Veteran Macro Investor Says Ai’s Easy Money Is Over And Bitcoin Is Next

What Happened

Veteran macro investor Jordi Visser says the easy money in artificial intelligence (AI) is gone. He thinks Bitcoin (BTC) is where the next big gains turn up.

Visser has worked in markets for more than 30 years. He runs AI research at 22V Research and founded Visser-Labs. He used to be chief investment officer at hedge fund Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers.

Investors used to hope for seven or eight times their money. He now expects closer to 30% a year. That is still good. It is just no longer a windfall.

Big investors have little spare money to put to work. Goldman Sachs told clients that leaves stocks stuck.

Regular investors are pulling back too. Trading activity this month is more than 3% below the five-year average.

Market Context

Its own release shows why. Sales rose 28%. Costs rose 55%. Meta then borrowed $24.91 billion to keep building. It spent $31.08 billion on new capacity in three months.

Even so, its spare cash fell 23%. Nobody escaped the squeeze. Only the size of it changed.

“There are limited sources of ‘juice’ for rallies in the immediate term. We still need to get through rubble of the past couple weeks before we can start the conversation for any meaningful re-risking,” Bloomberg reported, citing Goldman Sachs trading desk.

Why It Matters

Computer-driven funds are the bigger worry. They hold about $196 billion in US shares. A further slide could force them to sell $15.7 billion inside a week.

Details

New company filings help explain why. The biggest AI spenders are now burning cash faster than they bring it in.

Big Tech Is Burning Cash to Build AI

Google spent more cash last quarter than it collected. That has never happened since the company listed in 2004.

The measure that matters here is free cash flow. It is simply the money left over after a company pays for the data centers it is building.

All three of the biggest AI spenders saw that cushion shrink.

Meta’s drop is the eye-catching one. A year ago it kept $8.5 billion. This time it kept $784 million.

One fair caveat. Some of those costs were legal bills and layoff payments, not AI. Together they came to $3.58 billion.

Microsoft looks the healthiest of the three. Its filing shows sales up 18% and its Azure cloud business up 43%.

Why Jordi Visser Says the AI Trade Is Over

“The AI trade’s over. The ability of getting seven, eight times your money in that is over,” Jordi Visser, on a podcast.

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He does not think AI is finished. He thinks the returns are shrinking.

The reason is competition. Cheap open-source models keep catching up, so no company stays ahead for long. Wall Street is already split on AI chips as a result.

Goldman Says US Stocks Have No Fuel Left

Hedge funds have already borrowed heavily to buy shares. Their borrowing sits near the top of the past five years.