Microsoft Set for Worst Quarter Since 2008 (opens in new tab)

https://www.lynalden.com/march-2026-newsletter/ (control-f “The Investment Implications of Chaos”)

Not investing advice, I’ve reallocated away from US domestic equities to international equities (VXUS) as a majority of a portfolio. This hedges against a correction from overweight Mag 7 exposure and US economic growth impairment from current policies (imho).

https://www.axios.com/2026/03/27/stocks-trump-iran-nasdaq

https://totalrealreturns.com/n/VTI,VXUS?start=2025-01-20

https://www.apolloacademy.com/sp-500-concentration-approachi...

I think a crash is coming and I do nothing. I rebalance my stock/bond split and keep a large emergency fund as per usual.

Either you need the cash now and are already in short-term treasuries or you're it it for the long-term and you'll be laughing at this question when the Dow hits 100k.

One should either weather out the storm or if one wants to cash out soon or manage their portfolio more closely they would pick the defensive assets they trust the most and hold until they stop thinking the stock market crash is coming up or stop trusting those assets. If they really think the crash is imminent, maybe investing some excess money into shorting the market while setting trailing stop loss would be a fun activity that might turn profitable

If you genuinely think these two events will shake the foundations of the US economy, then no investment is really going to protect you; you can't expect a system to shield you from the very thing that's breaking it.

There is crypto but even that got infiltrated by institutional wall street money. There are off-shore jurisdictions but the recent Iran war has showed these can be very vulnerable at a moment notice. There is China, but a Taiwan invasion could reduce your assets there to zero.

Honestly, I think the best bet is crypto/Bitcoin, by far. It operates across borders and still relatively insulated from government reach. Unlike gold, oil, or anything physical, it can be moved without physical visibility.

If everyone (most people) think the same, shouldn't you do the opposite?

Be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful. Etc.

The advice I have heard is if you think there will be a significant drop in the market you liquidate all your holdings while they are still high and then rebuy when the price is low. Granted this is a gamble though, if you’re wrong then you just sold all your stock and are no longer participating in the market plus you need to pay capital gains tax

Dunno, but yesterday was the first time ever I felt confident shorting nearly across the board. Nearly.

Other than buying oil futures, probably selling to cash and getting ready to buy when it hits the fan.

You can go all cash so not risking leverage via shorts, etc. But a lot of folks think that's dumb. I feel better being in cash right now as the mental stress of big loses in middle age is not worth the missed gains if I'm wrong. To each their own.

Their target is not coders, it is the professional world who do 90% of their work in Office applications, like me. A $200/m model absolutely does not fly when rolled out to entire corporations. It needs to be a $20/user/month product.

But I agree, it sucks. It is the only AI we are able to use at work and for tasks that it should be good at (compare comment sheets against a deliverable register and assign to specific packages) and it just can’t do it. It can read the spreadsheet and understand them just fine but outputs are garbled nonsense.

“Copilot” is not one product, it’s around 15 different products, seriously.

I think that people often compare apples to oranges by comparing the “copilot” they have in Windows/Office/Teams etc to Claude Code which is ridiculous.

A better product to compare Claude Code to would be “Github Copilot CLI”, but I haven’t seen the two seriously compared anywhere.

It’s odd to me how much Microsoft over committed to Copilot. They added unwanted Copilot buttons to laptops. They renamed Office to Copilot. And in the end, it’s a terrible product anyways. They can only get away with this because of the control they have over OEMs, distribution channels, and the inability for consumers to opt out of all of thus.

Meanwhile startups can’t compete fairly because they don’t have the same channels to flood with their own branding.

Copilot was by far the worst for coding. Not that the code snippets it would generate were not good, but due to the insane number of bugs in its UI. It would just spit out blank blocks thinking they contained code. When I asked it to repeat the steps which were empty, it would generate the same empty blocks like "here's your code" lol

How TF can you go to market with such bugs.

We have copilot at work integrated very deeply in our E5 landscape. It def sucks in Office, and I can break Copilot very easily when building small notebooks. It often crashes and the next page build in a notebook doesn’t come close to the previous iteration. That’s maddening.

But, the Teams integration for meeting summaries and in-meeting “what did Bob just say about the data center project?” prompts is magical and very useful. If you live in meetings or are trying not to. They need to put that team on rescue duty.

I have no interest in Copilot from Microsoft in general but I do like GitHub Copilot overall. That said, I’m _very_ interested in a viable alternative. I only use it for “fancy autocomplete” and have zero use for the agent/chat capabilities (I use Claude Code for that). It’s been a year or so since I looked at and tried alternatives but when I last did, copilot was the best IMHO.

What are people using as an alternative?

OpenAI also signed an agreement with AWS. And Anthropic has signed on with Microsoft as well as GCP.

The underlying dynamic is that no single cloud provider has the capacity required to host all the demand, so the frontier AI labs have no choice but to diversify for their infrastructure needs.

Once we are able to run language models on any consumer hardware with good T/s Windows will become an absolute powerhouse just like it did in gaming with DirectX. Any application will be able to be AI infused and the API to do so will be consistent and free to the business offering it.

With any luck they've missed their exit dumping window.

spacex is particular is desperately searching for a bagholder. Leveraging the obvious synergies between rockets (a mediocre business), xai (a horrid business), and social media that lost more than half it's already modest revenues...

Kind of ongoing theme in tech industry and beyond. "Investors" will punish every stock unless company announces mass layoffs. My company is posting 10% year over year growth yet stocks keep falling.