Sameer

Proud British Indian. Interested in politics, stock markets & economics. Liverpool FC fan.

[Alvin Foo @alvinfoo]

Alex is 100% right to call out the frontier labs. Replace your entire workforce with Anthropic/OpenAI models and you no longer own your company, they do. The “weights” are trained on stolen IP, trade secrets, and human knowledge at scale. It’s not augmentation, it’s transfer of ownership.

This isn’t sustainable. The hype machine is running on vapor, massive energy bills, and future lawsuits. Real value is in applied, governed AI with data control (Palantir’s lane), not renting god-mode models that commoditize your edge.

The correction is coming. Position accordingly.

What’s your take?

[Steven Swinford @Steven_Swinford]

Sir Keir Starmer has left Andy Burnham with a series of unexploded bombs with his unfunded defence spending plans

1) The £4.7billion funding gap

After months of bitter in-fighting over defence spending, Starmer came up with an unexpected way of funding it — he simply deferred it to the next budget

Nearly a third of the £15 billion increase in defence spending, £4.7 billion, will have to be raised at the next budget. In other words, it will be Burnham’s problem

Expect tax rises or spending cuts

2) Defence spending targets

An even bigger bombshell. One of the key things missing from the defence investment plan was a date for hitting Starmer’s pledge to spend 3% of GDP on defence, or indeed 3.5% for that matter

Hitting 3.5% will cost an extra £25billion a year. For context the government has just ripped itself apart over an increase of £4billion a year

As Ruth Curtice at the Resolution Foundation, this is huge. A 3p rise in income tax. The equivalent of the entire of the MOD Budget. She says we need a national conversation about it. She's undeniably right

3) £10.7bn of efficiency savings

To describe these savings as amitious is to understate it. The language in the DIP on these savings is almost unreadable. It talks about saving £1.1billion from a new "defence operating model" which will provide a "unified enterprise to translate political direciton into strategy, planning and delivery".

It claims £3.3billion will be found from reducing the cost of the civil service by 10 - something successive govts have failed to do. It talks about saving billions by 'optimising land use and assets' without explanation. Huge savings from 'acquisition' and 'breaking down operational barriers', again unclear where they will come from

4) Military housing

Starmer has delayed a £9billion upgrade in military housing. The decision is not detailed in the spending plan, but ministers have admitted it on the broadcast rounds this morning. £6bn of those upgrades will now be spent in next Budget. Given appalling state of military housing this is likely to be contentious

5) Cuts to public services

The govt says it will raise £6.8bn from cuts to public investment - schools, hospitals, net zero, you name it. But there is little detail on where those cuts will fall. They are likely to involve some painful decisions. Ed Miliband, if he becomes chancellor, faces having to cut £2bn from his former department's budget

https://t.co/ec5IUaxrVW

[Al Carns @AlistairCarns]

The country is tired of being told it's borrow, tax or cut. It's just not true...

If we can run the state 10% better, we free up the money for what the country actually needs.

That's the ground Labour should be fighting on.

[Maurice Cousins @MDC12345678]

Labour is about to discover, as Sir Tony Blair and Dominic Cummings have both argued, that its problem is not simply that Starmer communicated badly. He did.

Good communication certainly needs pathos, which Burnham clearly has in spades. But above all, it needs logos.

That brings us to Labour’s deeper problem. The party does not seem to understand that effective communication flows from clear thinking, an honest diagnosis and policies that respond to the world as it is.

Videos and social media allow you to reach new audiences. But they cannot fix the substance!

[The Spectator Index @spectatorindex]

🇨🇳 China government debt as share of GDP.

2006: 25%

2026: 106%

(IMF)

[Dominic King @DKingTelegraph]

Thomas Tuchel hollering at Djed Spence again. The irony being, of course, that he decided a full-back who spent a season fighting relegation at Spurs and arrived with a broken jaw was a better bet than Real Madrid’s right-back. That pick can’t have been based on football.

[Ricardo @Ric_RTP]

Palantir's CEO just exposed Sam Altman and Dario Amodei for robbing every Fortune 500 company.

