Saturday, June 20th, 2026
Denver, Colorado
Bigger than Japan? Bigger than the dot.com boom? The Nifty Fifty? Bigger, even, than the railroad boom of the 1800s?
Well no. Not the last one. I’m referring to the chart above from Bank of America. It shows that 39% of the market cap of the S&P 500 is now in ‘AI Stocks.’ That puts this market bubble—what our Investment Director Tom Dyson calls The Greatest Financial Experiment Ever—firmly in the death zone where other bubbles have run out of oxygen/liquidity.
This opens up a debate about what exactly you mean by AI. Is it true intelligence? A thinking machine? Or just a very powerful tool that increases productivity and discovery in a few key industries? For example, just this week Midjourney—a company previously famous for turning text prompts into moving images—announced it can now do full body ultrasounds that are better than an MRI without any radiation or magnetic fields. Amazing, if true.
For our purposes today, let’s stay that AI stocks are stocks whose market value is based on the proposition that Artificial Intelligence is the most transformative technological innovation since…well…the railroad. Maybe even electricity. Perhaps the printing press. Or even the wheel.
Those are all tremendous claims. Hyperbolic you might even say. But it takes a great deal of hyperbole to justify trillion dollar companies selling at nine, ten, and even twenty times sales (GOOGL, MSFT, AAPL, NVDA). Historically, those kinds of multiples mean very meager stock market returns for the next decade. And this time?
This time around, it depends on what AI will or won’t do. Our fearless leader, Bill Bonner, spent much of the past week digging into that question. You’ll find the four-part series he wrote below. Stay tuned for more next week.
Until then,
Dan Denning
P.S. The BPR brain trust—all three of us—will meet in London next week to discuss strategy for the second half of the year. If there are any big questions you think we should be asking, or would like to know the answer to, feel free to leave a comment below or send us an email to bpr@bonnerprivateresearch.com
When the market ultimately tops, will it roll over or take the elevator down?