XRP’s latest surge has reignited the usual crypto shouting match, which tells me one thing straight away: something practical is happening beneath the noise. When an asset that half the market loves to hate starts rallying without a catchy narrative or a celebrity mascot, it is rarely an accident. XRP’s move feels less like a speculative sugar rush and more like a response to pressure building in the real financial system, particularly where that system is weakest. XRP moves quietly where traditional finance struggles to keep pace At around $2.34, XRP is up sharply on the day, carrying a market capitalisation close to $142 billion and daily trading volume pushing $8 billion. This is not a thin, excitable market. It is deep, liquid and being actively repositioned. The interesting question i

From Search Queries to Self-Learning Systems Baidu’s recent 9% surge has been treated as a feel-good rally in a battered China tech name. I think that misses the point. The market continues to value $BIDU-SW(09888)$ as a search engine with advertising ambition, yet the company is quietly building something far more ambitious: a self-reinforcing machine that learns from the real world, improves itself, and then sells that intelligence back to everyone else. Baidu transforms data into a self-learning AI machine The most underappreciated piece of this puzzle is Apollo. Few investors realise that even if robotaxis themselves never turn a profit, the data they generate may already be paying dividends by improving Baidu’s AI models and infrastructure.

From Moonshots to Margins: Why Meta’s Next Rally Is About Capital Discipline, Not the Metaverse For years, owning $Meta Platforms, Inc.(META)$ has required a strong stomach and an even stronger imagination. I have watched the company oscillate between operational brilliance and strategic excess, often within the same earnings call. The reported plan to cut the metaverse division’s 2026 budget by as much as 30% feels like a genuine inflection point—not because it flatters near-term earnings, but because it signals something more important: a renewed commitment to capital discipline over corporate theatre. The market’s reaction to Meta’s most recent earnings was swift and unforgiving, leaving behind a visible earnings gap and reviving talk of whethe

CES used to be where we pretended to care about smart refrigerators. Now it’s where Nvidia and AMD duke it out to see who gets to power the robot that might replace your job—or at least the one you didn’t want anyway. This year, I’m less interested in marginal GPU gains and more focused on whether these chip titans can convincingly present themselves as robotics platforms rather than pure AI silicon vendors. If robotics is the next stock engine, it will look very different from the last one. AI is leaving the cloud and learning to lift real weight When Compute Leaves the Cloud The first structural shift investors often underestimate is how robotics changes the AI compute demand profile. Data-centre spending remains lucrative but cyclical, tied to hyperscaler budgets. Robotics flips that mo

Applied Digital’s share price does not do understatement. With a five-year beta north of seven, this is a stock that treats volatility less as a feature and more as a calling card. Yet focusing solely on price swings, or even the eye-catching contract backlog, misses what I see as the real value multiplier here. The core opportunity is not simply how many megawatts $APPLIED DIGITAL CORP(APLD)$ can promise, but how effectively it converts contractual certainty into immediate build-ready capital. In an industry throttled by development bottlenecks, that is a rare and underappreciated advantage. Where contracts turn into capital before the concrete even sets Most commentary frames Applied Digital as a leveraged bet on AI data centre demand. In my vie

Sandisk’s elevation to market superstardom has been so abrupt that I half-expected someone to quietly admit they’d uploaded the wrong ticker. A 513% year-to-date return, a near-vertical three-month rally, and the red carpet rolled out for S&P 500 admission — it’s all very glamorous. But as investors cheer its coronation, I find myself more interested in what happens when the music stops, the lights come back on, and the industry returns to something resembling normality. That, in my view, is when we find out whether Sandisk is a genuine AI-era heavyweight or simply the accidental beneficiary of a very tight NAND market and a lot of index-driven enthusiasm. Sandisk surges as AI demands push storage into overdrive Margins Rebound — Real, But Fragile Sandisk’s margin improvement has been

