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Playing the AI Megatrend
By: Joe Duarte | May 21, 2023

Playing the AI Megatrend

If nothing else, Wall Street is good at creating buzz over technology trends. And this one's no different than any of the past ones. Thus, when ChatGPT started to gather steam, so too did the Nasdaq 100 bottom out. I detail the recent action in the index below. But, as I noted last week, owning the Invesco QQQ Trust (QQQ), or stocks which are housed in the ETF, has paid off from an investment standpoint.



Note that QQQ, along with NDX, started to bottom out in November 2022, just as ChatGPT started making headlines. Specifically, the big tech bottom began in late 2022, while ChatGPT was "born" on November 30. Since then, NDX, led by a handful of the usual-suspects mega-cap tech stocks, has been on a tear, which culminated with a breakout above 13,300 on 5/18/23.



Microsoft (MSFT), Alphabet (GOOGL), and Apple (AAPL), among others, have broken out to new highs, because of their association or potential association with A.I. Of the three, the most reliable as a bellwether for what's likely to happen in the A.I. segment is Microsoft. That's because an increasing percentage of its earnings is coming from its cloud services division.



Another high flyer on the A.I. whirlwind has been Nvidia (NVDA), long known for its next generation gaming chips and more recently for its association with A.I. via its graphics processing unit heavy lifting data processing chips (GPU).

My point is that it's clear A.I. is going to be something to deal with as an investor for the next few years. At the same time, it's a bit mindboggling that the biggest beneficiaries of what should be a breakthrough technology are stodgy old tech companies like Microsoft, instead of a startup or two who delivered the technology and are making it available.

For the record, the creator of ChatGPT, Open AI, is still described as a Unicorn and is not publicly traded. Of course, knowing Wall Street, that could change sooner rather than later, unless of course someone buys the company out before it goes public.

Moreover, the big tech stocks have come a long way over the last six months and are due for some sort of pause. At the same time, there are still lots of well-run fundamentally sound tech stocks which have yet to pop. In other words, it is not out of the realm of possibilities that, even as the current crop of tech giants consolidate after their heady gains, the next tier will start to pick up steam.

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