This company is seriously impressing me

We’re coming off a big week on Wall Street…

The Dow Jones hit all-time highs after the Fed said it plans to cut interest rates next year.

And did you know India, Germany, and France—three of the world’s largest stock markets—are also sitting at record highs?

All the Wall Street strategists who predicted a DOWN year for stocks in January are turning bullish... which makes me a little more cautious.

Here’s what I’m thinking…

1. This chart shows why we invest the way we do.

Solar stocks have had a horrific 2023.

The Solar ETF (TAN) plunged 35% this year while the S&P is up 21%. Ouch for anyone sitting in these clean energy stocks.

I’ve seen a lot of investors make this mistake.

They find a genuine, fast-growing trend—like solar energy—and invest in solar stocks thinking it’ll lead to big gains.

If only it were that simple.

Investing in fast-growing trends is easy—anyone can do it. But it won’t make you money consistently unless you also pick great businesses profiting from that trend.

Our investing framework in Disruption Investor is finding stocks in that “sweet spot:” Great businesses profiting from megatrends. And it’s working perfectly.

Most solar stocks have been obliterated this year, but the one we own is bucking the trend. It’s surged 50% while its peers lost one-third of their value. Talk about a performance gap:

Solar energy is the real deal, but selecting the right stocks to profit from it is key.

You can access our full portfolio of great disruptors, which we call the “Disruptor 20,” here.

2. This company is seriously impressing me.

I wrote about the beginning of the end for the iPhone last week.

Facebook (META) has a real shot at building the next trillion-dollar device.

I just watched an awesome live demo of its new artificial intelligence (AI)-powered Ray-Bans. They’re sleek, unlike those dorky $3,000 Apple (AAPL) ski-goggles you won’t catch me wearing.

On the left: Sleek. On the right: Dorky.

Source: The Verge; Apple

The specs are equipped with Meta AI, which can see and hear.

In the demo, the guy is looking at a bunch of different teas. He asks, “Hey Meta, which of these teas is caffeine-free?"

A few seconds later, the AI assistant whispers in his ear that the chamomile tea is caffeine-free.

The glasses can also “see,” so they can do things like translate menus from Spanish into English. It’s like having ChatGPT on your face.

Facebook is seriously impressing me with these new announcements. A decade from now, we won’t think about Facebook as a social media company. It’ll be something much bigger.

Glasses are an obvious fit to dethrone the iPhone. Billions of people already wear specs. It’s not a huge leap to imagine us buying a pair of AI-powered Ray-Bans, if the tech is good enough.

Remember: When the iPhone launched, everyone was skeptical that touchscreens would work. Now, billions of people tap away on a six-inch piece of glass all day.

Give it a few years… but I think the “weirdness” of talking to an AI through our glasses will be perfectly normal.

AI is ushering in the “post-iPhone” era. We’ll carry our little AI assistants around with us 24/7, forgetting they’re even there.

3. AI: Dystopia or Nirvana?

The idea of wearing AI-powered glasses all day, every day sounds dystopian.

Teenagers already walk around like zombies with their heads stuck in their phones. AI will make this even worse, right?

I don’t think so. In fact, AI can solve this problem by making computers more natural.

Technology has always been unnatural. We tap awkwardly placed buttons on our PCs… swipe our smartphones… and once upon a time, we flicked switches on giant mainframes.

With AI, we can just talk to the machine, and it’ll know exactly what we want.

No more slouching and squinting while we type on keyboards. No more bumping into people on the street because you were texting. A decade from now, screens basically won’t exist.

AI will usher in the invisible computing age.

If you want a glimpse of the future, try ChatGPT’s voice mode on your phone. My daughter is too young to type, so I had her ask ChatGPT to explain the moon to her.

It explained the moon (to a five-year-old), then asked whether she liked the moon. It felt like magic. This was a lightbulb moment for me.

AI opens up computers to a whole new audience: The young and the old who can’t use a keyboard.

AI, everywhere, all the time.

Better… smaller… faster computer chips enable this innovation.

Chipmakers are the obvious winners here. That’s why we own six chip stocks in Disruption Investor, and they continue to be one of my top sectors to invest in.

Make it a great day. I’ll talk with you Wednesday.

Stephen McBride
Chief Analyst, RiskHedge

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