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Ashwin Viswanath

@ashwinviswanath.bsky.social
63 followers 19 following 209 posts

Product management in AI/ML, fintech, data platforms, API, and analytics. ❤️ open source. Building a stock signal app. Nothing should be construed as financial advice. Opinions are my own and not my employer’s.

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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
If consumer confidence keeps falling lower and lower, it will hurt consumer discretionary, and especially retail stocks hard. $XRT $XLY $NKE $LULU $UA $AEO are especially at risk. Coupled with today’s hot PCE inflation report, the risks are even bigger.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 24/08/2026
If this is true, then Nvidia is underwriting and backstopping a whole lot of bad deals. Depending on the terms of the guarantees, if any of these AI companies go belly up, it could negatively affect Nvidia stock as well because they have to dip into their free cash flows. x.com/kakashiii111...
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
The majority of AI data centers yet to be built have faced opposition and this will constrain compute. Thus, the more efficient Chinese open-source models will be used instead and this will put the revenues of Anthropic and OpenAI at risk. The semis will also get more efficient at power usage.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 22/08/2026
Jamin Ball mentions how more headcount is needed to increase the TAM of AI. Yet, many companies are laying off humans. He compares Snowflake to Teradata back in 2017. The latter is in a specific category of databases while AI has many unproven categories cloudedjudgement.substack.com/p/clouded-ju...
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
Take a look at the charts of the rising 30 year yield and the dollar index. In January 2024, the dollar index had really gone up on the assumption that money would flow into America. Strangely, the yield had fallen. Now, the yield is at all-time high, but the dollar is falling.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
After the blockbuster earnings season, there’s a tremendous amount of bullishness about next quarter and the consensus amongst fund managers is that we will have a “no landing” scenario. When expectations are this high, even the slightest mishap can cause the market to tumble.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 19/08/2026
I bought Moderna in late 2024 in the $40 range and sold it for a slight profit in February of this year because the stock was moving sideways? Thankfully, I still hold Merck and have held the same tranche since March 2015. Also have $IBB and $XBI for many years. Biotech is a volatile industry!
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 18/08/2026
From this week’s Simply Wall Street: the Europeans are literally regulating themselves to death when it comes to AC. There are some buildings in France where you have one of the most restrictive retrofit rules. This could be a good opportunity for Carrier to go in and capture some revenue.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
There’s a detail everyone’s missing: $AMAT only provided forecasts until 2027 because that is the date for which their customers have provided forecasts. Where are these growth estimates for 2030 coming from when the semis themselves only have line of sight until 2027? en.sedaily.com/internationa...
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 16/08/2026
All components of inflation are coming down but it’s been stuck above 2.5% for a while now. If it doesn’t come down fast enough, the Fed will raise rates. The other wild card here is the cost of computer peripherals which have gone up and is a major portion of inflation. This is because of AI usage
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Most of our GDP is being driven by AI data center spending in anticipation of massive demand. OpenRouter shows DeepSeek token usage surging leading to collapsing token prices. This isn’t good for OpenAI or Anthropic, who are the top customers of the hyperscalers. What happens if they bleed cash?
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 15/08/2026
Amongst all the hyperscalers, Google has raised the most debt issuance. Their latest round was $25 billion which brings their total to over $114 billion. None of this is good for the free cash flows of hyperscalers. 
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
We know Nvidia is lining up other investors because it believes the usable life of a GPU is far beyond 5 years. Read this piece about the risky business Nvidia is getting into: stratechery.com/2026/nvidias...
stratechery.com
Nvidia’s Risky Business
Nvidia is finding new ways for its customers to raise money, and it’s expanding the risk of the AI buildout significantly.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
The NFIB report is out (nfib.com/wp-content/upl…). Optimism Index rose 2.4 points to 99.8, vs 97.4 in June and is above the 52-yr avg of 98.0 - the highest reading since August 2025, with 8 of 10 components improving (biggest was hiring plans). Interest on short-term loans rose from 7.4 to 7.9%.
nfib.com
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 08/08/2026
The US trade deficit has narrowed but if you look at the blip at the end, both our exports and our imports declined. No wonder the GDP increase was pretty low. That’s not a good sign for the rest of the economy.
US balance of trade for imports and exports
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Jun 30, 2026: ASML 52-wk high $1999.96 Aug 12, 1996: Cisco partners with WorldCom Oct 11, 1999, Nvidia GeForce 256 Aug 12, 2026: July CPI print Aug 26, 2026: midpoint between June 30 & October 23, 2026 Nvidia releases earnings before the Fed meets Sep 11, 2026: Aug CPI print & 9/11 25th anniversary
static.klipy.com
Thanos: What Did It Cost? Everything.
