Investment management - Christmas Edition

RobHT

barnstar2077 said:

csgohan4 said:

barnstar2077 said:

@RobHT You have mentioned AMD.  If you look at their share price over the last 30 years or so you will see that the price has exploded over the last four years.  What do you think has changed to do that?  Yes, they have certainly been doing better at competing against their rivals in recent years, but how likely are they to sustain that? (historically Intel have always made a come back.)  Do they have new management?  Was it Bitcoin that started their good run?  I do not know.  I would be rubbing my hands together if I had bought some shares a few years ago, but buying some now would make me feel very uncomfortable indeed unless I knew exactly why they were doing so much better now, and more importantly why they were set to continue their meteoric rise.  Why do you think they are a good place for your money?  I am very interested to hear how you have carried out your analysis, as I do plan on dabbling a tiny bit in shares at a later date once I have a solid foundation under me that can take care of my expenses.

I would have rather invested in Nvidia or SSD manufacturers , the former has done very well over the last 12 m

I agree that I would feel better owning Nvidia, their products have been very consistent in my opinion (I have bought many of their cards.)  Still though, when you look at their share price, just like AMD they have had an incredible rise in the last three and a half years.  Which is what made me think of Bitcoin as being a possible reason.  But as with AMD I couldn't tell you why they have done so well, or why the price is set to continue.  So again, I wouldn't be very comfortable buying in today.

The big miner farms mine with other systems, for sure not video cards, they use videocards because of shortage of the real systems.
That could have boosted both NVIDIA and AMD in the recent years, but no miner is interested in their products to mine, that's the whole point, and I'm talking about big !!!!!! companies, for example China years back was owning 60% of the blockchain, not sure nowadays.
But don't lose the focus, videocards are not for mining, even if they may perform 100x CPUs x86 / x64.

Actually it's more about the gaming industry and AMD/ATI owns both Xbox and Playstation since 2 releases for my knowledge , where PS is actually running a FreeBSD optimized, here you see the power of things when all is designed with art, something where Microsoft could go blindly rather than reinventing the wheel with NVIDIA/ARM.

barnstar2077

RobHT said:

barnstar2077 said:

@RobHT You have mentioned AMD.  If you look at their share price over the last 30 years or so you will see that the price has exploded over the last four years.  What do you think has changed to do that?  Yes, they have certainly been doing better at competing against their rivals in recent years, but how likely are they to sustain that? (historically Intel have always made a come back.)  Do they have new management?  Was it Bitcoin that started their good run?  I do not know.  I would be rubbing my hands together if I had bought some shares a few years ago, but buying some now would make me feel very uncomfortable indeed unless I knew exactly why they were doing so much better now, and more importantly why they were set to continue their meteoric rise.  Why do you think they are a good place for your money?  I am very interested to hear how you have carried out your analysis, as I do plan on dabbling a tiny bit in shares at a later date once I have a solid foundation under me that can take care of my expenses.

I work in IT, so that makes me a bit confident by default.
AMD is outperforming Intel since 3 years, in consumer, business and Enterprise (here recently we've seen a clear jump off the game from Intel).
Recently I saw with my own eyes what is happening in Enterprise, from HW and cloud point of view, AMD is dominating every HW refreshment, Intel is not anymore a choice, AWS is using all AMD, Azure too, Google possibly (I didn't experience that in person but I quite believe they will follow the same), Apple has his own CPU/GPU now and Microsoft is planning the same, but rumors talk about a partnership with AMD/Xilinx, that anyway by default is the clear intenction for AMD to dominate in the semiconductor field, certainly would have been better to see M1 chip from AMD .

Yes, the stock is pumped and that makes you feel uncomfortable, but what about Tesla, Amazon, Apple, Netflix?  I'm quite sure that even if you invest in whatever fund, these companies are the major players there.

AMD in the past has been under too many changes, it couldn't take the fly due to all the internal beefs and chair changes, otherwise also in 2010 it was offering a good product in consumer and enterprise, but it was though to smash the habit of people and enterprises to only have Intel and it was a bit less price/performance gain.
Nowadays Intel counts less than zero, AMD has already take over, it's just a matter of time to see it on a graph summary.
Plus Intel has had too many problems in security, but also in performance and thermal requirements from Apple, if they couldn't make Apple happy, all this story is very bad.

AMD has also Radeon (ATI) as of today, not sure if you understand what that means.

Certainly NVIDIA/ARM is a great move on, also NVIDIA is a good company where to invest and I do, the bad game could be played by them if Microsoft decides to partnership with NVIDIA/ARM rather than AMD/ATI, that scares me mostly.

For the moment AMD is in uptrend, and I'll ride till they don't !!!!!! up or NVIDIA/ARM changes the game.

Everything you have said sounds good, and I too see their immediate future as being rosy.  You still can't get away from the fact that their good performance is mainly from the last three or four years however.  Fingers crossed!

RobHT

csgohan4 said:

barnstar2077 said:

csgohan4 said:

barnstar2077 said:

@RobHT You have mentioned AMD.  If you look at their share price over the last 30 years or so you will see that the price has exploded over the last four years.  What do you think has changed to do that?  Yes, they have certainly been doing better at competing against their rivals in recent years, but how likely are they to sustain that? (historically Intel have always made a come back.)  Do they have new management?  Was it Bitcoin that started their good run?  I do not know.  I would be rubbing my hands together if I had bought some shares a few years ago, but buying some now would make me feel very uncomfortable indeed unless I knew exactly why they were doing so much better now, and more importantly why they were set to continue their meteoric rise.  Why do you think they are a good place for your money?  I am very interested to hear how you have carried out your analysis, as I do plan on dabbling a tiny bit in shares at a later date once I have a solid foundation under me that can take care of my expenses.

I would have rather invested in Nvidia or SSD manufacturers , the former has done very well over the last 12 m

I agree that I would feel better owning Nvidia, their products have been very consistent in my opinion (I have bought many of their cards.)  Still though, when you look at their share price, just like AMD they have had an incredible rise in the last three and a half years.  Which is what made me think of Bitcoin as being a possible reason.  But as with AMD I couldn't tell you why they have done so well, or why the price is set to continue.  So again, I wouldn't be very comfortable buying in today.

Of course buying at today's prices would be risky, not knowing how much left for growth, however AMD and Nvidia will be around for sometime and there will be room for growth.

I wouldn't mind holding on to these, however there better more sustainable stocks to hold, such as energy sector ones. 

SBE, EQT being an extreme example. But the key is having the time to research them before they take off. 

But I'm happy with penny stock punt on IAG, I would be happy at 50% gain, but there may be potential to double to triple in the next 10 years potentially

I guess you hope in the market recovery and therefore airlines to take literally the fly...
Well, I don't think so, before to fly you need to have money for your holidays, and that's just the smallest picture, the other one is that the airlines get money from locals, advertisements, governments, central banks etc...
I think they won't receive anything for the next 5 years...
You would be better with fund/ETFs with mixed growth and dividents.

RobHT

Prism said:

barnstar2077 said:

csgohan4 said:

barnstar2077 said:

@RobHT You have mentioned AMD.  If you look at their share price over the last 30 years or so you will see that the price has exploded over the last four years.  What do you think has changed to do that?  Yes, they have certainly been doing better at competing against their rivals in recent years, but how likely are they to sustain that? (historically Intel have always made a come back.)  Do they have new management?  Was it Bitcoin that started their good run?  I do not know.  I would be rubbing my hands together if I had bought some shares a few years ago, but buying some now would make me feel very uncomfortable indeed unless I knew exactly why they were doing so much better now, and more importantly why they were set to continue their meteoric rise.  Why do you think they are a good place for your money?  I am very interested to hear how you have carried out your analysis, as I do plan on dabbling a tiny bit in shares at a later date once I have a solid foundation under me that can take care of my expenses.

I would have rather invested in Nvidia or SSD manufacturers , the former has done very well over the last 12 m

I agree that I would feel better owning Nvidia, their products have been very consistent in my opinion (I have bought many of their cards.)  Still though, when you look at their share price, just like AMD they have had an incredible rise in the last three and a half years.  Which is what made me think of Bitcoin as being a possible reason.  But as with AMD I couldn't tell you why they have done so well, or why the price is set to continue.  So again, I wouldn't be very comfortable buying in today.

Probably a bit off tangent for the thread but one of the reasons that Nvidia and AMD have been doing so well is that their cards have been going into the big Amazon, Microsoft and Google cloud datacenters for server based applications. They are great at high speed video rendering (video streaming), 3D rendering (gaming and simulations) and machine learning (AI applications) - all of which have been very popular over the last few years. You can basically rent these things by the second which makes them very accessible to all.

I would add that NVIDIA will cook all the data from IOT too, and the cloud gaming was already launched, they just can't keep up with the demand , I think AMD is powering the PS cloud gaming though.

AI for sure went to NVIDIA, but AMD is not looking the other side, they are coming too  

Google Stadia uses AMD GPUs, the CPU I think will come soon, currently it's on Intel, AMD outperforms Intel as of today, whatever is your requirement.

barnstar2077

RobHT said:

Prism said:

barnstar2077 said:

csgohan4 said:

barnstar2077 said:

@RobHT You have mentioned AMD.  If you look at their share price over the last 30 years or so you will see that the price has exploded over the last four years.  What do you think has changed to do that?  Yes, they have certainly been doing better at competing against their rivals in recent years, but how likely are they to sustain that? (historically Intel have always made a come back.)  Do they have new management?  Was it Bitcoin that started their good run?  I do not know.  I would be rubbing my hands together if I had bought some shares a few years ago, but buying some now would make me feel very uncomfortable indeed unless I knew exactly why they were doing so much better now, and more importantly why they were set to continue their meteoric rise.  Why do you think they are a good place for your money?  I am very interested to hear how you have carried out your analysis, as I do plan on dabbling a tiny bit in shares at a later date once I have a solid foundation under me that can take care of my expenses.

I would have rather invested in Nvidia or SSD manufacturers , the former has done very well over the last 12 m

I agree that I would feel better owning Nvidia, their products have been very consistent in my opinion (I have bought many of their cards.)  Still though, when you look at their share price, just like AMD they have had an incredible rise in the last three and a half years.  Which is what made me think of Bitcoin as being a possible reason.  But as with AMD I couldn't tell you why they have done so well, or why the price is set to continue.  So again, I wouldn't be very comfortable buying in today.

Probably a bit off tangent for the thread but one of the reasons that Nvidia and AMD have been doing so well is that their cards have been going into the big Amazon, Microsoft and Google cloud datacenters for server based applications. They are great at high speed video rendering (video streaming), 3D rendering (gaming and simulations) and machine learning (AI applications) - all of which have been very popular over the last few years. You can basically rent these things by the second which makes them very accessible to all.

I would add that NVIDIA will cook all the data from IOT too, and the cloud gaming was already launched, they just can't keep up with the demand , I think AMD is powering the PS cloud gaming though.

AI for sure went to NVIDIA, but AMD is not looking the other side, they are coming too  

Google Stadia uses AMD GPUs, the CPU I think will come soon, currently it's on Intel, AMD outperforms Intel as of today, whatever is your requirement.

From what you have said it sounds like Intel would be the bargain underdog about now then!

RobHT

barnstar2077 said:

Thrugelmir said:

barnstar2077 said:

Thrugelmir said:

barnstar2077 said:

Prism said:

barnstar2077 said:

csgohan4 said:

barnstar2077 said:

@RobHT You have mentioned AMD.  If you look at their share price over the last 30 years or so you will see that the price has exploded over the last four years.  What do you think has changed to do that?  Yes, they have certainly been doing better at competing against their rivals in recent years, but how likely are they to sustain that? (historically Intel have always made a come back.)  Do they have new management?  Was it Bitcoin that started their good run?  I do not know.  I would be rubbing my hands together if I had bought some shares a few years ago, but buying some now would make me feel very uncomfortable indeed unless I knew exactly why they were doing so much better now, and more importantly why they were set to continue their meteoric rise.  Why do you think they are a good place for your money?  I am very interested to hear how you have carried out your analysis, as I do plan on dabbling a tiny bit in shares at a later date once I have a solid foundation under me that can take care of my expenses.

I would have rather invested in Nvidia or SSD manufacturers , the former has done very well over the last 12 m

I agree that I would feel better owning Nvidia, their products have been very consistent in my opinion (I have bought many of their cards.)  Still though, when you look at their share price, just like AMD they have had an incredible rise in the last three and a half years.  Which is what made me think of Bitcoin as being a possible reason.  But as with AMD I couldn't tell you why they have done so well, or why the price is set to continue.  So again, I wouldn't be very comfortable buying in today.

Probably a bit off tangent for the thread but one of the reasons that Nvidia and AMD have been doing so well is that their cards have been going into the big Amazon, Microsoft and Google cloud datacenters for server based applications. They are great at high speed video rendering (video streaming), 3D rendering (gaming and simulations) and machine learning (AI applications) - all of which have been very popular over the last few years. You can basically rent these things by the second which makes them very accessible to all.

The reason I bring it up is RobHT thinks that individual company shares is the way to go, and I am interested in how he analysis companies. 

How often did you read a company's annnual accounts? 

I am not sure if you are asking me or RobHT.  I haven't as I am not looking to invest in individual shares at the moment.

How do you pick your collective investment funds?  

I looked at what had the best likely hood of achieving my objective for a reasonable cost and for a small amount of effort.  I eventually settled on VLS100 because it ticked those boxes, and because I thought that the uncertainty of brexit was keeping UK shares low and that I would potentially gain a bit of bonus growth from it's heavier weighting to the UK.  I figure that as long as either the UK or the US do okay over the next ten to fifteen years then it would be unlikely to let me down.  Regardless of whether some individual heavy hitters go bust or not.  For the most part, I just thought it was good enough, and though it may not give me incredible results, it should at least not implode.

Do not mistake my questioning of Robs strategy as an attack on anyone who buys individual shares.  As I said before, I fully intend to do so at some point in the distant future myself.  I am interested in what variables to look at when buying shares in a company, like debt levels etc(and also where I might find out that information.)  Or whether it is better simply to select companies that have strong brands with long track records of growth and no obvious upcoming bumps in the road.  I think it is an interesting topic.

The usual reasoning, but hey, not that bad.
What I think about it is that in every fund or ETF, these bis companies are always an heavy weight on it, so it's pretty much the same I do on my portfolio, with the difference that I need to rebalance manually and I need to enter in good times in every stock when I invest, this makes the balancing and timing a boring stressful job, and it's always easy to make mistakes, more than fund managers, btw I always feel I could have done better and that's a kind of psyco !!!!!! .

All above is the basic, but let's look the reality, the majority of companies in NASDAQ are garbage, as well as in these funds, for example, buying the SPY500, not only you know just the 10% of these companies, the others are also garbage...
I don't like to invest blandly and not having things under control knowing that my fund manager is doing bullshits just to mitigate risk, investing in many companies hoping to leverage potential losses of the big asses, without even knowing them or considering them in a real growth estimation.

Looking few numbers, it's really unluckly that the fun doesn't collapse easily if a major player goes busted, the market cap involved is to high.
In fact, do you remember in March? Markets collapsed no matter what, same for 2008 or the dotcom bubble, you can't stop it.

If it has to crash it will, fund or not, and especially for funds, if you look historical data, there are just few good entry points, even looking a long period of 20 years, the only thing that leverages a bit the mistake of people investing every month are the dividents reinvested, but that's just a small nugget.
So, ideally, you should monitor the global economy, your fund, and then buy at the best moment with a lump sum, what no one does.
Potentially, you may need also to cash out on the high and pay taxes, or your investment will be worthless for 2-3x the number of years needed to reach again that high or to start the uptrend again.
Am I wrong?

RobHT

barnstar2077 said:

RobHT said:

barnstar2077 said:

@RobHT You have mentioned AMD.  If you look at their share price over the last 30 years or so you will see that the price has exploded over the last four years.  What do you think has changed to do that?  Yes, they have certainly been doing better at competing against their rivals in recent years, but how likely are they to sustain that? (historically Intel have always made a come back.)  Do they have new management?  Was it Bitcoin that started their good run?  I do not know.  I would be rubbing my hands together if I had bought some shares a few years ago, but buying some now would make me feel very uncomfortable indeed unless I knew exactly why they were doing so much better now, and more importantly why they were set to continue their meteoric rise.  Why do you think they are a good place for your money?  I am very interested to hear how you have carried out your analysis, as I do plan on dabbling a tiny bit in shares at a later date once I have a solid foundation under me that can take care of my expenses.

