There's a scene in The Matrix where Morpheus looks at Neo and says: "There is a difference between knowing the path and walking the path."
In financial markets, most analysts know the path. They talk a good game about artificial intelligence, technological revolution, "paradigm shift." But when Nvidia drops its quarterly earnings and the numbers come in strong, those same guys rush to say they "called it." Bullshit — if you called it, why did you spend the last few weeks feeding panic about an AI slowdown?
What actually happened
Nvidia released its results and, once again, shut up everyone who was peddling the end-of-cycle narrative. The numbers came in robust enough to get the Asian tech market waking up with a hard-on the next morning.
Semiconductor stocks in South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan rallied across the board. SK Hynix, TSMC, Tokyo Electron — everyone hitched a ride. The domino effect was textbook: Nvidia validates the AI thesis, and the Asian supply chain that manufactures the chips, the memory, and the lithography equipment grins from ear to ear.
It's the classic "when Nvidia sneezes, all of Asia catches the cold — or the euphoria."
The fear that never left
Let's be honest: the fear of a slowdown in AI investment hasn't disappeared. It just got shoved into the back seat for another quarter.
The American big techs — Microsoft, Meta, Google, Amazon — keep burning billions on data center infrastructure. But the question nobody wants to answer is: when is all that investment going to translate into proportional recurring revenue?
This reminds me of what Charlie Munger (rest in peace, wise old man) always hammered home: "The big money is not in the buying or the selling, but in the waiting." The problem is the market doesn't know how to wait. It wants quarterly results, pretty guidance, and a smiling CEO on the earnings call.
Nvidia delivers that. For now.
The circus of "AI experts"
What gets on my nerves is the sheer number of LinkedIn gurus who became "semiconductor experts" overnight. The guy who two years ago was selling dropshipping courses now posts silicon wafer charts like he knows the difference between an H100 chip and a pack of crackers.
The AI market is real. The revolution is real. But the amount of noise surrounding it is deafening.
Nassim Taleb would say most of these people have no skin in the game. They talk about Nvidia without holding a single share in their portfolio. They opine about the future of semiconductors without understanding that TSMC operates with margins that would make any average company weep with envy. It's easy to be an analyst when the risk is zero and the ego is infinite.
What this means for the real investor
If you have exposure to Asian tech — directly or through ETFs — Nvidia's results are a temporary relief. And temporary is the key word here.
A one-day, one-week rally doesn't change the fundamental equation: the AI thesis needs to keep being fueled by real demand, not just corporate FOMO. The day a major big tech hits the brakes on data center spending, the house of cards is going to shake.
That doesn't mean you should sell everything and stuff cash under your mattress. It means you need to be crystal clear about why you're positioned and what your time horizon is. If you bought TSMC thinking five years out, you sleep just fine. If you bought it Monday morning because of a CNBC headline, maybe you shouldn't have.
The question that lingers
Nvidia remains the most important company of the current tech cycle. That's undeniable. But here's the reflection nobody in your feed is going to give you:
Are you investing in the AI revolution because you understand the thesis — or because everyone else is investing and you're afraid of missing out?
Because between those two motivations there's an abyss. And that abyss is where the market tends to swallow people whole.
