Wall Street’s Tipping Point? Nvidia, AI, and the Sentiment Shift

Hello and welcome back to the Market Maker podcast. It's towards the end of the week. We're actually recording this prior to the nonfarm payrolls report coming out, so I'll do my best to update maybe in the comments how that came out. But in this conversation, obviously it's the morning after Nvidia's earnings, quite frankly, are ridiculous in terms of the growth, almost the law of physics in terms of how this normally works in terms of corporate finance. But at the same time, there's a couple of things to flag, some concentration risk, which has always been there, but still a bit of a talking point. And also, we're going to discuss whether the recent dip in the S&P 500 is a head fake or a buying opportunity. There was a few banks, sell-side banks, I think, some bulge brackets coming out talking about sniffing around, picking bottoms, which I know you're a big fan of, Piers, in more ways than one. And at the same time, More than a trillion dollars has been wiped off the cryptocurrency market in the past 6 weeks. That was getting quite a few headlines earlier in the week. Concerns about these lofty tech valuations. Perhaps NVIDIA has come out and saved the day here. Santa might still be coming for Christmas for any stock investors. But also its relationship to US interest rates and the link that has to speculative assets and I know there's some quite interesting correlations here on, I guess, fundamentally where crypto started and where it's at now in the fact that it's had quite large institutional adoption and how, and how it's kind of interlinked within the system. It's quite interesting. And then finally, Washington has turned into Wall Street's hottest deal room. Trump and Mohammed bin Salman dropped a trillion-dollar bombshell that could reshape everything from AI to F-35s that they've agreed, fighter jets from the US to Saudi. So let's kick it off. Let's talk about NVIDIA first. I'll hit you with some numbers and then we can do a bit of a deep dive into some things you're looking at, Piers. But Q3 revenue, and just for, for context, I think the market, market was heading south for pretty much every day this week up until these earnings hit the tape on Wednesday night. and there was a lot of the usual, you know, the AI bubble. Is this the moment of which we get confirmation that it's all a bit misplaced, bit lofty in valuation? So a lot was teed up for this, and Q3 revenues came in at $57 billion. The Street was looking for $54.9, so clear beat. We'll probably circle back to gross margins in a, in a moment. I'm sure you'll want to dive into that. But it was the guidance that was just pure blowout. And I think that was the thing that a lot of investors were a bit nervous about. But they came out and they said they're expecting that at $65 billion plus or minus 2%, the kind of range of guidance that they, they had. Wall Street was looking for just $61.98 billion. So absolutely still ultra bullish over NVIDIA HQ. And Jensen Huang, as ever, talking his book, saying Blackwell demand off the charts, he was saying. So, yeah, what, what was it within some of these numbers? I know there's plenty more to look at here that really caught your eye.

Well, yeah, I mean, look, the numbers are, as you said, just absolutely extraordinary. Um, and actually it puts the kind of business, uh, you know, basically now almost in terms of our run rate is kind of now above a $200 billion a year kind of business in terms of revenue run rate, meaning like you take the last, the latest quarter and then you just kind of multiply that by 4, um, to give yourself that kind of run rate figure. But, um, yeah, I guess, and, and, and actually Jensen talking his own book, he's predicting more than $500 billion worth of sales. Um, over the next 2 years, basically. Um, or sorry, no, that's not true. He predicted $500 billion over '25 and '26. So we're kind of halfway through. And so that, that's kind of implying that the ramp is still there and that, you know, this revenue is still, still gonna, gonna shoot higher. But I guess, yeah, just some numbers just to kind of get this into people's minds from us to appreciate the kind of scale of this and the, and the, you, you mentioned defying the laws of, of, of gravity here. Um, so its revenue growth, right, was $73 billion. So year on year. So, and to put that into perspective, that's just the revenue growth, right? That is more than the entire annual revenue of a company like IBM, for example, or a company like Morgan Stanley. You know, it's grown more than their entire businesses in just 12 months. And then you think about the growth rate, right? 60%. Because normally, you know, that kind of growth rate, that's for startups. You know, that's for, you know, young companies that have got huge kind of market share to go and win. Remember, Nvidia already have all the market share. It's 90% of the AI chip market, right? So 60% growth, to put that into context, the last time a company like Google had a growth rate like that was when they only had a market cap of $150 billion. You know, here's, here's a market cap business, $4.5 trillion, and they're growing at 60%. Um, it is absolutely like we've never seen anything like it ever, ever, ever, ever. Um, 90% market share, 73% gross margin. I mean, this is just right now at this moment in time, take a kind of snapshot It is absolutely unprecedented.

