KISS: (Keep it Simple Stupid)

When I first got into the business of investing and trading, I used to hear often this expression KISS: Keep it Simple Stupid. Back then, it was the idea to not overly complicate things, whether it was market direction, narrative or what matters to a specific stock. Similarly, it was said “it is not the girl you think is most attractive, it is the girl you think others will find the most attractive.” In that vein, both of these concepts are on steroids since the 2020 pandemic. Stocks with momentum often defy rationale valuation methodologies while the indices themselves often do not seem to reflect the underlying trends.

We sit here Sunday with the markets marking 52 week highs, for example, the QQQ closing at $539.52 on Wednesday of last week to see a drop by the close Friday of 2.5%. The storyline or narrative has a list of issues to it (as it always does): 1) a growth scare (S&P global US manu and services PMIs missing badly Friday), 2) momentum break, with winners like PLTR, VRT, VST, CEG, CVNA, TSLA, META, CRWD etc all “breaking” at the same time with some news, some sell the news and some just overbought being worked off, 3) Friday AI scare with Satya Nadella warning of overbuilds, albeit it is hard to discern his pragmatism on not funding OpenAIs LLM model build into the commodity zone vs a hand-off to the spending blinders of Masa at Softbank and Stargate, 4) Steve Cohen yelling fire on worried about the economy from tariffs, DOGE and immigration headwinds, 5) market seasonality ahead with tax selling into April 15th (new one just making its rounds). Are we due for a correction that is deeper than the Deepseek type drop we had a few weeks back or is it just another buy the dip opportunity?

Nvidia reports on Wednesday. Up until mid day Friday, the market had thought it was time to get positive on the 2H of 2025 for Nvidia and AI spending.