5 year duration). Now that the whole bond market yield is jumping in expectation of additional inflation and stability, am I correct in assuming the longer term TIPs (in this case, VTP) will perform better since they cover a broader range of durations?

Or is buying TIPs through an ETF not as subject to the same amount of interest rate chaos that other bonds are facing?