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Gold is outperforming the Nasdaq 100 since the launch of ChatGPT

There’s a bull market in anti-humanity.

Gold is glittering.

The shiny metal, which drives no future cash flows and offers no yield, has now delivered a better price return than the Invesco QQQ Trust, which tracks the Nasdaq 100, since the launch of ChatGPT at the end of November 2022.

What does it mean that the so-called barbarous relic is doing so well — even better than the AI-driven tech-heavy index?

For some perspective, in April 2013, my old boss Joe Weisenthal (then at Business Insider) wrote about how it was “great news” that the price of gold was crashing.

Some excerpts:

Investing in gold is a rejection of government money and finance. Money flowing into gold-related assets represents a belief that rocks (however shiny they are) are a better place to invest than human endeavors (like stocks).

You can see that even with the recent upturn in stocks, relative to gold, gold has crushed stocks since 2000.
Arguably, 2000 represented a peak in belief in the capabilities of humans. The internet inspired all kinds of crazy optimism about how humans would re-shape the world for the better. The ebullience spread beyond the net. There was, for example, optimism about new ways of transporting humans: Fuel cells! Segway!
Of course, the bubble crashed. Then we had 9/11. Then we had two wars. Then we had the housing implosion. Then we had the financial crisis. Then the horrible recession. Then the European crisis and the debt ceiling and everything else.
In other words, we had a series of a events that, for good reason, shook our faith in humanity. During this time, people thought about history on a large scale. And gold, having been used as a money for thousands of years, did pretty well, especially relative to stocks, which represent companies made up of humans.

If you agree with Weisenthal’s mental model (I do!), that makes what we’re living through now all the more striking.

We have similar (if not more!) techno optimism that we did during the dot-com bubble, this time over AI, that’s sent tech shares soaring.

And yet we have the outperformance of gold, which in my view is is primarily a function of:

Concern that global fiscal and monetary policymakers are willing to allow inflation to run hotter than it has during the 30 years that preceded the pandemic (i.e. “The Great Moderation”)
A diversification away from US assets in favor of the shiny metal, on the margin, fueled by:
- The sanctions imposed on Russia in the wake of its invasion of Ukraine, and a desire by other countries to not potentially have reserves frozen in the same nature;
- Uncertainty around US policymaking as it pertains to trade, capital flows, and the independence of monetary policy.

Put these things together, and there seems to be building distrust about macroeconomic policymaking coupled with an implicit disassociation between “technological progress” and “human progress” — which may be down to the fact that artificial intelligence is being billed as a labor-replacing technology (see: Salesforce).

Gold and tech ripping together, for these reasons, tell us we’re in the midst of a bull market in anti-humanity.

Nia Warfield, Luke Kawa

US stocks grind higher as volatility dissipates

The S&P 500 rose 0.2% in what was is fourth-smallest intraday range of 2025, as did the Russell 2000, while the Nasdaq 100 gained 0.5%.

Matt Phillips

Retail darling Planet Labs soars on earnings pop for second straight quarter

Planet Labs, which operates a network of satellites that record data, images, and information about the Earth, surged more than 40% after reporting better-than-expected quarterly numbers before the open of trading Monday.

It was the second straight quarter when the money-losing company’s quarterly update generated a massive market reaction. The stock jumped nearly 50% after numbers came out in June.

The company, which went public via SPAC in 2021, raised its full-year revenue guidance and notched its second straight quarter of positive free cash flow. Analysts and investors watch free cash flow closely as it can signal when a company’s business is starting to become more durable.

While the company is small — roughly $2.5 billion in market cap — it has posted pretty serious gains, rising almost 300% the past 12 months. Planet Labs also appears to have a fairly large retail shareholder base.

Just 57% of its float is in the the hands of institutional investors, according to FactSet data. That’s roughly the same as other retail favorites such as Palantir, though Planet Labs is no where near as highly valued as the defense data and AI software company led by CEO Alex Karp.