Alt: Thanos: What Did It Cost? Everything.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 07/08/2026
Here is research that projects AI datacenter electricity usage through the year 2033. It was done based on semiconductor purchases. I have issues with this kind of research because semiconductors are being made more power efficient and much of the demand are purchases being pulled forward. 
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 06/08/2026
During the AI era, we’ve had many corrections, and with stellar earnings from Sandisk and Western Digital failing to move markets, it’s hard to know what catalyst is needed. The spring run up in semiconductors may have been caused by hedge funds. Emerging markets have been flat during this period.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 04/08/2026
With the intervention in the Japanese yen, we should look at what happens to the yen-peso carry trade. The last time this faltered in mid 2024, take a look at ETFs like EWW and ILF. Right now, the yields on US treasuries are still higher than Japanese ones which is probably saving this trade. 
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
If the Japanese are going to intervene in the falling yen, then doesn’t that strengthen the yen, raise interest rates, and take away the Japanese carry trade? And shouldn’t that affect our stock market negatively? We’ve seen Japanese bond yields go up for a while but it hasn’t impacted our stocks. 
The yen has been declining against the US dollar for a very long time now. There was a sudden intervention which raised its price against the US dollar and there is speculation whether this will continue. 
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 31/07/2026
The book destruction by Anthropic reminds me of what Thanos says in Endgame: “I will shred this universe down to its last atom and then, with the stones you've collected for me, create a new one. Teeming with life that knows not what it has lost but only what it has been given. A grateful universe.”
static.klipy.com
Thanos Marvel: A Greatfull Universe
Alt: Thanos delivering a line in avengers endgame about how he wants to shred this universe down to its last atom and build a new one teaming with life that knows not what has been taken but only what has been given. A grateful universe.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
Kevin Warsh gave no clue as to how he would battle high inflation and you saw the bond and stock market react violently. The hardest choices require the strongest wills. In acting this way, he follows in the footsteps of Greenspan who presided over the dotcom crash. And that is destiny fulfilled. 
Three members of the FOMC dissented against keeping rates steady. They wanted rates to go up. Although rates were held steady, the stock market did not like Kevin Warsh’s lack of explanation as to how he would tackle inflation. Treasuries swung violently during the fed chair press conference and then reshuffled back to where they were. 
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 30/07/2026
This day extracts a heavy toll. Meta’s stock was punished due to its free cash flow decline while Microsoft was rewarded due to reducing capex. There’s only so much cash flow left over. When there’s too many mouths and not enough to go around, investors bail. What I predicted has come to pass.
The consensus forecast is for hyperscalers to spend even more on AI capex compared with the forecast from a month ago.When results of both matter and Microsoft were announced after hours, investors loved Microsoft Capex slow down and hated Meta‘s revenues. Meta’s decline in free cash flows shows how much AI Capex is straining it. 
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 29/07/2026
I expect Kevin Warsh to say that the Fed will resume QT, allow the MBS runoff to continue, and reinforce that the Fed has no tolerance for persistently high inflation. He’ll also tie a lower balance sheet to lower policy rates and say that the Fed will rely on the trimmed mean to measure CPI.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 28/07/2026
Even though Citadel believes that the Fed will raise rates, I don’t think they will. They’ll hold because Warsh has said that he wants to rely more on the CPI trimmed mean so that it strips out outliers and one time shocks. The CPI trimmed mean is pretty stable www.clevelandfed.org/indicators-a...
clevelandfed.org
Median CPI
The median CPI is a measure of inflation computed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland. It ranks the components of CPI inflation and picks the one in the middle. Its construction makes it less sen...
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
Two different headlines about Jeff Bezos about the same story. This one from Fortune: fortune.com/article/jeff... and this one from TNW: thenextweb.com/news/bezos-s.... Reminder to everyone to always look behind the headlines even in a world with ever-decreasing attention spans.
fortune.com
Jeff Bezos says working harder is the cure for anxiety: ‘The stress goes away the second I take that first step’ | Fortune
Bezos worked through decades of stress to build the No. 1 Fortune 500 company.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 23/07/2026
Oil is now higher and we all know what happened the last time it was this high back in March. The only difference is back then, we still had oil reserves to draw from whereas now they are perilously low. This does not bode well for any stock.
A chart of oil prices from 2025 until now showing the spike during the recent Iran war and how it just hit $100 per barrel again.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Kimi has a promotion where if existing users share their referral code and it results in a download, both you and I get entered into a draw to get a year of free membership. Here is my code: kimi-bot.com/activities/v...
kimi-bot.com
Kimi Moon Landing Plan - Invite Friends & Win Prizes
Invite friends to Kimi and both sides will receive draw chances. 100% win prizes!
