Analysts at Jefferies & Co. on. Wednesday published one of the strangest reports I’ve read in a long time, which laid out the case that we are at an “inflection point” for humanoid robots, but actually managed to convince me we are nowhere close to such an event.

The title is cute: “From Aasimov to the Assembly Line, Humanoid Robots Begin to Clock In.”

Except that, they aren’t really. “Atlas is not expected to approach a meaningful cumulative volume of 30,000 units until close to 2030 with Hyundai,” the report notes of Boston Robotics’s flagship unit, Atlas. Tesla’s “Optimus rollout is likely to be dominated by internal use in its factories, given constraints such as harmonic reducer torque density and ongoing mechanical redesign,” they note.

The bulk of the report, which was put together by a whole team of Jefferies analysts, including semi analyst Blayne Curtis and colleagues from all different areas of equities, is filled with rich technical details that are thoughtful.

However, the top-level perspective that has been thrown onto the thing strains to convince you of some imminent financial development that will be useful to a trader or possibly an investor. It is tremendous “organ music,” as in the opening fugue of a great drama.

“Humanity appears to be on the precipice of wider adoption of humanoid automatons,” it boldly states. “Humanoid robots—machines structurally resembling humans and built to operate in environments designed for people—are transitioning from longstanding aspiration to commercial reality.”

Except that the 46-page piece itself, though, is like the fine-print disclaimer about what doesn’t yet work regarding human-like robots.

Morgan Stanley chip analyst Joseph Moore engages in a spirited defense of memory-chip stocks Micron Technology and SanDisk on Thursday, after a sharp drop in their shares this week.

We are not in normal times as his main message, as things that would mark a normal “cyclical peak” in their businesses are moot with the rise of “agentic AI” and the need for much, much more memory.

“Looking for sell signals from prior cycles misses the point,” writes Moore. “Memory is not just constrained by AI demand — memory is increasingly THE primary constraint on AI demand.”

Moore has an Overweight rating on Micron shares, and a $520 price target — almost 50% upside from a recent $357 — and also Overweight on SanDisk stock with a $690 price target, about 13% from today’s $611.

I think Moore is right on the money on all points. Both Micron and SanDisk are in the TL20 group of stocks to consider, and I see good times continuing for both, as I wrote at the beginning of the year.  

Both stocks are down sharply today despite his endorsement.

Moore outlines his sense of the factors weighing on shares:

Shares of ARM Holdings are up nineteen percent on Wednesday at $159.99 after the company said Tuesday that it will go into competition for the first time ever with its customers, making its own microprocessor for the data centers, the “AGI CPU.”

At an event at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco, ARM CEO Rene Haas talked with analysts about the virtues of the AGI CPU to relieve the exhausted x86 CPUs of Intel and AMD. (Interestingly, both AMD and Intel shares surged 7% on the news — we’ll come back to that.)

The question now becomes, having earned the most expensive stock multiple of all semiconductor stocks based on a business of one-hundred-percent profit, or nearly, should ARM stock still trade for twenty-four times next year’s sales as it transitions to a business with fifty-percent profit margin?

Probably not, but let’s go through the numbers.

Merrill Lynch software analyst Tal Liani on Tuesday initiated coverage of CoreWeave, the debt-laden operator of artificial intelligence clouds that is under contract to OpenAI and Microsoft and Meta. It was one of the more interesting initiations in a while because it is positive, with a Buy rating, and a $100 target, but behind the lines, the subtext is quite negative to my mind.

Liani doesn’t write it, but I think the conclusion is that at some point, CoreWeave becomes just a software vendor, shedding the money-losing data center operations.

Liani’s critique boils down to three questions that he calls the “central debates” of investors: 1) Will the company lose its edge as Microsoft and the others build their own AI data centers, and as the game shifts from AI “training,” the making of new AI models, to “inference,” the making of predictions for the masses; 2) are they going to be able to transition to a broader market after having worked for a captive handful of customers for years; and 3) will they be able to keep financing operations that depend on quickly rushing equipment into service in order to pay their enormous debt service.

Deutsche Bank semiconductor analyst Ross Seymore this morning offered up a “chart book” of where semiconductor valuations sit. He notes that the chip equipment companies, including KLA and Lam Research, are the most expensive group: their forward price-to-earnings multiple is well above what the median had been for their stocks.

By contrast, Nvidia and Advanced Micro Devices are well below their median. Seymore sees the disparity between processor companies like Nvidia and equipment companies like Lam to be “puzzling dislocations in relative valuation.”

Seymore offers a handy chart that shows which stocks are expensive and which are cheap based on where their P/E is now relative to the historical median:

I wrote a week ago or so that software stocks are trading below their average price-to-sales multiple and could be acquisition bait.

