Investors / stance tracking
What Ankur Crawford is saying
FollowFollowingUnfollowPresident & Portfolio Manager, Alger
13 dated public stances tracked since 2026-04-17, most recently 2026-08-18. Each line carries the date and the venue it came from; quotation marks mean verbatim. Methodology.
The stances below are c8alpha's editorial distillation of Ankur Crawford's public commentary — television, podcasts, and interviews — compiled by automated transcript analysis and dated to the episode they came from. They may lag the speaker's current view and may contain extraction errors. Text in quotation marks is verbatim from the episode; everything else is our paraphrase. Ankur Crawford is not affiliated with c8alpha and has not endorsed this page. Nothing here is investment advice.
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13
tracked stances
10
themes
0
side flips
2026-08-18
last heard
Returns 90d -3.5% 33% correct · 6 calls · 180d -8.1% 50% correct · 6 calls
Raw direction-aware returns on public statements — long calls credited when the price rose, shorts when it fell, shorts capped at −100% — in a rising market this mostly measures who was long, not who has skill. Returns run from the stance date; calls are rarely closed publicly, so fixed 90-day / 180-day / 1-year horizons are used. A horizon shows only once it has fully matured, and only at 5+ scored stances. “% correct” is the share of those scored calls whose direction-aware return was positive at the horizon — in a rising market a bullish call is correct by default, so read it beside the market, not alone.
Scored calls
Every tracked call with at least one matured horizon: the rows behind the Returns line above. A dash is a horizon that has not matured yet.
| Date | Name | Call | 90d | 180d | 1y |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-04-17 | WDC | bullish | +25.3% | -2.2% | — |
| 2026-04-17 | QXO | bullish | -38.3% | -58.7% | — |
| 2026-04-17 | PLTR | bullish | -8.2% | +37.3% | — |
| 2026-04-17 | NBIS | bullish | +9.3% | +18.4% | — |
| 2026-04-17 | APP | bullish | -9.0% | -45.1% | — |
| 2026-04-17 | AMZN | bullish | -0.3% | +1.4% | — |
Most-argued themes
| Theme | Stances | Lean | Mix | Last |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| NBIS | 2 | 2 bullish | 2026-08-18 | |
| AMZN | 1 | 1 bullish | 2026-04-17 | |
| APP | 1 | 1 bullish | 2026-04-17 | |
| HARD DISK DRIVE COMPANIES | 1 | 1 bullish | 2026-08-14 | |
| NVDA | 1 | 1 bullish | 2026-08-14 | |
| PLTR | 1 | 1 bullish | 2026-04-17 |
Tracked stances
bullish / bearish is a view they argued; owns / short is a position they said they hold.
2026-08-18
long AI HARDWARE AND NETWORKING / short IT SERVICES AND ENTERPRISE SOFTWARE
pair
The Big Picture (Ritholtz) · article
AI shifts the $6T IT spending pie away from software and IT services (whose moat of high creation cost is eroding to near-zero) toward hardware and networking which are the true scarcity driving the innovation curve
“our contention was that the value would go from IT services and software into hardware and networking”
Transcript: Ankur Crawford, Portfolio Manager, Alger Capital Appreciation
Investors misread CEO Arseny Palobkov's culturally Russian self-deprecating style as a business red flag, creating a mispriced opportunity in the company's fundamentals
“I'm kind of looking at the opportunity, because that's just his culture”
Transcript: Ankur Crawford, Portfolio Manager, Alger Capital Appreciation
2026-08-14
long HARDWARE AND NETWORKING INFRASTRUCTURE / short IT SERVICES AND SOFTWARE INCUMBENTS
pair
Masters in Business · video
AI reducing the marginal cost of software creation to near-zero commoditizes IT services and software incumbents while concentrating value creation in the hardware and networking layer that powers the innovation
“the value would go from IT services and software into hardware networking”
Understanding Hyperscalers | Masters in Business with Ankur Crawford
Nvidia is the primary beneficiary of AI infrastructure buildout as global compute demand remains structurally undersupplied and GPU spending by hyperscalers and neo-clouds continues to accelerate
“Nvidia's currently a 13 and a half percent position in the portfolio”
Understanding Hyperscalers | Masters in Business with Ankur Crawford
Said again: 2026-08-18 (The Big Picture (Ritholtz))
2026-08-14
HARD DISK DRIVE COMPANIES
bullish
Masters in Business · video
AI-era data storage demand reversed the HDD secular decline by creating supply shortages that enable aggressive pricing, driving 3-5x earnings growth from former single-digit valuation multiples
“hard disk drives all of a sudden became in shortage and now they're taking pricing and their earnings power has gone up three, four, fivefold”
Understanding Hyperscalers | Masters in Business with Ankur Crawford
Said again: 2026-08-18 (The Big Picture (Ritholtz))
TSMC is becoming the sole supplier of leading-edge semiconductor fabrication, granting it structural pricing power it has now begun to exercise as AI chip demand intensifies
“you guys are going to become the single supplier of leading edge”
Understanding Hyperscalers | Masters in Business with Ankur Crawford
Nebius is led by former Yandex engineers who left Russia and are deploying $2B to build AI-native data centers with deep technical expertise, positioning it as potentially the next hyperscaler in a structurally undersupplied compute market
“this is actually potentially the next hyper scalar. The next AI native hyperscaler.”
90d +9.3% · 180d +18.4%
Amazon trades at historically low teens GAAP P/E — well below Costco and Walmart — while AWS grows mid-to-high 30% annually, the Anthropic partnership drives cloud revenue, and custom Trainium chips create a cheaper compute layer that expands addressable…
“Amazon, if you look at the valuation...it is absolutely not egregious...it's at like teens”
90d -0.3% · 180d +1.4%
2026-04-17
SAAS POINT SOLUTIONS (E.G. ATLASSIAN)
bearish
video
Point-solution SaaS companies face structural terminal-value compression as AI enables customers to write their own software, eliminates the per-seat expansion flywheel, and compresses operating margins from the ~40% benchmark to ~20%, making their historical…
“there's no way all of these companies can remain relevant if Anthropic is going to continue to come on at the rate it's been coming on”
Western Digital is a classic life-cycle-change opportunity in a two-player duopoly (with Seagate) where AI-driven exponential data growth is forcing rapid capacity density gains without supply-demand-imbalancing unit additions, and earnings estimates have…
“just in the last 3 months, Western Dig's numbers have gone from 10 to 25”
90d +25.3% · 180d -2.2%
Brad Jacobs — proven serial consolidator behind United Rentals and XPO — is applying the same roll-up playbook to a highly fragmented building products market, targeting EBITDA growth from ~$1B to $5B by 2029–2030
“he thinks that he's going to increase the EBITDA of this company to 5 billion in 2029 to 2030”
90d -38.3% · 180d -58.7%
AppLovin was incorrectly swept into the SaaS selloff despite being an AI-powered mobile advertising company — not enterprise software — that is now expanding its ad inventory into e-commerce while the founder-CEO holds headcount flat, compounding into high…
“I do think AppLovin was put into that bucket”
90d -9.0% · 180d -45.1%
Palantir acts as the enterprise guide helping companies operationalize AI across complex workflows, giving it a durable role as the AI transition accelerates rather than being disrupted by it
“like the shepherd that is basically having everyone cross the chasm with them”
90d -8.2% · 180d +37.3%
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