Monthly rollup | November 2025
- Nov 30, 2025
- 8 min read
Stocks Mentioned Meta (META), Google (GOOGL), Oracle (ORCL), Microsoft (MSFT), MicroStrategy (MSTR), Super Micro Computer (SMCI), Top Ships (TOPS), IREN ltd. (IREN)
Highlights
November 03, 2025
Gold is showing incredible strength
It is incredible that after such a long bull run and parabolic peak, gold hasn't corrected much in terms of price. Demand from investors the world over is strong.
Even Wall Street has cottoned on, calling for a 20% allocation to gold as an alternative to fixed income.
However, this price action signals we may be in for a long and boring consolidation phase, similar to the April-August sideways move.
A great bull market does its best to buck traders off. Don't get frustrated.
Powell reveals his AI ignorance
At the FOMC press conference, Jerome Powell said the AI bubble isn't like dotcom because AI spending is being financed from profits and equity, not debt.
Well Jerome, you couldn't be more wrong. Meta (META), Google (GOOGL), Oracle (ORCL) have all raised debt to blow on GPUs.
IREN Microsoft deal
Bitcoin miner turned AI bubble stock IREN ltd. (IREN) is up 22% pre-market on announcing a $9.7 billion GPU contract with Microsoft (MSFT).
As always, the devil is in the details.
Before it can provide any service, IREN first needs to spend $5.8 billion buying the GPUs and ancillaries.
MSFT will provide $1.94 billion upfront, but IREN needs to come up with a further $3.86 billion to fund this capex.
Assuming this is debt financed at 10%, the 5-year contract achieves breakeven in year 4.
Here's the math:
Annual revenue: $1.94 billion
Initial capex: $5.8 billion
Total interest on loan: $0.77 billion
Gross profit: $3.13 billion
Annualized gross profit: $626 million
IREN currently spends $136 mn on SG&A to capture $500 mn in revenue. That amounts to 27 cents out of every dollar in revenue, down from 38 cents the previous year.
Assuming the same run rate and zero depreciation on the new data center facility, the company will spend $528 mn on SG&A to capture the incremental $1.94 bn in annual MSFT revenue.
Annualized operating profit = $98 million
Let's be charitable and assume the company manages to cut down SG&A to 20% of revenue.
Optimistic annualized operating profit = $238 million
While "$9.7 billion contract" makes for a great headline, the numbers throw cold water on this fairy tale.
Making $238 million on a $5.8 billion investment amounts to a mere 4.1% pre-tax return.
The hard truth is data centers are a low-margin business. Microsoft is smart, which is why they have signed this deal rather than build this capability in-house.
IREN investors have nothing to cheer for. This deal is inferior to simply buying 10-year US treasuries and calling it a day.
November 04, 2025
MSTR Ponzi - Now in Europe
With bitcoin tanking and MicroStrategy (MSTR) down 11% YTD, Michael Saylor seems to be getting desperate.
The newest capital raise using STRE preferred (which complements the already issued STRD, STRK, STRC and STRF) comes with an important clause -
If MicroStrategy is too broke to pay dividends on STRE, it will dilute holders of its other securities and come up with the cash within 60 days.
Let's see if this is sufficient reassurance to induce investors to risk their capital for a 10% yield.
Paul Tudor Jones and Market timing
Legendary trader Paul Tudor Jones, famous for his 1987 Black Monday trade, likes to call market turns. But the headlines miss his approach to trading these turns.
Below excerpt from Market Wizards is illuminating:
Jack Schwager: My impression is that you often implement positions near market turns. Sometimes your precision has been uncanny. What is it about your decision-making process that allows you to get in so close to the turns?
PTJ: I consider myself a premier market opportunist. That means I develop an idea on the market and pursue it from a very-low-risk standpoint until I have repeatedly been proven wrong, or until I change my viewpoint.
Schwager: In other words, it makes a better story to say, “Paul Jones buys the T-bond market 2 ticks from the low,” rather than, “On his fifth try, Paul Jones buys the T-bond market 2 ticks from its low.”
PTJ: I think that is certainly part of it. The other part is that I have always been a swing trader, meaning that I believe the very best money is to be made at the market turns.
Everyone says you get killed trying to pick tops and bottoms and you make all the money by catching the trends in the middle. Well, for twelve years, I have often been missing the meat in the middle, but I have caught a lot of bottoms and tops.
When catching market turns, being wrong repeatedly is part of the process.
Michael Burry is misunderstood because he is great at it.
November 05, 2025
Bond Investors prepare for Stagflation
Since September 2024, the Fed cut rates from 5.5% to 4%.
During the same period, the bond market (30Y) hiked yields from 3.9% to 4.75%.
As the below chart shows, bonds topped out at the first rate cut and are now pricing in higher inflation.
Meanwhile, oil is hovering around $60 on demand concerns - i.e. recession fears.
While stock investors are focused on the AI bubble, bond investors are quietly preparing for stagflation.
November 06, 2025
META: A case study in value destruction
As of Q3, META had working capital of $36.16 billion and long term debt, including leases, of $48.95 billion. Its net cash position is negative $12.79 billion.
In 2025, they plan to spend $71 billion on capex, and project significantly higher capex spend in 2026.
While the company generates sufficient free cash flow to cover it all, they need the debt in order to have cash available for share buybacks. And they can't skip the buybacks since they need it to offset share based compensation.
The AI bulls are right - there's enough equity and profits to power the data center bubble. What they miss is the value destruction that comes from incinerating capital for no return.
