SoftBank dropped over 7%. Broadcom led a sell-off overnight. Asian tech stocks followed like lemmings who attended a webinar on momentum investing.
The narrative says investors are "souring on AI-linked names." Beautiful phrasing. Investors don't sell because they made speculative bets on companies with no earnings trading at 400 times sales. They sour. Like milk left in the sun. Or a relationship where someone forgot an anniversary. Very natural. Very organic.
SoftBank — a company whose business model is "guy with too much money makes bets" — lost billions because other people also made the same bets and decided today was the day to stop making those bets. The AI trade worked until it didn't. Revolutionary insight there.
Broadcom sold off first. Then Asia woke up and said "you know what, we should also sell." No independent analysis. No local market conditions. Just monkey see, monkey panic-liquidate positions at a loss.
The financial media writes these headlines like they explain something. "Investors sour on AI-linked names." Why? What changed? Nothing. Someone sold. Then someone else sold. Then algorithms noticed selling and sold more. Now we're writing articles about sentiment.
SoftBank has been wrong about tech investments so consistently they should franchise the model. "Want to lose billions? We'll show you how." Masayoshi Son could charge admission.
The stocks will probably bounce tomorrow when some analyst upgrades them because "valuations look attractive after the pullback." Then they'll fall again next week when another chip company misses guidance by 2%. Then they'll rally when Jensen Huang wears a different leather jacket.
None of this means anything. The stocks went down because they went up too much. They went up too much because they went up. The story around the movement is invented after the fact to make financial journalists feel employed.
SoftBank investors are learning an expensive lesson: the only thing worse than not being in the AI trade is being in the AI trade at exactly the wrong time, which is always.
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