Is AI a Bubble? Our Investment Committee Breaks Down Q2 2026

If you only looked at the major indexes this quarter, you probably think you had a pretty good handle on what happened. But when we sat down as an investment committee, the conversation was very different. Nolan, what's the biggest thing you've changed your mind about over the last 3 months?

Yeah, I would say it's the duration and the magnitude of the AI buildout. Consequently, I think it's going to be more powerful and longer than most people anticipate. And if I'm right, this means there's going to be many more AI winners. And so I've started to think that way the last quarter.

And that's exactly where I wanted to start because it touches on almost everything we're going to discuss today. Welcome to the Left Brain Investment Committee. I'm Brian Dress, Director of Research at Left Brain Wealth Management.

And I am Nolan Langford, Founder and CIO.

Every quarter we're going to bring you inside the conversations we're having as an investment committee. We'll discuss where capital is flowing, what's changing beneath the surface of the market, what we're debating internally, and most importantly, why those changes matter for investors. Our goal isn't to predict next week's market. It's to help investors understand the bigger trends shaping portfolios over the months and years ahead. If you enjoy these discussions, subscribe to the channel and let us know in the comments what you'd like for us to cover next quarter. Let's start with a quick look at the quarter that was. So let's start with the scoreboard. On the surface, it was a very strong quarter for investors. The S&P was up 14.9% for Q2. The NASDAQ Composite was up 21.4%. The Dow Jones was up 12.9%. The Russell up 21.2%. And then the Equal Weight S&P was up 10.9%. Those will all be up on your screen for you. Those numbers tell part of the story, but they don't really explain what happened. Nolan, when you look back at the quarter, what was the biggest story that isn't obvious from just looking at those returns?

So I think the biggest story that's not obvious is the Mag Seven, the Magnificent Seven, those popular big stocks that we all have heard about that have become synonymous with daily life in America. The performance wasn't really there in the second quarter.

Okay.

And the Magnificent Seven, that group of 7 stocks really haven't had a great year. And if you'd have told me coming into the quarter, the S&P was gonna be up 12, but you're going to have some Magnificent Seven stocks that are negative. That would, that would surprise me.

That's definitely a departure from what we've seen over the last 5 years. No question about that. Did the quarter finish the way you expected and what are investors still missing about what's going on out here?

I think there's a big rotation. We see rotations all the time that happens at the index level. You can't see it. But when things, you know, when they sell semis, buy software, sell consumer discretionary, buy oil, you don't see it at the index level. But certainly we do when we're looking at individual sectors or ticker names. So I would say that is something that certainly has my attention. I think it'll— that'll be the case that that rotation thing will probably be with us. But I think, you know, what we need to pay attention to is earnings. Earnings are really healthy right now. Liquidity in the market's good. Okay. And that's probably going to inform what happens the rest of the year.

Nolan, there's broadening leadership to the market. So as you mentioned with Magnificent Seven, that was sort of driving all the returns over the last 3 or 4 years. But we've got broadening going on. Healthcare is something that's kind of emerging. Software is weak. Any thoughts around those couple of areas of rotation?

No, I think you're right. It's going to be a back and forth with software for quite some time. So I'm not really sure what to make of it. In the short term. I think healthcare, the rally could have some legs. We'll have to see what the next couple of weeks bring. But I think healthcare, I think we've been waiting for a few years for healthcare really to take the mantle and run with it. Right. And it really hasn't. So I think anytime healthcare can get moving, I think people will certainly pay attention to that. And those will be a couple of things I'm watching the rest of the year to see if that actually takes hold.

Yeah. So you, as you said, healthcare has kind of been on the mat. Previous years. Magnificent Seven has sort of driven returns. So expectations for investors have really not matched what's happened over the last few months. Headline returns were good, but underlying market is definitely changing. And we want to build on that over the next few minutes as we go through kind of some of the sectors where we see money flowing back and forth. So one thing that really stood out to us wasn't simply which stocks were up and down, it's where money was actually flowing. So this is definitely an area that we're going to cover in subsequent quarterly review videos that we have. We spend a lot less time looking at winners and losers and a lot more time looking at where capital is flowing. Nolan, those flows often tell us where expectations are changing before it becomes obvious in the headlines. So the big question for Q2, where was money flowing this quarter, flowing in and flowing out?