That has not prevented software from continuing to trade lower in price and lower in reputation.

The latest casualties on Monday are nine software stocks that Jason Ader of William Blair cut from either Buy or Hold to either hold or Sell after concluding that, as he puts it, “AI has injected unprecedented uncertainty into the software sector — every company will need to rethink their product, their pricing, and their GTM strategy.”

I’ve laid out the nine for you in a handy table:

It might seem pointless to be worrying about stock allocations with a war in the Middle East, but my philosophy tends to be in good times and bad, one needs to focus on the quality of stock investment — if you're going to be putting money into the market at all. 

Last week, for the seventh rebalancing of the TL20group of stocks to consider, I swapped out five names and swapped in five new ones.

Based on a reference date of March 13th, the TL20 is down a third of a percent in the past week, holding up better than a two-percent fall in the broader indices. 

Year to date, the TL20 is up 5%, better than down 7% for the Nasdaq Composite, and down 5% for the S&P 500.

Since inception, the TL20 is up 309%, more than triple the Nasdaq and more than quadruple the S&P. 

It has also done much better than benchmarks such as Cathie Wood’s ARK Innovation ETF, the ARKK, up 57%; the IGV, the iShares Tech-Software ETF, up 52%; and the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index, up 185%.

Even though the stock market was fairly terrible this past week, they were partying in Los Angeles.

That was where fiber-optic vendors such as Lumentum and Coherent were showing off their wares on the show floor of the OFC conference, one of the most closely watched trade shows for the fiber-optic industry. The outlook was extremely positive. The show was sold out, with over 16,000 attendees.

The big theme at the show, as it has been for years now, is fiber-optic lines replacing copper cabling in racks of computers in the data center. As speeds increase, and distances grow longer between computers, copper gives out and you need optics instead. 

That has always been true, but there is an added sense of momentum in the shift to optics because of Nvidia’s relentless takeover of the artificial intelligence data center.

Nvidia’s vision, as articulated by CEO Jensen Huang the day before at its own GTC conference in San Jose, is that multiple racks of computers will work together as one giant virtual supercomputer. In order for that to happen, the connections between racks of computers need to be bolstered with greater and greater bandwidth so that a chip in Rack A, say, will communicate directly with a chip in Rack Z, and all the racks in between will communicate, all at top speed.

I rebalanced the TL20 group of stocks to consider this week, with my usual laudatory words for DRAM and NAND chip maker  Micron Technology. 

Over a decade ago, I wrote for Barron’s that Micron could become one of the most valuable chip makers in the world as a result of the semiconductor “renaissance,” and Wednesday evening’s quarterly numbers from Micron affirmed my sense that Micron is becoming much more valuable. 

But, the stock is down three percent today at $447.02, even as stock price targets zoom to as high as $700 at some shops. This is similar to what we saw Wednesday with Nvidia stock selling off despite very positive commentary by Nvidia management on  Tuesday during a meeting with analysts. 

First, the numbers, which are, to my mind, more incredible even than those of Nvidia.

Analysts on Wednesday were mulling everything they heard from Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and CFO Colette Kress on Tuesday during the session held for financial topics at the company’s GTC conference in San Jose, California.

The biggest technical point of Huang’s remarks was that the OpenClaw software that came out in January, which lets you run software agents (and can cause chaos), is the new operating system software for our age. It’s just like Windows or Mac for agents, he implied, because it manages resources and runs scheduling tasks, etc.

“Every single software company, every single company needs to have an OpenClaw strategy,” said Huang. “This is a very big deal.” Huang plans to help by having revealed this week Nvidia’s own version of the open-source software, which Huang calls “NemoClaw.” Oh, and, selling a lot of chips.

Whatever you think about speculative excess in AI, the fact is that we are at an historic moment in the history of computer chips, a semiconductor renaissance that has been gathering steam for years. That very profound change is sending ripples through the tech market. Nvidia is a big part of the story. Here are other ways an investor can capture the seismic shift.

In another era, Adobe’s financial report Thursday night would have been admirable. The company increased revenue faster than people expected, twelve percent, which is no small feat at $6.4 billion in revenue.

But CEO Shantanu Narayen is stepping down after eighteen years, and it’s not a victory lap. The threat of artificial intelligence has bedeviled the stock for a long time. The shares are down 38% in the past twelve months, and the multi-year, annualized return is mediocre. Since Narayen took the top spot in December of 2007, the shares are up 540%, which is well below the Nasdaq’s 900% in that time.

The search is on for his successor.

Asked what qualities his successor might have, Narayen Thursday evening offered some vague stuff about finding someone who will take advantage of the “opportunity that AI has.” He didn’t seem to have any real thoughts, or he kept them to himself.

