transcript.txt and here: "Enthropic / Daario Amade" = Anthropic / Dario Amodei, "open claw" = OpenClaw (the agentic-AI marker he dates to January 31st — kept as a concept, not a ticker), "Metamuse Spark 1.3" = Meta's Muse Spark 1.3, "Marll / Celestea" = Marvell / Celestica, "Nebias" = Nebius, "John Turnis" = John Ternus, "John Mayor Kees" = Keynes. (2) Cash is his top pick #1 but is not a security, so it has no row. (3) SpaceX is tabled under its listed symbol SPCX (the host quotes an IPO price of $135 and a ~$150 trade), not the older private SpaceX id used on the 2026-SEP-03 page. (4) CRM, NOW and TRI are the host's "SaaS apocalypse bucket" rotation idea; his answer is about the market as a whole, so they are Neutral. (5) "Watermelon" is Meta's forthcoming frontier model, not a ticker. (6) The host discloses she owns Apple, Meta, Alphabet and Microsoft — a disclosure, not a Niles stance. (7) No price targets are given. (8) Not tabled: DeepSeek, Neuralink and Yahoo (passing references), the "semiconductor index" (cited for its 29% drawdown, no ETF named), and the sponsors.Remarks of 2026-SEP-15 on In the Money with Amber Kanwar. Stance reflects how each name was framed in this conversation (not a price rating). Research: QT Qualtrim · SA Seeking Alpha · STK Stock Analysis.
| Ticker | Name | Research | View | What he said | At |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| META | Meta Platforms | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Top pick #2, behind cash. "Meta also settled their social media lawsuit. So, that's a big clearing event," Muse Spark 1.3 put it "back in that conversation of having a leading model," and for the first time the capex can be monetised outside the core business: "Now, they have an API for that, and they have their agent, which if that's a big hit, you have three and a half billion people that it can be distributed over." The multiple is "much lower than a lot of their peers" (mid-teens vs low-20s on calendar-27 PE), and "Watermelon," a frontier-class model, "is due at the latest in October." "I love stocks that people hate… the fact the multiple is low gives me a margin of safety." | 1:04:17 |
| GOOGL | Alphabet (Google) | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | "I think Google and Anthropic are going to be two of the big survivors." The edge is data: "over 10 products with over a billion users each… we give Google the data to train on," so "they're always going to be in the hunt," and it wins consumers by folding AI into free search. Still, "I like Google right now. I like Meta more." The caveats: "I don't like the fact that Google went cash flow negative," and he never thought he'd see Google "having to issue equity or debt." | 33:21 |
| NVDA | NVIDIA | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | "In a totally different bucket" from the neoclouds: "they forecasted 70% revenue growth for calendar 27 and you're paying right now a 14 times PE" against the S&P at ~18x and the public clouds in the low 20s — "not paying an outlandish valuation for the guy with the best chips on the planet." Also "pushing very hard in the open-source, open-weight model category." The tension is customer concentration as hyperscalers build their own ASICs, but "Nvidia is one that I feel like deserves a place in people's portfolio." | 47:11 |
| CSCO | Cisco Systems | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Liked on the May 2025 appearance and up 86% since; still liked. If owning your own data matters, enterprises build their own AI infrastructure and "you're going to need to upgrade your networks," and hyperscalers spreading data centers across locations must network them together — "Cisco is obviously the networking king." "Trading at a reasonable valuation… positive cash flow… high margins, things that I like." Sized as a portfolio position, not a bet. | 58:06 |
| AAPL | Apple | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | Hopeful on the new CEO: under John Ternus, "because he's a product guy… we hopefully don't have to wait eight years after Android introduces something." "I think we're going to see a massive upgrade cycle to the Duo phones, which is their foldable phone. It's about 50% bigger surface area than the Pro Max… a huge upgrade cycle next year in Apple." Tim Cook was "a supply chain god" who got the multiple to ~30x, but Apple is still shipping "a beta version of AI." | 1:07:54 |
