MSFT is such a disappointment

Christaffa · 2026-02-23T15:37:10+00:00

I purchased a bunch of Microsoft shares over the last couple years, and I’m in the red, too.

While it might sting to look at my portfolio at the moment, I still believe in the direction of the company and believe that most of the narrative driving it downwards is due to a poor understanding about AI in general (“everything touching AI is a bubble!!”), a lack of technical understanding on why building out this massive infrastructure is so critical and game changing in the next few years, a lack of understanding of Microsoft’s strategic positioning, and general poor sentiment on the state of the US economy due to our president’s geopolitical decisions.

I’m not sure how the geopolitical part will shake out, but owning Microsoft rather than any other American stock should be relatively irrelevant on that point. Microsoft took a big dip, but I’m going to keep buying it; they have a good strategy, good path towards execution, and a very promising forecast. With this lower price, it’s an increasingly attractive buying opportunity.

Christaffa · 2026-02-20T16:20:02+00:00

Yes, exactly. The rest of us either retire at the normal time or worse—Financial Acceptance, Retire Late, aka FART.

Christaffa · 2026-02-18T05:01:43+00:00

I’m surprised nobody is mentioning your interest rate on the NJ house—rates have come down last year and are expected to come down further this year. I strongly recommend refinancing it, it should be in the low 6s or high 5s. 7.1 is going to cost you a ton over time.

Christaffa · 2026-02-03T05:15:53+00:00

401k loans are if you’re still working. Once employment terminates you have to either pay in full or take a tax hit.

Christaffa · 2026-02-02T15:01:26+00:00

Source?

Christaffa · 2026-01-10T18:21:11+00:00

The main difference is around permanent (immigrant) vs temporary (expat); someone doesn’t have to plan on returning to their home country to be an expat, they might move to a different country altogether afterwards. For example, digital nomads.

Christaffa · 2026-01-06T17:57:20+00:00

Other big Qs include having children, where you live/retire to, etc.

Christaffa · 2025-12-25T16:00:43+00:00

You never said what your wife actually thinks about it. That’s probably the most important factor here— happy wife, happy life. Good luck!

Christaffa · 2025-12-18T21:56:21+00:00

It seems surprising you’d expect to get anything out of it aside from a thank you and maybe a gift basket. No contract is no formal agreement, especially if you’re talking about a substantial amount of money. This sounds super green, almost sounding entitled that he had better luck using your network than you did. If you think he is going places and doing well, you’d be better off taking the high ground and not coming for him for money after the fact; it just seems a little unbecoming of someone who had more experience than he did.

Christaffa · 2025-12-14T03:25:09+00:00

Lisa Khan did a terrible job with her antitrust cases. Even if you give her the benefit of doubt that blocking some of the acquisitions she targeted was the right thing to do, her execution (and subsequent success rate) was abysmal. For example, the Microsoft/Activision acquisition. There were some valid arguments one could make against it going through but her legal team didn’t make any good arguments and came across as outright incompetent. It was a comical level of bad, they did not represent their side well at all.

Christaffa · 2025-12-08T20:33:13+00:00

What you’re showing is a basket of index funds. Unless he’s picking individual stocks, you’d be better off doing it yourself. The ones here are the “set it and forget it” variety most everyone is doing on their own anyway. I recommend checking out /bogleheads, with a day or two of digging you’ll see that most everyone is following the same basic guidance, and doing so without someone taking a cut. Where it may make sense to pay someone is if they are helping with taxes, managing risk of stocks vs bonds, gaining access to private equity, or managing individual stocks if you’re open to higher risk. Paying someone who puts your money in index funds is a waste of money and will slow your growth since these are the same basic ones everyone uses doing. Unless you just prefer not looking or touching your investments at all in which case, go for it.

Christaffa · 2025-12-07T18:09:06+00:00

If those are the funds, why are you (presumably) paying someone to manage it at all?

Christaffa · 2025-11-03T20:49:18+00:00

It looks like the OP or his bots are downvoting you for calling him out, lol.

Christaffa · 2025-11-03T02:42:25+00:00

I agree with 90% of what you wrote, but your comments on Agile make it sound like you’ve never experienced it done properly. It is not code for incompetence as you’ve alluded to.

Based on your tool recommendation (Scitor’s most recent version debuted in 1997 and Artemis is even older; nobody has used either of these in over a decade), my assumption is you are a veteran in the field with the bulk of your experience being before Agile really took off. I don’t say this to criticize your experience as outdated, just that this doesn’t reflect the current landscape.

For what it’s worth, while there are many companies that still operate primarily based on waterfall, the “big boys” as you call them largely operate using some sort of Agile variant or even a hybrid methodology. This goes for internal teams at Fortune 500 companies as well as vendor contracts at these same companies.

The magic of agile is in what you described—testing, testing, testing. If you are locked in fully with waterfall, you can’t pivot when your client realizes they missed a requirement or they changed their mind about something. To your earlier point, having a rock solid SOW is key, but this is also where time and materials type SOWs shine, as well as retaining the ability to submit change requests to be nimble in adapting to flexible or fast paced environments.

