Here’s what you need to know today

• In Australia, all eyes this week are on the Reserve Bank, as we await their decision on interest rates on Tuesday 18 February. A decision to cut rates could trigger an Australian Federal Election, as the Labor Party await any good economic news. (AFR)
  
  

• However, the biggest stories of the weekend all centered on European security:
  
  

• Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he was prepared to negotiate with allies before engaging with Russia to end the war. This comment came after US President Donald Trump initiated peace talks with Russian President Vladimir Putin, seemingly without the input of Zelensky. (The Guardian)
  
  

• Meanwhile at the Munich Security Conference in Germany, US Vice-President J.D. Vance called out many of his NATO allies by name, including Germany for excluding the hard-right Alternative for Germany and Britain for laws over abortion clinic safe zones. The US Vice-President said that Europe’s greatest threat comes “from within” citing political suppression and mass migration. (BBC)
  
  

• A Russian drone strike hit the Chernobyl nuclear plant, igniting a fire and damaging the radiation containment shelter that has kept radioactive material from spreading across Europe since the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown in 1986. (ABC News)
  
  

• Back in Australia, negotiations between the NSW Government and the Rail, Tram and Bus Union continue as the union refused to comply with a Fair Work Commission recommendation to suspend industrial action. Sydney commuters should be ready for the possibility of more disruptions, cancellations and delays over the coming weeks. (ABC News)
  
  

• The Australian government will ban foreign buyers from purchasing homes in Australia for the next two years, with an exemption for new homes. This move sees the Australian Labor Party matching a policy the Coalition were planning to take to this year’s federal election. (ABC News)
  
  

• The Australian government has reportedly entered a consultation period that could see them extend the social media ban for children under 16 to other platforms including YouTube, WhatsApp and gaming platforms like Roblox. (Capital Brief)
  
  

• Several US Prosecutors have quit over the Trump Administration’s decision to dismiss corruption charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams. The Prosecutors allege Trump has dropped the charges in exchange for Adams co-operating with Trump’s immigration crackdown. (CNN)

What the…?

The Denmark-USA beef continues to escalate. After Trump threatened to take over Greenland and subsequently threatened tariffs against major Danish countries to do it, Denmark is now fighting back in this war of words.

More than 200,000 Danes have signed a petition to buy California from the US and rename it “New Denmark”. The petition is a joke with plans to “Bring hygge to Hollywood” and rename Disneyland ‘Hans Christian Andersenland’. But it does highlight the absurdity of America’s efforts to take Greenland from its NATO ally. (Sky News)

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Investing is a lifelong journey

Here’s what you can learn today.

Nick Griffin: The Nvidia story is not over

This is an excerpt from our conversation with Nick Griffin, founder & CIO at Munro Partners. (Check out the full conversation: Apple | Spotify | YouTube)

Question: What are you working on right now as an investor?

Nick: We are working on AI - artificial intelligence. So we found over the journey that you'll spend a lot of time getting bombarded with what's happening in the economy, what's happening in the macro, et cetera. And that's great, but that's noise. The best way to make money is to identify a big structural change and identify the winners. That's what our funds are set up to do. So right now, the big structural change in the world is the emergence of artificial intelligence. It's really exciting. No one really knows what's going to happen, including us and everyone's investing quite heavily in it. And so our job is to identify the big structural change, work out how big it could be, and most importantly, work out the companies that are going to win from it.

What insights did you get from your recent US trip about AI?

What they all told us was that there's no diminishing returns at scale. If we spend more on compute, these models will just get better and better and better... Tesla's gone and built a hundred thousand GPU cluster, which they just started up the other day. Facebook's trying to build a 200,000 GPU cluster and Nvidia and Broadcom both told us that their clients have asked for equipment that will enable to stand up to a million GPU cluster... What you come back discovering is you're probably only two years into something that's probably going to last five to 10 years.

Prefer to watch this conversation? All Equity Mates episodes are now released in full on YouTube. Check out our conversation with Nick here:

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