| MRVL | Marvell Technology | QT · SA · STK · FA | Positive | The better of the two AI-spend beneficiaries in the mailbag, on the gross-margin test: "Marvell is in a different bucket where they've got obviously very high gross margins. They're helping some of the best companies in the world to turn out ASICs like Google." "I think Marvell's much more interesting than a Celestica." Comparative preference rather than a sized call. | 41:16 |
| Anthropic | Anthropic (private) | — | Positive | A survivor: "Google and Anthropic are going to be two of the big survivors," because "Anthropic from day one was really focused on corporate. Why? Because corporations will pay." Now "much bigger than OpenAI… about 65 billion annualized run rate and OpenAI is right around 40," with the ratio reversed from two years ago. The skeptic's note: a frontier leader has an interest in regulation that chokes off open weight — "if you can give yourself a monopoly, wouldn't you?" | 15:57 |
| AMZN | Amazon | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Split between time frames. The negative free cash flow "bothers me a lot," and near term "if oil goes to 120 bucks, Amazon has a consumer business… Amazon will struggle," with oil high "at least through the midterms." Longer term "Amazon's very interesting": "the next big wave… is robotics and Amazon is ridiculously good in that," and AI plus robots make the asset-heavy logistics core "a lot more efficient." | 52:22 |
| MSFT | Microsoft | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Liked in May 2025 but only up 12% since; asked where he comes down, he declines to rate it: "pretty much any stock you mention, I've probably been long and or short depending on the period of time… When the facts change, I change." Today "I'm just a lot more nervous and that just cuts across to most stocks." Also cited for the overinvestment mindset — "Microsoft has said the biggest risk is underinvestment, not overinvestment" — and as a neocloud customer that can simply stop renting that capacity. | 59:57 |
| TSLA | Tesla | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Preferred to SpaceX on a relative basis only: "I've both owned Tesla at certain points and I've been short Tesla, and so I'm a bigger fan of that company on a relative basis because the valuation is less. I think they have a good play on robotics." But "cash flow, some of those other things you still have to be concerned about." | 55:35 |
| CRM | Salesforce | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | Named by the host as part of the "SaaS apocalypse bucket" rotation (sell semis, buy Salesforce, ServiceNow, Thomson Reuters). Niles does not rate the names; his answer is market-wide: "Between now and midterms, I'm very negative on the market overall, which means I don't want to be involved in anything." | 19:20 |
| NOW | ServiceNow | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | The second name in the host's software-rebound basket; no Niles view on the stock. (A system-of-record business would sit in one of his three "safe" software buckets, but he did not apply that to ServiceNow here.) | 19:20 |
| TRI | Thomson Reuters | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | The third name in the host's SaaS-rebound basket; Niles answers only at the market level ("I don't want to be involved in anything" before the midterms). No stock view. | 19:20 |
| NFLX | Netflix | QT · SA · STK · FA | Neutral | The winner-take-most base rate again, alongside Amazon (e-commerce), Google (search) and Facebook (social): "What about streaming? Well, you really only have one, and that's Netflix. So, do you think you're going to have five plus models that everybody uses? I don't think so." No stock view. | 15:11 |
| Situational Awareness | Situational Awareness (hedge fund, private) | — | Neutral | The dating point for the summer semis washout: "the semiconductor index went down 29% from the end of June roughly to the bottom when Situational Awareness got taken out… in the space of a month." That June 22nd – July 29th drop "should be a warning shot," because the trigger then (token minimization) was milder than today's data-center pushouts and lab slowdown talk. | 17:35 |