And, and, um, one of the things that I saw, um, we'll probably come back to gross margins, was I, I was, I was asking my, my agents, my agents, about anything that they could scour from the wider, uh, kind of commentary and the numbers here. And one of the things that popped out, I love the way that the, the agent framed it, it was The Four Horsemen, the Four Horsemen idea being that of concentration risk. So when we talk about that revenue number, and this isn't, I don't think, a new thing, but it was interesting as in if you're an analyst or an investor, what is it that you're looking for as signals of continuation of momentum and trend or signals of fragility in terms of that demand acceleration, deceleration. And one of the things there, well, I'm not sure entirely if they disclosed this, but I'm assuming that they, they did in some shape or form, but not disclosing the, the client name, but the fact that there's 4 key customers, right? Which I guess reading between the lines. Exactly, yeah. So yeah, mate, I know you've got those numbers at hand, so yeah, what did that look like?

Concentration risk is often one of the sort of factors that someone, you know, an analyst might point to as, you know, a concern. If you're looking ahead and trying to value this business based on future growth potential, well then concentration risk is not a good thing where you're kind of over-reliant on a really small number of clients. And so here, I mean, their concentration risk is actually, it's really bad. It's 61% of their revenue comes from just 4 customers. As you said, the Four Horsemen, I mean, obviously it's the, it's Microsoft, Meta, Google, and Amazon. I'm not sure which order they're in, but Customer A, so one of those four, makes up 22% of NVIDIA's revenue. Customer B is 15%, C is 13%, and D is 11%. So yeah, I mean, look, I said take a snapshot like right now, and I said, look, right now, like, I don't know, I'm gonna kind of give away my opinion here early doors, but, you know, I think this could well be the moment where this is the best it, it ever looks. Um, but I'll come on to it in a minute. But yeah, like Nvidia, like we've, we've spoken about how they've nailed phase 1 of this boom, right? It's picks and shovels. It's, it's like building out the infrastructure. Um, and, and obviously the CapEx spend of the big 4 hyperscalers, as we call them. So reminder, Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon— they're the ones kind of with the monster checkbooks, with the ridiculous cash flows that they are just pumping into data center buildouts. And roughly speaking, according to Jensen, CEO of NVIDIA, he takes about, about two-thirds of the, the cost of building out a data center goes directly to NVIDIA. Most of that's for their chips, right? So look, They've definitely got concentration risk that there's, there's a bear case that I do want to talk about. I do believe this story, uh, chapter 1's done. I think chapter 2 is now beginning, and I think these numbers are awesome. What's going to be really telling is, yeah, fine, the share price of Nvidia is up 5% in aftermarket trade. It was down 11% off its all-time high that it set, um, at the end of October. It hit about $2— let's just call it $207. Okay. So in the last 4 weeks, it's just traded down to like $179, and now it's bounced 5%. So we're trading just below the 200— well, when it opens, it'll be trading just below 200. And so, you know, not, not quite back to that all-time high set 4 weeks ago. Around $180 bucks, so $179, $180, that is a really, really important kind of technical price point for Nvidia. It was the high of the summer. So in August, it topped out at that $180 handle. It's kind of— been chopping around there, and I think that 180 handle is really key. Now, for now it's held and we've bounced. I think the next 48 hours, so Thursday's market trade and Friday's market trade, are absolutely pivotal to tell you what's going to happen into the end of the year. 5% bounce for Nvidia in aftermarket. Does it hang on to those gains in Thursday's— today's session? Do that, does that 5% start to get eroded or does it add to those gains, right? And I think the, the next 48 hours are going to be very telling. I, I'm nervous. I'm a kind of buy, I'm a sell the spike now rather than a buy the dip. And I'll tell you why. And this is just my opinion, right? And there's plenty of people on the other side of the fence who are saying, look, thank, thank God, right? NVIDIA strong numbers, right? Let's go. Another big leg in this rally. I'm not so much a believer now, and I think it is down to this, what we call that circular economy point, where it's become quite incestuous. And I think, I think when we talk about is it an AI bubble and people referring to the dot-com bubble, I mean, that was like a valuation bubble, right? It's kind of a profit bubble. Where's the money? I think here we might be in a revenue bubble. Where actually the revenue that NVIDIA is making is coming from these hyperscalers. Okay. These hyperscalers are building out this compute power. So, so who's renting the compute power? So, well, that's often obviously smaller businesses and maybe startups, and the startups are being funded by venture capital money, right? And fine, these startups aren't making much revenue. And that venture capital money, it's finite and it runs out, right? And how long can this venture capital money, you know, proper— and look, OpenAI is probably the best example. We spoke about it a couple of weeks ago where they're, they're talking about spending, what, a trillion dollars? They've got $13 billion revenue, right? So obviously they're VC-backed. Obviously there's a bit of circular money coming in from the likes of Nvidia, but it's like, how long can this this kind of thing continue to be juiced. And I think there might be a gap between this kind of infrastructure build-out phase and then a genuine sort of return on investment from the broader economy, you know, really benefiting from all of this stuff. I'm talking about driverless vehicles, I'm talking about robotics, okay? That's not here yet.

