Growth stocks are experiencing their biggest drawdown since the Liberation Day tariff debacle.

Multiple themes are experiencing a waterfall sell-off, including data center operators, rare earths, SMRs, and speculative AI names associated with the AI buildout. With less aggressiveness, quality names across semiconductors are also suffering a significant correction.

Inflation is back, as oil prices have surged after supply chains were disrupted by the war in the Middle East.

As the Fed, controversially, hikes rates to temper aggregate demand and control inflation, the already-doubted financing feasibility of the AI buildout becomes even more challenging.

Investors are full of questions, and sometimes, the past can offer valuable answers. While we’re in a unique situation, undergoing the largest infrastructure buildout in human history, we’ve experienced similar drawdowns in the past, driven by very similar causes.

In this article, I’ll analyze when this market could bottom, based on how major oil shocks since the 1970s ended and what could happen from here.

Then I’ll get into what this means for growth stocks, using the 2021–2022 crash as another example of a more recent inflation-related drawdown that slowed down many infrastructure projects and helped push the US into a technical recession in 2022.

Hopefully, after this analysis, it’ll be clearer where we stand today and what to expect over the coming months.

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1. Robotics and the Long-Term Opportunity

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Cloud computing was revolutionized by AI, resulting in a before-and-after in the data center industry. Robotics is going to go through the same shift.

The reason? AI is going to transform robotics from preprogrammed tasks, with no ability to adapt and very limited usefulness beyond production lines, into generalized robotic systems that are adaptable, versatile, dynamic, and, most importantly, powered by AI models.

We’re entering the era of generalized intelligence, and this intelligence needs a physical body to liberate humanity from the most mundane tasks.

Of course, it’s going to be a long journey. But just as technology freed humanity from having to ride horses, light candles, copy documents by hand, and move earth with picks and shovels, robots will gradually liberate us from factory work, household chores, construction labor, and even fighting wars ourselves.

Welcome to the early innings of advanced robotics. As with any new technology, it won’t be too impressive at first, until one day you realize the world has changed forever.

That isn’t a new concept. AI didn’t become revolutionary overnight. Recurrent neural networks have been studied for decades, and the first GPT model was introduced in 2018. However, it wasn’t until 2022 that the consumer-facing ChatGPT product was introduced, leaving everyone in awe, although not without skeptics.

Now, four years later, everyone agrees. AI is the future, and it’s going to change the world drastically in a matter of a few years.

My point here is: don’t wait for technology to be perfected to become interested in a subject. Of course, by 2025, it was already obvious where the puck was going, but by that time, NVIDIA was already a $4 trillion behemoth.

The robotics ramp-up is just beginning, and in this article, I’ll go over eight robotics mid-caps, small caps, and microcaps to uncover picks-and-shovels opportunities for the boom that is coming.

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Portfolio is up 91% YTD.

In the previous article, I said I was going to compile all the best ideas I’ve shared this year but never ended up investing in.

Before that, I want to share a more general overview of what I’m thinking about for my next potential positions:

I’ve been inactive because of some personal issues lately. Hopefully things will get better. I’ll try to compensate you as much as possible for your patience.

I believe this will also be a good recap of some of the most interesting investment trends developing, some of which I have already covered.

Once I got into all the positions and themes I’ve gone over, I realized: it’s a lot.

I wanted to compile everything and then filter it down to arrive at the most interesting opportunities. I still ended up with a wide mapping, but it’s a good starting point nonetheless, especially considering I’ve already shared comprehensive context on many of these companies.

I believe investors sometimes get too lost in the short term and waste a lot of time focusing on small, short-term news, missing the forest for the trees by ignoring the underlying long-term trends.

I believe those who take advantage of powerful trends through long-term, high-potential, high-conviction positions get better results than those trying to trade in and out of positions in a matter of months.

That’s why I’m taking this approach: analyzing the strongest trends for the next few years, then picking the best positions within each of them.

I’ve been extremely successful with this approach. Just since I started this Substack, I invested in Nebius in the $20s, Micron when memory was a hated theme, and AMD when it was a disrespected company.

I’ve had more hits since, and I still believe the same underappreciated stories are happening through some of my newest positions.

But I also believe there is a universe of stocks beyond what I already invest in that needs to be examined to spot the next big opportunities to hop on.

