John ZechnerTaiwan Semiconductor MFG.TSMDON'T BUYSep 09, 2025

Best in class. Prime beneficiary of AI. Advanced chips carry the lion's share of profitability. As long as that continues, it'll be a good investment. Quite expensive here. Put on your radar for when we get a decent correction.

We're in the craziest cycle we've ever seen. We haven't even touched levels people think we're going to reach in terms of AI demand. Sold out for the net 4-5 years. Stock reflects a lot of that good news. When the cycle ends, it'll be painful.

AI infrastructure buildout is a massive growth segment. This is the name he uses for client portfolios. Valuations in the space tend to be fairly rich. So this name isn't a buy today. Watch and wait.

There is demand for their chips. Claude, ChatGPT, all these AI applications need more chips.

Spending lots of $$ to build foundries in the US. Demand backdrop remains strong, margins are great.

The semis stocks have seen extreme momentum and peaked. He is moving away from semis and is now underweight the space. These stocks will continue to be volatile and could even make new highs, but now is a good time to exit if you have made good money.

It's always undervalued on valuation, because there's a fear that China will one day clash with Taiwan. But TSM is the bottleneck in all memory and they have the most advanced technology. Even after ramping up production, they can't keep up with this ferocious demand.

Good opportunity if you're looking for broad exposure to semis with both GPUs and CPUs. Whichever cycle comes out the winner, this name will perform well from risk/reward. Pullback today due to overreaction on META news, not a bad entry.

Her team prefers to play one or the other, and right now is really excited about CPUs. 

TSM was cheap last year because of worries that China will invade Taiwan. TSM is the bottleneck to AI. They are the most important company around--they make the products for Nvidia, Qualcomm, everybody. Musk and Intel say they will compete with TSM, but building those factories will take years. TSM's demand will last years. Valuation remains okay. Prefers this to Nvidia any day.

(Note the short timeframe.)  Still a wonderful bottleneck-monopoly company. Last quarter saw revenue growth of 40% YOY, gross margins of ~67%, operating margins of 58%. Software margins for a hardware company.

Raised full-year revenue growth to above 30%. Increasing capex, which is a very strong signal for the overall space.

His price target is $456, or ~$40 (9%) from here. Has 75-85% market share. Huge backlog.

They have more business than they can handle. Shares popped 6.36% today.

He'd trim, as long as you're not in an adverse tax position. Great quarter, with revenues up 35%. Seeing increasing demand. Bit pricey at 18x PE for 2028 for only 9-10% growth.

Allegedly has competitors, but not in practice. Those competitors are on the lagging edge. Effectively the monopoly on bleeding edge chips. Best and most consistent toll road on AI technology getting more miniature and sophisticated. Yield is 1.03%.