A company minting money at Ferrari speed while being priced as if it’s due for retirement. $Tencent Holding Ltd.(TCEHY)$ continues to present one of the most entertaining mismatches between perception and reality in global tech. The market clings to a narrative of a fatigued Chinese conglomerate, yet the numbers depict a company in full command of its cash engine and quietly reorienting itself toward higher-margin, lower-regulation business lines. This isn’t a repair job. It’s a deliberate strategic shift carried out by a business that was already functioning beautifully. A giant quietly reshaping itself beneath the market’s gaze Valuation, Cash Flow, and the Persistent Mispricing Problem The latest million-share buyback on 26 November adds anoth

From Pandemic Pin-Up to Profit Powerhouse Zoom just reported 196% earnings growth on 4.4% revenue growth—and the market barely blinked. Only in tech could a company multiply its profits almost threefold and still be treated like yesterday’s novelty item. But beneath the market’s aloof shrug lies one of the most dramatic and, dare I say, underrated corporate evolutions of the post-pandemic era. Reinvention begins quietly, then reshapes everything beneath the surface Rather than chasing its former hyper-growth identity, $Zoom(ZM)$ has reimagined itself as something more stable, more efficient, and frankly more investable. The top line may now grow at a leisurely 4.4%, yet the company has become a masterclass in translating incremental revenue into out

If the last decade of tech was defined by who could build the biggest data centres, the next decade will be defined by who can run the most intelligence for the least money. And on that measure, I’m increasingly convinced $Alphabet(GOOGL)$ has engineered a structural advantage the market still only half understands. While competitors parade models like catwalk fashion, Alphabet has been busy constructing an AI machine room where it owns—and optimises—every wrench, cog, wire and circuit. In an industry finally waking up to the economics of inference efficiency, this matters immensely. What makes Alphabet interesting isn’t simply that it’s enormous. It’s that its vastness is now cohering into an economic engine: models designed for its own silicon,

How Holding a Decade-Old SG Dividend Champion Like Sembcorp Shapes My Compounding Engine I’ve held $Sembcorp Ind(U96.SI)$ for ten years, and somewhere along the way, my steady dividend stock became a teenager who quietly excels at everything I didn’t expect. What began as a reliable dividend play in Singapore has evolved into a subtle yet powerful growth engine for my portfolio. Thanks to tax-free dividends, every dollar I’ve received over the years has been able to reinvest at full strength, quietly compounding while the market chased flashier headlines elsewhere. A decade of quiet compounding pushing outward with deliberate strength The Compounding I Didn’t Realise I’d Built Reinvesting dividends sounds dull until you do the maths. A $10,000 p

Why the Sell-Off Happened Despite Both Companies Posting Excellent Quarters When $XIAOMI-W(01810)$ and $XPENG-W(09868)$ reported earnings, I half-expected a polite round of applause from the market. Instead, both stocks were thrown down the nearest lift shaft. Xiaomi delivered nearly 200% auto revenue growth with margins climbing to 25.5%. XPeng crossed 20% gross margin for the first time, hit record deliveries and narrowed its net loss. Yet the share prices behaved as if both firms had announced a surprise pivot into artisanal candle making. When great earnings meet markets in a particularly dramatic mood This was pure sentiment, not fundamentals. Investors came in hoping for immaculate guidance in an

CoreWeave’s backlog isn’t a sales forecast — it’s a revenue conveyor belt. And the striking thing, at least to me, is how few investors seem to grasp just how defensible that makes the business. This isn’t a polite queue of potential buyers; it’s a multi-year commitment from companies that literally cannot operate without the infrastructure $CoreWeave, Inc.(CRWV)$ provides. With revenue already growing at triple-digit rates and the AI infrastructure market still starved of supply, the backlog behaves less like future interest and more like revenue scheduled for arrival. In a sector where demand keeps sprinting ahead of supply, that’s as close to structural inevitability as you get. Where demand outruns supply, inevitability becomes the real advant

Racing Ahead While Others Change Tyres Solana has spent the past year reminding the market that speed still matters, even in an industry that often congratulates itself for progress that would make a snail impatient. With the token hovering around 136 dollars after a choppy stretch, it has not been the easiest asset for anyone prone to checking price charts before breakfast. Yet beneath the volatility sits a network evolving into something more substantial than a speculative trade. Solana is quietly carving out the rarest commodity in crypto: practical utility. Speed shaped into structure, revealing Solana’s emerging economic momentum Throughput That Isn’t Just a Party Trick Many blockchains claim to be fast, cheap and scalable in the same way every start-up claims to be revolutionising so

