This past week was a classic schizophrenic stock market.
- Wednesday: the market did what it usually does after an election, it jumped on relief that the voting was over.
- Thursday: panic set in as the consequences of campaign promises started getting tallied. Political anxiety over potential restrictions on AI data center expansion caused Semiconductor stocks to plunge 12%. Their steepest single day drop since March 2020, and the second worst on record.
- Friday: a reflexive bounce as reality set in that campaign promises are just promises.
As the dust settled on Friday, I bought 13 world-class companies. I added to Amazon, ASML, Broadcom, Eli Lilly, JPMorgan, Meta, Microsoft, Texas Instruments, and Visa, and started new positions in Charles Schwab, IBM, Mastercard, and TSMC.
Regardless of which hollow political promises get kept, or which tyrant is holding committee meetings, I want to own the companies that make the world work — the ones collecting a toll on every transaction, every chip, and every byte. A broad spectrum portfolio mitigates political tomfoolery.
TSMC is characteristic of everything in my portfolio.
TSMC is the foundry that makes the world’s most advanced chips — the AI chips from Nvidia, AMD, Apple, and Broadcom all run through its fabs. TSMC was founded in 1987 by blending government industrial policy that supported private sector leadership to meet strategic market demand. Washington isn’t copying the playbook — it’s remembering it. America wrote it during the space race: Washington set the goal and funded it, private industry built the rockets, the satellites, and the computers. The CHIPS Act and TSMC’s Arizona fabs are the same play, sixty years later.
TSMC’s revenue has compounded about 18% a year for 31 years — from under a billion dollars to $122 billion. It dipped three times — the dot-com bust, the financial crisis, the 2023 chip downturn — and every time the trend resumed.
The trend isn’t political. It’s digitization. And the buildout it feeds is concentrated for a reason — the politicians are using digitization, not restricting it. The world’s largest data-center market is Northern Virginia (deep blue socialist USA) — more than double second-place Beijing (deep red communist China). The buildout is the government.
The Digitization Genie can’t be put back into a vacuum tube.
Learn more about Investable Wealth LLC at: About the Firm
—————————————————–