Within two minutes, Alex Karp took the entire frontier AI industry apart on national television.

His exact words:

"Every single enterprise in this country, these people are LIVID. They are paying for tokens that create no value. These people are stealing the weights and alpha of my business."

He literally said the entire frontier AI business model is intellectual property extraction dressed up as a subscription.

Then he also destroyed the pricing model with a single question that Silicon Valley still refuses to answer:

"If it was so valuable, let's say I can make you $1 billion tomorrow. Wouldn't I say I'll make you $1 billion and I want 30 percent? Why are they charging for tokens if it's so valuable?"

That question breaks the industry.

If OpenAI and Anthropic's models truly delivered the productivity gains the labs claim, they would take equity or a share of the profit they generate. They would not sell access by the million tokens.

Token pricing is itself the CONFESSION that the product cannot produce reliable value at scale. If it did, they would price for the value. But they price for the compute because that is what they are actually selling.

Karp went even further...

He called the entire arrangement "a wealth tax that does not help the poor. It just punishes."

American businesses are transferring the alpha of their operations, meaning the workflows, the customer data, the strategy memos, the internal models that make them competitive, directly into the training pipelines of a handful of Silicon Valley labs. Once those labs retrain, the customer's own edge becomes the next enterprise product sold back to their competitors.

And the part the AI industry does not want anyone thinking about:

Every enterprise running its confidential documents, its customer conversations, and its financial models through a frontier model is potentially teaching that model HOW to replace them.

The vendor collects the token fee AND the compounding intelligence about that customer's business. That is the mechanism. And that is why Karp used the word "stealing."

He claims this is why every executive he meets is furious in private and silent in public. Nobody wants to be the CEO who called out the labs and then discovered their next competitor was built on their own leaked workflows.

The entire AI industry has been priced for perfection on one assumption:

That frontier labs produce durable, defensible value that justifies infinite compute spend.

But Karp just told us that the customers do not believe that assumption anymore. They believe they are being taxed without benefit, watched without consent, and copied without recourse.

The moment enterprises stop believing, the whole valuation stack shakes.

[Daniel Koss @daniel_koss]

Holy shit this $NBIS -17% just now was the biggest gift ever.

Nebius down 17% on GOOD NEWS! 😂

First, here's why I think market dumped Nebius:

- $META own cloud = competition for Nebius!
- So META has too much compute? Capex is over! Bubble top is in!
- So META will not buy from Nebius anymore?! Less demand!

Here's the reality:
- $META intentionally bought as much as possible upfront because they knew they could always sell it at a profit
- META cloud was long teased and might add a profitable business unit that gives them the flexibility to always buy more aggressively upfront and sell potential excess to the market, giving them flexibility and a news profitable unit. Super smart! Just like how Amazon started AWS btw!
- $NBIS will either sell MORE to $META if they like this business or instantly sell that extra capacity to much higher margin startups in weeks IF META wouldn't want it, which I think is very unlikely.

Market handing you a gift imho. Another Deepseek moment.

But I do not know how long it will take to figure out this selloff is dumb af.

Maybe people just panic sell Nebius and some lucky folks get insanely great entries. But I'm not being greedy and take the opportunity here.

[Rittenhouse Research @RHouseResearch]

In March, Meta signed a $27B cloud services deal with Nebius. In April, Meta signed a $21B expansion of their cloud services agreement with CoreWeave.

Two weeks ago, Bloomberg reported that Meta signed up to rent 1.6GW of data center capacity from Crusoe. And just 3 days ago, the Financial Times reported that Google had capped Meta's use of Gemini because of capacity constraints.

And now all of a sudden, Meta actually has excess capacity?

In reality, I suspect Meta looked at SpaceX's valuation and recent deals to sell excess capacity.. And came to the conclusion that investors will look favorably upon any willingness to monetize their capacity externally.. Which will give their share price some relief, and allow them to raise capital.. Which they'll use to buy and build more compute capacity, lol.

