DATELINE — CLAYBORN, W. Va. — The Clayborn County Investment and Fellowship Club convened its regular second-Monday meeting at the Elks Lodge this week under circumstances described by club treasurer Donnie Hasslebeck as “not ideal,” the membership having collectively shed $342.17 on its Nvidia position before the coffee urn had finished perking.
The club, which has gathered in the lodge’s back room since 1987 for fellowship followed by roughly eleven minutes of actual investment discussion, found itself on Monday wrestling with a word that none of its fourteen members could spell on the first try and only three could spell on the second. The word was DeepSeek. The mood was somber. The cold cuts, by all accounts, were fine.
“We own a share and a half of the Nvidia apiece, most of us,” explained Hasslebeck, 71, who has served as treasurer since the Clinton administration and keeps the club’s ledger in a spiral notebook that says TRAPPER KEEPER on the front. “Then Mitchell comes in Monday morning with his phone and says the Chinese have done something. I said done what. He said he didn’t know yet, but it was bad.”
What the Chinese had done, according to several hours of subsequent discussion, was release an artificial intelligence program that reportedly cost a fraction of what American companies have spent on similar technology, causing a single-day selloff that wiped nearly $600 billion off Nvidia’s market capitalization and, more locally, enough money off the club’s portfolio to cover two rounds at the Lodge bar with tip.
The club initially believed DeepSeek to be a submarine. This belief persisted for approximately forty minutes.
Mrs. Lorraine Peterson, 68, who joined the club in 2003 and is its only member with a grandchild employed in what she calls “the computers,” attempted to clarify matters by calling her grandson Tyler in Charlotte. Tyler explained that DeepSeek was a large language model developed in China that performed comparably to American models at dramatically lower cost. Mrs. Peterson relayed this to the room. The room asked her to define four of those words. “I told them I’d call him back,” Mrs. Peterson said. “He was at a wedding.”
Member Roy Kettering, 74, a retired postmaster, pressed the group on whether the Chinese had built the artificial intelligence themselves or whether, as he put it, “they just looked at ours and made it cheaper, like the patio furniture.” The club was unable to resolve this point, though several members conceded the patio furniture theory had some merit.
A follow-up call was placed to Ben Arley, 31, who runs the technology help desk at the Clayborn Public Library on Tuesdays and Thursdays and is widely regarded as the most qualified person in the county on matters of computing. Arley spent twelve minutes on speakerphone trying to explain the concept of a “model,” at which point Hasslebeck asked if Arley could just tell them whether to sell. Arley declined. The club thanked him for his service.
By the close of business Tuesday, Nvidia had recovered roughly 9 percent of its losses, which the club regarded as good news, though Mitchell Doakes, 69, pointed out that they had still lost money overall and that the stock could, in theory, go down again. This observation was met with the kind of silence usually reserved for a bad weather forecast at the county fair.
Club president Earl Vickers, 76, moved that the club’s investment committee — consisting of Vickers, Hasslebeck, and whoever brought the pretzels — issue a formal position on emerging artificial intelligence markets at the February meeting. The motion carried. Vickers later clarified that the formal position would likely be “we’ll see.”
Reached at the Lodge bar following the meeting, longtime bartender Cheryl Maddox, who has served the club every second Monday for nineteen years, offered the afternoon’s most concise market analysis. “They lose money on that thing three or four times a year,” she said, wiping down the counter. “Then they find out they made money. Then they forget. Then a Chinese submarine does something and they remember.”