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Posted by mooreds 7 hours ago

Mag 7 starting to underperform [pdf](www.apollo.com)
173 points | 139 commentspage 4
alecco 2 hours ago|
US Big Tech is betting the house on AI, news at 11.
re-thc 6 hours ago||
It is less that the Mag 7 is starting to underperform and more that a market correction is likely and coming very soon.
uejfiweun 6 hours ago||
This is probably a hot take and I am by no means a financial expert and this is probably quite wrong. I personally think that attempting to value these companies using the same methodology as the history of all American companies is fundamentally wrong. Sure, some mom and pop small local regional business that overperformed is probably more likely to underperform. But when it comes to big tech companies, these companies are operating a data and capital flywheel that doesn't easily just slow down. I mean, you look at the history of these computer tech companies, especially software companies. They really haven't slowed down. Like, look at Microsoft. It's just been growing from the very beginning, pretty much.
wolframhempel 6 hours ago||
This seems healthy to me. A market where returns are less dependent on seven mega-cap names is probably more stable, not less. If earnings growth broadens out and capital starts flowing back toward quality and free cash flow outside the obvious AI winners, that should reduce concentration risk and make the whole market less fragile.
edot 6 hours ago||
You can tell these guys know nothing about LLMs or how they’re provided. I love how they show OpenRouter’s graph of token usage as if it speaks for usage across the board. DeepSeek looks like the king because people who use Anthropic and OpenAI use them on either a direct basis or AWS Bedrock …

And the bar chart for token costs, really? As if that’s information? Their sources are the API docs ffs. If they had at least modeled something to estimate token costs that would be interesting, but showing the public prices and calling it research is dumb.

pj_mukh 6 hours ago||
"I love how they show OpenRouter’s graph of token usage as if it speaks for usage across the board."

I'm not sure what was said during what looks like a deck of a presentation? I'm hoping it wasn't this, because that's an obvious misfire.

toomuchtodo 6 hours ago||
Apollo Group has $1T assets under management, I believe them over most folks on HN. Their argument that the Mag 7 is burning up all of their free cash flow is factually accurate, as the returns are not materializing for the investments being made (ie underperformance).
davidpapermill 6 hours ago|||
The Mag 7 spending around $700B on capex this year, expected around a trillion next year.

That's more than their combined FCF, and they're borrowing to bridge the gap.

Danox 6 hours ago||
One is not spending anything out of the ordinary up until this point in comparison to their competition. But the Apple Silicon design group might start spending some money on something practical, something that might begin the typical Apple long-range process of replacing two or three existing companies within their current supply chain, but that’s nothing new over the last 25 years.
toomuchtodo 5 hours ago||
It is a bit unfair to lump Apple in with everyone else in the Mag7, as their strategy is arguably reasonable and prudent for the current position of the hype circle. Apple Silicon was a spectacular decision and investment. Everyone else has lost their damn mind.
roboror 6 hours ago||||
If we're doing money=smart, the mag 7 control almost $4T in assets and cash, so wouldn't you trust them even more?
toomuchtodo 6 hours ago||
Not based on the evidence of how they allocate capital. Meta wasted $80B on the Metaverse, for example. Apollo allocates capital as their day job. Mag7 allocates by vibes.

https://finance.yahoo.com/sectors/technology/articles/mark-z...

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/19/technology/mark-zuckerber... | https://archive.today/iEGAj

triceratops 6 hours ago||
> Apollo allocates capital as their day job. Mag7 allocates by vibes

Lol what in the world? Is running a trillion dollar corporation anything other than allocating capital?

You can argue that Meta made a poor capital allocation decision with VR and perhaps continues to do so with AI.

toomuchtodo 6 hours ago||
I have an opinion based on the data, yours may differ. Favorite this thread for when the music stops. It has before (1999-2000, 2007-2008), it will again.
triceratops 6 hours ago||
I'm objecting to your categorization of the job of running one of the Mag7s as something other than "capital allocation". The CEO of Meta or Amazon or any of these other companies allocates capital all day long. They do it differently than an asset manager like Apollo for sure, and sometimes make worse decisions. But it's in the same category.
staticman2 4 hours ago||||
Vanguard has 12T under management so you believe any PDF they put out 12 times more?
toomuchtodo 4 hours ago|||
Vanguard holds and manages index funds and are, broadly speaking, not active managers. Apollo is a sophisticated, active capital market participant|manager.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Global_Management

jknoepfler 3 hours ago|||
I mean, I'd assume this deck was trying to sell something. But the relevant comparison is to stonk-bros on HN LARPing as hedge fund managers, not Vanguard.

Which, to be fair, Vanguard has earned a good deal of trust from me on the passive investment side of the equation, although I don't think it's meaningful to make it linearly proportional to the total size of their managed assets? I'm not even sure how I'd operationalize that in reality.

Having actual skin in the game on getting an answer right is generally a sign of credibility, though.

That said, without context I'm not really drawing any conclusions from this.

petesergeant 6 hours ago||||
> Apollo Group has $1T assets under management, I believe them over most folks on HN

Ah, the old _argumentum ad giletum Patagoniae_

serf 6 hours ago||
in pecunia veritas , an old HN favorite.
re-thc 6 hours ago||||
> Apollo Group has $1T assets under management, I believe them over most folks on HN

If only that's a measure of if they know how to time the stock market. The real measure is how much they earn not if their sales or marketing department manages to get more customers.

bitexploder 5 hours ago|||
[flagged]
kingleopold 6 hours ago|
they are building new narritaves with made up BS name like mag 7 this, that. it used to be faang BS but they updated so lower IQ folks gets into new narratives. Marketing dep. and fin. engineering working together. Another older one was ZIRP that, ZIRP this and you see lower and avg. IQ folks talk about it along with lots of bots. ZIRP bots stopped so MAG whatever bots can take over.

Waiting for next game, bets are open, any new names? O A S I S? upcoming IPOs and new names needed so they can exit scam