🍔 What's Eating McDonald's?

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McDonald's stock is about to lose for eight straight weeks.

That hasn't happened since the dot-com bubble popped. Flip phones were cutting edge. Shrek hadn't come out yet.

$MCD ( ▲ 0.39% ) is trading around $232, down roughly 24% this year.

For a stock people buy specifically because it's boring and reliable, that's a lot of excitement nobody ordered.

Zoom out and it gets worse. Shares are down about 5% over the last five years.

Five years of holding the world's most famous burger stock, and you'd have been better off keeping the cash under your mattress. Inflation aside, obviously.

If the stock can't claw back gains by Friday's close, it locks in nearly two months of red weeks, the longest losing run in over two decades.

This week alone it's off around 1.5%. Small drop, big symbolism.

A few things are weighing on the stock:

McDonald's just announced an $8.5 billion franchisee support plan that runs all the way to 2036.

That's a commitment longer than most marriages, and investors are side-eyeing it hard.

The issue? It needs heavy cash spending right now, while the payoff in margins gets pushed out to 2030.

Think of it like paying for a gym membership today and being told you'll see abs in four years. Maybe. If everything goes to plan.

Wall Street is famously bad at waiting. "Spend now, profit later" is the fastest way to make shareholders nervous.

If you own MCD directly or through an index fund, this is a reminder that even "safe" blue chips can go through long, painful stretches.

The real question is whether the NEXT plan is smart long-term investment or an expensive bet that takes years to judge.

The market is currently voting "show me the receipts first." Whether that's an overreaction or fair caution depends on how much you trust a 2030 margin target.

“If I were a farmer, I would absolutely use AI.” 

That’s Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA. 

He’s pointing to one of AI’s biggest untapped opportunities: farming. 

DIT AgTech is already putting AI to work with 500+ units deployed and 370,000 head on-platform.

Invest in DIT AgTech Today

^{𝘐𝘯 𝘮𝘢𝘬𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘢𝘯 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘥𝘦𝘤𝘪𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯, 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘰𝘳𝘴 𝘮𝘶𝘴𝘵 𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘺 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘪𝘳 𝘰𝘸𝘯 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘶𝘦𝘳 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘴 𝘰𝘧 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘭𝘶𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘳𝘪𝘴𝘬𝘴 𝘪𝘯𝘷𝘰𝘭𝘷𝘦𝘥. 𝘋𝘐𝘛 𝘈𝘨𝘛𝘦𝘤𝘩 𝘩𝘢𝘴 𝘧𝘪𝘭𝘦𝘥 𝘢 𝘍𝘰𝘳𝘮 𝘊 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘚𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘳𝘪𝘵𝘪𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘌𝘹𝘤𝘩𝘢𝘯𝘨𝘦 𝘊𝘰𝘮𝘮𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘪𝘯 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘯𝘦𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩 𝘪𝘵𝘴 𝘰𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘨, 𝘢 𝘤𝘰𝘱𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘸𝘩𝘪𝘤𝘩 𝘮𝘢𝘺 𝘣𝘦 𝘰𝘣𝘵𝘢𝘪𝘯𝘦𝘥 𝘩𝘦𝘳𝘦: https://bit.ly/4bzuWCi​}

Michael Burry just clapped back at Nvidia with a book from 1968.

Yes, The Big Short guy. Yes, a paperback older than most fund managers.

Here's what happened.

On Sept. 27, Nvidia showed investors a slide claiming its chips hold value far longer than accountants assume.

The title: "NVIDIA AI Infrastructure Retains Value Beyond Accelerated Depreciation Schedules." Catchy stuff.

It plots the retained value of Nvidia's A100, H100 and B200 chips against a standard five-year depreciation curve. The implication: companies are writing these chips off too fast.

Why does anyone care about depreciation? Because how fast you write off a chip decides how much profit you get to report.

Slow write-offs mean smaller annual costs and fatter earnings. Fast write-offs mean the opposite.

Nvidia bulls, including author Tae Kim, hailed the slide as a knockout blow to the "depreciation bears."

Burry is the depreciation bear. He did not stay down.

Burry fired back with passages from "The Money Game," a finance book published in 1968.

In it, a seasoned critic asks how fast computers are being written off. He gets laughed out of the room by a "super-speculator" called The Great Winfield and a gang of young traders.

Their verdict on his worries: middle-aged and antiquated. Ouch.

Those traders were piling into computer leasing stocks, armed with arguments like:

Swap "computers" for "GPUs" and you could post that on X today with zero edits.

Burry's point: AI bulls are running the same "this time is different" playbook as the '60s crowd.

He said the exchange shows "human nature is more constant across the human experience than just about any other feature."

Translation: same FOMO, better haircuts.

This was Burry's second swing in a week.

Last week, he warned that Big Tech's massive AI spending could end in significant write-offs. That's Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Oracle in the firing line.

His history lesson: the late-1990s tech, media and telecom buildout. The write-downs that followed pushed aggregate S&P 500 net investment negative for 12 straight quarters, from mid-2003 to mid-2006.

Twelve quarters. That's three full years of hangover after one very expensive party.

So what does it mean for your money?

If you own an S&P 500 tracker, you own a big slice of these AI spenders, whether you meant to or not.

If Burry's right, today's profits could be flattered by optimistic depreciation, with the bill landing later. If Nvidia's right, those chips keep earning and the bears end up as the middle-aged critic in the story.

One thing worth watching: how the hyperscalers describe the useful life of their hardware on upcoming earnings calls. That's where this argument gets settled.

Somebody in this story is The Great Winfield. We just don't know who yet.

The company behind Claude is reportedly aiming to IPO before Thanksgiving.

Anthropic lost $42 billion last year. Now it’s got a target valuation is $1.8 trillion to $2 trillion, and the goal is to match or beat SpaceX's $SPCX ( ▼ 1.85% ) $1.77 trillion IPO from June.

Elon's rockets, meet the chatbot.

Nothing like a $2 trillion listing to go with your turkey.

2025 revenue: about $4.6 billion.

2025 net loss: nearly $42 billion.

That's roughly $9 lost for every $1 earned. Most startups burn cash. This one is running a bonfire.

Compute and infrastructure cost $7.33 billion last year, triple the 2024 bill.

That's more than half of its $12.65 billion in total operating expenses.

And the spending spree is just warming up. Anthropic expects to spend at least $518 billion over the next decade on its workloads.

That's about $52 billion a year. Every year. For ten years.

Broadcom $AVGO ( ▼ 2.15% ) will lend Anthropic up to $42 billion to fund infrastructure.

Yes, the same number as last year's loss. The universe has a sense of humour.

Here's how it fits together:

The twist? The debt is convertible. Broadcom could end up holding Anthropic shares.

Anthropic says it doesn't expect the notes to be sold before the IPO.

Anthropic also flagged in its own filing that Broadcom playing supplier and lender at once could create "potential conflicts of interest" and affect its access to compute.

When your landlord also holds your mortgage, things can get awkward.

OpenAI isn't expected to go public until at least 2027. That gives Anthropic first crack at public investors' AI appetite.

At $1.8T to $2T, buyers would be paying roughly 400 times last year's revenue.

That price only makes sense if revenue grows enormously, and fast.

The ripple effects are already spreading. Amazon is a heavy backer, Broadcom is the lender and supplier, and Google supplies the chips.

If you own any of those three, you already have a seat at this table.