Expectations for Banks Are Low, but Are They Low Enough?
Bank stocks have been punished more by fear than by fundamentals, and their reaction this morning is the first test of earnings season.
Chip Selloff Keeps a Lid on Indices Despite Another Day of Broader Gains
Eight of 11 sectors rose and the Dow Jones Industrial Average gained for a third straight day, but another selloff in chipmakers kept the S&P 500 little changed and the Nasdaq in the red on the lightest volume of the year.
Meta Trots Out 2 New AI Models
Here’s where Meta’s AI subscription figures become more than just interesting.
VIDEO: Anthropic, Apple and Inflation Set Up Pivotal Week for the Market
Plus, ASML’s price hikes rumblings and implications for Applied Materials.
AI Data Center Stocks Could Bounce Hard. Here’s What Would Make It Last.
Three things are needed to bring beaten-up AI data center stocks back — and one developer is closest to breaking through.
More Tales From Nvidia: Who Could Have Predicted This One? (Issue #260)
And Meta ($META) got what, about four weeks out of it, and they spent $500 billion and gave it away for free?! This is the economics of AI to a T:
Meanwhile:
And From September 23:
BY DOUG KASS · Sep 23, 2026, 7:35 AM EDT
More Tales From Nvidia: I’m Not Trying to Call the Stocks But Consider That Muse Was Offered for Free! (Issue #253)
“Muse personal AI agent is free to use with a generous weekly usage limit (such as up to 100 million tokens per week), though paid subscription tiers are available if you need higher usage capacity.”
– From AI
### Does Anyone Do Their Homework Anymore?
Not that I am or have been trying to call the stocks, because that is a fool’s errand these days, especially in these types of mania-driven markets. But it is fun to occasionally comment on the markets relative to the underlying fundamentals and business issues.
Monday and Tuesday were a combination of a gamma squeeze aided and abetted by Facebook’s Muse announcement.
For those that don’t know, Muse is Facebook’s personal assistant app, a theoretical AI agent, that made it to the top of the app stores download list, helping to inspire the gamma squeeze rip of the last two days.
Why did it make it to the top of the list? Because it is both new and FREE! (I don’t recall a single person in the business media saying this!)
Hundreds of billions of investment, and this is what they have to show for it? A free, largely non-differentiated personal assistant app that Amazon ($AMZN) has already cut off from shopping its site? And an app, that after the novelty factor wears off, will probably not be used all that much and likely never generate any economics, because it is free and of limited real utility and effectiveness. Guess what, people actually like shopping themselves, that is why they do it!
Heck, even Angry Birds costs money (and generates economics).
My guess, this thing goes the way of the Metaverse and Threads.
If any thing speaks volumes about AI, not sure if it is this, or it is OpenAI spending $22.5 million of compute to win a $1 million prize and needing to cheat along the way to even do that!
Coincidentally per prior on Muse, I just saw these.
The reference to Amazon is their theoretical no human convenience stores where AI was supposed to figure out everything you put in your basket. Turns out they had humans in India watching people on cameras. End of day, none of it ended up working, it lost too much money, and they shut all the stores anyway. Same for McDonald’s ($MCD) automated AI ordering system, where “no onions” seemed problematic for the AI to get right. I guess I was too optimistic, hundreds of billions of investment, and Meta ($META) still needs the humans too, because the AI still does not work.
Trillions of dollars of market cap added across the board due to this? And PS, Meta already paid for the junk they have in place to do this. They would have been better off buying offshore call centers for pennies on the dollar. Incidentally, that is one more thing AI was supposed to replace, but the opposite is happening, because it turns out Gen AI is multiples more expensive than cheap offshore labor.
Positions: Short NVDA S
Tracking 33 Signals Across 9 of the Pro Portfolio’s Investment Themes
Let’s scan through the headlines for the stories of the week that speak to our Pro Portfolio holdings.
Weekly Roundup: Oil, Yields and AI Jitters Make for a Choppy Climb
We added to one holding while our concern for higher energy prices starts to play out.
Why Are Asia’s Chipmakers Selling Down on Sunny Forecasts?
Share prices of the two biggest Asian companies by market cap are down despite optimistic updates. Here’s what investors should watch heading into earnings season.
This Stock Was Sold as an AI Loser. Then Came Muse.
Your AI will call their AI. Here’s the stock I’m buying for that.