Publisher: The Sunday Times
The headline is a scam. Show sector valuations, cash generation, capex requirements, unit economics for AI infra, sensitivity to rates and risk premia. Show anything beyond “I did fine last quarter.” The Victorian railways analogy is a party trick. Yes, rail changed the world. It also nuked plenty of investors who paid fantasy prices for projected utility. Long-run utility does not backstop short-run valuation.
The headline “I don’t worry about the AI bubble bursting — here’s why” is a scam. If you write “here’s why,” you bring evidence. He brought vibes. It’s a feelings column in a business suit, and the suit doesn’t fit.
We get Boeing anecdotes and dividend bromides masquerading as rigor. That’s not analysis, that’s mood lighting for skittish readers. Anecdote is not a framework. “I bought here, sold there” is coin-flip theater. He snarls at bears as if skepticism were a personal insult. Spare me.
Show sector valuations, cash generation, capex requirements, unit economics for AI infra, sensitivity to rates and risk premia. Show anything beyond “I did fine last quarter.” Survivorship bias is doing all the heavy lifting while the author takes a bow. Sourcing is paper-thin. A few price quotes, a wink at LSEG, and zero context on timeframes or sensitivity. No sector multiples, no revenue-to-market-cap sanity checks, no capital flow data into private AI, no margin-of-safety math. Instead we get admin trivia like W-8BEN, as if brokerage forms will save you from paying 40 times sales for a story stock.
The dividend fetish is worse. Quoting 6 to 9 percent yields like talismans is how amateurs get trapped. High yields often flag deterioration. You need payout ratios, free cash flow coverage, debt maturities, and the history of cuts through cycles. Kraft Heinz is not a mattress. A fat coupon on a shrinking business is a warning light, not armor.
“Diversified forever fund” with 50 names and a bunch of investment trusts sounds prudent until you ask basic questions. What are the factor tilts. Sector and country weights. Position sizing rules. Rebalancing discipline. Max single-name exposure. Apple sitting near 8 percent is not diversification, it’s hand-waving. There’s no volatility or correlation math, just a number that feels big enough to impress the uncritical. The portfolio reads like playing cards taped together by nostalgia.
The Victorian railways analogy is a party trick. Yes, rail changed the world. It also nuked plenty of investors who paid fantasy prices for projected utility. Long-run utility does not backstop short-run valuation. If your “don’t worry about the bubble” case rests on a nineteenth-century fairytale, you don’t have a case.
The editorial sloppiness shows. This thing reads like it was green-lit mid-tea by people terrified of irritating advertisers. Diversification gets pitched as a consolation prize for the emotionally uncommitted, while the columnist clutches yield like a comfort blanket and pretends that’s stoicism. It’s not. It’s incoherent.
If you want to reassure people about AI froth, publish a defensible framework. Earnings power, capital intensity, supply chain bottlenecks, pricing power, cost of capital, and how that maps to cash yields versus implied growth. Until then, stop laundering nostalgia and personal trades as wisdom. This is sentiment dressed up as scholarship, and it insults readers who can count.
Short version. Long-term investing is fine. Selling reassurance with no numbers is not. Either do the work or get out of the way.