Why this rare-earth revival hinges on geopolitics, grit, and a dash of luck—rather than exponential economics. $MP Materials Corp.(MP)$ has become the unlikely star of 2025’s market drama—a rare-earth miner whose share price has rocketed more than 270% year-to-date, eclipsing the S&P 500’s modest 14% rise. It’s a performance more fitting of an AI darling than a company that literally digs things out of the desert. Yet investors appear convinced that MP sits at the crossroads of two irresistible forces: geopolitical urgency and the green-energy transition. The question is whether this is a sustainable business model—or just a policy-fuelled mania wrapped in patriotic packaging. Where geology meets geopolitics — and valuation defies gravity From D

AppLovin's September inclusion in the S&P 500 brought automatic prestige and passive inflows—but not immunity from gravity. Index membership signals scale and credibility, yet it doesn’t guarantee that growth can continue at breakneck pace. For a company that has grown from a mobile gaming adtech upstart to a $200 billion behemoth, the pressing question is whether Axon 2.0, its high-margin AI engine, can drive durable expansion beyond its core niche. S&P Inclusion: Momentum Versus Fundamentals The stock’s recent performance is remarkable. Shares have climbed more than 100% over the past year and a staggering 3,350% over three years, largely fueled by pandemic-era gaming demand and a rapid monetisation pivot via the original Axon platform. That extraordinary surge illustrates both t

Flipping houses at industrial scale sounds efficient in theory, but in practice it can feel a bit like juggling chainsaws while riding a unicycle. That’s Opendoor Technologies in a nutshell: a company demonstrating operational growth while still wrestling with the messy economics of home flipping. Its recent quarterly revenue of $915 million impressed the market, yet profitability remains elusive, and structural challenges have not disappeared. Innovation teeters where precision meets chaos — Opendoor’s daily reality Revenue beats, but the profit puzzle persists Opendoor’s revenue performance demonstrates the operational discipline the company has developed, yet margins remain thin. Gross profits reached $378 million, while operating margins lingered at roughly -7%, net losses totalled $31

BigBear.ai looks every inch the market darling, with a 224 per cent one-year return and a valuation that usually belongs to polished, enterprise-scale AI platforms. Yet the fundamentals tell a very different story. Revenue over the past twelve months sits at roughly $153 million, and quarterly sales are shrinking at an 18 per cent year-on-year pace. I see a company trying to grow into a valuation that assumes momentum it hasn’t yet earned, and the widening gap between its slowing top line and expanding cost base feels like a warning that ambition is outrunning execution. This is a business that has built a fast-moving narrative, but the financials haven’t kept pace with the headlines. Momentum dazzles — until the numbers start whispering doubt The numbers whisper caution while the price sh

From Eli Lilly’s metabolic muscle to Viking’s speculative edge, I’m pivoting towards a sector that feels less like a gamble and more like a prescription for market resilience. The market, much like a marathon runner who’s overtrained, is starting to wheeze. Valuations in tech are stretched, margins are thinning, and investors are once again pretending AI efficiency can outrun interest rates. I’m not buying it. Where markets tire, biology invents the next growth cycle With the Fed likely done cutting and tech multiples still stretched, investors are beginning to rotate into sectors with genuine pricing power and predictable cash flows — healthcare ticks both boxes. The next phase, in my view, will favour earnings resilience over multiple expansion, and few sectors combine pricing power, dem

Archer Aviation’s electric air taxis are no longer science fiction—they’re in production. The question isn’t whether they can fly. It’s whether they can make money. Where imagination meets engineering — the dream of flight reborn The Californian start-up has turned its futuristic vision into a tangible aircraft, and the market loves it. The stock is up more than 260% in the past year. But while Archer’s sleek eVTOLs (electric vertical take-off and landing aircraft) are edging closer to reality, the investment case still hinges on one thing: can the company make the leap from prototype to profitable business before gravity catches up? Scaling the Prototype Problem Archer’s future depends less on aerodynamics and more on execution. The company has proven its Midnight aircraft can fly; now it