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
With Perplexity, you could simply select additional connectors, but now you have to select each one individually and go back to the UI to select others. I think that most Pro users selected all and it increased token consumption costs for Perplexity, so now they’re adding friction to this process.
Screenshot of the Perplexity mobile app which shows all the connectors you can select when it processes a prompt for you. Some of the connectors you can see on the screen include the web, academic, Gmail, Wiley, CB insights, pitchbook, statista, and another button which allows you to manage connectors and add any additional ones that you want.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
Most of the banking stocks are on a tear and it looks like the semiconductor stocks are experiencing quite a selloff since their highs in mid June. But then again, we also know that it’s the trading revenue that’s bolstering these banking stocks. So if the AI bubble pops, what happens to them?
Share prices of Citibank, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America from July 14 onwards especially as Citibank was talking about its earnings.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 14/07/2026
When will the AI bubble pop? We know Warsh wants to cut the money supply, but there’s more money printing. During the pandemic bubble, the sign was bond rates going up in late 2021 in anticipation of a Fed hike. Now we’re in a high interest rate environment and we don’t know where inflation will go.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 10/07/2026
The S&P has downgraded Oracle to one notch above junk status due to their concerns over weaker cash flows, competition from Meta & SpaceX, and the risks posed by OpenAI being the largest AI datacenter customer, making up over half of the $638 billion worth of RPO. www.spglobal.com/ratings/en/r...
spglobal.com
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Microsoft is replacing openAI with some of their own models. I wonder if they’re willing to write down the value of their investment if it comes down to it? I suspect they must’ve run the numbers on their margins and correlated it with their stock price. thenextweb.com/news/microso...
thenextweb.com
Microsoft swaps in its own AI over OpenAI in some apps
Microsoft is routing some app features to its in-house MAI models instead of OpenAI and Anthropic, chipping away at its reliance on partners.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 05/07/2026
Happy Fourth of July, my fellow Americans! This view of the Pacific with our stars & stripes in the foreground signifies an unlimited expanse for our ambition. We are the greatest country in the world and we must continue to strive towards even greater heights. We are inevitable.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
I am impressed by Kimi v 2.6 agentic capabilities and how I’m able to audit its chain of thought. I asked it to research some nuclear energy stocks for me, and look at how I’m able to see which skills it is retrieving, how is executing Python code, and any activities it is doing in its terminal.
A research plan generated by Kimi‘s computer on researching nuclear energy sector performance. It is gathering financial data for VST, CEG, SMR, and OKLO. It will then review financial metrics, research research industry, and then compare companies against industry benchmarks. Finally it will create a comprehensive analysis on a spreadsheet and finish writing the report with findings and conclusions.It is first gathering stock data and use to compare the stocks and then going back to its to-do list. It is then invoking it’s deep research skill to perform the next step in the research plan which was financial analysis for the stocks. It is also going into its skill.MD file.It has now proceeded further into its task progress and has already retrieved financial statements around these different nuclear stocks in order to perform analysis. It still needs to get balance sheets and cash flow statements and get more specific information about power generation, nuclear industrial metrics, and recent news. It is now invoking a “fetch database“ function to search through Yahoo finance. I’m also able to see a quick data preview.More details around its task progress where I can see that it is executing Python code and thinking before executing even more Python code. I can click on the arrow to see what specific python code it has executed. In fact there are at least eight instances here where it is first thinking, and then I see a line where it is executing Python code, and where is thinking again.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
Between LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, CrewAI, when do you use these frameworks versus building lighter-weight primitives? Also, for fine-tuning or embeddings, is it better to use PyTorch and TensorFlow to write custom classes to define layers, weights, and dimensions or just Hugging Face?
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
This is a great article that outlines 3 ways in which the AI bubble might burst (dotcom-style violent crash, 2008-style economic contagion, or slow deflation due to unusable infrastructure) and what the EU can do to take advantage of it when that happens: federicozebele.substack.com/p/this-is-wh...
federicozebele.substack.com
This Is Why AI is a Bubble — and What EU Should Do
What the consensus says. What it stays silent about. And what would actually happen if it burst.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 20/06/2026
With the release of Google open knowledge format, I wonder if DBT is in serious trouble. With OKF, all data analysis can be automated and you don’t need a dedicated data analyst anymore. You do of course need ETL and data catalogs - that never changes no matter how the tech landscape changes!
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 14/06/2026
Microsoft’s take on the AI frontier ecosystem snscratchpad.com/posts/fronti.... To accomplish this, they must “hot swap” models. Before that, they must create an Azure service out of an open source model. Then, get rid of LLM-as-a-judge evals. Finally tie in observability and Azure API management.
snscratchpad.com
A frontier without an ecosystem is not stable
I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of the firm in an AI-driven economy.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
Software stocks are getting disrupted due to AI, yet have to destroy their 70% gross margins even more by using the frontier models. If AI wasn’t there as a growth catalyst in 2022 when we were in a bear market, I wonder where their stock prices might be today. What if ChatGPT and LLMs didn’t exist?