I work in IT, so that makes me a bit confident by default.
AMD is outperforming Intel since 3 years, in consumer, business and Enterprise (here recently we've seen a clear jump off the game from Intel).
Recently I saw with my own eyes what is happening in Enterprise, from HW and cloud point of view, AMD is dominating every HW refreshment, Intel is not anymore a choice, AWS is using all AMD, Azure too, Google possibly (I didn't experience that in person but I quite believe they will follow the same), Apple has his own CPU/GPU now and Microsoft is planning the same, but rumors talk about a partnership with AMD/Xilinx, that anyway by default is the clear intenction for AMD to dominate in the semiconductor field, certainly would have been better to see M1 chip from AMD .

Yes, the stock is pumped and that makes you feel uncomfortable, but what about Tesla, Amazon, Apple, Netflix?  I'm quite sure that even if you invest in whatever fund, these companies are the major players there.

AMD in the past has been under too many changes, it couldn't take the fly due to all the internal beefs and chair changes, otherwise also in 2010 it was offering a good product in consumer and enterprise, but it was though to smash the habit of people and enterprises to only have Intel and it was a bit less price/performance gain.
Nowadays Intel counts less than zero, AMD has already take over, it's just a matter of time to see it on a graph summary.
Plus Intel has had too many problems in security, but also in performance and thermal requirements from Apple, if they couldn't make Apple happy, all this story is very bad.

AMD has also Radeon (ATI) as of today, not sure if you understand what that means.

Certainly NVIDIA/ARM is a great move on, also NVIDIA is a good company where to invest and I do, the bad game could be played by them if Microsoft decides to partnership with NVIDIA/ARM rather than AMD/ATI, that scares me mostly.

For the moment AMD is in uptrend, and I'll ride till they don't !!!!!! up or NVIDIA/ARM changes the game.

Everything you have said sounds good, and I too see their immediate future as being rosy.  You still can't get away from the fact that their good performance is mainly from the last three or four years however.  Fingers crossed!

AMD is a weird one on that point of view, for 30 years sitting behind the scene, but now is different and the potential is there, plus only one player in the market makes that player easy to fall down, and here is AMD taking over as only player for CPU/APU, probably also videocard but that's a wider story.
I always had ATI and outperformed NVIDIA for price/performance since 10 years that I can recall, in Enterprise is more complex and ATI was always behind due to drivers, but they are catching up even with these.

Another thing is who makes the chips for AMD, it's only one company and that's a single point of failure.

RobHT

barnstar2077 said:

RobHT said:

Prism said:

barnstar2077 said:

csgohan4 said:

barnstar2077 said:

@RobHT You have mentioned AMD.  If you look at their share price over the last 30 years or so you will see that the price has exploded over the last four years.  What do you think has changed to do that?  Yes, they have certainly been doing better at competing against their rivals in recent years, but how likely are they to sustain that? (historically Intel have always made a come back.)  Do they have new management?  Was it Bitcoin that started their good run?  I do not know.  I would be rubbing my hands together if I had bought some shares a few years ago, but buying some now would make me feel very uncomfortable indeed unless I knew exactly why they were doing so much better now, and more importantly why they were set to continue their meteoric rise.  Why do you think they are a good place for your money?  I am very interested to hear how you have carried out your analysis, as I do plan on dabbling a tiny bit in shares at a later date once I have a solid foundation under me that can take care of my expenses.

I would have rather invested in Nvidia or SSD manufacturers , the former has done very well over the last 12 m

I agree that I would feel better owning Nvidia, their products have been very consistent in my opinion (I have bought many of their cards.)  Still though, when you look at their share price, just like AMD they have had an incredible rise in the last three and a half years.  Which is what made me think of Bitcoin as being a possible reason.  But as with AMD I couldn't tell you why they have done so well, or why the price is set to continue.  So again, I wouldn't be very comfortable buying in today.

Probably a bit off tangent for the thread but one of the reasons that Nvidia and AMD have been doing so well is that their cards have been going into the big Amazon, Microsoft and Google cloud datacenters for server based applications. They are great at high speed video rendering (video streaming), 3D rendering (gaming and simulations) and machine learning (AI applications) - all of which have been very popular over the last few years. You can basically rent these things by the second which makes them very accessible to all.

I would add that NVIDIA will cook all the data from IOT too, and the cloud gaming was already launched, they just can't keep up with the demand , I think AMD is powering the PS cloud gaming though.

