Minotaur Capital co-founder Armina Rosenberg appeared on the "Navigating the vibe-coding apocalypse" panel at The Australian Financial Review AI Summit, discussing how AI is reshaping both markets and the investment process.
Rosenberg said she'd been surprised by how quickly the market turned on software stocks following the release of new 'vibe coding' tools from Claude and OpenAI. Over the summer, co-manager Thomas Rice — an experienced programmer himself — recognised that a step change had occurred in coding that would weigh on software stocks, prompting the fund to move quickly from long to short.
We flipped from long to short software very quickly, and the precipitous downfall in those stocks was faster than we anticipated.
She added that Minotaur had since closed out the short:
We've closed out our short, and I now think that the market is being a bit more discerning in who the winners and losers of the SaaSpocalypse are.
Rosenberg also noted that companies are getting more sophisticated about how they write earnings transcripts, dropping AI-friendly terms into earnings calls so they're picked up favourably by AI-based transcript scanners.
They're actually getting quite clever in figuring out how to optimise their earnings transcripts for how AI is going to interpret their results. You do see that a lot.