Yeah, I was going to say, so that, that's his defense to your argument, right? Is that once that stuff starts kicking in the longer term, then it starts to move. But on that infrastructure point, so you're talking there about, and I agree, there's only so much Microsoft, Amazon, and the rest are going to, going to build out. Is there not also an another infrastructure risk for Nvidia, which is that on the energy and electricity consumption side. So the other, the other invisible hand within this is that you can provide the hardware, the chips for the processing power, uh, then you've got the demand coming from the people who want these to create it to drive their models. At the end of the day, you need power, right, in order to— as the key ingredient, almost as the fuel for the fire. But that in itself, you know, has a, has a time constraint.

And we're on an exponential track there in terms of power requirement, because on the one hand, the user numbers are increasing strongly. Okay. But then on the other hand, you're getting these, you know, the latest update. What are we on? ChatGPT 5.1 now, right? 5.2. When we get to ChatGPT 6 or whatever, these models are getting better and better and better, requiring more power per user. As well. So you get this exponential energy, um, growth requirement situation. Now there is one other counter to say, well, science might help, because this is one of NVIDIA's challenges. Can it make chips that are more energy efficient? And look, there is definitely gains to be had there, and they will become more efficient, but I'm just not so sure the efficiency gains through science is really going to satisfy that exponentiality of sort of, you know, the energy requirement. So yeah, I do think the energy bottleneck is a key handbrake for, for getting a genuine return on investment. And, and so I think we're just going to have a gap where— this is my per— I just want to stress, this is my personal opinion. I think we're going to have a gap where the infrastructure build-out has just gone over its skis a little bit. It's got ahead of itself, and you're just gonna get that little realization. And you know what it's like, you know, market sentiment, it kind of had turned right over the last few weeks. And we'll talk about crypto in a minute because Bitcoin's had a shocker. But sentiment's shifted and turned, you know, we're going into year-end, maybe Powell's not going to cut interest rates, maybe the job market's deteriorating. So there's a little bit of concern around the economic scenario going into 2026 and, and just sentiment shifted. Now, is this Nvidia earnings report enough on its own to flip the entire market sentiment back to positive? Let's go boom time or not. And I'm just feeling not because people are just questioning the, the revenue bubble now. I think 6 months ago Nvidia revenue growth was way awesome. You know, everyone was on the same page. Let's go. It's just got all very circular with all of these deals that have gone on in the last 6 months, which has just put a magnifying glass on, well, is this sustainable? And actually, we do need genuine return on investment from the wider economy, and that just doesn't look like it's quite there yet.

So, so, 2 points then. One being more to address that, that question mark here about the, um, can this revenue momentum sustain? And also on the energy side. And then a second one about your 48-hour kind of analogy, and, and also something that I'm going to counter with that from a market positioning point of view. Yeah. And so first of all, uh, I know we don't want to go into the, the politics of it, but Saudi Arabia did meet with Trump earlier this week, and they've pledged $1 trillion in US investment commitments this week. 6 months ago, that figure was basically half. That was, it was around $600 billion. So out of thin air, your man MBS drops another $400 billion just like that on, on the US. Now, this is quite multifaceted. There's kind of, there's, uh, nuclear corporation, critical minerals, AI, defense. Sticking with what we're talking about, AI though. So when you talk about, well, it's interesting, isn't it? People know a lot of these factors you've described about Nvidia. We know that Saudi requires certain things like defense deals and so forth. Now, what do we want in response? Well, we want access to energy in order to fill that void, to power these systems. And one of the things that Saudi Arabia is doing is what's called de facto the data hub ambition. And this again fits under this 2030 Vision umbrella. And this is about making AI and the data hub of the Middle East. And this is Saudi Arabia right at the center of that. And obviously all these big— Elon was there, you know, it doesn't matter if Elon doesn't like Trump, when Saudi are involved, everyone's involved, including—

well, Elon's out of the deal.

Ronaldo.

Ronaldo at the smoothing over. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He's the ultimate broker here. Um, but yeah, I just thought it was quite interesting, you know, all the other stuff of that whole thing about the Middle East order and Eurasia supply chains and all that other stuff that we could talk about just on that point about their relationship. Uh, I thought it was quite interesting in the context of the Nvidia stuff.

But this is the same thing. This is a buyer of Nvidia chips that doesn't yet have a full set of end users with unlimited money to make a return on investment. Look, they're gonna build a, I think they, they wanna build a 500 gigawatt data center in Saudi Arabia, right? So, but, but okay, but who, who's gonna use it and how much are they paying? And does that math add up? And like at the moment, the maths doesn't add up like that. There's not enough use cases. We're still— look, don't get me wrong, when Elon's selling a million robots a year and, you know, half the global population are using driverless vehicles, well, obviously, okay, cool, massive return on investment, huge revenue streams there. But that's— we're not there. So at the moment, I think they've— they're just building at a rate because of the hyperscalers who are in this race and they don't want to lose it. I think just the rate has got too far ahead of that return on investment demand story. That's my personal opinion.

Okay.

And just finally on Nvidia, maybe to close it out specifically on Nvidia and their valuation and what happens with their share price. So two things to mention. Number one's their gross margins. So it's their, their margins for the quarter just in is 73.6%. which, look, on a standalone figure is awesome. Okay, and look, they've got 90% market share, they've got pricing power, they can basically charge what they want, um, on a, on a 73.6% margin. Amazing. It's just the margins dropped. So the direction of travel for margin is down. It was 75%. Now look, Jensen said we're going to get it back up to 75% in 2026, but But will they? You know, their Blackwell Ultra, which is their latest chip, that's going to require a lot of investment. And that's why their margins dropped. The Blackwell chip itself had some problems getting it up to kind of scale production. And so that costs more money. So the margin got eroded a little bit. So we're worried maybe that's going to happen again as these chips get ever more complex and advanced. You know, are they going to have to— is the cost of manufacture going to be on an uptrend, meaning margins on a downtrend? So that's one kind of thing.

Just on that point, explain to me this. The margin compression at Tesla is far more severe than has been in Nvidia, but aren't they both to some extent built on similar parallels of hype? But in fact, Nvidia's is even more realistic than Tesla's, but Tesla can get away with quite severe margin compressions and that doesn't seemingly factor in so much.

Yeah, I mean, well, I mean, firstly, you know, I don't know where Tesla is in market cap now, but I think it's around about a trillion, is it? So Nvidia is $4.5 trillion. I mean, all right, their revenues are much, much, much higher, growing much faster. Look, the car business, you know, which is what Tesla is today— I know Musk is saying, well, don't value us as a car business, we're a robotics and an AI business, right? But yeah, fine, that's in future. But right now their margins are like around then below 20% because making cars is really expensive, right? Um, so look, 70— don't get me wrong, 73.6% is phenomenal. It's just that the direction of travel's the wrong way. And look, when you're valued at $4.5 trillion, I mean, it has to be perfect to justify it.

The other point to me, I feel like there's just human behavior here, which is like, yeah, it's going so well As humans do, we defeat ourselves almost. It's like, let's just find any reason to justify.