| OpenAI | OpenAI (private) | — | Negative | "OpenAI to me is the one that potentially has the most issues because from the beginning, they were focused on consumers… only 5% of those consumers actually pay. Why? Because we're all used to getting things for free from Google." So "OpenAI in particular are stuck between those two guys. Anthropic on enterprise, Google on consumer." Anthropic's run rate (~$65B) now exceeds OpenAI's (~$40B), and "a lot of roads lead to OpenAI" in the circular financing. | 15:34 |
| NBIS | Nebius Group | QT · SA · STK · FA | Negative | "I don't like the neoclouds at all because when this bubble breaks, they're going to get destroyed. They are in my mind overflow capacity." If spending or model advancement slows, "the neoclouds are going to be the first ones to feel that pain," because their biggest customers are the platforms themselves — "if you're Microsoft, are you going to say, 'I don't need that neocloud capacity anymore.'" They are debt-funded and not generating cash ("cash is king. Everything else is an opinion"), so they fail his screen even though they "can absolutely scream higher." | 46:14 |
| CRWV | CoreWeave | QT · SA · STK · FA | Negative | Asked whether the lab slowdown means pulling back "on semis, pull back on like the CoreWeaves of the world": "Yeah, you should have been pulling back a few weeks ago," once Texas and Pennsylvania put data-center connections on hold. As a neocloud it is in the bucket he expects to "get destroyed" when the bubble breaks — overflow capacity, debt-funded, no cash flow. | 10:17 |
| SNOW | Snowflake | QT · SA · STK · FA | Negative | Avoid, despite acknowledging the bull case (agents use products like Snowflake; product revenue has accelerated three quarters running). "I sort of have a cardinal rule of I don't want to fight the hard battles. Snowflake doesn't fit into any of those three buckets within software that I feel comfortable about" — security, system of record/database, and video games. With OpenAI + Anthropic run-rate revenue up from $29B to $105B this year, "that spend has got to come from somewhere and some of that has got to be software." "It's a great company, but" not a name he's interested in. | 39:35 |
| CLS | Celestica | QT · SA · STK · FA | Negative | Fails the value-add test: "In general, I don't like EMS companies, and you can look at the value add any company has by looking at the gross margins. Celestica, you can see what the gross margins are, get an idea what the value add is." The host notes margins went from ~2% to ~10% — "good expansion but still relatively low." Marvell preferred. | 40:54 |
| SPCX | SpaceX | QT · SA · STK · FA | Negative | Avoid on cash burn, not on Musk: "I think Elon Musk is the Leonardo da Vinci of our generation," but "if you think about everything I just talked about in terms of being focused on valuation, cash flow, I don't like long-term forecasts… it's very hard for me to say, 'Hey, I want to be in SpaceX.'" "Because they are spending so much money to try to catch up in AI, I just hate the cash flow part of it." Elon "always seems to get there, but… in a longer time frame than what we all expect." | 56:13 |
"View" is Niles' framing in this conversation (Positive / Neutral / Negative), not a price rating. Through-line: cash first into November 3rd, then own the names that pass risk-versus-reward — low valuation relative to growth, high gross and operating margins, positive operating and ideally free cash flow. That passes META (top pick #2), NVDA, CSCO, MRVL and GOOGL, with AAPL on a product cycle; it fails the neoclouds (NBIS, CRWV), low-value-add EMS (CLS), cash-burning SPCX, and software outside his three safe buckets (SNOW). Research: QT Qualtrim · SA Seeking Alpha · STK Stock Analysis.
A jargon-free summary of the view on each name — what the business does and why he frames it that way. (Plain-language companion to the table above; renders on each ticker's consolidated page.)
Meta owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp and is spending enormous sums building AI. Niles' problem with Meta used to be simple: unlike Microsoft, Amazon or Google, it had no way to sell that computing power to anyone else — the spending could only improve its own ad business. That is changing. Meta has just launched an API (a way for outside developers to pay to use its AI models) and an AI agent product, and he would not be surprised to see a rental cloud business later.