The question isn't whether Meta is overvalued at 28 times earnings.
The question is - Why pay 28 times earnings to buy Meta if those earnings will simply be frittered away?
Bitcoin treasury company #Metaplanet has crashed and burned
The company owns 30,823 bitcoins at an average acquisition cost of $108k/BTC. The giant position is now 5% underwater.
Rather than cut their losses like any good trader would, the company is doubling down, raising $100 million in debt to buy more bitcoin and lower their cost basis. Perhaps they'll also use the cash to engineer a short squeeze.
If bitcoin treasuries are getting wrecked with bitcoin at $100k, what happens when bitcoin goes to $40k? The NFT craze of 2022 offers a clue.
Three cheers for the ongoing Ponzi implosion!
November 10, 2025
Don't buy the dip
When a company has known issues and corrects in price, buying the dip is a bad idea. Even when it initially appears to work.
A cautionary tale for investors in AI bubble stocks.
November 13, 2025
My Solana trade ($11-> $220)
Some of you have asked why I have my Solana trade in my bio. Here's my story:
I moved from India to UAE in 2023 to trade crypto and get ahead of capital controls. It was a scary time.
Silicon Valley Bank and Silvergate both failed, and the Biden admin shut down Signature bank with no warning. The only 3 crypto-friendly banks in the US were suddenly gone.
Binance founder CZ was under criminal prosecution for money laundering. Bitmex founder Arthur Hayes had already been sentenced, and the rumor was CZ would be extradited from the UAE while Binance would be forced to close down.
Ethereum had moved from PoW to PoS and nobody really knew if ETH 2.0 would be a failure like "New Coke" or revitalize the network.
In crisis lay opportunity. Trading volume had dried up across exchanges as a result of the 2022 failures and FTX blowup. Discretionary swing trading was actually profitable.
When Robinhood $HOOD de-listed Solana $SOL in June 2023, on fears it would be deemed a security, I allocated 5% of my portfolio to it. And staked it all for a 7% yield. Price: $17.
I had seen Solana's rise in the previous bull market, its association with SBF, and subsequent collapse to $8 when FTX went bust. I knew their technology was better than Ethereum, and much faster.
Sure, the network had outage issues and was the butt of jokes (Solana spelled backwards is...). But those were all solvable problems. Besides, I had already doubled my money on Solana in a previous trade, so I was re-deploying profits and not just fresh equity.
The bull market began with Grayscale winning against the SEC, paving the way for an eventual bitcoin ETF. BlackRock entered the scene. The Fed pivoted.
And just like that, in Q4 2023, crypto roared back.
I rode the wave into 2024, exiting Bitcoin in February, Ethereum in July, and finally Solana exactly a year ago. By then, that 5% allocation had ballooned to 80% of my crypto portfolio and ~70% of my liquid net worth.
I reckon I'll only have a handful of such trades over my lifetime.
Making money in crypto is hard work. Even harder than that is keeping it. Walking away from the game.
Which I did.
In the last year, my crypto portfolio has been fully in staked USDT and Paxgold. Ironically, the 'safety' trade has outperformed bitcoin. Solana is 30% below my exit price.
I kept 'Rode $SOL from $11 to $220' in my bio because I knew I'd either be wildly right in my timing or way too early. Either way, that was my trade and I wanted to be honest about it.
A year ago when I announced my exit from crypto, my friends called me an idiot behind my back. But I've seen these cycles before and I knew what was right for me.
I wanted to surf one last wave on the crypto cycle before retiring for good and focusing on less stressful parts of capital markets.
I succeeded in walking away, and a year later, I have zero regrets.
November 14, 2025
Waling away from winners - Super Micro Computer
Super Micro Computer (SMCI) was the hottest stock of 2024. It was the first stock in history to achieve an RSI reading of 100 on the daily chart.
I shorted it because it was a fraud, and covered my short at the exact bottom, which was partly luck.
I haven't touched it since.
As with my Solana trade, walking away from winners is my superpower. Believe me, that part isn't easy.
The key is to deeply internalize this truism - there will always be another great trade.
Don't obsess over past winners. Find the next trade.
November 29, 2025
Top Ships
Top Ships (TOPS) ($27M market cap, $290M EV), a tanker shipping company, is acquiring $200M worth of Dubai residential real estate from its President and CEO.
The synergies in these two lines of business are obvious. But hey, rest assured the transaction will be at a 10% discount to fair market value.
Sentiment marks the top
In 2000, the buzzword was "eyeballs".
In 2013, the buzzword was "3D printing".
In 2018, the buzzword was "blockchain".
In 2025, the buzzword is "AI".
Sentiment marks the top.
November 30, 2025
What were you thinking?
"At 10 times revenues, to give you a 10-year payback, I have to pay you 100% of revenues for 10 straight years in dividends. That assumes I can get that by my shareholders.
That assumes I have zero cost of goods sold, which is very hard for a computer company. That assumes zero expenses, which is really hard with 39,000 employees.
That assumes I pay no taxes, which is very hard. And that assumes you pay no taxes on your dividends, which is kind of illegal.
And that assumes with zero R&D for the next 10 years, I can maintain the current revenue run rate.
Now, having done that, would any of you like to buy my stock at $64? Do you realize how ridiculous those basic assumptions are?
You don’t need any transparency. You don’t need any footnotes.
What were you thinking?" - Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun Microsystems.
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Good Trading!
Kashyap
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