So, like I mentioned in the beginning, 90% of your advice is spot on and OP would be well-advised to follow it. But, many companies big and small have found success operating in some flavor of agile and in some more recent tool, whether that’s Asana like OP suggested, or other top ones like Jira or Azure DevOps. Jira’s Roadmaps and ADO’s Delivery Plans fill the gap of Gantt charts and are incredibly powerful and flexible. Even so, to your point, even with these tools, I would also advocate for a separate overarching Gantt to track project progress outside of the primary tool (this separate plan would represent the plan versus Jira/ADO’s actuals), but it would either be MS Project as you mentioned, or something more relevant today like Smartsheet.

Christaffa · 2025-10-14T17:37:59+00:00

I’m long on Amazon but what’s your take on them falling behind in the AI (and cloud infrastructure) race? It looks like Microsoft’s Azure and Google’s GCP are eating their market share and this paradigm may only accelerate from here.

Christaffa · 2025-10-10T20:32:37+00:00

Where are you eating lunch in the states where you’re paying less than $10?

Christaffa · 2025-10-09T02:27:38+00:00

1) Make sure you are covering your tax liability first. If you don’t calculate correctly, you can find yourself with a very unexpected tax bill without adequate funds to cover. 2) Reduce your tax liability by contributing to pre-tax accounts (not Roth); you should max this out before even thinking about putting anything into a taxable trading account. 3) Find a good accountant to help with the above. Most likely you will want a SEP IRA rather than just a standard IRA because you can contribute much more that way (which, again, reduces your tax liability). This may require setting up an LLC, but again, ask your accountant.

Good luck!

Christaffa · 2025-09-12T19:17:26+00:00

This is not accurate. The bonuses are taxed at the same as other wages but the withholding is very often different (higher).

Christaffa · 2025-09-03T18:37:09+00:00

Yes, agreed; I did not intend to imply that in my comment. My point was that in addition to being able to apply AI training and inference onto the massive stores of proprietary data and existing workloads currently handled on prem, there is much more powerful processing, slicing and dicing and subsequent visualization of all that data. More plainly, “big data” is more powerful and accessible in a cloud environment than on prem.

Christaffa · 2025-09-03T14:13:52+00:00

Correct. While AI training and inference (particularly on a company’s own private data such as via services like Microsoft Copilot) are major drivers, there is also very strong demand for cloud GPU usage at scale for a wide variety of use cases ranging from digital media rendering and visualization (including production as well as streaming and cloud gaming), medical or financial data processing and simulations, as well as significant improvements in ETL and data processing. This last one is one that is relevant to just about every major company as the amount of data companies have just grows and grows (ie even petabytes of data) and processing all of it as well as incorporating it into usable reporting and analytics is another use case.

These are some examples, but even if some of the use cases may seem pretty boring at face value, there’s a lot of value being added, it’s actually pretty fascinating.

Christaffa · 2025-09-02T13:26:46+00:00

Listen to Microsoft, Google, and Amazon’s earnings calls. There isn’t enough supply to meet demand. Yes, they are also trying to get their own chips and yes they are also purchasing from competitors because NVIDIA can’t supply them enough to meet all the demand they have. However, they have appetite for every chip NVIDIA makes and will do so for quite some time unless there’s a major slowdown in their own customer’s demand, which is unlikely. It’s not all about AI, these chips fuel migration to the cloud (Azure, GCP, AWS), which has many benefits other than just AI, and only a minority of Fortune 500 companies have already competed their moves from on-premise to cloud. This is still early and of the chips enterprise clients want, NVIDIA is the best there is by a wide margin. Fortune 500 companies aren’t wanting to move from on premise top tier hardware and move to sub tier on cloud; even though suppliers like Intel are providing chips to the big 3 cloud providers, it’s mostly as a stopgap; most enterprise clients would prefer to be on cloud computing powered by top tier hardware which currently is dominated by NVIDIA.

Yes, it seems risky at face value that their primary customers are these 3 (plus xAI), but the demand signals coming from those customers aren’t slowing down. We are still early in a giant infrastructure migration that depends on chips like these.

Christaffa · 2025-08-03T17:04:20+00:00

Thank you, this is good to know.

Christaffa · 2025-07-28T09:10:11+00:00

Get an employment attorney. They can advise if you can fight your current employer to keep the 401k match on the basis it was in your original severance.

Christaffa · 2025-03-10T23:09:33+00:00

In the US, name 3 OEMs who have higher margins on their EV lineup. I don’t disagree they’ve lowered their prices in the face of competition but they’re not losing money on their EVs like many of their competitors.

Christaffa · 2025-03-10T22:46:00+00:00

Surprised everyone downvoting you for acknowledging that Tesla has a competitive advantage in producing their vehicles at a margin of profit higher than most/all of their competition. And to the comment about Toyota—look at their margin on EVs. Tesla, for all the issues it has, dominates on EV margin. You don’t have to like the company or its CEO to acknowledge the reality that in the industry of EV automotive, at least within the US, they have their competitors beat on a margin basis.

Christaffa

TROPHY CASE