You are copying what active investors (in aggregate) are doing so if they’re fueling a bubble so are you.

With massive concentration like this you are forced to be bullish, as your success is predicated on the bubble not bursting.

How does your first premise follow from the second? Yes, you're not bullish on these companies specifically, but you're effectively giving them (and some others) your money and inflating their valuations. You're bullish on the status quo and they're a large part of the status quo.

In fact, it's arguably worse than deliberately investing in them, because you're completely indifferent to the soundness of their business model. The hope is just that through the magic of "efficient markets", someone else will arbitrage your errors away. I don't know if there are enough takers for a bet of this size.

Microsft, Google, Nvidia, and Facebook earn tons of money and fuel the bubble.

Are there any mutual funds that track these types of companies?

I second this, has anybody properly measured how much has actually been invested from private funds/pension funds? Is this really difficult to do?

I think the answer is extremely little.

> the $15 trillion held in private sector workers’ retirement accounts is now, for the first time in history, available to be invested in private funds.

The article acts as if this means there are $15T of funds that Coreweave can tap into at will, but all this means is that 401k plan admins are allowed to add private equity to the list of options in 401ks. I expect quite a small percent of plan participants to actually make use of said options even IF they are added, unless plan admins start changing the default investments to include them. Not saying that can't happen, but it hasn't happened yet.

Then again, when you look at the performance of your typical pension fund or university endowment, and then see the actual incentives of the people managing the money (as there's ultimately managers there looking for their personal best interests), then you see that said argument one could make is not exactly going to do well empirically.

The main reason we are seeing private equity now being offered in 401ks isn't that it's going to be great returns for your average mostly-self-directed worker, but because those managing private equity believe they will make more money if they managed more capital. There's no guarantee that they are making any choices there that provide good risk-adjusted returns. But the managers sure would be making more on fees.

There is, but the presumption in that argument is that those risky bets bring higher returns. If that assumption is invalid, the argument falls apart. (I'm not especially confident myself that private credit can actually bring higher returns over a long time horizon.)

Or perhaps not. You don't want to retire at a moment when the retirement fund is down 20% and decides to pay no interest on your savings for the next 10 years. Or not pay you at all.

No, these are who should make conservative slow raise, be sure not to crash bets. Cause when they crash, whole lot of people suffer.

You have the option of rearranging. your 401k investments where you can choose to invest in individual companies instead of the grab bag fund where the managers invest in a little bit, parceled out to many companies where they give equal weight to investing in Intel, Dell, Microsoft and Apple. Which is a horrible deal because Apple, for example, has outperform those three companies by a wide margin over the last 20 years.

Note: you have to go out of your way. to make this happen. Most funds prefer to dump everything together, so they don’t have to make individual tough decisions.

They also appear to be highly revenue generating businesses and yet supposedly they will collapse.

I’m spending quite a bit of money on subscriptions and API tokens and so are many people like me. The revenue numbers in the prospectus and what is known about AI revenue across the industry is real and significant revenue. Yes the capex is big but also exaggerated as they report 10 year numbers on contracts that have flexible cancellations etc.

I have no idea why people think AI will need a bailout. It appears to be one of the most rapidly profitable and expanding businesses we have ever seen.

Sam and I think another OpenAI exec have dropped the idea in recent interviews.

Tokenmaxxing was the management buying the marketing that AGI was here and if employees would only use AI they would herald their own replacement?

In other words, those who are doing it are winning and those who are not doing it are losing.

I think 1. and 2. could both be true at the same time.

1. is claimed to have happened because INVESTORS in AI companies rerated their investment due to a threat of construction restriction 2. is a prediction about the future of how the industry will turn out

Someone who believes (2) is less likely to have been an investor to begin with and therefore didn't participate in the price rerating for (1)

I do agree with your point that a reduction in spending would have a positive outcome overall if we turn out to be in an "arms race" with a lack of ROI.

401K’s can be self-managed. But you have to take it upon yourself to do so if you don’t, you will get dumped into a hodgepodge fund where you have the high performing and the low performing thrown together, the purpose is to average everything out in a safe conservative investment strategy.

If you take control and invest in individual companies and pay attention to what they’re actually doing, your returns can be a lot higher over time, however not all blue chip stocks are equal. Many are slugs some of the lowest performing stocks cruising on past reputation ie.. IBM or Intel, for example, both have come up a little bit from their low watermarks but they are nowhere near what they were in their heyday and probably never will be.

The article is not strictly about pension funds. There are several mentions of individual retirement accounts.

The major target retirement date funds are just "funds of funds" that are distributed across stock and bond index funds in an age appropriate allocation. e.g. https://investor.vanguard.com/investment-products/mutual-fun... They're generally not actively managed funds chasing bubbles.

I mean you're right but also not right.

If your retirement savings went down by 20% and you had to put off retirement by 5 years, but then you died after 5 years, you've lost your retirement!

Excepting shares of bankrupt companies, of course.

In fact, the problem is that they keep bailing us out of recessions, which will eventually lead to a collapse and possibly a depression.

2019: That bond bailout you didn't hear about

2020: COVID bailout

2022: Various credit/liquidity facilities and the slow-walked rate hikes

2023: Bank bailouts

I dunno what happens this time. So many cards have been played out and a lot of entities seem to be white-knuckling it.

The boom-and-bust cycle is a natural consequence of running an economy on debt: margin leads to speculation which leads to overheating, and then it has to cool off. It is entirely possible to guarantee the public's welfare during busts; you just have to sacrifice not having a ceiling on earnings/wealth.

Lucky enough we don't live in a free market. US America perhaps more than germany, non the less there are plenty of regulations to protect consumers.

If a recession was started because someone else is taking your retirement fonds and putting them in companies overvaluated to move money from retirement fonds to random other people, and this is closer to gambling than investment, regulators should step in.

I'm not sure I'd call her a regulator... she worked at the one of the ratings agencies.

Technically she wasn’t a regulator - I believe she was at one of the ratings agencies. In their defense, it looks like Anthropic’s IPO is going to receive a junk rating.

I don't understand his phenomenon either. Listened to a few long podcasts with Zitron. He had about 10-15 minutes worth of ideas and not much beyond that, mostly anecdotal stories about excesses. Nothing of it was particularly novel. Are AI companies in a huge bubble? Most likely. Is there a shitload of grifting? Yes, there is. Is AI itself useful? Not to the degree it's hyped, but yes, it has its uses. And that's about it. Nobody knows how the events will unfold, and listening to speculation feels like a complete waste of time.

Because he actually analyzes the rather ugly financials of the companies in the bubble.

For some reason the people who hate him the most are the ones most inclined to completely ignore the topics he actually talks about.

They all get hooked on anthropic screeching about ending humanity or some other nonsense and forget that this is a business. A business which is losing gargantuan stacks of cash and is running on the fumes of hype and cope.

Zitron had an extremely poor track record. https://danluu.com/zitron/

> owning an index means I still have a piece of the pie

You're assuming within-pie transfers.

US equities in 1990's were 40% of the world market; now they are 80%. It's pretty easy to imagine them going back to 40% or less as capital moves elsewhere. But owning indexes across currencies and markets is another layer of risk.

Pretty typical for social media websites to be largely private in 2026.

That seems like a pretty shallow dismissal: Perhaps it indicates a person is simply more-engaged with their real work than trying to be a terminally-online micro-celebrity.

More likely it's just a specific oversight with this one shared blog, because it lists four items for them and the oldest is 2018.