Well, I said it's got to be perfect because when you're valuing these businesses, you've got to think about the future. What are those future cash flows? And I mean, the rate at which this AI boom's going, it's so difficult to predict 6 months, never mind 5 years, but some of the big banks have tried to do it. So, you know, and when you're thinking about their market share, right, NVIDIA's market share is 90%. So when you're thinking like over the next 10 years, I think Citigroup have estimated that the spend on data centres over the next 10 years will be $7.8 trillion. So, and they're predicting, look, there's going to be some, they believe their market share, they're not going to be able to defend 90% like forever. So they're saying that NVIDIA might generate and capture $4.6 trillion of that. Oh, sorry, actually Citigroup's estimate was $7.8 trillion, but they, they make two-thirds of the data center build-out revenue goes to NVIDIA, right? And if they maintain 90%, that's right, they get $4.6 trillion. So if they maintain their absolute dominance and somehow $7.8 trillion gets spent, fine, they'll get $4.6, but City, um, uh, another bat, McKinsey, their analysis is that $5.2 trillion is going to get spent in the next 10 years. Okay, and let's just say they can't hold on to 90% and it drops to 70% market share, right? Then actually Nvidia's revenues halve. If you— so we're talking about assumptions about the future, which is a cornerstone of trying to value a business, right? So if you just make some small adjustments, instead of 90%, it's going to get eroded to 70. I think that's probably more likely. And if it's not $7.8 trillion, it's $5.2, then their revenues halve, right? So I'm just saying it's really difficult to predict what's going to happen here. And just small tweaks in assumptions kind of lands with a very different kind of figure you know, at the bottom of your spreadsheet. So look, I'm just, just playing, just playing the bear here. And I personally, I think this is a, well, not a dead cat bounce, but I think this spike we're getting off these Nvidia results are great. I just think it's not enough to turn the sentiment story, which was negative and already in place, That's my view.

Okay, well, to bring in like a macro wrap to this segment, let's say, um, obviously the government in the US has reopened, so we're going to start getting a data, uh, release, data deluge of like all of the stuff that we should have seen. And one of those things is non-farm payrolls. Now, the S&P 500 prior to this NVIDIA release had dropped over almost 3.5%. It's longest decline since August, in fact, actually, because we, you know, we continue to soldier to onto record highs. Now, one of the things here is that, yes, I totally agree, NVIDIA is absolutely crucial, not just for that AI tech stocks, but overall market sentiment for sure. But there's other things as well that are influencing US rates expectations, which could come to the savior and perhaps NVIDIA's savior in, in the case of cushioning, let's say, any repricing down that you might see. So what do you think of this idea that if you look at the context of the week, the S&P's had its biggest pullback in a number of months, and a lot of people are talking about this idea of cleaner market positioning. So A, what are they referring to when they say cleaner market positioning? And B, what do you think of that just generally in terms of, uh, your opinion? Because I did see that Deutsche Bank came out and they, you know, there's ways and means of tracking this sort of stuff in terms of market, uh, orders and so forth, but they said that equity positioning is back to neutral and that discretionary investors are underweight, implying there is room to buy into this market, which evidently is not at record but close to record highs.

Yeah, I mean, underweight, well, fine. Okay, I guess this is it, right? If they've, they've moved underweight, that's why the market's gone down because there's been net sellers, right? And by the way, you get people like some of the catalyst is then on singular players in the market like SoftBank. Sold all of their Nvidia position. They banked $5.8 billion, I think, right? They're right. You know, when you get, uh, Michael Burry, famous for The Big Short, has just closed his hedge fund because he's like, this is ridiculous. Now look, I'm not saying— all I'm saying is it's these little catalysts that help to drive the narrative and the sentiment, and that's one reason why things are sold off. Now, yeah, now they're underweight because they've sold. But if you're underweight, yes, you've got some ammunition to buy back, but you only buy back if you think it's a low and it's going to go back up, right? So it just comes down to the point, do you believe this Nvidia news? And look, yes, it might be added to, right? We're going to get payrolls data today. We're going to get, you know, maybe the Fed do cut in a few weeks' time at their meeting. Okay. If these things happen, well, then fine, that can add to bull story and you should buy the dip and there's money to do it on the sidelines. It's just what's the sentiment and do people want to buy at these levels or are they more like me where they think actually the sentiment from, uh, is kind of shifted to a negative footing and that's going to remain to be the case for a couple of months.

Um, do you take any warmth from the market breadth of what we had in the market movement on Tuesday, which was not so much concentrated risk in just 5 big tech names.

Yeah.

More than half of the entire S&P 500 was up rather than dragged by the tooth and nail by the big tech firms.