Let’s Get Into It Directly

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The AI trade has stalled since midyear. It makes sense. The Philadelphia Semiconductor Index surged 88% in Q2, its biggest quarterly gain on record, beating even the 67.75% rally in Q1 2000 during the dot-com boom.

Such a massive surge could only be followed by a correction, especially in the messy macroeconomic environment we live in, where supply-side inflation, rising AI capex, high oil prices, and the biggest technological revolution in history are all converging to create particularly strange times, especially for investors.

In this short article, I’ll explain what AI needs to maintain its momentum and what investors should be looking at.

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The portfolio is up 74% YTD (as of Sep. 13)

Make sure you don’t miss the first part:

This is Part 2 of my portfolio update.

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In today’s article, I’ll:

• Update some portfolio positions

• Cover power generation plays outside of the portfolio

The portfolio is up 74% YTD

Let’s start.

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SEMICON is one of those events that lets you step into the world of the future. It disengages you from the present and shows what the semiconductor industry will look like a few years from now.

And the main look of that future is: bigger, richer, and more efficient.

SEMICON Taiwan, specifically, lets you specially enter the physical world of semiconductors: the actual machinery, materials, and processes being used to turn rocks into computational power and, ultimately, intelligence.

This year, the excitement was palpable, and I dare to say it was the most excited the semiconductor public has felt since, probably, forever.

The reason why is obvious: AI is injecting so much money into this industry that not only are growth, earnings, and stock prices soaring, but funding for new technologies has skyrocketed.

This is accelerating progress like never seen before.

This can be seen in the development roadmaps of large companies like AMD or Nvidia. Going from one generation every three years to a new generation yearly, sometimes even with a completely new architecture per year, is simply out of this world.

Scaling performance by orders of magnitude, sometimes just within a frequency of months, would have been absurd when the industry was solely dependent on Moore’s Law. Today, the industry is making all these metrics explode through implementing advanced packaging techniques that are making systems larger and more powerful than ever.

And this was the most popular and consequential theme of the event.

Yes, it wasn’t photonics, memory, or the logic die itself. It wasn’t design or foundry.

It was advanced packaging.

The reason? All of the above depends on it.

You can’t build a CPO switch without advanced packaging, you can’t stack more layers of HBM without advanced packaging, and you can’t scale logic dies in bigger and bigger world sizes without advanced packaging.

Since increasing the density of transistors is increasingly challenging, advanced packaging is, and will increasingly be, the defining scaling anchor for compute and, ultimately, of the AI era.

What were the attendees, from engineers to analysts, sales teams, and journalists, more interested in?

• The core of the event was Fan-Out Panel-Level Packaging.

• The nascent star: glass substrates.

• And the satellites supporting these technologies: robotics, specialized machinery that scales well beyond wafers, and advanced materials that make the transition toward these new technologies, including hybrid bonding, possible.

To take advantage of this opportunity in the semiconductor space, I’ll initiate a new series where I’ll be dissecting the companies that supply companies like TSMC, Intel, Micron, and Samsung, including complex automated machinery and robots that transport the key components manufactured in a fab, so that investors know how to get exposure to these companies’ expansion plans.

I’ll consider not just the technology, which is the core aspect, but also the financials and valuations.

Let’s begin with the first company in this series.

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SEMICON Taiwan is one of the world’s largest semiconductor industry trade shows and conferences, held annually in Taipei.

This year I’m attending to share what I discover here.

This is only Day 1.

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A Future $100B Company or a Disappointment?

A shorter article, not really my style, but why not?

IREN really does bring a lot of attention.

That’s the curse of becoming a retail favorite: as many people will hate you as will love you.

Anyhow, there are valid arguments worth responding to. These are some I found.

Dilution

“IREN is a dilution machine. Way more than Nebius.”

IREN has used more ATM issuance, but Nebius has used more convertibles.

Assuming all convertibles convert, Nebius has increased its fully diluted share count by 45% over the last 14 months, while IREN is at 61%. Over the last six months, it’s 22% and 21%, respectively.

Let’s not exaggerate here.

Financing

“They are raising debt. They’ll probably have to dilute way more to fund $25–30B of capex.”

The fact that IREN can get 50% of GPU value in customer prepayments and another 90% in GPU financing on top of that, while keeping its data centers unencumbered and therefore preserving another pool of collateral against which it can raise financing, is very impressive.

