Veteran money manager George Noble recently posted a funny bit from the Laurel and Hardy film Thicker Than Water under the headline: "OpenAI, Anthropic, Nvidia, and Oracle right now."
In the clip, Stan uses the money given to him from Ollie to pay a furniture salesman to pay his rent to Ollie's wife, or as Ollie says, "That was the money that she gave to me, and I gave it to you to give to him. Then you gave it back to me, and I had to give it to her to give to him."
Noble is, of course, comparing the circular financing endemic among Big Tech companies, which to him is just one fly in that sector's ointment.
When reached by phone, Noble, who was a portfolio manager at Fidelity -- having learned his trade at the knee of the legendary Peter Lynch -- has nothing good to say about Big Tech. "They're spending money like drunken sailors," he tells me. "They're selling hopium. It's mutually assured destruction. An exercise in wealth destruction. They're headed for the cliff. It's going to collapse. It's a pile of shit."
Straight from the Department of Tell Us How You Really Feel, George.
Over on the sunnier side, there's Ryan Detrick, chief market strategist at Carson Group. "We've been pretty bullish for years," he says. "We don't think this wave of AI is over. We say ride the wave." In a blog post this week, "Back to Your Regularly Scheduled Bull Market" (after July's mini-swoon), Detrick points to strong market breadth, measured by the advance/decline data. "To see A/D lines trending higher is a clue things are healthy...[and] weren't about to crash like so many on TV were claiming....This bull market is alive and well."
Another rose-colored take comes from Hardika Singh, economic strategist at Tom Lee's bullishly inclined Fundstrat. In a research report titled "The Bull Case for Buying Companies With Moonshot Ambitions," Singh delved into the S-1s of Alphabet (then Google), Amazon.com, Netflix, Uber Technologies, and Meta Platforms (then Facebook), concluding that aspirational bets pay off for investors. "The thesis applies to not just SpaceX and Tesla but also OpenAI and Anthropic, which will likely be unprofitable when they go public, and the onslaught of companies that will likely come to the market," Singh writes.
Longstanding market participant Ed Yardeni is most sanguine, as well. On Tuesday, he raised his S&P 500 index year-end point estimate to 8400, up from 8250, one of the highest on the Street. (The index was recently at 7768.) Yardeni is maintaining his 10,000 target for the end of 2029, though says he'll raise it if what he calls the "Roaring 2020s" continues unabated. "I have been bullish," Yardeni told me, "but not bullish enough."
Flipping back to the gloomier side, the equity and quant strategy team at Bank of America is standing firm with their year-end target of 7100 for the S&P 500. In a midyear update with the subhead "Why we are index bears," they note that free cash flow, earnings-per-share quality, and possible interest-rate hikes "are moving in the wrong direction," and express concern with capital spending by Big Tech companies.
And back and forth we could go all day long between the bulls and bears, which of course is what makes a market.
From the first days under Wall Street's buttonwood tree -- or earlier to the first proto-exchange in 14th century Bruges, Belgium -- raging, pounding-the-table bulls and snarling, short-selling bears have been at each other. It's curious, right? Both parties look at the same data, stocks, and market and come to radically different conclusions.
Take something as seemingly straightforward as earnings. Both the yeas and the nays agree that earnings growth has been stellar. But what underpins that strength is a matter of debate. To Detrick and Yardeni, above-trend earnings growth is the cornerstone of the market's rise. "Earnings season has been spectacular," says Detrick, writing that second-quarter earnings for the S&P 500 are up a "staggering 50.4%." For 2026, Detrick notes that S&P 500 earnings are estimated by FactSet to be up 30.5% from 2025.
Yardeni says the market's recent run is all about FEMO, for "fabulous earnings momentum." "Earnings have been phenomenally strong," he adds. "It's been a combination of strong revenue and profit margins moving higher. The resilience of the economy is attributable to consumer and capital spending."
This isn't the view from Noble's perch, who warned of doom in 2022. In a post titled " Should Equity Investors Be Reassured by Record Corporate Profits?" (guess what his answer is), Noble writes that "profits everyone is pointing to as proof that stocks are reasonably valued aren't independent of the AI boom. They ARE the AI boom."
When AI capital spending slows, Noble says, profits will fall across the economy. In particular, spending by OpenAI is a ticking time bomb, propping up the hyperscalers, he says in "OpenAI Is Going to Take This Entire Market Down With It." (Noble does like some nontech stocks, including Transocean, SLB (formerly Schlumberger), and Baker Hughes, as well as gold and gold-mining stocks.)
If Noble's right and the tech sector and market tank, it will be immortalized in the pantheon of great Wall Street calls. Most lionized are those who predict market tops. There's Paul Tudor Jones and Elaine Garzarelli calling the 1987 market crash. Or Jeremy Grantham and Howard Marks calling the 2000 tech bubble. Before the 2008-09 financial crisis, Meredith Whitney, John Paulson, and Michael Burry with the Big Short crew sounded alarms.
Some of these folks are successful long-term investors. Some had their 15 minutes of fame. Others are just "permabears," or always bearish. "Permabears will get you out at the top, the middle, and the bottom. So, you'll never be in the market," Yardeni jokes. "I'm accused of being a permabull, which I take as a great compliment," he says. "On my tombstone, I want it to say, 'Ed Yardeni was usually bullish and usually right.' "
Permabulls have one great advantage over the permabears, best articulated in a common-sense catchphrase of Sam Ro's, writer of TKer, a Substack about the market. As Sam says, "Stocks usually go up."
"The stock market is the opposite of a casino," writes financial advisor Peter Malouk in an X post. "The longer you play, the higher the odds you win." Malouk says that since 1928 there was a 53% chance the S&P 500 was up on a single day, a 75% chance of up over one year, and 100% over 20 years.
Sometimes the bears are right, but not usually.
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