Stock Talk
Launched 8 Months Ago
Hi, I’m Papa Phil, the founder of a space called Stock Talk. I combine my decades working in Finance, Entrepreneurship & Technology with my passion and curiosity for finding great companies, to make it easier for people to invest or trade.
The critics of artificial intelligence investing have been loud and confident lately. Their claim is straightforward: this is the internet bubble ready to burst all over again. In their view, today’s market leaders are trading at exaggerated valuations, the investments are not producing corresponding products or revenue, and history is about to repeat itself. The Magnificent 7 of Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, Apple, Meta, Tesla, and Amazon now account for a third of the US stock market’s value. To skeptics, this is proof of dangerous concentration and unsustainable faith in a technology they insist is overhyped. Their comparison to the dotcom crash of 2000 is meant to seal the argument. Even Open AI’s Sam Altman, last week declared that “investors are over excited about AI”.
I am speaking from firsthand experience, as Papa Phil was at ground zero (Silicon Valley) of the Internet of Things (IOT) in the 90’s. By that, I mean responsible for a large team, for a huge $40 billion-dollar high-tech communications company. We provided voice and data products as well as 3/4 of the internet gateways that transmitted all that data traffic to the world. Of the few with a badge of bleeding edge courage, of that time and place, and the pros and cons of the internet economy, I am among them.
The reality is the comparison of dotcom and AI collapses under scrutiny. The dotcom bubble was mostly a frenzy of companies with no more than a website and a promise. Hundreds of them had no profits, no defensible business model, and in many cases no product, let alone revenue. Yet capital flooded in because the market was convinced that the internet itself was enough to justify valuations. When “reality arrived”, most of those companies disappeared entirely. Investors were often left holding a small bag of monopoly money instead of a large, hefty bag with rolls of Benjamins rubber banded and stuffed to the brim.
What the skeptics cannot see is in the contrast with today’s AI buildout. The Magnificent Seven companies are not speculative startups. They are some of the most profitable and dominant corporations in world history, with vast cash flows and resilient moats.
Critics point out that hundreds of billions are being invested while returns appear modest. Yet this is how every great technological revolution begins. The buildout of railroads, electrification, and the internet required enormous upfront capital. At the time, skeptics dismissed those costs as wasteful and doubted that the benefits would ever justify the scale. But infrastructure is not judged on one year’s return. It is judged on the platforms it enables. AI is no different. Its value lies in what it makes possible: new business models, productivity gains, and entirely new industries that compound over decades.
The Internet was often described as an answer in search of a question. AI is the opposite. The questions are already clear to us, how to automate complex tasks, how to accelerate research, how to augment decision making, and AI provides the first real answers. Early users are not internet hobbyists poking around on message boards; they are enterprises embedding AI into workflows, governments using AI for logistics and defense, and hospitals applying AI to patient outcomes, and biotech / pharma finding new ways to heal us.
Yes, valuations in today’s markets are stretched, and we may see a 10% to 20% pull back from a hot market, but no, this is not a bubble ready to completely burst and never return such promise. Valuations should be stretched at the dawn of a new paradigm. But to call this a bubble is to confuse speculative mania with transformative investment. The internet did not collapse because it was useless, it collapsed because the companies selling the dream had no way to capture its value. AI firms today are not only building the infrastructure but are also monetizing it in real time. That is not a bubble. It is the groundwork of the fourth industrial revolution. AI revolution will make the other three revolutions that came before, (Industrial, Computer, and Internet) look almost miniscule when history writes this new ending. Not as an epitaph, but rather as it’s testimonial.
Results are not typical. The methods I teach have helped other traders and investors, but there are no guarantees. Success in trading and investing takes work, discipline, and dedication. Past performance is never a promise of future results. Every trade and investment carries risk.