Planet Labs Boosts View as Deals Close Quicker on Higher Demand

Luke Kawa

OpenAI’s cash burn suggests selling Nvidia because of reported Broadcom chip orders may not make much sense

When Broadcom announced that it booked $10 billion in new orders from a customer reported to be OpenAI, shares of their major AI chip rivals tanked.

The judgement of the Invisible Hand was that this was nearly a zero-sum outcome: $130 billion of market cap erased from Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices, and a $135 billion increase in Broadcom’s market value.

But looking at this from the perspective of near-term cash flows, the market’s view seems off.

The Information is reporting that OpenAI now expects to burn through $115 billion by the end of 2029 (or more than 11 seasons’ worth of NFL broadcasting rights).

Let’s zoom in on this tidbit from The Information:

But the biggest change emerging from OpenAI’s latest projections was to its cash flows. The company projected it will burn more than $8 billion this year, or roughly $1.5 billion higher than its prior projection from earlier this year. Cash burn will more than double to more than $17 billion next year—$10 billion higher than what the company earlier projected

That $10 billion fits all too neatly with the $10 billion in orders from a major new customer that Broadcom CEO Hock Tan pointed to in the chip designer’s earnings call.

(Cheers to @lokoyacap for flagging this on X)

Assuming the reporting around OpenAI and Broadcom is accurate, these orders for ASICs don’t look to be displacing what the ChatGPT creator was going to spend on Nvidia’s GPUs, but are just in addition to it! The money’s not coming out of Jensen Huang’s pockets, it’s coming out of OpenAI’s coffers. Their spending budget is just getting bigger.

Perhaps if you squint, there’s a world in which OpenAI may prefer to have an additional $10 billion in Nvidia GPUs rather than ASICs, and I am still of the belief that hyperscalers diversifying their chip sources due to constrained top-end supplies isn’t a good sign for the company selling the most in-demand product.

But it’s quite intriguing, and says something about the depth of the pockets that fuel the AI boom, that OpenAI’s reported new relationship with Broadcom has seemingly no direct negative financial impact on Nvidia in the near term.

Luke Kawa

Broadcom’s post-earnings romp continues on heavy volumes

As Broadcom enjoys a rush of new orders from a major new customer (reported to be OpenAI), it’s also reveling in a flood of traffic into the stock.

Volumes are running at 2.5 times their daily average through 1:20 p.m. ET as traders continue to bid up shares in response to the brighter outlook for 2026 revenues, which sent the stock up 9.4% on Friday.

The chip designer is basking in a flood of price target hikes from Wall Street, with Bank of America, JPMorgan, Argus Research, Citigroup, Bernstein, Deutsche Bank, Morgan Stanley, Barclays, Piper Sandler, Rosenblatt Securities, Wells Fargo, and Susquehanna upping their view on how high shares can go since the company reported earnings last week.

Separately, Taiwanese industry outlet DigiTimes is reporting that orders from several other leading tech companies for custom-made Broadcom chips (or ASICs) are “already in the pipeline.” This report has not been corroborated by our own or any other publication’s reporting to date.

Matt Phillips

SpaceX spectrum deal sends would-be rivals lower

Shares of struggling satellite services company EchoStar soared Monday, after the company — which had recently tottered close to bankruptcy — announced the sale of some of its wireless spectrum licenses to Tesla CEO Elon Musk’s SpaceX for $17 million.

The sale provides a competitive advantage to Musk’s growing Starlink satellite services business, as the licenses it is acquiring from Echostar allows Starlink to operate ground based broadband and cellphone services, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Entities that stood to be hurt by the emergence of a Musk-led SpaceX Starlink service got hit hard on the news. AST SpaceMobile, which has plans to offer a similar satellite-to-consumer cellular service, tumbled.

So did wireless tower providers like Crown Castle and American Tower. Low cost cellular service provider T-Mobile, which had a deal with SpaceX, also slumped, as Luke noted earlier, along with other large wireless telecommunication services providers.

The wireless telecommunications industry grouping within the S&P 500 was down more than 2.5% shortly after noon, making it the worst performing industry within the S&P 500 on Monday.

SpaceX strikes $17B deal to buy EchoStar's spectrum for Starlink's direct-to-phone service | TechCrunch