I have some thoughts.

Here’s a fun game you can play at home: Which aging software giant will try to make up for a lack of innovation by acquiring a younger firm currently in the bargain bin? Which private equity shop will milk the cash flows of some struggling outfit under the pretense of “making it great again”? If you want to know what happens to software stocks, consider the prices at which firms have been taken out, including IBM’s $10 billion deal for Confluent and Salesforce’s $8 billion deal for Informatica.

“Thirty to forty percent of our code now is being generated with Claude Code.”

Oracle reported results after market close on Tuesday, and the stock jumped 9% in after-hours trading, and is up over 12% Wednesday morning, at $167.47.

The favorable response is mainly in response to the company’s impressive cloud computing sales growth of 44%.

However, nothing about the report changes my feeling this has become a bad proposition.

The company has gone massively into debt, they’re diluting shareholders, they’re eroding their margins, and, worst of all, we don’t know just how much the company is exposed to one giant customer, OpenAI.

It’s funny what is trending Tuesday morning: big cuts in price targets for software stocks even as tech companies are doubling-down on the artificial intelligence-generated code that is causing havoc.

ServiceNow, Salesforce, Hubspot and Zscaler are among names seeing price targets slashed at various brokers Tuesday morning. These price target cuts are mostly still accompanied by Buy ratings or the equivalent.

The argument is not that the companies are in trouble. Rather, the analysts are trying to find what the bottom is in stock valuations, so they are proactively cutting the valuation multiples they put on these stocks.

I was certainly caught by surprise to learn this morning that Google’s YouTube has surpassed Walt Disney to become the world’s biggest media company, according to an estimate by Michael Nathanson of the eponymous Moffett-Nathanson research house.

Nathanson’s lengthy report is full of several original observations. He writes that the comment by Google on its most recent earnings call that YouTube made “over $60 billion” in revenue in 2025 implies actual revenue of $62 billion. That is larger than Disney’s reported $60.9 billion when one strips out the amusement parks revenue for Disney, he notes.

I’ve made some dumb mistakes in my time, but picking Oracle stock for the TL20 group of stocks to consider in August has to be one of my dumbest. The shares are down 33% since then at a recent $150.72.

I should have gone with my gut feeling in January of last year, when the news of Oracle partnering with OpenAI and SoftBank for a massive data center project, “Stargate,” came to light. It seemed exorbitant at the time. What we now know is that it has become a huge point of customer concentration for Oracle since then given how much of its outlook is tied to OpenAI as a customer.

Micron Technology shares are up 33% this year so far at a recent $378.75, and have more than quadrupled in twelve months, all driven by the incredibly tight conditions of DRAM supply. The latest stats from the Semiconductor Industry Association show DRAM prices up thirty percent, month to month, in January.

Will the stock crash when DRAM prices stop rising? Well, probably cool, but not crash, in my view.

We saw in December how rising DRAM prices are driving Micron’s profit margin way, way up; we’re going to hear again from Micron a week from Wednesday. Citigroup’s Atif Malik, who’s bullish on Micron stock, asks a fundamental question this morning: Is it different this time? 

Shares of chip equipment maker BE Semiconductor are down sixteen percent today on a news headline about slight changes to the design of “high-bandwidth memory,” or, HBM, the fastest kinds of DRAM memory for artificial intelligence applications. 

The development is certainly not fatal to BE, but it shows you just how much the stock is tied to a very specific sense of a payoff from one aspect of the AI trade.

In brief, the development, as identified by Pierre Ferragu of New Street Research, who has been following BE Semi’s business assiduously for quite some time, is that the DRAM community decided to change requirements for the “thickness” of the HBM parts. HBM is made of a stack of DRAM chips. They’re specified by committee to have certain dimensions. The latest thinking of the committee is written up this morning in a longish article by ZDNet Korea’s Jang Gyeong-yun.

Software maker Samsara, which sells purpose built hardware and software packages to run fleets of vehicles — logistics companies, school bus operators, etc. — is one of the many promising software stocks that has struggled for a while now. The shares were off sixteen percent heading into Thursday evening’s earnings report.

It turned out to be a very favorable report, and now the stock is up about eleven percent, pre-market, at $32.50.

Will it stick? That’s the question. This is the third quarter in a row where the shares are seeing double-digit gains, and yet, Samsara has tended to give up those gains in past in relatively short order.

Most of the time when Marvell Technology reports earnings, its shares sell off. In five years, the shares sold off a dozen quarters, according to FactSet data. So, the stock being up almost twelve percent Friday morning, in pre-market trading, at $84.70, is cause for celebration.

