3 stock picks: 1) AMD, with Zen 2 coming in April 2019, Zen 3 in 2020, and even 5nm manufacturing on the horizon, is about to supplant Intel as the dominant desktop chip maker.
2) MSFT has scaled down its megalomania under the new CEO Satya Nadella, but under the calmer exterior, it is still a ruthlessly ambitious company. They’re into everything:
– cloud with Azure,
– IoT,
– AI,
– business analytics (Power BI),
– quantum computing (they even have a language Q# to be used for quantum research),
– desktop with Windows 10 being regularly updated and still the premier gaming platform (e.g., DirectX 12 has just been updated with Raytracing technology),
– servers with SQL Server being in my opinion their best software overall,
– developer tools like Visual Studio soon to be updated to VS 2019 (one crucial reason MS has been so successful is its commitment to developers and thorough documentation of all its tools),
– porting their stuff to Linux,
– Office 2019 is coming, and so on.
They’re also working on a mysterious “modular” version of Windows called Windows Core OS + CShell which may enable them to return to the smartphones market.
3) NVidia (NVDA): still the undisputed leader in GPUs for servers and machine learning, crypto mining, and gaming, with AMD way behind and Intel seriously wounded, it may announce a new GPU architecture very soon.