Active managers have long sold two products: stock‑picking skill and risk management. AI is attacking both at once. On the research side, large language models and specialized ML tools can now ingest filings, transcripts, alternative data and news at a scale no human team can match. What used to require a floor of analysts can…
Payments used to be about owning the rail. Today, the real prize is owning the brain that routes money across rails in real time. AI is accelerating that shift, and it’s a problem for many listed payment companies. Network giants like Visa and Mastercard still benefit from scale, data and global acceptance. But as AI makes it…
For years, Wall Street’s biggest firms treated AI as a back‑office tool. That’s changing fast. A new wave of AI‑native companies is attacking core profit pools across banking, asset management, wealth and investment banking. In lending and small‑business banking, startups like OffDeal and other AI‑first “investment banks for SMBs” are using agents to automate sourcing, outreach, data…
Elon Musk has floated an eye‑catching goal: ramp solar manufacturing to around 100 gigawatts per year, roughly twice today’s total US solar installations, with the aim of powering data centers on Earth and in space. The big idea is that AI will be constrained less by chips and more by electricity, so owning a huge,…
Insurance just hit an important milestone: for the first time, a regulated insurer can quote real home insurance directly inside an AI chat interface. Tuio, a Spanish digital insurer, has launched an app inside ChatGPT that lets users describe their home in natural language, answer follow‑up questions, and receive a personalised quote in real time…
After watching high‑beta tech crack in 2021 before the first hike, it’s natural to ask: could 2026 rhyme with that episode? The goal isn’t to call a top, but to map the conditions that made 2021 so painful and see how many might line up again. In 2021, three forces converged: (1) a turn in the rate narrative as…
Most investors remember the first Fed hike arriving in March 2022. But if you pull up a chart of the Nasdaq and the highest‑beta names, the real break started months earlier, in 2021. The key shift wasn’t the policy move itself; it was the rate narrative turning decisively away from “lower for longer.” Through early 2021, tech…
In my earlier post on how AI agents might be “killing SaaS,” I argued that the real risk isn’t software disappearing—it’s value shifting away from thin UIs toward data, workflows, and domain intelligence. This same lens helps explain why so many people now feel “done” with subscriptions, even as software revenue keeps compounding. On the…
In my earlier piece on how hyperscaler capex is shaping the next market cycle, I argued that AI infrastructure spending is becoming one of the most important macro signals to watch. Over the past week, Alphabet and Amazon effectively doubled down on that thesis. Alphabet’s Q4 commentary points to a “multi‑year” AI data‑center build‑out and…
Disruptive technologies often trigger brutal sell‑offs in the sectors they threaten, but prices don’t fall forever. History suggests that share prices usually stabilize only after the earnings outlook stabilizes. You can see this pattern in past disruption episodes. Newspapers lost most of their market value as the internet reshaped advertising, and tobacco stocks were crushed…