Trendline Charts #61

Welcome back to Trendline in 2025, where I share 5 best charts on Investing trends.

Let’s dive into today’s post.

1) DeepSeek vs. Silicon Valley: Deepseek’s AI launch has taken the world by storm and making silicon valley sweat. This is the best chart to explain why. Deepseek’s almost same in quality as OpenAI’s o1 but costs less than 1/10th. No other model comes close. Investors fear this will reduce ROI on AI investments from a lot of big tech companies, leading to a big sell off today! (Nvidia is down 17%!)

Note: Artificial Analysis’s Quality Index is built covering different dimensions of model intelligence (Reasoning and knowledge, scientific reasoning, math and coding)

2) Substack is the new media: Substack is continuing its trend of decentralizing traditional media. According to similarweb, Substack MAUs grew 139% in 2024 vs. 2023 to reach >2M. If you add the growing popularity of podcasts, and newsletters in general, there is a wider trend of decentralization of media that is growing stronger every day.

3) Amazon’s moat in e-Commerce: There is still daylight between shipping time of Amazon US and other ecommerce websites (even as both are trending downwards over time).

4) US Teens love YouTube: For US teens, its YouTube then everything else. Almost 90% of US teens use YouTube. TikTok and Instagram are then next 2 most used apps.

5) Over the long term, earnings is what matters for stock price: As Benjamin Graham, the famous investor once said: “In the short-run, the stock market is a voting machine. Yet, in the long-run, it is a weighing machine”. The chart below shows that beautifully.

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