The market’s favorite mood swing
A little AI doom-and-gloom can do strange things to stocks. On Monday, comments from Melius Research analyst Ben Reitzes suggesting advanced model development may slow in the near term gave investors a fresh excuse to rotate out of the usual AI darlings and into the names that could benefit from lower AI capex.
That meant the so-called “AI losers” — the companies markets think are less exposed to disruption — suddenly looked pretty popular. CrowdStrike, SailPoint, and Palo Alto Networks jumped roughly 13% to 15%, while ServiceNow and HubSpot added about 7% to 11%.
Why this matters for your portfolio
The weird part? Reitzes wasn’t exactly calling time on the AI party. His view was more like: the punch bowl is staying, but somebody’s definitely talking about needing smaller cups.
He argued the broader AI investment cycle is still alive thanks to recursive self-improvement, or RSI, which could keep driving future computing demand. In other words, the short-term trade may be about fear and positioning, but the long-term theme is still: more compute, more infrastructure, more money flying around.
- Cybersecurity names could benefit if more powerful models create new attack surfaces.
- AI leaders like OpenAI and Anthropic still appear to have an early lead.
- NVIDIA may remain a key bellwether as investors debate who benefits from the next leg of AI spending.
Big picture
This is less a fundamental rerating and more a market whiplash moment. If you own any of these names, the message is simple: AI headlines can move your stocks even when the underlying business hasn’t changed overnight. And in tech, that’s basically the price of admission.