Mon Apr 07 2025
04/06
The rout continues, with the fear of global recession and shutdown of global trade triggered by insane reciprocal tariff. On Tech, we have more clarities now - (1) US content does not need to pay tariff, so NVDA chip within AI server is not included. (2) PC and Smartphone from China/Vietnam/Thailand, and vendors do NOT want to shift production base again, so they will push for price hike to address the tariff impact. (3) AI server assembled in Mexico no need for tariff, while components inside the server exported to US from Taiwan/Thailand would be charged with 32%/36%. Now 70% of AI server is assembled in Mexico and 30% in Taiwan. In other words, assembling in Mexico will be much cheaper than assembling in Taiwan, and AI server will face lower tariff than PC/smartphone.
On AUM $300M, Return since inception is $ 26.3M. Long side start to turn negative, and all the profit is from short side.
Before any clarity on how tariff will evolve, priority for all market participant is (1) to maintain PnL, (2) caution on retaliatory tariff, (3) prepare for pipeline for high quality names.
We are starting to switching some higher-valuation quality bluechip tech names into lower-valuation ones, including Shin Etsu, Tokyo Electron, TSMC. We might be a bit early, so we are controlling the sizing of this shift.