Richard Stroud @Richardstroud: "COPIERS AND FOLLOWERS UPDATE Hi everyone,..."

United Kingdom

COPIERS AND FOLLOWERS UPDATE Hi everyone, another quick update from me as markets continue to lurch from one drama to another. Stock indices around the globe fell back last week on the back of AI news from a Silicon Valley AI lab called Anthropic. Last week, Anthropic launched a new tool called “plugins” which is being heralded as an assistant which can be employed in more specialist areas such as legal, marketing, data analysis or customer support. Essentially, this is a semi-autonomous bot that can be set to carry out business tasks with a few simple prompts and little human oversight. While this is what a lot of people hope and imagine AI can aspire to achieve, nevertheless the news has caused in particular software and data analysis stocks to fall sharply. Companies as diverse as $SGE.L (The Sage Group plc ) $LSEG.L (London Stock Exchange) $MSFT (Microsoft) and $RMV.L (Rightmove PLC) have fallen on fears that their products and tools will become less relevant, if this new AI feature from Anthropic turns out to successfully be what it is being touted as. Along with stocks, cryptocurrencies have also sold off dramatically as it became swept up in the tech sell-off on Wall Street. Last Thursday, $200bn was wiped off the value of Bitcoin in its steepest one-day collapse on record. Although it has recovered a bit, it is currently sitting around $70,000 per Bitcoin, way below the $125,000 mark it achieved just a few months ago. Stocks on the other hand have mainly recovered and once again our portfolio shows the value of being well diversified, as the swings we saw were nowhere near as dramatic as the wider market. We have seen in the past tech stocks reacting badly to news from AI companies, with China’s Deep Seek springing to mind and, just as the markets have done in the past with Trump, have seemingly looked past any bad news eventually. It will now be an interesting period to see how these tech stocks recover and I will be spending a bit of time looking to see if any companies have reacted a bit too harshly to the AI news. As always, I will keep you informed of any new positions, I certainly feel that I would like to get our remaining cash to work soon. Wishing you all a great week! Best wishes, Richard

Not investment advice. The author may have financial interests in the mentioned instruments.

4 Mentioned

SGE.L

The Sage Group plc

LSEG.L

London Stock Exchange

MSFT

Microsoft

RMV.L

Rightmove PLC

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