Marvell’s results and outlook came in just fine, though I’m inclined to see competitor Broadcom as the better bet.

Like Broadcom, Marvell helps companies make custom AI chips that they increasingly use as alternatives to chips from Nvidia. While Broadcom has six customers, Marvell has two, Amazon and Microsoft.

Enthusiasm for Marvell rests in it suddenly being the budget way to play the AI trade, if you will. Marvell shares are cheaper: they trade for under eleven times next year’s projected earnings per share, while Broadcom trades for under sixteen times. They’re both cheaper than a market, but Marvell even more so.

When chip giant Broadcom reported in December, the key issue was the company having to absorb greater costs in order to support new business with AI startup Anthropic. The result was going to be “deterioration” of the company’s gross profit margin, CEO Hock Tan said back then.

But, last night on the company’s first-quarter conference call, Tan walked back that assertion. He said they now expected to hold their company’s gross profit margin steady at the 77% it was for the quarter just ended.

“On further study, relative to even comments that I did make last quarter,” said CFO Kirsten Spears, the impact of rising costs is “not going to be substantial at all. So I wouldn't worry about it.”

• After a continued heavy earnings schedule, we now have over three hundred earnings reports of merit on which to reflect.

• The trend is clearly still in favor of “infrastructure” stocks, things such as semiconductors and chip-equipment makers and computer system vendors. Investors are still dumping software names.

• Recent earnings winners in infrastructure include Applied Optoelectronics, following a report last week that sent its shares soaring by 57% the next day — after having already gained 54% leading up to the report.

• Even the most bullish analysts cautioned investors not to take too seriously Applied Opto’s extremely bullish scenario for data-center-related sales of $4.5 billion by the middle of next year.

“Try to imagine Claude Code writing a distributed system for inline inspection of traffic and detecting any cyber issues!”

The past forty-eight hours of earnings are pretty dismal. Many of the companies seeing upward stock moves are companies whose shares have been weak for a long time and are seeing a minor reprieve, including software makers Box, GitLab and Asana. In the case of GitLab and Asana, missing revenue for the quarter doesn’t bode well going forward. 

Database maker MongoDB, which had been one of the biggest turnaround stories in software last summer, plummeted 23% because of a disappointing forecast. The sticking point at the moment is that the company’s additions to its database of artificial intelligence stuff is not generating a lot of revenue — a familiar story across the software landscape.

The big surprise was Tuesday’s 23% jump in shares of hydrogen fuel cell maker and distributor Plug Power. They have heavy, heavy assets, such hydrogen production plants in Tennessee, Georgia, and Louisiana.

“The big impediments to enterprise adoption are things that can be solved with data engineering.”

I noted back in December that the double-digit rise in the price of DRAM memory chips globally is great news for Micron Technology — indeed, it has powered the stock up 44% this year at a recent $411.54 — but it is a big headache for companies that have to build things with the increased expense of DRAM.

The debate at the moment is whether Apple will be hurt by the memory tax, which has the possibility of either driving up its iPhone prices or forcing Apple to eat the cost and sacrifice profit margin. Apple shares are down two percent this year, at $266.18, in line with the Nasdaq Composite.

The negative view is expressed in straightforward terms by, for example, UBS analyst David Vogt, who rates Apple’s stock Neutral, with a $280 target, writing Monday that the rise in memory prices will reduce prospects for whatever arrives this fall as an “iPhone 18.”

“The outlook is increasingly cloudy” for iPhone, writes Vogt.

Shares of CoreWeave, the debt-laden provider of artificial intelligence data centers, are down 16% Friday morning at $81.65.

This is the fourth time the company has reported quarterly results since coming public on March 28th of last year. And it’s the fourth time the stock is selling off on the numbers.

Funny thing, though, CoreWeave has actually been a terrific performer since the IPO, up 144% through Thursday’s close, and 36% this year.

Clearly, the rhythm of this stock is that it sells off on earnings and then buyers swoop in.

So what is there to like and not like this time around? Basically, the company has huge demand but profit keeps slipping farther into the future.

Wednesday evening is one of the most consequential evenings of the earnings season, with Nvidia reporting its January-ending results, which easily topped expectations.

I’m surprised by the weak response to Nvidia Wednesday night — shares up just a fraction at $195.94. So is Simon Leopold of Raymond James, who writes, “we are a little perplexed by the muted stock response.” He reiterates his Strong Buy rating and hikes his price target to $291 from $272. 

Certainly, the results are something to cheer about. Back in September, when I rebalanced the TL20 group of stocks to consider, I had hypothesized that Nvidia would show less upside every quarter. But, I was wrong. The company’s sales forecast tonight is the strongest in almost two years.