Yeah. I mean, more than half. I mean, yeah, that's, I mean, it doesn't really matter about the rest. If you're thinking about the index, all that matters is the tech stocks. So it doesn't matter what the other half are doing, they're not big enough or powerful enough. And it— look, if these tech stocks do go through a, a larger correction, I don't care who else is in that index, they're going to sell off as well because the whole sentiment is dependent on tech stock performance and the whole AI narrative. And if that changes, you're going to be in a very defensive kind of mood. And fine, some of those defensive sectors might pick up some, some of the inflows, but look, I think you'll get a broader sell-off anyway. Um, and that, I guess, with your point about clean positioning, I don't know, is that just a, a more fancy way of saying averaging in, as in buying, buying at a lower price so that looks more favorable in terms of your book cost on your portfolio.

I don't, I think, I think they're looking at it. Yeah. Short term is in the market was a bit overstretched. You've had your 11% pullback in Nvidia. That's kind of, uh, that's been your spring clean to get out some of these extreme longs who've closed their positions like your SoftBank. So yeah.

So, so that's about, yeah, I understand that point. That's about some of the short short-term money is coming out, um, bringing low prices lower, allowing more longer-term money to buy the dip. Um, yeah, so that, that can be a healthy thing for a sustained rally. And that's why I say the next 48— that's why I say the next 48 hours is buy the dip here. Does it work? And it needs to work. If there's any— if we go back to if Nvidia lose this 5% bump they've had that's happened overnight, if that gets lost by Friday, I'm telling you next week's going to be red. But it might not get lost, it might not get— they might hang on to the 5%, in which case, okay, maybe I'm wrong.

The firm's saying buy the dip, all the big household sell-side names. But you can imagine then, if you kind of think about it, you know, of course you want to be saying you're going to buy the dip. Because if I think about the breadth of my business, well, yeah, the more deals I can finance, the more M&As I could, uh, well, yeah, right, I can do. There's such benefit for the gravy train to continue across all facets of the market from their perspective. But maybe just to close then, how does this translate then into the, the crypto market? Because, yeah, everything we've talked about are, um, what has been some negative developments in in general sentiment and also potentially things that could under certain circumstances get worse. So what, what can we get from the tea leaves of the crypto market in particular? And then also this, this connection it now fundamentally plays in terms of an asset class. I know when, you know, you used to trade and we used to sit on the floor, you know, you'd be watching, you'd be trading, uh, I don't know, the US T-note or the short end of German fixed income rates, but you'd still be looking at the NASDAQ, oil, euro, all these other products. Would you now be looking at Bitcoin in these sorts of crypto markets as another key signal?

Yeah, I mean, yes, it's kind of— it's a pure risk asset. I mean, I don't— obviously there's a portion of the crypto society, um, that believe Bitcoin is digital gold. Um, it's not. I mean, it might be in the future, but right now it's a pure risk play. And we kind of saw that. I mean, we've seen over the last few weeks, right? We've had this general tilt to negative sentiment, which is why, fine, Nvidia down 11%, you know, NASDAQ, S&P, you know, coming off the highs. Um, Bitcoin has been down 28%. I mean, it has, and it's bounced actually sharply off this Nvidia news, right? But it's a classic risk asset. A lot of the positioning in Bitcoin and crypto broadly is leveraged. So that's where you're getting players that are borrowing money in order to then invest in crypto. Now, the problem with that, if you've got an outsized proportion of the market that's leveraged The problem comes if the market starts to go down, because a lot of the arrangements around the leverage is that, you know, as long as the, the, the coin that you're buying stays above a certain price, well, fine, that leverage loan agreement is in place. But if the, if the price goes below a certain point, you're triggered out, you're forced out of the position, right? So the market coming down often triggers or forces other sellers because of this leverage. This is what's happened. This is why Bitcoin's 28% down, whereas Nvidia is 11% down. It's because of the outsized leverage proportion of the market. And we saw this, and there on October the 10th, we had a massive move lower. And then that was the, the beginning of what's been then a sort of 6-week sell-off. And on October the 10th, that's when Trump threatened China with another round of massive tariffs, which— I don't know, it's obviously— we know that's Trump style, threaten tariffs and then back off. So I don't know why the crypto market fell for that one particularly, um, but they did. And this just meant that Bitcoin dropped enough to start triggering people out of their leverage trades, which has meant that then the sell-off continued. And look, it just means when you look about, look, look over the markets, that the crypto markets more generally, I mean, Bitcoin's now, it's down on the year, um, even with this rebound, it's down on the year now. But you're looking at like some of the smaller ones like Cardano and Solana, you know, they're, they're like 40, 50% down year, year on year. Um, so these, these are big moves, right? But Oh yeah, when you're looking at Bitcoin broadly, we peaked at $125, and that was back at the start of October. Big sell-off on that 10th of October. Technically, we dropped below a key $110. That took us now through the floor and down below $100,000, right? And so there are— there's a lot of technical sort of influences here going on as well, but I'd say we're right at a key technical technical point where we might be breaking the sort of 2-year uptrend that we've seen. We might be breaking that trend line. And so look, it's still— it all comes down to the same point. What happens in the next 48 hours? Is Nvidia— is that alone a story that's big enough to switch sentiment? Um, yes or no? And if it is, great, great time to buy Bitcoin. If it's not, not a good time to buy Bitcoin.

