Data: FactSet; Chart: Matt Phillips/Axios The momentum trade is having a terrible start to the second half. Why it matters: Momentum shares drove the market gains early in the year, and it will be harder for the rally to continue without their participation. How it works: Momentum is one of the "factors" some mathematically minded investors, known as quants , use to describe and organize the market according to certain well-understood market trends. - Momentum stocks are defined, more or less, as shares that have been going up — and outperforming the broader market — for roughly a year. - The academic research that quantitative investing is based on has found that such trends have a tendency to persist. - In other words, a momentum…
Data: Financial Modeling Prep ; Chart: Emily Peck/Axios Investors seem to be hitting pause on the AI run-up. Chip stocks in particular are slumping from their record highs. Why it matters: We're in a bit of a reality-check moment in the AI buildout — both for the businesses blowing their budgets on compute and for the investors bidding up stock prices for any company engaged in the new technology. The big picture: AI is moving faster than ever before, and the cost of some compute , or the price to rent the processing power needed to run models, is going down. - But prices to run the flagship frontier models from OpenAI and Anthropic are far more costly. - At the same time, demand for AI technology is still growing. State of play:…
Investors were confronted this past week with four difficult realities that may fundamentally change the way they think about AI the business vs. AI the technology: - AI is too expensive, say CEOs and even Microsoft itself. - It's not paying off nearly as much as companies expected, per a new Bain study . - Infrastructure demand is strong — but not as strong as the most optimistic wanted, as Broadcom showed with its "weak " forecast. - Financing that infrastructure is going to be more expensive for longer, with signs pointing to the Fed raising , not lowering, interest rates. Why it matters: Those realities challenge assumptions that powered markets to historic heights over the past few years. It's hard to justify chip or…
AI may never be as cheap to use as it is today. Why it matters: AI companies are hooking users with low prices that won't last — straight out of the Amazon and Uber playbook. The big picture: The push to show profits before IPOs could end the era of cheap AI. - "These LLM companies are going to go public and they're going to raise prices because they have to," May Habib, CEO of Writer, told Axios. State of play: New models from OpenAI, Google and Anthropic are generally getting faster and cheaper. - The industry was fixated on training chips. Now Nvidia and its rivals are focused on inference — the computing that lets models answer your questions. - Aggregate token pricing — the cost of generating text — has fallen, partly due…