At this point, I’ve seen this behavior countless times in my five-decade career…
I’m sure you’ve seen it, too.
I’m talking about the market’s naysayers and curmudgeons. Specifically, I’m referring to the folks who don’t miss an opportunity to complain loudly about anything they can.
The market has dipped lower since the end of July. So the naysayers and curmudgeons are out in full force today. And this week, one headline in particular amused me. Take a look…
Now, this article is just an opinion piece from a Bloomberg columnist. And I don’t mean to call out the person who wrote it. But I still can’t help but chuckle at the message.
I’ve said it before…
I don’t have a crystal ball. I work in quantitative analysis.
I’ve spent many decades selling technical tools to Wall Street. And by design, that means I had to stay on the leading edge of technology.
Wall Street pros simply won’t pay top dollar for a tool if everyone else already has it. To get their attention, you need to be able to show them something new and useful.
And yet, every time something new comes out, some of the loudest opposition comes from these Wall Street pros. They just want to say, “This is nothing. It won’t change the world.”
Today, I want to look at what history says about that type of mindset…
Heck, I bet some early humans even panned the invention of the wheel. I can just imagine the writing on the cave wall saying, “This new round thing won’t change much.”
In fact, we even have written record of the wheel being panned more recently. No kidding…
While discussing the “hot fad” of bicycles in 1902, the Washington Post said, “The popularity of the wheel is doomed.” And in 1906, the New York Sun noted, “As a fad, cycling is dead.”
History is full of other bad calls on innovation, too…
The curmudgeons criticized the invention of cars as well. In the early days, the New York Times said that prices “will never be sufficiently low to make them as widely popular as were bicycles.” And people didn’t think the infrastructure would ever make cars practical.
The list is just as silly in recent years…
The curmudgeons saw the answering machine as a novelty for rich people. And they thought laptops would fail as well.
In 1995, a Newsweek writer even predicted the Internet would fail within a year. This wasn’t wild commentary from an uneducated author, either. He lived in Silicon Valley!
The guy was saturated in the game-changing technology at the time. And yet, he thought it had reached its peak before it even got off the ground. Specifically, in the article, he said…
Hardware and software will all top out in the mid-90s and, thus, the Internet will never ever get any more user-friendly or portable. Also, it is different and scary.
Folks, that brings me to today’s game-changing technology…
I don’t have a crystal ball. But it doesn’t take magic to see that something big is happening.
The curmudgeons will tell you that all the recent talk about artificial intelligence (“AI”) is much ado about nothing.
But kids in schools are already using generative AI to write papers. And their teachers can’t figure out which papers are “real” and which ones are AI-written.
Like it or not, AI is here to stay. And it will only get bigger in the months and years ahead.
Now is the time to prepare. We should start positioning our portfolios to capitalize today.
Good investing,
Marc Chaikin
P.S. I just put together a special presentation on the massive opportunity in AI today. Specifically, I’ve pinpointed five companies that Wall Street is focusing on – including one under-the-radar stock that’s trading for 1/12th the price of Nvidia (NVDA). It could become the No. 1 winner of the AI boom. This is a must-see presentation. Click here to learn more.