Yet people focus on the absolute $25–30B figure and ignore the outstanding work IREN is doing to raise tens of billions of dollars while being a $15B company.

IREN is performing just as well as Nebius in the financing department while being the smaller company.

GSW sponsorship

“$50M per year GSW sponsorship.”

I agree. It makes no sense to anybody.

At least it’s almost humorous that they got to put such an ugly logo on their shirt.

“Too slow”

“Slow as fuck compared to Nebius and CoreWeave.”

IREN is about a year behind CoreWeave and Nebius in AI cloud monetization, but saying that alone is cherry-picking.

IREN came later, but it’s coming stronger.

• IREN’s operating ARR as of August 26 was $1B. Nebius exited June at $3B.

For a company that was AI-native and had a much stronger team working on this for a decade before IREN, does that really sound like some crazy gap? Especially considering IREN is now growing faster?

IREN went from a $280M annualized revenue run rate based on its June-quarter average to $1B of operating ARR by August 26.

Once you start delivering contracts, ARR explodes. People are turning a timing issue into a fundamental issue when it isn’t.

CoreWeave and Nebius were earlier. That doesn’t mean IREN can’t catch up.

• Moreover, IREN is projecting 300% growth from its current $1B operating ARR to $4B by year-end, already contracted.

• Nebius is targeting $8B of year-end ARR at the midpoint, up about 167% from its $3B June exit ARR.

Again, IREN is growing faster in relative terms.

For 2027, IREN is targeting 0.8 GW of cumulative IT delivery, translating to 0.5GW of added delivered capacity. Nebius has said it wants to add more than 1 GW per year starting in 2027. 1/4 of the market cap, 1/2 of the capacity growth.

That doesn’t seem like a crazy difference to me for a company that started this journey years before IREN.

So is IREN really too slow?

Or is it actually one of the most impressive pivot and acceleration stories in the data-center space?

Vertical integration

And that’s before we even get into power capacity.

It’s easier to grow quickly when you lease data centers, but then you can run into problems like Nebius did with DataOne or CoreWeave did with Core Scientific.

Nebius has recognized this problem and is increasingly focusing on wholly owned sites, while CoreWeave is sticking with its existing model.

IREN has pursued vertical integration from day one.

It has the most impressive power portfolio of the three at a fraction of the market cap.

Monetization

Now let’s talk about monetization.

IREN’s base monetization is basically the same as the others.

IREN had around 90 MW operating as of August 26. Based on $1B of operating ARR, that implies:

• $11.1M ARR/MW.

Nebius reported $12M ACV/MW for its 2026 base economics.

Then you move further out on the curve.

• IREN said its newer three-year contracts are now above $20M/MW, with active discussions around $25M/MW.

• Nebius said its Q2 new deals were above $20M/MW, while some Q3 short-duration deals exceeded $40M/MW.

Nebius is capturing higher rates at the right end of the curve, which makes sense considering the depth of its platform.

But on the base deals, the picture is practically the same.

The bigger picture

Like I said, IREN is behind Nebius in monetization and definitely behind in its software stack.

But in terms of speed? IREN takes the crown.

Look at the moves this company is making:

Securing enormous amounts of power and land. Signing contracts. Bringing in high-tier customers like Figure AI, Perplexity, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Fluidstack, Cohere and Higgsfield. Building its software stack from zero. Building a brand. Expanding globally.

It’s genuinely a feat.

IREN is spending a lot of money. It’s rapidly expanding headcount, making acquisitions, developing sites around the world and spending on sponsorships and branding.

But they’re doing this with the ambition of becoming a $100B company, and you don’t get there by operating like a small, conservative infrastructure company.

While I agree IREN has overspent in some areas, particularly the GSW sponsorship and the massive executive compensation package, I also believe they’re taking the steps required to become a data-center giant.

Pieces falling into place

IREN has sold out its 2026 capacity.

It has already pre-sold around one-quarter of the capacity it plans to bring online in H1 2027, and its growth is staggering.

Demand isn’t the problem.

Power and land aren’t the problem.

It now has a close relationship with NVIDIA that should help with GPU access, while its financing options have improved dramatically.

The pieces are falling into place.

But investors tend to become overly emotional in both directions with popular names, which is why, on X, IREN can only be the next vertically integrated neocloud giant or a house of cards about to collapse.

Nothing in between.

What am I doing?

