🤖 Your Chatbot Wants You In

Most people assume an index fund spreads their money across 500 companies. But a few tech giants carry a big chunk of it, so a hit to AI lands in your 401(k). Here are 10 stocks to help protect it. Get the Free Report.

Anthropic wants up to 20% of its IPO in regular investors' hands.

That's double what Arm $ARM ( ▲ 12.05% ) offered retail. Four times Instacart $CART ( ▲ 0.68% )

The company behind Claude is going public, and it's saving an unusually big chunk of the shares for retail investors.

$64.4B works out to roughly $8 for every person on Earth. From one IPO.

If retail gets the full 20%, that's about 160M shares, or somewhere between $11B and $12.5B of stock for regular investors.

Retail buyers in the US and other countries can take part. The final split depends on actual demand.

Very generous, compared with recent tech IPOs:

The only other giant to match it? SpaceX, which also set aside 20%.

Two mega-IPOs inviting retail in. That's either a trend or a very well-timed coincidence.

The decision is mostly about size.

With a valuation at $1.4 to $2 trillion and a raise that could reach $100B. That's a lot of shares for even the biggest institutions to absorb.

Retail is a huge pool of money. And a lot of those people already use Claude every day.

Your chatbot would like you to become a shareholder. Good branding, frankly.

Now the catch. It's a great deal for the company, but not necessarily for the people buying.

Retail investors tend to care less about the offer price than institutions do. Big funds haggle. Regular buyers mostly just want in.

Demand could also outstrip the retail supply, so a full order fill is far from guaranteed.

What it means for you: getting in and getting a good price are two separate questions.

An allocation gets you shares at the IPO price. Whether that price is good is your call. The banks setting it (Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, JPMorgan, Citi, Barclays, Wells Fargo, BofA, Deutsche Bank, RBC, UBS and more) are hired by the seller.

If demand runs hot, expect allocations to get scaled back. Wanting in is easy. Actually getting the shares is the hard part.

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Microsoft just dropped nearly 3% in a day over a spreadsheet.

Okay, a spreadsheet, a whiteboard and a dashboard.

On Tuesday, Anthropic (the Claude maker) unveiled a set of office tools, and investors suddenly felt a draft around Microsoft's most profitable furniture.

The timing is spicy. Anthropic is heading toward an IPO. Nothing says "value me generously" like poking Microsoft in the Excel.

Here's what launched…

All of it comes with every paid plan.

Honest answer: Sheets is pretty basic right now. Anthropic says more features are coming.

It even plays nice with the incumbent. You can export to Excel as .xlsx or CSV, or use Claude for Excel directly.

It also hooks into tools from Airtable, Asana, monday.com and Smartsheet.

So why did Microsoft drop? Markets price the three-year version of a product. And the three-year version of "AI that builds your spreadsheet for you" looks a lot like Microsoft's lunch.

On the same day, Goldman Sachs added fuel: it expects Anthropic to hit $685B in revenue by 2030.

More than $550B of that would come from enterprise sales. That's roughly 80% of the pile coming from businesses.

Businesses are the exact customers Microsoft has been happily billing for Office for decades. Whiteboards, Sheets and Dashboards are what that enterprise push looks like up close.

What does this mean for your money?

Microsoft has survived plenty of "Excel killers." This one just happens to have Goldman's forecast behind it.

Michael Burry just 4x'd a bet against Caterpillar.

Yes, the tractor company. The Big Short guy has been betting against the people who make big yellow diggers.

And it worked.

Burry bought put options on Caterpillar $CAT ( ▲ 2.92% ) at the end of Q2. Puts are basically a bet that a stock will fall.

Those puts have roughly quadrupled in value. On November 6, he told readers of his Substack, Cassandra Unchained, that he'd cut the position by 75%.

His words: "My Caterpillar puts have roughly quadrupled, and today I took them down 75%."

Now the clever bit. What's left is worth roughly what he put in to begin with.

Quick maths: 4x your money, sell three-quarters, and you've banked about 3x your original stake. The chips still on the table are basically free.

It's like leaving the casino with your winnings in your pocket and only gambling with the house's money.

CAT fell 10% last week, its worst week in 18 months.

Three things spooked investors:

Wait, AI? From a company that makes bulldozers?

Yep. Caterpillar also sells generators and power gear, and data centres are hungry for power. So when the market gets nervous about the

AI boom, CAT feels it too.

Then came the bounce. On Monday, November 9, CAT jumped 7.2% to close at $598.88 as the wider market rallied.

Which makes Burry's timing look sharp. When you're up 4x and the stock starts bouncing, you don't hang around to see if it sticks.

He hasn't turned bullish. Most of his bearish bets are now consolidated into puts on two big targets:

He's also holding puts on individual names: Oracle, Palantir, MetLife, and what's left of Caterpillar.

The chips, the software, the shovels. He's shorting the AI boom from every angle.

He's not the only one getting twitchy. On Tuesday, Bank of America pulled Nvidia, Micron and Lam Research off its US 1 top-picks list.

It gave no reason, and all three keep Buy ratings. Still, the chip trio slipped in premarket trading.

Which is Wall Street for "we still love you, we just don't want to be seen with you."

Lesson one: taking profits counts as a strategy. Burry didn't sell everything. He took his stake out plus profit, then let the rest ride.

Lesson two: the AI trade has spread way beyond chips. Power, industrials, even construction equipment now move on AI sentiment.

If your portfolio has some "boring" industrial stocks, they may be riding the AI rollercoaster without you knowing.

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