Writing this before we know
I’m writing this the night before the open.
NVIDIA has just dropped another absurd quarter of AI-fueled revenue, the headlines are already calling it historic, and the futures are twitching. By the time you read this, we’ll know which version of reality we woke up in:
- Green candles everywhere, “AI is back, baby.”
- Or another ugly leg down, “the bubble has popped.”
I have no idea which one we get.
That’s not humility. That’s the only lesson the market has ever reliably taught me: nobody knows the short-term reaction, especially after an event everyone is staring at.
So instead of trying to guess the next tick, I want to talk about the curve underneath the chart and why, for OppenFolio, it doesn’t actually matter which way tomorrow goes.
The wrong curve
Most of what you’ll read about these earnings will live on one of two curves:
-
The price curve
- Did NVIDIA beat or miss?
- Is the guidance strong enough?
- Will margins hold?
- Is the multiple justified?
-
The macro curve
- What does this mean for “AI as a bubble”?
- Is this the next dot-com?
- Will the Fed react?
- Does this change the odds of a recession?
Those are fine questions. They’re just not the main question.
The real curve — the one I care about when I design systems like OppenFolio — is this:
How fast is AI changing what individual humans can do with an hour of their time?
That curve is almost completely invisible in price action, and totally obvious if you sit inside a large company right now and watch what’s happening on the ground.
The trench-level reality
Here’s the short version of what I’ve been watching from inside a very large fruit-flavored company:
- Projects scoped for 12 weeks are getting done in one.
- Not by a hundred-person tiger team. By one engineer + an LLM.
- Pull requests with hundreds of changed files, new modules, test coverage, all drafted by a model and steered by a human who two months earlier didn’t want AI in the workflow at all.
Management is still catching up to what that means. The market is even further behind.
If you zoom in on NVIDIA’s quarter, you see data center revenue, GPU demand, cloud capex.
If you zoom out to the trenches, you see something different:
- AI isn’t just taking jobs. It’s teaching people new ones.
- The limiting factor is no longer “Can I learn this?”
- It’s “Do I have a reason to learn this, and a few uninterrupted hours?”
That’s the revolution.
And it does not care whether the stock is up 10% or down 10% tomorrow morning.
The capability shock nobody is prepared for
We’re living through something that doesn’t map to any previous transition. The closest metaphor I have is this:
Picture a world locked in slow, grinding attrition — old fears, old processes, old limits. Then overnight, thousands of people quietly acquire something like superpowers: the ability to learn any skill, build any tool, rewrite any part of their lives, often in a single evening with an LLM.
Not metaphorical superpowers. Real ones — creative, cognitive, economic.
Imagine a waiter at a dying diner off a rural highway. A job with no ladder, no credential pipeline, no upward path. A dead end in any previous era.
In the past, escaping that reality required rare opportunity: money for school, time off work, relocation, luck, someone willing to open a door.
Now the same person can sit down after their shift, open a laptop, and ask an AI to teach them how to:
write music
build an app
start a store
design a product
code a website
pass a certification
write a book
start a new identity entirely
It might not work on the first try. But the cost of trying is so low, and the teacher is so patient, that it doesn’t matter anymore. They can try again tomorrow.
This is the capability shock. This is what no economic model has caught up to. This is the part of the story no earnings report can capture.
You can use that ability to build a war machine — people hurt each other with hammers too — but the number of people choosing to build something grows, while the number choosing destruction shrinks. That’s not optimism. That’s simple population dynamics: the group creating value expands; the group limiting it contracts.
And this happens regardless of whether tomorrow’s market wakes up bullish or panicked.
The stock chart oscillates. The capability curve only moves one direction.
Scarcity, detours, and why this revolution is different
Every previous revolution was about scarce resources:
- Farmland near trade routes.
- Oil fields and shipping lanes.
- Factory capacity and supply chains.
Those were zero-sum. If I had them, you didn’t.
This one is about competence — what a person can do with a browser tab open and a model on the other side.
Competence is not zero-sum:
- If AI helps your sister-in-law write a motion that finally gets her child support paid, that doesn’t take anything away from me.
- If AI helps a junior engineer ship something that used to be “senior only” work, the whole product improves.
