before we begin.
this isn’t a research note on ibm. i’m not your stockbroker. i’m not trying to persuade you to buy the shares. frankly, whether you own ibm is almost beside the point.
what interests me is the process.
for forty years i’ve discovered that the biggest investment opportunities rarely begin with certainty. they begin with discomfort. with an idea that sounds faintly ridiculous. with a chart that refuses to agree with the narrative. with the nagging suspicion that everybody is looking in the same direction and somehow missing the thing carrying the weight.
that’s what this is.
it’s an invitation to watch someone think.
not because i’m always right. christ no. if my career has taught me anything, it’s that i’ve made enough bad decisions to fill several hedge funds. but every now and then one of those bad decisions wasn’t bad at all. it was simply early. curiosity, playfulness and a willingness to entertain ideas that sensible people dismissed have probably contributed more to my career than any spreadsheet ever did.
that’s what i’m trying to share.
the money is almost incidental. if ibm becomes a four-bagger, wonderful. if it doesn’t, life goes on. that’s never been the real prize. the real prize is learning how to look at the world differently. how to dismantle consensus. how to rebuild a problem from first principles until the answer, whatever it turns out to be, becomes visible.
that’s the acid capitalist operating system.
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forget big blue. think blue sky.
ibm doesn’t win the ai war. it wins what comes next.
the chart says this thing might be a four bagger. the sell-side says that’s lunacy. somewhere between those two positions sits the trade.
because markets have an irritating habit of sniffing out change long before we become emotionally comfortable enough to describe it. price moves first. narratives arrive later like the bereaved carrying flowers to a funeral.
what i do know is that the market has stopped behaving as though ibm is merely a sleepy value stock with a consulting problem and a respectable dividend. it’s behaving as though something larger sits beneath the surface. something most investors seem incapable of seeing. it's synthesis. markets often struggle to recognise emergence until it's already obvious. that’s why i urge you to.
forget big blue. open your mind and think blue sky.
because whilst some proclaim ibm the most ai-disrupted company in the s&p, its chart says something entirely different. artificial intelligence is supposed to automate large chunks of the very work ibm charges handsomely for. software increasingly writes software. a consulting focused business like ibm built on billable hours shouldn’t be chillin. it should be reaching for the painkillers.
yet ibm stock doesn’t look frightened. and that’s the contradiction.
every piece of bad news arrives exactly when it should. consulting slows. another frontier model appears. another obituary gets written for enterprise services. ibm absorbs the blow, coughs politely and carries on climbing. i’ve watched markets long enough to know that when price refuses to validate the story, one of them is lying. and usually it isn’t price.
and that’s what keeps bringing me back to ibm. not because i’ve suddenly become an evangelist for big blue. far from it. for most of my career ibm represented exactly the sort of company i instinctively avoided. large. bureaucratic. slow-moving. forever financially engineering the shrinking share count while promising organic growth. respectable. dependable. but faintly depressing.
or was it?
you see, ibm is the investing equivalent of a man wearing a suit at a rave. you notice him immediately because he looks completely out of place. but twenty minutes later you discover he owns the fucking building. that’s ibm. nobody boasts about owning it. nobody turns up at an investment committee desperate to pitch it. yet somehow the stock keeps grinding higher and the chart keeps hinting at outcomes sensible investors aren’t supposed to discuss.
because depending on how seriously you take the price base that’s been quietly forming beneath this thing for the better part of a decade, the stock price implications become increasingly uncomfortable. three hundred and twenty dollars? six hundred dollars? perhaps even nine hundred and sixty dollars? a trillion-dollar valuation. the sort of numbers that trigger eye-rolls from analysts and ennui from portfolio managers.
