AI Summary
5 min read“One out of four men aged 18 to 29 trade stocks daily,” Michael opens, citing a Bloomberg headline. “Two-thirds of them report feeling like failures.” The hosts land on this image early: a generation of young men treating the stock market like a slot machine, losing money and self-worth in roughly equal measure. It is not a moral judgment, they insist—it is a structural one. The episode that follows is a sprawling tour through the AI-driven market that keeps hitting all-time highs, the gambling-adjacent culture of retail trading, the SPV scams that prey on unsuspecting investors, and the quiet demographic shift remaking both the economy and social life.
The AI Trade Is Everything
The stock market has been “Teflon,” Ben argues, shrugging off a pandemic, 9% inflation, 5% interest rates, two wars, and a frozen housing market. The reason is simple: AI. The hyperscalers—Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle—are on a spending spree unlike anything in history. A chart from HyperScale Farmer shows their three-year rolling capital expenditure sum surpassing $3 trillion, up from $500 billion in December 2022. “It’s going vertical,” Michael says. “It can’t continue to do this forever.”
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What you'll learn
- 1 Timestamped Outline
- 2 (00:45) **Market Resilience and All-Time Highs** - Michael and Ben open with the surprising number of S&P 500 all-time highs in 2025 despite relentless negative headlines
- 3 (03:31) **The Hyperscaler CapEx Boom** - A chart shows AI infrastructure spending by Amazon, Google, Meta, Oracle, and Microsoft has gone vertical
- 4 (06:40) **Earnings Growth Defies Logic** - S&P 500 Q2 earnings are on pace for 30% year-over-year growth, even excluding one-time investment markups
- 5 (09:08) **Broad Market Participation** - Small caps and equal-weight indices are outperforming, but only 45% of stocks beat the S&P 500 year-to-date
- 6 (12:36) **Emerging Markets at a Record Discount** - EM stocks trade at 9.9x forward earnings versus the S&P's 20x, a record valuation gap
- 7 (17:08) **Michael Burry's Crash Call and Market Structure** - Burry predicts a possible 1987-style fall, but Ben and Michael focus on the structural speed of modern markets
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
On episode 477, Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson discuss: new all-time highs in the stock market, AI is the only thing that matters, emerging markets are cheap, 1987 crash calls, things rich people and poor people have in common, day trading is hard, how often you should check your portfolio, early retirement, housing market recessions and much more.
This episode is sponsored by Xtrackers by DWS. Find out more at http://xtrackers.com/
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Find complete show notes on our blogs:
Ben Carlson’s A Wealth of Common Sense
Michael Batnick’s The Irrelevant Investor
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Investing involves the risk of loss. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be or regarded as personalized investment advice or relied upon for investment decisions. Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson are employees of Ritholtz Wealth Management and may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this video. All opinions expressed by them are solely their own opinion and do not reflect the opinion of Ritholtz Wealth Management. See our disclosures here:
https://ritholtzwealth.com/podcast-youtube-disclosures/
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