- If AI helps a stranger in another country start a micro-business that feeds their family, you don’t lose your dinner.
The pressure that has driven most of human history — resource scarcity — doesn’t vanish, but it gets bypassed. More and more people can step sideways out of old zero-sum fights and into new paths that didn’t exist before.
That’s the curve I care about.
What this has to do with OppenFolio
OppenFolio wasn’t built as an AI bet. It was built as a time bet.
- Start with tiny amounts of capital.
- Route them through high-yield ETFs.
- Turn them into a self-funding engine for creative work. :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0}
- Let the machine buy back hours of your life.
When I talk about OppenFolio being “the lazy alternative to owning a vending machine,” that’s really what I mean: I want the results of leverage without adding more stress to my day. :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}
A small slice of that engine happens to sit in exotic income products tied to AI names like NVIDIA — things like NVDY. If the market loves this quarter, those might throw off a little more income for a while. If the market hates it, they might decay faster and get sized down.
But the core mission doesn’t change:
Turn money into time. Because time is the only real currency you ever actually own. :contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2}
The AI revolution matters to OppenFolio only in one specific way:
- If AI keeps making individual humans more capable per hour,
- and those humans keep building things other humans value,
- then the global system keeps throwing off cashflows we can harness.
Not because some line on a chart goes up forever, but because people keep showing up and building something instead of nothing. :contentReference[oaicite:3]{index=3}
Two tomorrows
So let’s talk about the two futures you might be reading this in.
1. Tomorrow is a party
NVIDIA beats expectations, the market decides AI is immortal, indices rip higher, your broker app is full of happy green numbers.
In that world:
- Nothing fundamental about AI changes.
- Nothing fundamental about your time changes.
- The temptation is to over-rotate: chase, FOMO, over-allocate to whatever just went vertical.
From an OppenFolio perspective, the move is boring:
- Stick to allocation rules.
- Reinvest income according to the plan.
- Maybe trim anything that ballooned too big.
The important work is still: use the income to buy time, and use the time to build what you actually care about.
2. Tomorrow is a bloodbath
NVIDIA guides “less insanely high” than expected, or the market decides the run has gone too far and sells anyway. Indices gap down, AI names get hit hardest, your broker app feels like a crime scene.
In that world:
- Again, nothing fundamental about AI changes.
- Again, nothing fundamental about your time changes.
- The temptation is to catastrophize: “It was all a bubble; the future just died.”
From an OppenFolio perspective, the move is still boring:
- Stick to allocation rules.
- Let the machine buy income streams at better prices.
- Keep your personal runway and emergency fund intact.
The important work is still the same: use the income to buy time, and use the time to build something that survives a few more board flips.
Why I don’t read earnings takes anymore
Most post-earnings analysis lives in a very small frame:
- “What this means for the quarter.”
- “What this means for tech.”
- “What this means for the S&P.”
Those can be fun to skim, but they’re not where I learn anything useful.
What matters to me is:
- Are more people able to use AI as a teacher, not just a tool?
- Are more people discovering alternate paths around scarcity?
- Are more people building small, real things in the middle of the chaos?
Because that’s where the real compounding happens:
- Not just in capital, but in competence.
- Not just in yield, but in optionality.
- Not just in portfolios, but in lives.
NVIDIA’s quarter is a datapoint. A big one. But it’s still just one pixel in a much bigger picture.
The takeaway
By the time you read this, the market will have reacted. Commentators will have declared victory or defeat. Targets will be raised or cut. Threads will be written. Clips will be posted.
None of that changes the three things I care about most:
- The AI curve is about human capability per hour, not stock price per day.
- OppenFolio is a machine for turning capital into time, not a bet on any single ticker.
- Every act of building — every project, every portfolio, every solved problem — is one more tiny diversion away from collapse and toward survival. :contentReference[oaicite:4]{index=4}
Whatever version of tomorrow we wake up in, the plan is the same:
- Keep the machine running.
- Keep buying back time.
- Keep using that time to build something a little more interesting than doomscrolling earnings reactions.
If you want help thinking through what this looks like in your own context, you can always reach me at [email protected].
Disclaimer:
This post is for informational purposes only and reflects personal opinions, not financial advice.
OppenFolio is not an investment advisory service. See site disclaimer for full details.