So if we take a look at the winners from the quarter and where money was flowing to, there's a few semiconductors still continue to lead the way. I'm impressed by their strength and their resilience. But a new one, one that we've talked about for a while, cybersecurity. Money was definitely flowing to cyber. I think investors are starting to realize with AI, the bad guys have powerful tools and a lot more ways to be really bad. And the only way to combat that is cyber. You can't let, you can't sit there as a board and let your company be defeated by bad guys. You have to fight back and put locks on the doors. And cybersecurity is, seen as definitely mission critical and accelerating mission critical. And so that's where money— that's another area money was flowing. We spoke about healthcare. Healthcare is an area that got flows in, which was a pleasant surprise for a lot of these value investors. And the places where— that were losing money is some of the same names we've been talking about. Gold clearly had outflows from gold, had outflows from silver. We definitely had outflows from Bitcoin and we had outflows from oil.

Okay. What surprised you and what's not getting enough attention? So I think some of the ones that you just mentioned are getting attention along with software. We would mention as well what's driving some of these flows. Is it sort of tactical or do you think there are business kind of fundamental reasons why we're seeing these changes?

I would say, Brian, one of the areas you didn't bring this up specifically, but we talked about small caps. And it's hard to know, you know, with small caps, um, the whole small cap Russell Index is like $2 trillion. And if you take one of these, uh, big large mega cap companies, you can take one of those companies and buy the whole, you know, S&P small cap index or Russell Index. And so it doesn't take a lot to move these stocks. So it could be people selling, you know, the Mag Seven, buying small caps. It could be people anticipating better times ahead for lending and borrowing and interest rates, which definitely is a wind in the sails of small caps. So it could be a little bit of that, but the small cap leading the charge is something that we definitely want to continue to watch because it has knock-on impacts. If small caps can continue to to lead the way. So that's something I'm definitely paying attention to. And from a money flow standpoint, it'll be telling. I think those other areas that you mentioned, I think it's natural for money to come out of areas that you have old— you have gold, you have oil, you have silver. These aren't things people buy when they're bullish about the world. And so I'm not— I think what money coming out of those areas tells us is that if you look at— take a look at animal spirits, it's probably investors feeling pretty good about things. And we have proof of concept. You know, we have the SpaceX IPO.

That's right.

And then we also have biotechs that are rallying and had a really good quarter. And those are more speculative areas of the market. So if people are putting money there, that tells you that money's betting that things are going to be pretty good.

Definitely positive development there. And we also would say, you know, money wasn't really leaving technology. So it's just kind of more of a shift, right? As you mentioned, large to small, I guess mega to small in some instances, and then software to hardware. So it's an important distinction to say, you know, money wasn't leaving technology, but it was kind of shifting from one, you know, kind of some of the more the areas that have done well over the last 5 years, shifting in some new, some new spaces. These capital flows explain a lot of the quarter, but they don't explain everything. And that's where we're going to move on to beneath the surface. If someone only watched the S&P 500 this quarter, they probably missed the biggest story. What is actually changing beneath the surface? And I'll ask this question because I hear this all the time. Is AI in a bubble? Is that the right question?

So you said what's happening beneath the surface. Let's deal with that. AI is part of the story. I'm going to come back to that because I'm not going to forget that part. But the first part of what's changing beneath the story, I'm going to say, Brian, the consumer, and I think it's beneath the surface. You know, 70% of our spending here in the US is driven by the consumer. It's not corporations. The AI spending, however, is basically corporate.

Sure.

But on the personal spending side, the fact that the consumer is holding up and spending money in travel, airlines, cruise tickets, and eating out, I think is huge, especially in the face of people worried about job gains, what's happening in housing. And that's been expressed in auto sales, which aren't growing very rapidly, if at all. So very split. I think the consumer has a certain amount of dollars to allocate to discretionary. And it's interesting what they're choosing to spend on and what they're not spending on. So I think beneath the surface, that definitely bears some watching because, again, it has huge implications on probably what's going to work going forward.

