In early April last year I sold my shares in Alphabet GOOG 0.00%↑. While I gave up an approximate 30% return in the intervening period, my rationale for doing so was the following (find the complete article here):
As I have come to realise, digital networks, even where they are supported by real world infrastructure, are ephemeral. Change has to and will happen to them. The extent to which they survive is determined by their efforts to be agents of that change. Even this is hard. Meta’s migration from Newsfeed (the absolute gold standard of digital property monetisation) to Reels has been fraught with risks. Having a massively successful digital property that also monetises well is a double coincidence. The inertia involved with changing from one monetisable modality to another is significant, and it makes every transition a risk for all involved.
With the benefit of hindsight, it would seem that my bullishness on the adoption of LLM-powered chatbots was a little misplaced, although, as I mentioned, it was very hard to know for sure:
Ultimately speculation over where all this leads is just that. If we were being intellectually honest we would accept how little we can know. The pace of change seems to be developing at a lightning speed, and this leaves the conservative investor feeling uneasy. Is this change going to help or hurt our investments? I don’t feel like I have a good grasp on what is about to happen, no matter how much I read on the topic.
Ultimately the path I laid out for value creation was one that seems to have been taken half-heartedly, if at all:
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