Three other things put it at #2 on his list, behind only cash. It settled its social-media lawsuit, which removes a legal overhang — the same kind of "clearing event" Google got when its antitrust case ended in a slap on the wrist. Its new model (Muse Spark 1.3) is competitive again after hiring Alexander Wang, and a frontier-grade model called "Watermelon" is due by October. And it is cheap: roughly mid-teens times next-year earnings versus low-20s for peers. A low price on a disliked stock is what he calls a "margin of safety" — if he's wrong, there is less to lose.
Niles thinks only a couple of AI model makers will matter in the end, and Google is one of them. His reason is data: an AI model is only as smart as what it learns from, and Google has more than ten products with over a billion users each. In exchange for free search, maps, email and video, we hand Google the raw material to train on. It also wins consumers because it can simply put AI inside the free search box everyone already uses.
He likes it, but likes Meta more right now, and has two reservations: Google's free cash flow (cash left after paying for everything, including data centers) has gone negative, and it has started raising money through debt — something he "never thought I would see" from such a cash machine.
Nvidia makes the chips that power AI. Niles' case is price versus growth: the company guides to about 70% revenue growth next year, yet the stock trades at roughly 14–15 times earnings — cheaper than the S&P 500 (about 18x) and the big cloud companies (low 20s). You are "not paying an outlandish valuation for the guy with the best chips on the planet."
He also likes that Nvidia is backing open-weight (freely available) AI models, which he expects to handle most everyday AI work. The risk he names is that its biggest customers — Google, Amazon, Microsoft — are designing their own custom chips, so Nvidia depends heavily on a few buyers who are also becoming competitors. That's why he treats it as one position in a portfolio, not an all-in bet.
Cisco sells the networking gear — switches and routers — that moves data between computers. Niles liked it in May 2025 and it has risen 86% since; he still likes it. His logic: if companies decide their data is too valuable to hand to someone else's AI, they'll build their own AI systems in-house, which means much more data flowing through corporate networks and a wave of network upgrades. And as local opposition pushes data centers into more scattered locations, those sites need to be wired together.
It also passes his financial screen: a reasonable valuation, positive cash flow, high profit margins. It's a steady, multi-year position rather than a high-growth bet.
Niles' Apple case is about a new product cycle. Tim Cook was brilliant at running the supply chain, paying dividends and buying back shares, which pushed the stock to about 30 times earnings — a price usually reserved for very stable businesses. But Apple has lagged on new products: Android phones have folded since 2019, and Apple's AI is still in "beta."
The new CEO, John Ternus, is a product person, and Niles expects Apple's foldable "Duo" phone — about 50% more screen than the Pro Max — to drive "a huge upgrade cycle next year" as people who have waited years finally replace their phones.
Marvell helps big tech companies like Google design custom AI chips (ASICs — chips built for one specific job). Niles uses gross margin — the share of each sales dollar left after the direct cost of making the product — as a quick test of how much real value a company adds. Marvell's is very high, meaning customers pay up for its engineering, so he finds it "much more interesting" than Celestica. The flip side, which he notes in the Nvidia discussion, is that Marvell's custom-chip work is exactly what creates tension between Nvidia and its biggest customers.
Anthropic makes the Claude AI models and focused from day one on selling to businesses, "because corporations will pay." Niles counts it with Google as one of the two likely survivors. The numbers support him: its annualized revenue is now around $65 billion versus about $40 billion for OpenAI — the reverse of a couple of years ago.
He adds a skeptical note on its CEO's safety warning: whichever lab is in the lead benefits if regulation makes life harder for free, open-weight competitors. He doesn't dismiss the safety risk, but says "there can be multiple forces at play at once."
Niles is torn on Amazon depending on the time frame. Longer term he finds it "very interesting" because robotics — which he calls the next big wave after AI — should make Amazon's huge network of warehouses and delivery far cheaper to run, and Amazon is "ridiculously good" at it.
Shorter term, two things bother him. Its free cash flow has turned negative because of AI data-center spending. And much of its business is selling goods to consumers: if oil goes to $120 a barrel — he expects high oil at least through the November midterms because of Iran — shoppers get squeezed and "Amazon will struggle."
