Hema Parmar
Investing reporter at Bloomberg News covering the people, power, and money shaping hedge funds and alternative asset management; she also appears on Bloomberg TV and radio.
Markets Are Pricing Resilience Before Inflation, Liquidity and AI Returns Are Tested
Markets, policymakers and lenders are pricing resilience before oil-driven inflation, liquidity stress and AI returns have been tested. Scrutiny of President Trump’s contact with Fed Chair Kevin Warsh could intensify if higher energy prices force a difficult rate decision, while Situational Awareness has resumed investing after a leverage-driven liquidity crisis without resolving questions about its future risk posture. Alphabet’s $25 billion bond offering, meanwhile, drew demand on the strength of demonstrated infrastructure revenue and cash flow, even as the wider payoff from AI remains unproven.
Coatue’s Concentrated AI Bet Drove an 8.3% July Loss
Bloomberg’s Hema Parmar says Coatue Management’s 8.3% July loss, its worst monthly decline in more than a year, reflected its concentrated exposure to AI and chip stocks during a sector selloff. The fund remained up 14.3% for the year, underscoring the trade-off in Philippe Laffont’s long-held AI “supercycle” thesis: the same positioning that captured earlier gains amplified July’s reversal. Parmar contrasts Coatue with Viking Global, whose more cautious AI exposure limited the month’s damage but left it with less of the prior rally.
Viking Calls AI Underweighting a Missed Opportunity, Holds Course
Viking Global Investors has told clients that its cautious stance on AI-linked stocks was a missed opportunity, after its flagship hedge fund returned 2.6% in the first half while several rivals with greater exposure posted far stronger gains. But co-founder Andreas Halvorsen said the firm will maintain its discipline, arguing that current valuations offer too little margin of safety against its revenue and earnings forecasts. Bloomberg News’s Hema Parmar reports that Viking is participating selectively, including through Samsung, rather than following peers wholesale into the AI rally.
AI Demand Pushes Beyond Nvidia Into Power, Memory, and Compute Markets
Bloomberg Technology framed Nvidia’s earnings as a test of the wider AI infrastructure trade rather than a simple chip-demand story. Caroline Hyde, Ed Ludlow and Bloomberg Intelligence’s Mandeep Singh said investors were looking past headline growth to constraints around China access, margins, memory prices, inference workloads and supply, while a $67 billion NextEra-Dominion deal showed how the data-center boom is already reshaping power markets. The program’s broader argument was that AI demand remains strong, but the bottlenecks have moved across the physical and financial stack.