Stocks Plunge as Traders Dump Everything With AI Exposure

[00:00:00] Barry: First, let's just get the technical aspect of this out of the way. All of your technician trader buddies will tell you, hey, you can't have that gap down there where the market's traded to overnight and then bounce back from. So we kind of took that out, which is not a bad thing. But really, we're going through the process of digesting. On the one hand, gridlock is great for stocks. We tend to see a rally following midterm elections. But then as people started to do a little homework, hey, there were over a dozen referendums on various state ballots about restricting data centers and just carving back what's been going on in an AI buildout. And so some of this is, hey, this is going to be more complex and more expensive than we originally thought. Maybe we're putting some of our eggs in one basket and we need to be a little more diversified and not so technology, semiconductor, AI heavy, because we really have no clarity as to what's going to happen here. [00:01:11] Speaker 2: OK, so very little clarity, a lot more uncertainty right now. What does this mean for what the price action will be for the next couple of weeks? Because there's going to be a sense that for companies and certainly for the companies that have a lot of projects that need to get moving, that they have this small window in which to push things along before, you know, the new elected officials take office and really clamp down on things. [00:01:40] Barry: So let me just correct one small thing you said. It's not that there's more uncertainty. Any time there's volatility, any time there's disruptive change like a change election, the amount of uncertainty is the exact same amount there always is. We don't know what the hell the future is going to bring. What changes our ability to lie to ourselves about it? So we see this every time there's a volatility spike and people trot out the uncertainty meme. No, it's the exact same amount of uncertainty. We simply start acknowledging reality and that tends to scare us. The big issue that I'm tracking with this has been earnings are still growing at a very rapid pace. That second, Tom Keen would say that, that second delta, the rate of growth is starting to slow. And so 35, 45 percent earnings growth is now looking more like 15, 20, 25 percent. Hey, that's still spectacular, but it's not as strong as it was assumed. And again, to put this in bigger context, 2026 is the fourth year of double digit gains. And it follows three years of gains that were above 20 percent. Sometimes you just have to digest those gains and let revenue and earnings catch up to stock prices. [00:03:09] Speaker 3: And in 2027, if for no other reason, the law of large numbers, you're not going to get 20 to 30 percent earnings growth. I think the streets got penciled in kind of mid-teens. But some people say, hey, the market's already discounting that with a lower multiple today than it was a year ago. Does that make sense? [00:03:25] Barry: I mean, here's the problem. Anytime you try and create a prediction relying on multiple variables, right? Multi, multivariate analysis is complex. And in physics, it's called the three body problem. But here's what we have is which of those numbers, earnings, earnings, growth and price, which of those numbers are most inaccurate? If it turns out that we're still going to have earnings gains in the mid-teens, yeah, the market has discounted that. The risk is maybe we have 10 percent earnings growth. Maybe we have single digit earnings growth. So that's the concern. And, you know, the other issue and you see it in consumer staples. So much money has been rotating into the sector over the past few years, including a lot of CapEx spending and a lot of borrowing. It kind of creates a situation where you're starving other sectors, more or less, in the economy of CapEx and maybe you start to see a general slowdown. So it's not I hate the analyses where people just say, hey, we're contracting if there's no AI CapEx. That's not how it works. Money moves from, hey, we're going to put less money into financial tech and more into AI. That's kind of what's going on. And if there was an AI that CapEx would be spread across other sectors, people kind of ignore what's been happening in the energy sector, the leading sector this year. And they're ignoring what's going on with consumer durables, which implies that some of this mad spending is going to start slowing down. [00:05:07] Speaker 2: Barry, are there certain sectors within the market right now that look more attractive, that are not tied to questions about AI and data centers and, you know, have some visibility? [00:05:19] Barry: So, you know, what's going to happen with the war on Iran? What's going to happen with tariffs? What's going to happen with the lame duck session for the rest of the year? And then what happens with Congress in 2027? I have no idea what direction this is going to go. But the underlying economy has been strong, has been resilient, has been able to shake off these sort of disruptions. That's just that's just a testament to the state of both the U.S. consumer and the corporate sector, which both have pretty clean balance sheets. And, you know, I never want to bet against U.S. consumers spending. They tend to spend no matter what's going on. So, consumer staples continues to be attractive. The weakness we see in sectors like finance and real estate, I have no guess how that's going to play out. But we clearly have spent a ton of money in AI and there has been a ton of misallocation. How that resolves itself is really unknown. And there are a lot of political variables with is Texas really going to not allow new data centers to go in? Look at what's going on with the price of SpaceX and Tesla to say nothing of the half a billion dollars that Elon burned through. A lot of variables going on.