Microsoft was one of his picks in May 2025, but has only gained 12% since. Asked where he stands now, he wouldn't commit either way: he has been both long (betting it rises) and short (betting it falls) at different times, quoting Keynes — "when the facts change, I change." His general mood is "a lot more nervous" across most stocks.
Microsoft also comes up as a symbol of the spending race (it has said the bigger risk is spending too little on AI) and as a big customer of the "neoclouds" that could drop that rented capacity if demand slows.
Tesla comes up only as a comparison with SpaceX. Niles has owned Tesla and shorted it at different times. Between the two Musk companies he prefers Tesla "on a relative basis" because its valuation is lower and it has a real robotics angle — but he still flags cash flow as a concern, so this is a relative preference, not a recommendation.
OpenAI makes ChatGPT and bet mainly on ordinary consumers. The problem, Niles says, is that only about 5% of ChatGPT users pay, because we're all used to getting answers from Google for free — and Google is now putting AI directly into free search. Meanwhile Anthropic has taken the business customers who actually pay. That leaves OpenAI squeezed in the middle.
It also matters beyond OpenAI itself: many of the circular financing deals in AI (companies investing in each other and then buying from each other) lead back to OpenAI, so its weakness can ripple through the whole sector.
Nebius is a "neocloud" — a company that borrows money to buy AI chips and rents that computing power out. Niles calls these firms "overflow capacity": they do great while the big clouds (Microsoft, Amazon, Google) can't build fast enough, but when spending slows, those same big clouds will stop renting from them first rather than idle their own data centers.
They also fail his basic safety test: they are funded with debt and don't generate cash. In the 2001–02 bust, the companies that went bankrupt were the ones with weak balance sheets burning cash. The shares can "scream higher" in good times, but he expects them to "get destroyed" when the bubble breaks.
CoreWeave is the best-known neocloud — the same business model as Nebius: borrowed money, AI chips, rented capacity. When the host asked if investors should pull back on semiconductors and "the CoreWeaves of the world," Niles said they should have done so weeks ago, once states like Texas and Pennsylvania started pausing power hookups for new data centers. It carries all the neocloud risks: first to lose customers in a slowdown, heavily indebted, and no cash flow cushion.
Snowflake sells cloud software for storing and analysing company data, and its stock is up about 50% this year. Niles admits the bull case — AI agents will use tools like Snowflake, and its revenue growth has sped up for three straight quarters. But he has a rule: don't fight the hard battles.
His reasoning is budgets. Companies' spending with OpenAI and Anthropic has jumped from $29 billion to about $105 billion a year, and finance chiefs have to cut elsewhere — some of it from software. He thinks only three kinds of software are safe: cybersecurity, "system of record" databases companies can't rip out, and video games. Snowflake isn't in any of them, so he passes.
Celestica is an electronics manufacturing services (EMS) company — it assembles hardware, including AI servers, to other companies' designs. Niles doesn't like that business model because it adds little unique value, and gross margin shows it: Celestica keeps far less of each sales dollar than a designer like Marvell. Its margins have improved (from about 2% to about 10% by the host's numbers), but they are still low, so if AI spending slows there is little cushion.
SpaceX has just gone public (priced at $135, trading near $150). Niles is a big admirer of Elon Musk — "the Leonardo da Vinci of our generation" — and believes space is the next frontier, even data centers in space. But he invests by valuation and cash flow, not by admiration.
SpaceX is spending heavily to catch up in AI, so it burns cash, and its story leans on long-term forecasts, which he distrusts — Musk usually hits his goals, but later than promised. For those reasons he wouldn't buy the dip, and prefers Tesla on a relative basis.
Summary & timestamps derived from the public In the Money with Amber Kanwar episode on YouTube (auto-transcript, cleaned, in transcript.txt) for personal study. Not investment advice. © In the Money / Dan Niles for source material.