$META $GOOG $NBIS $CRWV

[Laura Trott MP @LauraTrottMP]

Bridget Phillipson’s priorities are all wrong. She’s quietly axed PE Premium, the Latin Excellence Programme, computing & physics, denying opportunities to disadvantaged children, but can still find hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayers’ money for social media influencers.

[Nick Timothy MP @NJ_Timothy]

David Lammy’s plan to appoint for diversity not merit is probably unlawful.

So I asked to publish his legal advice.

He says it’s "not in the public interest" - and told me to submit an FOI!

What does he have to hide?

[Politics UK @PolitlcsUK]

🚨 NEW: Peter Mandelson has reportedly been in contact with Russian spies for over 35 years

He was considered a "privileged contact" and "one of the most significant Russian achievements in manipulating UK politics" in the last 30 years

[@Telegraph]

[amit @amitisinvesting]

$PLTR

Alex Karp is one of the only people saying the honest truth about AI within this technology revolution: the monetization of tokens is not in the interest of actually creating value for enterprises.

Palantir is in the business of value creation, not selling tokens.

[M. V. Cunha @mvcinvesting]

$NBIS is down 10% following reports that $META is developing a cloud business to sell access to excess AI compute.

This was something that had been expected for a long time.

Meta has been pushing CapEx as aggressively as possible because any potential excess capacity could always be resold later anyway. Mark Zuckerberg said as much back in May.

It doesn’t change anything for $NBIS IMO.

Quick reminder: Nebius has a $12B contract with Meta, plus a $15B backstop. And according to Nebius’ management, they don’t expect to use a single dollar of that backstop for Meta. Instead, that capacity should be sold to enterprise customers at higher margins, because the demand is clearly there.

[M. V. Cunha @mvcinvesting]

$DLO is still VERY cheap here.

Happy shareholder.

[Wall St Engine @wallstengine]

UBS Upgrades $DLO to Buy from Neutral, Raises PT to $20 from $16

Analyst comments: "We see a combination of a strong growth path, with improving operating leverage and re-rating potential given the rising market confidence after a series of solid results.

Growth should be supported by rising global digitalization and still lower e-commerce penetration in emerging markets, expansion into new geographies, and deeper relationships with clients, implying higher share of wallet. At the same time, we believe profitability should expand in 2H26, as DLocal reaps the fruits from the investment cycle deployed during 2024-2025.

We incorporate those trends and increase our earnings estimates by +15%, on average, over 2026-2030E. Our earnings estimates are ~2% above consensus in 2027-2028E. At 16x/12x P/E 2026/2027E, DLO is trading below global peers, at a ~50% discount versus ~40% in the last ~3 years, and below historical levels, 25% below its ~3-year average. Adjusting for growth, we believe the stock trades at a compelling multiple."

Analyst: Kaio Prato

[Victoria @vickygrayson_]

While the UK Government is celebrating slashing VAT on Peppa Pig World, they have imposed 20% VAT on the education of children in private schools, including the learning support of children with SEND.

It says something about the priorities of Labour & what @TorstenBell values.

[GB News @GBNEWS]

'First time I've been banned for 26 years! Since Tony Blair or Alastair Campbell kicked me out of some event.'

Parliamentary Sketchwriter for the Daily Mail Quentin Letts who was banned from entering Andy Burnham's speech on Monday, discusses the importance of press scrutiny.

[Tom Slater @Tom_Slater_]

‘Burnham is a phoney. He bangs on about being from the north because he has nothing else to say. Large parts of the north voted Brexit, but he wants to reverse that. He’s said nothing about the grooming gangs. Who does he think he’s kidding?’

My less-than-impressed take on Talk

[Oliver | MMMT Wealth (CPA) @MMMTwealth]

Funny how very few of the metals/mining posts I do get much interest from investors here?

It's probably some of the biggest opportunities in the entire market today yet people really only care about the $AAOI or $NBIS's of the world.

$SREMF I've called out almost weekly here on X from $5 -> $12.62 today in a few months.

Others to take note of:
-> $TMQ
-> $NB
-> $HL
-> $CTGO

Copper, silver, niobium, scandium are all extremely important.