Ruchir Sharma: “It’s an AI-driven world. Of course, this monomania will not last for ever. The speculative enthusiasm will fade even as the technological revolution endures and expands in scope. As was the case following the railroad boom of the 19th century and the internet craze at the turn of this century, a more balanced global market will eventually re-emerge. But so long as investors continue to see AI as the sole foundation of the next world order, they will keep ranking nations based on their tech prowess.”
Debashis Basu: “The result is that FPI selling and DMF buying have not been mirror images of one another. Foreign investors have largely been exiting one part of the market while domestic investors have been enthusiastically accumulating another. There is another flaw in the argument that retail investors have neutralised the impact of FPI selling. When FPIs sell Indian stocks, their action weakens the rupee, as we have seen last year. DMFs, in contrast, invest in rupees; their buying can support stock prices but does not bring in foreign exchange or strengthen the currency. India has certainly become much less dependent on FPIs than before. But the idea that retail investors have simply absorbed foreign selling is flawed in multiple ways.”
WSJ: “We are witnessing an extraordinary transfer of cash from the providers of AI—and, perhaps one day, AI users—to memory-chip makers…Ultimately, there are only three ways to deal with higher prices from chip suppliers, as the airlines can attest when oil rises. Make lower profits (the short-term response), find efficiencies so you need less (in the long run), or wait for more supply (as fat profits encourage production). All three are likely in AI, and investors need to think carefully about which parts of the AI stack will make money, and how long it will last.”
TheGreySwan: “For ~20 years, enterprise software built moats around stored business memory. The switching cost was not contractual. It was existential. Leave the CRM and you leave behind the accumulated memory of your business. That was a beautiful moat. Until the reasoning layer arrived above it. AI agents now sit on top of the CRM, pulling from emails, call transcripts, calendars, support tickets and product telemetry. The database does not disappear. It gets demoted. From castle to plumbing. Any incumbent whose moat was built on holding data rather than reasoning over it is vulnerable to the same inversion.”