It's interesting that you bring up that that concept of kind of shifting dollars from one area to the other, you know, away from auto sales, maybe home building, and then on to kind of experiential. That's happening in tech too, right? So enterprises spend money on software for years and now that spend is starting to shift into hardware. And that brings us to that question about is AI a bubble? You know, we've seen NVIDIA go up many, many fold over the last 5 years. We think it's justified based on the earnings. But that's a question that we get all the time. Is AI a bubble? So talk about your answer to that and then talk about also how it's, you know, the AI buildout is expanding just beyond sort of semiconductor chips.

Definitely want to do that. And I have a question I'm going to throw back to you before we get to the AI buildout. So let's imagine you and I are in the C-suite. And we're CEO and CIO of some big company.

Sure.

Right. And so you play CEO, I'm going to play CIO. All right. So, Mr. Brian, Mr. CEO, hey, I wanted to give you an update on what we're up to this quarter and kind of what we're requesting for budget this quarter and some of the challenges. All right. So here's our budget that you and the board have given me. Right. And it's a budget of X. Right. So Here's typically how we would spend our money: software, applications, cyber, and maybe a little bit of hardware. But this quarter, just so you know, Brian, Mr. CEO, I had to flip the grid. So instead of the hardware stuff coming in at the bottom of spend, we not only had to move it to the top, but we need to request additional funds. And the reason is, during the AI buildout and the scaling, ends up we had to secure components earlier and we kind of had to pay a premium for the components. And the contractors that are building out our AI data center tells us they're a little bit behind schedule, a little bit over budget. However, we see the payback period getting better. So that's my one issue, right? The other issue that I have is my software stack that's still important to run the current organization, not the future organization. We're getting some pressure there too. They're raising prices on us like they typically do, about 5 to 6% increase in price. And we already have a tough, tough budget. So tell me, how should I think about these balancing these priorities of spend?

Yeah, it's going to be a matter of doing more with less in this case, right? And you're going to have to prioritize spend about what's going to give the— give us the best return on our investment. And so it comes down to you telling me, do you think building out our hardware stack is going to do more for us? Or do you think continuing along the same spending trajectory that we have with software, is that going to be better?

Yeah. So these are going to be really tough problems, right? Because if I tell you, Mr. CEO, I want to cut cyber spending—

That's a no.

Right.

You're right.

Okay. Now the AI race, can we be late to the AI race or not participate?

I don't think that will go over well at the board meeting. It's not.

The third man out is software. I think that's kind of what's happening. Also a lot of software that are seat-based and we cut headcount by 10%. We need 10% less seats. That might be an issue. And I just think there's going to have tougher discussions on software. Even if we didn't even have a discussion about should we cancel or replace one of these vendors, right? We just assume we're going to keep our current vendors status quo and not mess with the stack.

Yeah, we're not even discussing about the potential of us building our own tools.

No, we're not. Or consolidating vendors. None of that. So I think that's the discussion and that's why software is going to be difficult moving forward. So definitely let's go back to the AI buildout now because I know you wanted to talk about— is it the duration you want to talk about or the spending itself?

So what's interesting to me is, you know, we all know about NVIDIA and kind of the big chipmakers. Broadcom's done really well over the last few years, that sort of thing. But I think what's going on is that there are a lot of different other winners that are coming out with a lot of the constraints and bottlenecks that are developing as the AI buildout continues throughout the world. We're running up against a lot of different constraints. And so I want you to talk to us about some of the new winners that are emerging beyond just sort of the chipmakers?

Yeah, I think the— so that's a mouthful there. And there's a few directions as you speak that I want to go. First, let's talk about— because you mentioned earlier about maybe the baton being passed from the original AI winners like the NVIDIAS and the GPU makers, Broadcom, Avago, being passed to some of these newer winners. I think both can win at the same time. Sure. Let's talk about what's happening in GPUs. I think you're right, Nvidia has been kind of stalled a little bit. All the GPU makers right now has been stalled a little bit. The batons have been passed, which I think it's not a bad thing, but I think it's a little short-sighted. What I think could be happening with GPUs, you know, when you first started these LLMs, you need to do a lot of model training, which is heavy compute, and the GPU makers were on the front line of that. So I think that that's why I got— they got all this shine, if you will, right, uh, up first. But now we're in the, um, we're in the inference, and then we're going to be going to the agentic. And when you're in the inference phase, asking AI questions and ask it to do stuff for you, not just training, you need a lot of CPUs. Yep, computer processing units. So you have the big GPUs, and for every GPU you need many, many CPUs to carry out the tasks, right? I think the market missed that from the first AI wave. And now this last quarter, just starting to catch up to, oh, CPUs need to really drive this thing forward and are not in the background anymore. They're in the foreground. So you've seen companies like Intel, AMD, ARM, all these CPU makers really grab the spotlight. So now let's talk about winners. And where the next categories are winners. So I think you can think about bottlenecks with AI. And right now we don't have a bottleneck on GPUs produced, maybe installed and assembled, but not necessarily produced. But I think where you do get a lot of this backup dynamic is definitely on storage and memory. So think about memory, you know, when we're doing inference, especially when we're doing agentic, The LLM or the system or the app needs to remember what we told it so they can give us the next right answer. And so the more we use, the more memory we need. And the thing about memory is structurally it was pretty much an oligopoly because it was a commodity business that it didn't make sense to pour billions into a fab when you weren't gonna get a payback period. And it had the traditional boom-bust characteristics to this market. So it was left for bidet. So now you have this huge supply need and demand crunch. But these businesses weren't set up to go super fast. You know, these are cyclical businesses. Your business, they buy too much, it overcorrects, you retool the factory and go to the next, next generation. But things are happening so fast and demand is so quick, they're not able to do that. So you have this supply crunch and the only way to resolve it is price. Price goes up and that's what happens to your product. Now it's not a commodity business. Now, you know, these memory makers are pricing on long-term contracts. So you have to look at the businesses different. So as far as bottlenecks, I think memory's still gonna be a bottleneck. I think storage, you know, we've had an explosion of data ever since the internet and before that, you know, we could have this data and we stored it differently. But now there's a deluge, just like a fire hose of data that's coming and it needs to be stored. And so I think storage is still a bottleneck and it's same thing, it's supply constraint. You know, that business was a duopoly really for storage, Western Digital and Seagate. And now they are refusing, at least in the case of Seagate, to increase supply. What they are doing is increasing density of the disk. So you get more with the supply you get, but not necessarily increasing supply. So I still think those are areas where you can find winners. And then finally, Brian, on the communication side, you know, you have all of this data going through these chips and the data needs to go out to other chips. It needs to go up in the rack and finally it needs to go to other data centers. So scale out, scale up. And I think any business or these companies that increase the communication speed, decrease latency, So I think the photonics businesses are going to do well. I think the Siennas of the world are going to do well. The Lumentums— anybody that's in this business of helping these chips communicate with other parts of the stack, I think are still going to be undersupplied. And the other thing is the architectures are all changing. So the old architecture doesn't work. In a lot of cases, you're changing in real time because of the power consumption that's needed. So stay tuned. But I think there's a lot of winners to come. And again, I look for those 3 areas.

The bottom line of what you're saying is there's a ton of shifting going on here. And what comes to mind for me is, you know, the win— and not to say Nvidia is not going to do well as a company, but, you know, last year's winner was Nvidia. And, you know, Broadcom's up there. These are top 10 in the, in the index. So you're highly concentrated if you're an index investor in some of these companies that have already made kind of their easy money or the obvious money, and some of the names that you mentioned are smaller and not represented in the index quite as, quite as easily. And so that changing leadership is creating another issue that doesn't get talked about nearly enough, and that's what we call hidden concentration. So let's talk about concentration. And this is a two-way, this cuts two different ways. You've got the concentrated stock positions, which we talk about all the time. And if you're an index investor, you do have concentrated stock positions in those top 10 companies. But also the hidden concentration inside of things that look diversified. So the first question I have, Nolan, is how can someone own hundreds of stocks in an index fund, but they're still much more concentrated than they realize?

Yeah, those index funds, it's a tricky, tricky thing because you think that, you know, I'm getting diversification and you are. It just may not be the way that you think or enough for you or what's appropriate. So if you're talking about the S&P, which is a cap-weighted index, it just means the larger company you are, the more money the index is going to have in you.

Yep.

So for example, SpaceX, which is getting ready to join the index, when it joins the index and you buy the index, you probably will have 5 times the amount of money in SpaceX as you would in something like ExxonMobil. And that's the market cap problem with indexes, which can lead you to not being as diversified as you want. So again, the top 10 stocks in the S&P make up almost 40%.

Okay.

And so that may not be— I think when most people hear 500, they think they're gonna put a little money in all 500. You just tend not to do it equally. It's the ones at the top get the most capital. And again, it's the reason that we talked about this past quarter. If you take a look at the Russell 2000, which is the small cap index, it far outpaced the S&P 500. And that's because it has these smaller companies that are more nimble, faster growing revenue growth. They're not constantly— they're not represented in the S&P 500. So if you want exposure to other areas, you have to diversify even outside the S&P a lot of times to be truly diversified.

I like that you brought that up because that just brings me to my next question, which is if leadership is broadening to memory, networking, power and equipment the way you just described over the last few minutes, Does a standard index fund actually capture that, or is that only going to show up after the fact?

Correct. It will be after the fact. And those areas in the index aren't nearly represented as like the Magnificent Seven.

Right.

So you're right. For to really have exposure to those dynamics, you have to do it either at the sector level or the individual stock level.

And then let's talk about the concentration now versus even 5 years ago. Where do you see that? Like how, how concentrated is the S&P 500 now? Relative to what it was 5 years ago or even 10 or 20 years ago?

It's definitely more concentrated. I don't have the exact figures on what the concentration was 5 years ago, but just take a look at the companies at the top and all you have to do is ask yourself, are the today's companies bigger today than they were 5 years ago? And the answer to that is unequivocally yes. Just take a look at the largest company in the index, which is NVIDIA, which bounces between $4 and $5 trillion. Well, 5 years ago, I don't think we had any company even over $2 trillion. And so if you think about the magnitude of these big companies, they are getting much bigger and at a faster pace, which means you're going to have probably less diversification, more concentration on the index level.

How do you think about that? Let's, let's bring it into the real world and how it really impacts investors. How do you think about that problem? Because we know lots of investors are passive investors now. That's something that's coming more into vogue over the last 15 or 20 years. What's the problem with just kind of staying with the status quo?

I guess it works until it doesn't. So I would say a few things. You know, if you're an investor and you're a younger investor investing through your 401 at work, I think the S&P is fine. You could do a lot worse. The problem is when you get older and you get closer to the preserving wealth side, you know, we see a lot of clients come in here and they're within 5 years of retirement. Right? And what's the number one thing we hear? I just don't want to lose my money before I retire, right? They just, they just don't want to do it. But, you know, if you're in the S&P 500, it's not unusual for it to have a 50% drawdown. Generally, people, as they approach retirement, they want something a lot more predictable. Yeah, right. So they want something where they can fix their return, something that has some downside protection. That's why they want diversification, because if the S&P drops 50%, do I have something else in my portfolio that either went up or didn't drop at all? And if you have it all in the S&P 500, particularly as you're barreling toward retirement, it certainly can be a tenuous situation if we get a nasty surprise in the market.

So we've definitely seen this concentration bubble up to the surface over the last couple of years, and it's getting more and more so. What do you think investors can do with this information? What should they do? When they're, you know, as you said, you're past that kind of accumulation phase where you can just kind of let things grow and not worry too much about the concentration. What about when you're getting into an area where you've got more money and it's time to be more intentional about what you're doing?

Yeah. So I think every listener here, if they have an advisor, it's probably a great discussion to have with him or her. If you don't have an advisor, we certainly be happy to speak with you. And see what we can do. But we've had a lot of success, Brian, for people who are approaching retirement with a— it doesn't have to be just they have an S&P and don't have anything else. A lot of times it's company stock. You know, you work for one of these big companies and you got 50% of your net worth, not in an S&P, but in a single company. A lot of things that we look at, even if you own the S&P, there's other securities you can buy to diversify and to get income. So for example, we use it, we have a model income portfolio that we use. We have about 50 names. These are securities that don't really trade based off what happens in the stock market. They trade based off of income or interest rates or inflation. But there are other movers than the same movers for stocks. So they kind of create a good diversification. The reason that people like them is they pay income. On the average, that portfolio pays about 8%. And these are returns that come to you independent of what happens and the stock market. So it's persistent income, it's durable income, and people can count on it. And it's a diversifier. So that's one thing that we've been doing, particularly as people approach retirement. You know, they need some steady income to replace the paycheck that they were earning from work. And income securities do that. They provide consistent income that then can be distributed to clients. That's not the only solution. If you just have an S&P index, But certainly it's one of them because we know you need some other assets in your account outside of the S&P. We just need to decide what those other assets look like.

Okay, excellent. We're going to bring this all together here in a minute, but I want to go through a number of, a number of topics that we didn't cover in super depth, but get some of your thoughts on some of the things that have been going on in the last 90 days. So the first one is gold, silver, and Bitcoin. So, This quarter gave us a huge stress test on the traditional safe havens— gold, silver, and Bitcoin. They're all down somewhere between 10% and 20% over the last quarter. And we had some certain— certainly had some uncertainty with the Iran war and a number of other topics. So what should investors take away from that?

You know, let's start with Bitcoin, because I think we've heard a lot more inbound requests for Bitcoin over the years than we have for gold.

I agree.

So let's start there. I think you have to assess that, like, I think you have to go back to what— why did I buy it? Most people, they just bought it because it was going up, right?

Right.

A lot of people was like, oh, we need something safe to overthrow the government. They don't want Big Brother knowing where all my money is. And, you know, the blockchain and Anonymous and wallets. And so that's kind of another reason that another group would have bought it. But I think whoever it is that owns Bitcoin, just like we do with stocks, you have to go back and look at your original purpose for buying. What did you think it was going to do? What story did you tell yourself? What was the thesis? What was the narrative? And you have to go back there to see if that still holds. As we've pointed out, a criticism we've always had about Bitcoin is what should the natural price be, right? And how low can it go? I don't—

I don't know.

I think Bitcoin may have another problem, Brian. I'm going to throw this out to you. Tell me what you think. I think Bitcoin had its shine stolen by AI. I think all of these people that were excited about what Bitcoin could do and become, I think, are kind of taken with AI. They should be, because I think you can see in AI you can make a similar return on the upside, I think, with a lot more confidence.

Yeah, so I guess kind of what you're describing is speculative money has gone from from Bitcoin to other areas which have more durable businesses and more tangible assets and cash flows.

And I wonder how much of Polymarket and Kowshi has stolen the thunder from Bitcoin too. Yeah, right. I guarantee you there's a huge correlation between the users of both.

That makes a lot of sense. All right, let's move on to the second rapid-fire topic, oil and the Iran question. So Oil spiked sharply around the Iran conflict and the Strait of Hormuz disruption. Then it gave almost all of it back. What's the lesson from how fast that unwound?

I think it's almost impossible to just trade oil or buy oil thinking oil price is going to do X. And so let me buy this. That just never works with oil. Yeah, there's just so— that's probably one of the reasons as a firm we decided when we started we weren't going to do any macro macroeconomic forecasting whatsoever. No. And the ultimate macroeconomic asset is oil.

Yeah. And it's also the, uh, like the original speculation is oil. Really?

It's interesting you brought that up because if you listen to these CEOs at oil companies, they don't even hazard a guess on what oil price is doing at all. And they don't base their business model on the price of oil either. And if those guys who are closest to oil and spend their whole career studying it, if they don't have a clue, I don't know how you can have a strong conviction either way with oil. So we try to stay away from things that you might as well flip a coin. Yeah, yeah, just, you might as well have a tarot card is what I was gonna say. It's just very difficult.

Okay, a couple others. SpaceX, that was, a huge headline in the quarter, just got marked north of $2 trillion in the private markets and IPO'd. You know, and the IPO ETF is up quite a bit this quarter as well. What's that telling us about the pipeline of companies that are coming public?

You know, Brian, this is a good one. On the surface, I want to say this is exciting because it kicks off the space race in a commercial way. Not that we didn't have space companies that traded in the market before SpaceX. But none with the pomp and circumstance. So I think SpaceX could have probably made the bell rung. Hopefully that means we get more investment in the space. You know, we still haven't landed a man on the moon since the '69 Apollo mission. Right. And so I think this is an area that's been derelict of capital. So if SpaceX IPO can help funding for, for space, I think that's, that's helpful. But I don't know that it says a lot about the IPO market. And the reason I said that is Elon Musk is a different animal. And so SpaceX coming public, I don't know that there's 100% read-through. Like, if it was just a regular business going IPO, non-Musk related, and they got that type of fanfare and welcome reception, I would say it's really good news. We have some really big IPOs coming out after. We have Chat with Claude, we're Anthropic. We have OpenAI, Databricks, we got Stripe, a lot of unicorns yet to come, and they may all— may some or all of them come this year. But I don't know that SpaceX— I think the market environment at the time they file will be more relevant to how they do than SpaceX. I think they're a tough act to follow.

I agree. So those are the kind of the rapid-fire questions. I want to just put one thing up for the viewers here. It's the Research Spotlight. Every week our research team is putting out reports like this one we're putting up on the screen. This is a report from Oracle, a company that we followed here for a long time and has been certainly in the headlines in the business press over the last few years. We just want to show you a real-world example of how we think through a name, not just to tell you about it. And again, this quarter, one of the names on our desk was Oracle. Oracle's become a bellwether for AI cloud spending, and it's one of the companies actually building the infrastructure behind this buildout. And the stock dropped almost 36% in a single month. So our analyst Garvit Bandari took a look at that just to take a look at is this— is the company still fundamentally sound and is this an opportunity? So putting this up on the screen that if you're interested in our research, it is available and the details are available below. So we're going to bring it home. Nolan, if viewers can remember one thing from today's discussion, what should it be?

I'm gonna say that the, the AI buildout is real, it's durable, it's gaining pace, and most people underestimate not only the duration but also the magnitude and how important it's gonna be. And not just to AI or tech specifically, but I think generally, I don't— there's not gonna be a sector, an industry, or a company that's not incorporating or using AI. So the adoption will be widespread.

So just a quick preview of Q3's recap video. We're gonna be talking a lot about AI. Eye on that one as well. Uh, it hasn't happened yet, but we know it's going to be a topic of discussion. And then the last question for you, Nolan, is what is our investment committee going to be watching between now and the end of next quarter?

That's going to be really easy. We're watching earnings, baby. We had that earnings coming out in about 2-3 weeks, which is right before NFL training camps open. So we're going to be paying attention to, in the Q2, Was there further acceleration?

Okay.

What old economy stocks are now being made new again by this AI buildout? Okay. What happens to the backlog? If the backlog that these companies are putting on, the computer chip makers, uh, the hyperscales, if the backlog continues to grow and accelerate, that will definitely be telling.

Okay.

We're gonna pay attention to any new features that are released by these LLM model producers.

Okay.

To see what sectors may be negatively impacted. But really, it's this revenue acceleration and this earnings acceleration we want to check to make sure it's still intact. And if my guess is right, it still should be accelerating at a rapid clip. That's the number one thing we'll be watching.

I appreciate your insights, Nolan. If you're already a Left Brain client and you have company stock outside retirement accounts, old 401s, cash, or investments we haven't reviewed recently, we'd encourage you to bring those into the conversation. Our best advice comes from seeing the complete picture. And if today's discussion made you realize your portfolio may be more concentrated or more exposed than you thought, we'd be happy to have that conversation. Thanks for watching. Subscribe so you don't miss the next Left Brain Investment Committee Quarterly Market Intelligence Briefing. We'll see you again next time.