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In today’s article, I’ll present what I believe is the safest type of investment you can make if you want AI exposure: energy.

Interestingly, it’s also one of the investments that, despite being extremely strong fundamentally, tends to get punished hard by the market at any opportunity. That creates plenty of opportunities to buy.

In fact, right now, I believe there’s a great entry point for some of these companies.

However, not all of them offer the same rock-solid business. Being selective is necessary to separate the wheat from the chaff and get exposure in a risk-aware way that truly makes this one of the safest bets in the AI buildout.

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High-Precision Manufacturing

The Hidden Industry Behind Space, AI, Robotics, and Advanced Hardware

In this article, I’ll touch on a theme you don’t usually hear about: high-precision manufacturing.

Behind every impressive technology humanity has ever invented, there is a machine that allows it to happen.

However, these companies tend to remain under the radar, despite their impressive customer portfolios.

And it’s not because they can’t deliver good returns. Some of these companies have vastly outperformed the SPY over the last few years.

It’s simply a more under-the-radar industry, but that could change through the growth of two key industries that require extremely precise components: aerospace and robotics.

• We live in a new space race. This time, it’s not just about reaching space, but about scaling the space economy. Satellite constellations, defense systems, a Moon base, and orbital data centers could turn space into an eventual trillion-dollar market, and every component sent to space needs one of these machines to make its production possible.

• Secondly, robotics. Some of these companies are already positioning themselves not just in robotic components, but also in the AI infrastructure that powers them. Semiconductor machinery, complex AI accelerator components, humanoid components... all of this increases demand for these machines.

This growth is already palpable, and it’s not mundane. Orders are increasing 30-60% YoY across the industry, all while everything indicates this is only the start of a worldwide manufacturing boom.

Manufacturing capacity for these machines is constrained, the industry is investing in expansion while machine pricing keeps increasing, and companies are forecasting years ahead of growth and expanding margins.

In this article I’ll cover the companies that supply SpaceX, Blue Origin, Airbus, Rocket Lab, NASA, Tesla, Anduril, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, GE Vernova, Siemens Energy, ASML, Firefly, Boeing, and Hadrian, among many others.

I will go into the industry, the most interesting stocks, and offer insights into names you genuinely may have never heard about before.

Let’s start.

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Portfolio up 90% YTD across just 13 positions in total.

In this article, I’ll cover my only Physical AI bet in the portfolio so far.

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In this article, I’ll cover an update on a company I’m accumulating.

This company is a semicap equipment supplier benefiting from the advanced-packaging tailwinds tied to the chips powering the AI era, including HBM.

Jensen sees the semiconductor industry needing to 10x production to power the agentic AI boom.

That means, as an investor, you want exposure to this massive expansion in semiconductor manufacturing capacity.

This company holds a quasi-monopoly in a key process within the supply chain for high-end AI chips.

Its dominant position, combined with the tailwinds from the massive expected growth of the semiconductor industry, makes it a solid bet at a $1.2 billion market cap.

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In this article, I’ll build a valuation model for SpaceX to assess what fair value could look like, so we can get a picture of what a rational, down-to-earth buy zone might be.

I’ll be using a sum-of-the-parts valuation, which, in my opinion, is the go-to approach for such a heterogeneous company.

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In this article, I’ll explain what’s happening in the markets and what I’m doing.

Let’s go.

Macro Analysis

We’ve had a few choppy weeks in the stock market, especially in semiconductors, which has greatly affected the more leveraged Korean investors.

There’s now a clear performance gap.

While the S&P 500 has just reached new all-time highs, the KOSPI and semiconductor stocks remain 25% below their yearly highs.

Why the Rally Became Excessive

From March through June, we went through the biggest semiconductor rally in history. It seemed as if the market had suddenly started believing in AI more than ever before, almost inexplicably.

I’d say it had a lot to do with the war in Iran.

While we were getting bearish news from the Middle East in the form of higher oil prices, supply-chain disruptions, and broader war fears, the fundamentals of the AI trade were improving in the background. However, they were being suppressed by the bearish market climate.

Once that weight was lifted from the market’s shoulders, all those improved fundamentals were suddenly reflected in stock prices, like a compressed spring being released.

Excesses Started to Build

However, with excitement often comes excess.

Investors started piling into semiconductors as if they were free money. I mentioned this several times throughout my articles and became increasingly selective with my picks.