Couple of other points of, um, of jargon, so to speak. One thing I was reading is about conviction buyers and this being this idea that, uh, I guess this is coming from this, this continued adoption that we've seen of digital assets through the last 12, 18 months. This was the idea that big buyers from earlier in the year because we've seen the likes of BlackRock, these big asset managers, you know, inflows into these sort of parts of their business. But these big buyers from earlier in the year are now underwater on their positions. And this idea then that when investors are sitting on losses— you mentioned earlier something about dry powder— well, yeah, there's, there's— we're not buying dips at this point if our positions are already underwater. So again, that compounding of that negative effect when the prices start to spiral lower. But one of the things here as well is about corporate treasuries becoming then unintended forced sellers.

Yeah.

So what are they talking about in that context when it comes to publicly listed companies which were hoarding some crypto holdings, you know, this year, which was actually a good, a good thing until, until more recently.

And look, this has been a politics trade because Trump basically winning the election has meant that the value of Bitcoin basically doubled. It was trading $60,000 when you look back around the election times, or just pre-election times. Obviously by the time we got to mid-October, you know, it was odds on Trump's gonna, gonna win it. So from that point it went from $60,000 to over $120,000. Um, at the end of September, right? So it's doubled, and that's because Trump's pro-crypto, okay? And it's meant that you've had corporate treasury departments saying, voilà, now the, the time of crypto is here, and it's become a more— it's going to become a more established currency, so let's have it as part of our— the makeup of what we are doing with our businesses' cash flows, right? So this— when we say corporate treasuries, that they're, they're in charge of the cash that companies have on account, and how are you making use of that cash? Where are you depositing it to kind of generate income from the firm, for the firm, right? Fine, you go out and buy treasuries if you want to play it safe, or now you go out and buy Bitcoin because, ah, Trump's come in and right now it's a valid thing to, to add to our mix. So I think that's happened, and that's been one of the things that's led to you know, BlackRock launching their ETF, one of the things that's led to this whole upside story to $120,000 plus, right? It's just that when this thing shows its hand as being— this is still mega volatile, 28% down in a few weeks. That's not the type of asset that a treasury, corporate treasury, should be holding. And this is where the board start to go, hang on a second, this isn't the kind of stuff we want to be in. It's too risky. Let's get out. It's too early. And so of course that then just adds to the whole narrative on the negative sentiment around it and obviously accelerates that downside.

All right, cool. Well, look, we've had lots of words mentioned here throughout the conversations from concentration risk, margin compression, leveraged money, conviction buyers. So hopefully listeners have learned how that ties to some of the market moves at the moment. You've heard it here, a world exclusive. The bear is out on Nvidia. Piers Curran is pounding the streets now. When are you on CNBC and Bloomberg talking about this? I mean, it's coming, isn't it? Yeah, you've got to juice it. Now bearish.

Yeah. They'll be all over it.

Um, but just a reminder as well before we, we wrap, we do have our Amplify Me Finance bootcamp happening in London, uh, in December. So I will put the link to that in the show notes. Please do check that out if you want to join us, both Piers and I and the rest of the team in London, uh, in a few weeks' time. Otherwise, thanks very much, Piers, and, uh, have a great weekend, everyone.

Yep, catch you later.