Chip madness getting close to FOMO mania phase?

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Today’s Links
The view from the top - Ken Griffin interview
Worth a listening to someone who has assembled a USD 50 billion fortune. Comments on the Iran war, US politics, some interesting comments on tech booming perhaps more than AI itself and more.

Tracking the AI tech developments and directions that are driving AI-related stocks
Stratechery.com is a great place to start for in-depth articles on key AI industry players (mostly chip- and software, not things like, the shifts in which technologies see more demand as AI moves to the next phase, the spin and analysis of what companies are saying on their earnings call, etc. AI tech is shifting so quickly - and the recent podcast on Intel’s earnings, for example, helps investors to understand the wild reception of AMD’s earnings and the huge boost to Intel’s shares as CPUs are receiving more intense focus than previously. The shift in data center loads from training to inference and increasingly to agentic AI will see intensifying use of CPUs as opposed to GPUs.

My favourite writer on the post-American order
It’s not that I share his viewpoints, but his writing is just so fantastically crafted and he brings up extremely important perspectives on what might happen if the rest of the world decides it doesn’t like the way the US is behaving and decides to go its own way rather than submit to becoming a part of the US…empire, patronage system, etc..

The Sportster is back!
I never knew it was gone as I haven’t fiddled with motorcycles since my early 20’s (a long long time ago) - but the big old 1200 CC one was always one of my favourite Harley Davidson models, and now they are bringing back the classic 883 Sportster and selling it for a reasonable price that they can still make money on. Some even lower-end smaller models are also on the way, which is very un-Harley Davidson, but shareholders are rejoicing (see below).f

Chart of the Day - Harley Davidson (HOG - natch!)

Its’s another day of AI chip-stock frenzy, but I am getting a bit wary of the spectacle and uneasy with where it is all headed - we are somewhere close to- or fully in a mania cycle that won’t end well, whenever it ends. So instead, I turn my attention to a company that is very much not AI- related, a real blast from the past: Harley Davidson. My father rode a Harley, something he had long wanted to own and then along came middle age and voila, he flew all the way to El Paso from Houston (about 1200 kilometers) to pick up his 1993 Heritage Softail Classic, which looked like this one, except it was black and with leather bags, of course. I also learned to ride on that insanely heavy bike, but it was very easy to ride with its low center of gravity. It was either the last, or one of the last Harley Davidsons that had the engine directly mounted to the frame, which meant the fillings in your teeth were about to rattle out after a couple of hours on the highway from the vibrations. Anyway, as noted in WSJ article link above, I was pleased to see the company is trying to innovate with a refresh of old models and even bringing in some new ones. As the chart below shows, this is generating some solid enthusiasm and the shares are up more than 50% from the recent lows. The valuation of the company is pricing in somewhat of a turnaround, given its recent falling revenues and the overall question of whether motorcycles are a dying industry because younger generations don’t want to take the risks. I know I would never encourage any of my four children to ride because of the dangers of motorcycle riding, but lucky for me my father was from an old generation that was willing to take such risks and I had the opportunity. Let’s ride!