👋Hi, I’m Amrita, the Chief Pragmatic Optimist.

Introducing The Pragmatic Optimist 2.0

Earlier in January, we published our first Monday Macro post for 2025, where we laid out our macroeconomic scenarios and respective S&P 500 price targets to help investors navigate the current bull market, which seems to have suddenly caught a bit of a cold.

As we enter 2025, I wanted to prepare a post on The Pragmatic Optimist’s 2025 roadmap, where we outline the forward vision for the publication in order to better align readers’ expectations with the publication’s renewed objectives.

Up until now, the content strategy at The Pragmatic Optimist (which we started in September 2023) was about connecting the dots in macroeconomics, technology, and culture in a jargon-free language to help readers understand the “big picture.”

Looking forward to 2025 and ahead, we will be narrowing down our focus to the AI value chain, where our objective is to help readers and investors navigate the evolving innovation landscape, identify rock-solid businesses with strong growth trajectories, and make long-term investments in the space with a high probability of success.

(Note: Our language will still remain jargon-free, and our quality will remain top-notch.)

But before, I wanted to quickly reintroduce ourselves and our background, especially for our new subscribers who have joined The Pragmatic Optimist over the last 3 months.

👋Let’s get reacquainted.

We are Amrita and Uttam (yes, we are married💍), the authors behind The Pragmatic Optimist.

Both of us come from a technology background, where we worked for several years in San Francisco, Bay Area. While Uttam worked in product roles at Big Tech companies such as Apple and Google, I worked in go-to-market strategy roles at enterprise SaaS (software-as-a-service) startups such as Tradeshift and Taulia (bought over by SAP).

Both of us took a deep interest in stocks and investing during those years (cough: Robinhood generation😉), but it was not until 2021 that we made a hard career pivot.

Ray Dalio was responsible for it. Well, not directly. But his book, “The Principles of Dealing with a Changing World Order” was.

It was at that moment that we decided to embark on a quest to study and disentangle how the world’s financial markets and economies work and use the insights to discover and invest in companies that sit at the intersection of key technological and cultural waves.

Less than two years later, The Pragmatic Optimist was born. In 2024, we also started actively contributing to Seeking Alpha (as individual authors), where both of us were featured in the Top Analysts in Technology, Software, and Internet.

Therefore, as we solidify our credibility in the world of finance and investments, we believe that it makes the most sense to build a tight synergy between our work on both platforms, which is where The Pragmatic Optimist 2.0 comes in.

🤖What to expect from The Pragmatic Optimist 2.0?

Up until now, The Pragmatic Optimist was a mostly free publication with the option for readers to “buy me a coffee and a muffin” to show their support.

In Pragmatic Optimist 1.0, our content strategy was centered on connecting the dots in macroeconomics, tech, and culture to form the “big picture.” During this process, our publication grew close to 7000 readers, many of whom have increasingly reached out to us for our perspectives on specific companies and industry insights within the evolving AI landscape.

As we incorporate reader feedback, we decided that it would be best for The Pragmatic Optimist 2.0 to have a narrower focus on the investment landscape in the AI value chain. Therefore, our content strategy going forward will involve understanding how different industries and companies fit into the overall AI ecosystem, how their product innovation roadmap impacts their revenue and profit cycles, and assessing industry crosscurrents and how that impacts forward valuations.

Most of our readers who have been with us are aware of how deep our analysis can get while still keeping it free from complex terms and jargon that are usually found in most other research publications.

This process does require a significant amount of time and effort on our part, and therefore, we would truly appreciate your support as we launch The Pragmatic Optimist 2.0.

In terms of subscription tiers, this is how it is going to look:

A “paid” subscription tier will get readers the following:

🌐 1 Monday Macro per quarter

🤖 9-12 industry research posts per quarter with a focus on relevant stocks 🗠 in the AI ecosystem.

(Think of more posts like the example below, but with an even sharper focus on companies’ investment cases.)

Nvidia’s earnings created a paradox for the AI boom/bust debate

Uttam Dey and Amrita Roy

·

September 5, 2024

Read full story

💬 Subscriber chat that contains all live trades with commentary on key events that signal an acceleration/deceleration in the companies’ profit cycles

📨 Post comments and/or DM us with any questions.

📈 Access to The Pragmatic Optimist’s portfolio (coming up in H2)

⏰⏰Please note that as an extension of our gratitude, all existing and new paid members until the end of March will be able to lock in our annual rate of $80 for a lifetime.

Go Premium for $80 annually FOREVER

In the meantime, a “free” subscription tier will consist of the following:

🌐1 Monday Macro post per quarter

🤖 Access to the 2-minute summaries on AI research posts

📈Who is The Pragmatic Optimist 2.0 for?

The Pragmatist 2.0 is designed for individual investors, portfolio managers, industry analysts, or just plain AI enthusiasts who are deeply curious about the innovation cycle in the AI value chain and are looking to make sound long-term investments in companies with stronger-than-average growth trajectories in this secular trend.

The paid tier may not be a fit for you if you are interested in technical analysis, want to use options, hedges, or derivatives, or have shorter than 1-year-long investment horizons.

Upgrade to paid

🏆Here’s some evidence of our work so far.

Before we end, I wanted to share my TipRanks rating over the past twelve months, which hopefully should speak for itself. TipRanks is an independent ratings publication that monitors every analyst’s calls on a particular company’s stock, and we monitor these ratings closely to review the performance of our analyses.

My latest rating puts my rank in the Top 3% of all analysts. Sure, having a rank in the Top 10 would have looked more glamorous, but close to 70% of my 88 ratings have generated an average return of 26.4%. Given that we just started putting out our research twelve months ago, I will take these ratings with an optimistic outlook that our ratings will just get better over time.

Here’s a glimpse of the price movements in some of my winning stocks throughout the year that include Reddit RDDT 0.00%↑ , Palantir PLTR 0.00%↑, Twilio TWLO 0.00%↑, Cloudflare NET 0.00%↑, Atlassian TEAM 0.00%↑, and Wix WIX 0.00%↑ .

Meanwhile, some of Uttam’s persistent calls on the platform that generated alpha include AppLovin APP 0.00%↑, Arista Networks ANET 0.00%↑, Broadcom AVGO 0.00%↑, Marvell MRVL 0.00%↑, Spotify SPOT 0.00%↑, and Celestica CLS 0.00%↑.

Lock in $80 annually forever

I hope this helps you better understand where The Pragmatic Optimist is headed next. We would love for you to embark on this journey as we disentangle the AI ecosystem to unlock long-term alpha-generating investment opportunities.

So, we deeply appreciate your support, and let’s prosper together in 2025 and beyond.

Amrita & Uttam 👋🏼👋🏼

Some highlights from the past

My newsletter also gets featured in leading publications such as the Wall Street Journal. 🥸🏆

Here are some of my top posts that my subscribers absolutely loved reading in 2024.

The Great Social Media Reset - We Scroll More Than We Post.

Risk a banking crisis or reignite inflation? The Fed's worst dilemma is here.

Yes, AI is in a bubble. No, it won't pop just yet.

“Don’t bet against America”- Are we entering a prolonged productivity boom?

What is Google so afraid of?

P.S. Substack gave me this badge that tells you I might be decent at writing, so here it is: