The Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) caught a firm bid on Wednesday, driving into fresh record highs as investors eased back from overexposure to the AI tech rally and moved deeper into more traditional investing mainstays, primarily major banks and healthcare stocks.
The Dow Jones rose around 430 points, setting a new intraday high of 48,419 as the tech-light major index gets a boost from traders piling back into traditional investments. The Dow is now up around 4% over a four-day period after falling to 46,490 in a mild pullback from the last record swing high near the 48,000 handle.
Banking stocks push the Dow higher
The financial sector bolstered the Dow Jones, with investor favorites such as Goldman Sachs (GS), JPMorgan (JPM), and credit card company American Express (AXP) all rising to record highs. Materials and construction also added a further boost, with building darling Caterpillar (CAT) climbing as well.
Investors continue to grow leery about revenue prospects within the AI space, despite eye-watering valuations for shovel sellers during the LLM data gold rush. Advanced Micro Designs (AMD) CEO Lisa Siu claimed that she could see total AI tech demand climbing to $1 trillion per year by 2030, a lofty investment and expenditure goal for an industry where most, if not all, of the revenue is contained entirely within data center suppliers.
Short-term resolution is better than no resolution
The US government continues to grind closer toward a short-term resolution to the longest federal government shutdown in American history. A temporary stopgap bill that would fund the US government through January passed in the Senate this week, and the bill is expected to be voted on by the lower House of Representatives as soon as 19:00 EST Wednesday or 03:00 GMT Thursday.
Dow Jones daily chart
AI stocks FAQs
First and foremost, artificial intelligence is an academic discipline that seeks to recreate the cognitive functions, logical understanding, perceptions and pattern recognition of humans in machines. Often abbreviated as AI, artificial intelligence has a number of sub-fields including artificial neural networks, machine learning or predictive analytics, symbolic reasoning, deep learning, natural language processing, speech recognition, image recognition and expert systems. The end goal of the entire field is the creation of artificial general intelligence or AGI. This means producing a machine that can solve arbitrary problems that it has not been trained to solve.
There are a number of different use cases for artificial intelligence. The most well-known of them are generative AI platforms that use training on large language models (LLMs) to answer text-based queries. These include ChatGPT and Google’s Bard platform. Midjourney is a program that generates original images based on user-created text. Other forms of AI utilize probabilistic techniques to determine a quality or perception of an entity, like Upstart’s lending platform, which uses an AI-enhanced credit rating system to determine credit worthiness of applicants by scouring the internet for data related to their career, wealth profile and relationships. Other types of AI use large databases from scientific studies to generate new ideas for possible pharmaceuticals to be tested in laboratories. YouTube, Spotify, Facebook and other content aggregators use AI applications to suggest personalized content to users by collecting and organizing data on their viewing habits.
Nvidia (NVDA) is a semiconductor company that builds both the AI-focused computer chips and some of the platforms that AI engineers use to build their applications. Many proponents view Nvidia as the pick-and-shovel play for the AI revolution since it builds the tools needed to carry out further applications of artificial intelligence. Palantir Technologies (PLTR) is a “big data” analytics company. It has large contracts with the US intelligence community, which uses its Gotham platform to sift through data and determine intelligence leads and inform on pattern recognition. Its Foundry product is used by major corporations to track employee and customer data for use in predictive analytics and discovering anomalies. Microsoft (MSFT) has a large stake in ChatGPT creator OpenAI, the latter of which has not gone public. Microsoft has integrated OpenAI’s technology with its Bing search engine.
Following the introduction of ChatGPT to the general public in late 2022, many stocks associated with AI began to rally. Nvidia for instance advanced well over 200% in the six months following the release. Immediately, pundits on Wall Street began to wonder whether the market was being consumed by another tech bubble. Famous investor Stanley Druckenmiller, who has held major investments in both Palantir and Nvidia, said that bubbles never last just six months. He said that if the excitement over AI did become a bubble, then the extreme valuations would last at least two and a half years or long like the DotCom bubble in the late 1990s. At the midpoint of 2023, the best guess is that the market is not in a bubble, at least for now. Yes, Nvidia traded at 27 times forward sales at that time, but analysts were predicting extremely high revenue growth for years to come. At the height of the DotCom bubble, the NASDAQ 100 traded for 60 times earnings, but in mid-2023 the index traded at 25 times earnings.