AI for sure went to NVIDIA, but AMD is not looking the other side, they are coming too  

Google Stadia uses AMD GPUs, the CPU I think will come soon, currently it's on Intel, AMD outperforms Intel as of today, whatever is your requirement.

From what you have said it sounds like Intel would be the bargain underdog about now then!

Interl bargain? Yes maybe, if they take over the market again, and it's still in downtrend, the botton is quite far.

Basically what's happening is a slow decline of Intel, but it will go down like crazy, it will take years, 30 years of dominance can't be destroyed in 3 years of AMD rump up.
Regarding what Intel is doing right now, well, it's not doing well anywhere, Stadia can easily replace all with AMD, in the end is the same architecture, it's just a business choice and they will need it to scale up new performance requirements and costs.
That was actually a thumbs up towards AMD.

I really can't find anything Intel is doing right, but at the same time the terrain is always insidious for AMD, in the end, that's the semiconductor war.
I wrote many messages today, let's see what do you think .

eskbanker

RobHT said:
I also see that taxes will eat up my gains if they are from dividents...

If you're evaluating growth versus income stocks, then from a taxation perspective you need to be comparing CGT on the former with income tax on the latter, both of which entail various rates and thresholds, but all of which are avoidable if using tax wrappers such as ISAs or SIPPs....

barnstar2077

RobHT said:

barnstar2077 said:

RobHT said:

Prism said:

barnstar2077 said:

csgohan4 said:

barnstar2077 said:

@RobHT You have mentioned AMD.  If you look at their share price over the last 30 years or so you will see that the price has exploded over the last four years.  What do you think has changed to do that?  Yes, they have certainly been doing better at competing against their rivals in recent years, but how likely are they to sustain that? (historically Intel have always made a come back.)  Do they have new management?  Was it Bitcoin that started their good run?  I do not know.  I would be rubbing my hands together if I had bought some shares a few years ago, but buying some now would make me feel very uncomfortable indeed unless I knew exactly why they were doing so much better now, and more importantly why they were set to continue their meteoric rise.  Why do you think they are a good place for your money?  I am very interested to hear how you have carried out your analysis, as I do plan on dabbling a tiny bit in shares at a later date once I have a solid foundation under me that can take care of my expenses.

I would have rather invested in Nvidia or SSD manufacturers , the former has done very well over the last 12 m

I agree that I would feel better owning Nvidia, their products have been very consistent in my opinion (I have bought many of their cards.)  Still though, when you look at their share price, just like AMD they have had an incredible rise in the last three and a half years.  Which is what made me think of Bitcoin as being a possible reason.  But as with AMD I couldn't tell you why they have done so well, or why the price is set to continue.  So again, I wouldn't be very comfortable buying in today.

Probably a bit off tangent for the thread but one of the reasons that Nvidia and AMD have been doing so well is that their cards have been going into the big Amazon, Microsoft and Google cloud datacenters for server based applications. They are great at high speed video rendering (video streaming), 3D rendering (gaming and simulations) and machine learning (AI applications) - all of which have been very popular over the last few years. You can basically rent these things by the second which makes them very accessible to all.

I would add that NVIDIA will cook all the data from IOT too, and the cloud gaming was already launched, they just can't keep up with the demand , I think AMD is powering the PS cloud gaming though.

AI for sure went to NVIDIA, but AMD is not looking the other side, they are coming too  

Google Stadia uses AMD GPUs, the CPU I think will come soon, currently it's on Intel, AMD outperforms Intel as of today, whatever is your requirement.

From what you have said it sounds like Intel would be the bargain underdog about now then!

Interl bargain? Yes maybe, if they take over the market again, and it's still in downtrend, the botton is quite far.

Basically what's happening is a slow decline of Intel, but it will go down like crazy, it will take years, 30 years of dominance can't be destroyed in 3 years of AMD rump up.
Regarding what Intel is doing right now, well, it's not doing well anywhere, Stadia can easily replace all with AMD, in the end is the same architecture, it's just a business choice and they will need it to scale up new performance requirements and costs.
That was actually a thumbs up towards AMD.

I really can't find anything Intel is doing right, but at the same time the terrain is always insidious for AMD, in the end, that's the semiconductor war.
I wrote many messages today, let's see what do you think .

I think only time will tell as far as AMD or Intel go.  Let us come back to it again from time to time and see how they are doing  :  )