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 13/06/2026
Amazon voiced concerns about Anthropic‘s Fable model despite investing in them. Why would they do this? My theory is that they ran the numbers on token costs which were too much for their customers. They’ll probably deploy a Chinese open source model as an AWS service www.reuters.com/business/ret...
reuters.com
Amazon voiced concerns about Anthropic AI models before US  government's crackdown, source says
Amazon CEO ​Andy Jassy raised concerns about security risks in Anthropic’s most advanced AI models.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 12/06/2026
Friday March 10, 2000 was the peak of the dotcom bubble. 📉 Dr. Strange saw 14,000,605 possibilities and only 1 victory against Thanos. Add 14,000,605 minutes to March 10, 4pm ET and you get Friday, October 23, 2026 7:26am ET before the market opens. We’re in the endgame now.
static.klipy.com
Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) in Endgame
Alt: Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) in Endgame signaling to Tony stark with his index finger that this was the only chance at victory out of 14 million possibilities to take the infinity stones from Thanos’s gauntlet.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 11/06/2026
Anthropic will spend $200 million to study AI job disruptions. It comes soon after Dario called for a halt to further AI development. With OpenAI seeking a government stake, we know why – their unit economics are bad. But what’s in it for Anthropic spending this money? www.usnews.com/news/busines...
usnews.com
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 09/06/2026
As Anthropic and OpenAI tokens get more expensive, the hyperscalers will simply take open source models and launch their own distinct AI services on their clouds, similar to what they did during the Big Data days with Hortonworks.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 29/05/2026
In Feb about $1T in market cap was wiped off from SW stocks due to fears that Anthropic would eat into their market share. Anthropic recently closed a round that values it at almost $1T. Yet, today, software stocks are up a lot. How can both sectors be up simultaneously? fortune.com/2026/02/05/s...
fortune.com
The ‘dumb money’ steps in as traders lose $1 trillion on the realization that AI will eat tech companies first | Fortune
The chaos is mostly a tech-stock phenomenon. The equal-weight S&P 500 is actually at a record high.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 27/05/2026
Google Health doesn’t save you time with its generative AI features. It suggested to me to snap a picture of a snack I was taking and it would automatically calculate the calories. It completely botched the job and cost me more time in deleting the entry. I will simply stick with MyFitnessPal.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 20/05/2026
The $NVDA earnings out, and results having beaten expectations, but we have to keep an eye on the GPU trade broadening to other sectors, high CAPEX, desire for free cash flow from fund managers, and how the bond rates for hyperscalers have increased due to CAPEX spend. Nvidia is down after hours.
AI that matters: the artificial intelligence trade is broadening out beyond GPUs. This is a chart of the Philadelphia stock exchange semiconductor index drawing much faster than NvidiaA chart that shows how the Russell 1000 fares much better than a portfolio of high caps stocks thereby showing that high cap does not benefit shareholders. This chart goes back all the way to 2006. You can see the divergence forming from 2009 onwards.A Bank of America global fund manager survey revealed that most of them would like to see companies return cash to shareholders and improve balance Sheets instead of increasing capital spending. This desire as of course changed rapidly over the past decades and this chart goes back all the way to 2005. However, in the past year or so, the desired improve balance sheets and return cash to shareholders has gone up. The desire to improve balance sheets massively spiked upwards in 2009 and late 2021. Throughout the ZIRP (zero interest rate policy) era of the 2010s, the desired to increase capital spending out ranked the other desires by a lotThis chart shows how the long dated bonds for hyper scaler like Microsoft, AWS, and Google are faring compared to the other regular investment grade long dated bonds. These hyperscaler bonds demand a much higher interest because of all the capital expenditure spending they are engaging in right now.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 18/05/2026
Effects of generative AI on dev productivity: #AI tool usage ⬆️ 65% 🟰PR throughput ⬆️ 8%. Most orgs in 5-15% range, below the 3x-10x expectations. Coding is about 14% of dev time but AI tools introduce new bottlenecks like additional reviews, tech & cognitive debt newsletter.getdx.com/p/ai-product...
newsletter.getdx.com
AI and engineering AI productivity gains: More modest than expected
Findings from DX’s longitudinal analysis of AI’s impact on velocity from November 2024 to February 2026.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 11/05/2026
You must use AI. Do not let #AI use you.
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Ashwin Viswanath @ashwinviswanath.bsky.social · 09/05/2026
Totally agree that #AI isn’t good for trading and @anthropic.com will have their work cut out for them. LLMs frequently get stale data when calculating even basic things like support levels for limit buys. #stocks
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