When I looked at themes such as ABF substrates, MLCCs, optics, and glass cloth, among others, valuations were getting out of hand, pricing in several years of earnings growth.

As if that weren’t enough, the leverage cycle poured gasoline on the fire.

Korean Leverage Reached Record Levels

• Korean domestic margin loans reached ₩38.63T on June 24, the highest level ever recorded.

• Borrowing specifically against KOSPI stocks reached ₩29.8T, up 71% from ₩17T at the end of 2025.

• Margin debt in Samsung and SK Hynix alone reached ₩7.79T, up 208% from year-end. The two stocks represented 28% of all KOSPI margin debt.

The Problem Wasn’t Limited to Korea

However, this wasn’t just a Korean problem.

While Korean investors abused leverage the most, the same trend was also visible in the United States.

• U.S. margin debt reached $1.502T at the end of June, up 6.1% in one month and 49% in one year.

• Assets held in U.S. leveraged ETFs reached $220B, up 60% from the end of March, with exposure heavily concentrated in technology and semiconductors.

With this level of leverage, any correction can have devastating effects on stock prices.

What Caused the Leverage Unwind?

The decisive catalyst was the June 22 regulatory warning.

On June 22, the Korean regulator acknowledged that authorities may have moved too quickly in approving leveraged single-stock ETFs and warned about market overheating.

With the risk of leverage restrictions increasing, institutions began selling.

Once Samsung and SK Hynix fell approximately 12%, several mechanical sellers entered the market, creating the domino effect we saw.

Oversupply and Financing Fears Added Pressure

After this, on July 1, Meta was reportedly planning to sell excess capacity as a neocloud, which introduced overbuild concerns into a market that had already seen more aggressive bond issuance to finance AI needs.

On July 7, Goldman data showed that hedge funds had sold U.S. technology hardware for four consecutive weeks amid this combination of historic leverage, oversupply fears, and what some investors saw as excessive debt being used to fund AI capex.

What followed was a historic leverage cleanup.

• July became the worst month in the KOSPI’s 46-year history.

• Two million Koreans were margin-called, and more than 500,000 were liquidated.

Where Are We Today?

We can look at what some institutions are saying to get a better idea of where we stand today and how the current situation could affect the next phase of the cycle.

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Performance Update

Despite the drawdown, my portfolio is up 65% YTD, and my six-year return stands at +869%.

This was achieved with no options, no margin, and no high-risk nano-cap investments.

In this article, I’ll compile all my investment theses, so any new investor can instantly understand what I’m invested in, why I own it, and what I’m buying during dips like the one we’re currently experiencing.

I’ll also share the updated portfolio spreadsheet, including all my holdings and price targets.

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Is AI a Bubble?

I just hopped off a call with an analyst at a major firm, and we both came to the same conclusion.

Market sentiment at the moment is composed of many little moving pieces, but they all come together to form the same question:

Is AI a bubble?

In this article, I’ll explore what needs to happen for stocks to go up and, beyond all the noise, what the market is looking at on a fundamental, long-term basis.

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In this article, I’ll cover a company I’m accumulating that has just presented an industry-shaking update the market has not yet fully digested.

I’ll explain my rationale and present a valuation model to derive my price target.

Let’s get into it.

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Performance Overview

• 2026 YTD: My portfolio is up 89.1% YTD, compared with 9.4% for the SPY.

• My six-year total return now stands at 1,011%, while the SPY is up 154% over the same period.

That means my starting capital has grown by roughly 11x, compared with about 2.5x for the market.

This was achieved without options or leverage, simply by investing in misunderstood companies exposed to the highest-growth themes in the market.

Every position is public. I publish my full portfolio, along with my rationale and price targets, and provide regular updates in my portfolio reviews. The figures are unaudited, but the record is open, and my track record is documented.

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Over the past few weeks, AI-related stocks have experienced a sharp drawdown, creating discounts of more than 30% across some positions I own. As I explained, I believe the sell-off was unfounded, and the recovery I expected is already underway.

Update Structure

This article will follow a different structure from previous updates.

1. First, I’ll explain all the news and recent developments.

2. Secondly, I’ll give my take on each company, providing a more direct and less time-consuming way to understand the key messages and their implications.

3. Then, I’ll provide a snapshot of all my price targets.

4. Finally, I’ll briefly explain what I’m doing with each of my positions.

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