TSM
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company Ltd.
stock NYSE ADR

Back for another week of running ***Short Put Verticals aka Bull Put Credit Spreads***.
What a rough start to February to say the least!!
I managed to squeak out $2038 in profit despite the waves.
Here is my simple trading plan.
I am enter these trades 30-45 DTE and choosing a .25 to .35 delta short put and 1 to 2 strikes lower for the long put.
I set a stop/loss order for 150% of the premium received and a BTC order for 30% of premium received.
I currently have 26 open spreads and have closed 28 trades for the month.
Here are results for the individual tickers month to date.
|Ticker|Profit +/-|
|:-|:-|
|COST|$842|
|GOOGL|$505|
|WMT|$335|
|XLE|$276|
|TSM|$190|
|PLTR|$145|
|APLD|$120|
|KO|$70|
|INTC|$70|
|XOM|$47|
|CVX|$45|
|AMD|$35|
|MULL|$19|
|AGQ|($287)|
|RDDT|($372)|
|Totals|$2,038|

TSM the most

TSM has been a steady increase and I don’t see that changing

TSM. Buy the shovel

In the age of the gold rush, you can’t go wrong with buying companies selling the shovels -$TSM.
Also the choking point of AI is Memory. $MU $SK Hynix and $Sandisk.

VRT MU ANET TSM AMD

\*\*Hyperscalers Quarterly Growth\*\*
\* AMZN: Cloud revenue $35.6 billion (up 23.6% YoY) and Ads revenue $21.3 billion (up 23.1% YoY). AWS had the highest quarterly YoY growth in the last 13 x quarters.
\* MSFT: Intelligent Cloud revenue $32.9 billion (up 29% YoY). Azure specific growth 39%.
\* GOOGL: Cloud revenue $17.7 billion (up 47.5% YoY) and Ads revenue $82.3 billion (up 13.5% YoY). GCP had the highest quarterly YoY growth ever.
\* META: Ads revenue $58.1 billion (up 24.1% YoY). Driven by AI enhanced targeting.
\---------
\*\*2026 CapEx Forecast\*\*
\* AMZN: $200+ billion (\*"as we build out the physical data center capacity required for the generative AI era"\*)
\* GOOGL: $175 to $185 billion (\*"The risk of under-investing in AI infrastructure is far greater than the risk of over-investing"\*)
\* META: $115 to $135 billion (\*"to accelerate our AI research and product development"\*)
\* MSFT: Undisclosed, $100+ billion estimated (\*"Demand for AI services continues to outpace our available capacity. We are investing heavily to close that gap"\*)
\------------
\*\*Revenue Backlog\*\*
\* MSFT: $625 billion (up 110% YoY). $281 billion (up 969% YoY) from OpenAI and $344 billion (up 28% YoY) from other customers.
\* AMZN: $244 billion (up 40% YoY)
\* GOOGL: $240 billion (up 151% YoY)
\-------------
\*\*NVDA mentions in the latest earnings calls by hyperscalers' CEOs\*\*
GOOGL: "Our ongoing partnership with Nvidia remains a cornerstone of our AI strategy. We are pleased to announce that Google Cloud will be among the first to offer instances powered by the Vera Rubin platform later this year."
META: "We are currently standing up some of the largest compute clusters in the world. By the end of this year, our infrastructure will include the equivalent of over 600,000 H100s, and we are actively transitioning our roadmap to incorporate Blackwell and beyond."
MSFT: "Our strategy is to provide the world's most comprehensive AI infrastructure. This includes our partnership with Nvidia to bring their latest innovations to Azure, alongside our own Maia 200 silicon which is now entering volume production."
AMZN: "While we are seeing fantastic momentum with our own Trainium2 chips, we continue to work closely with external silicon providers \[Nvidia\] to ensure our AWS customers have access to the broadest range of GPU instances."
\---------------
\*\*AI CapEx Supply Chain Beneficiaries\*\*
\* Nvidia: Designs GPUs (H200, Blackwell Ultra and Rubin), CPUs (Grace and Vera) and Networking (NVLink, Ethernet-X and BlueField).
\* Broadcom: Designs Custom AI ASICs for Google (TPU) and Meta (MTIA).
\* Marvell: Designs Amazon Trainium and Inferentia.
\* TSMC: Manufactures all the logic chips from Nvidia, Google, Meta, Amazon and Microsift as well as the Nvidia networking equipment.
\* Samsung, SKHynix and Micron: Design and manufacture memory chips.
\* ​Vertiv, Schneider Electric and Eaton: Power and cooling.
\----------
Long positions: NVDA, GOOGL, META, MSFT, AMZN, TSM and MU. Not financial advice.

I think I get the gist of what you’re saying. What I’m having trouble wrapping my head around are these 2 ideas:
- future expectations are inherently baked into the price today
- over/underperformance is predicated on earnings growth exceeding/failing to exceed those expectations
I bought shares of SMH, NVDA and TSM about 4-5 years ago, and even back then a lot of people were saying those were already priced to perfection, or even overpriced. But others thought those stocks had room to grow, and after doing some research, I decided they were right. And then, after a lot of time being in the red, those stocks started going up in price. Why couldn’t that be the case today? (And I get that past performance is not an indicator, etc. But that’s more of a caveat).
Also, I’m not sure I understand the idea that thematic ETFs consistently underperform broad based index solutions. There are definitely some that do. But I thought SMH outperformed VOO and VTI for the better part of the last 10 years?
I’m just trying to get a better understanding of how the market works.

I still wouldn’t touch AMZN.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/big-tech-set-to-spend-650-billion-in-2026-as-ai-investments-soar-163907630.html
With all the capex spend by AMZN, MSFT, META and GOOG. I’ll buy the firms where this year’s 650B investment goes. They will be making money until the capex falls. On dips… I’ll be buying NVDA, AVGO, TSM, ASML, CEG, VST, FLNC, VRT, MRVL, MU, AMKR, ANET.. I have made a watch list and waiting for correction.

NVDA TSM ASML .
MSFT GOOG TSLA and META will go sideways due to capex impinged earnings.
In 2001 after the crash in internet stocks, there were only three or so winners at the top of the S&P 100. CSCO IBM MSFT AOL etc went sideways.

Buy the semis: MU, Samsung, NVDA, AMD, AVGO, TSM, ASML and dump the hyperscalers AMAZN, META and GOOGL, ORCL. The semis are trading on the valuation that the capex is stagnant but it is accelerating.
Alphabet, Xai and OpeanAI are trying to build a God by pouring money into silicon and most of it going into semis.

I appreciate the response and the details. I’m actually retired too, walked away from corporate America at 41. I doubled up during Covid allocated those gains to buy three properties. Our goals are likely more aligned than my age reflects. 
I’m at 20% international, been trimming VWO because I agree with you on emerging mkts. It’s like that chart can’t ever break through and it Taiwan breaks TSM will be in real trouble. Buffet sold that one early for that very reason. Half of our net worth is buried in real estate and the financial assets are: 50% domestic, 30% bonds, 20% international. The domestic is value oriented. I’ve been trimming domestic daily, flipping to international, and was hoping this last dip would get deep enough to pivot more out of bonds into VT. 
Do you have any bond exposure? 
I honestly thought long term rates would’ve come down more by now and likely need to trim my blv position, possibly pivot more into vxus. Bnd likely isn’t moving much more after a decent back half of last year. I did well with bonds during Covid, thought I was positioning myself for one more rotation out of them into equities. After taking gains from last April I bought even more. Also kinda addicted to selling tlt puts, been trading it from both sides for years.
I’ve just been rebalancing daily and the guys I used to seek guidance from have mostly aged out. They’re still rich, have just been watching them make late age mistakes and think they should hang it up. Guys get so focused on never paying taxes they put their money in investable 1031 zones that are crap shoots. Another one got so confident with option straddles he blew up 300k early last year. 

Hi, exited long TSM around the open 342.17 (opened 26/01 333.76)

my roth is up 1.2% right now (mostly bc of TSM)

Stonks bro. I also added a little bit of MU, TSM, and SOX yesterday

Take note where about $500bn of capex is going. It isn't going to software.
$TSM $ASML $TER $AMAT $ETN $POWL $GHM $ESE $FLS $GNRC the list goes on and on

Why not own a little of each? LRCX, ASML, TSM, KLAC have all been excellent long-term holds when it comes to chip manufacturing, design, and equipment stocks.
AI data center plays are going to be super volatile, but CRDO has had a lot of positive coverage.
MU has been great and will be until there's a supply glut again.
ASTS is an interesting space play, and there are others out there. The SpaceX IPO will be interesting to see how already publicly traded space/satellite plays get revalued. I'm personally in RKLB and LUNR for several years and have opened spec positions in ASTS, VSAT, FLY, and KTOS.

10 years a short time. All of mag 7. In terms of profitability: Google, MSFT, nflx, Amazon, aapl (10 sure, 20 maybe, 30 don’t think so), nvda (exists but won’t be hot), TSM, avgo, asml (overvalued and not not), visa, Mastercard, all of the big banks.

I really believed that MSFT would visit sub-$400 for a tiny bit of time yesterday, and then I really believed that it would hold over $400 like premarket. I'm starting to believe in my beliefs a lot less. Meanwhile SNDK, INTC, TSM, AMD, NVDA all up 4-8% just mad chillin'. Even TSLA is recovering quicker than microsoft after the world's dumbest fucking news ever. Crazy.

This might be the most basic statement, but correct me if I’m wrong. Basically any tech stock will be fucked unless it makes the components , so Nvidia and TSM should fair better than the likes of meta, msft etc?