The AI investing boom (or perhaps bubble) is something Silicon Valley has seen many times before: a gold rush of VC money thrown at the Big New Thing. But one aspect of it is completely unique to these times: startups rocketing from $0 to as much as $100 million in annual recurring revenue, sometimes in a matter of months. Word on the street is that many a VC won't even look at a startup that's not on the ARR superhighway, aiming for $100 million in ARR before their Series A funding round.
Ark Invest's Cathie Wood, who's a big investor in disruptive innovators, has been reducing her stake in AI data analytics firm Palantir ( NASDAQ:PLTR) in recent weeks. And a bit of profit-taking at quite a volatile and anxious time certainly does seem wise, especially as Dr. Michael Burry looks to keep those subscribed to his newsletter informed on his views of big tech and his bearish put positions.
"OpenAI was the golden child earlier this year, and Alphabet was looked at in a very different light," said Brett Ewing, chief market strategist at First Franklin Financial Services. "Now sentiment is much more tempered toward OpenAI."
Many growth-heavy investors might have felt it when the Nasdaq 100 slipped close to 8% as part of a tech-driven correction. Though the market has recovered more than half of the ground lost since before the November dip in AI stocks, there are still quite a few opportunities out there in the tech wreckage for contrarians to pick up. Undoubtedly, we've enjoyed a swift market rally going into Thanksgiving, and for that, investors can give thanks.
Billionaire Peter Thiel runs the hedge fund Thiel Macro and is known for playing a significant role in identifying growth stocks. Based on the recent 13F filing, Thiel sold his entire stake in artificial intelligence (AI) giant NVIDIA Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) and reinvested the proceeds in Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) and Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL). While not everyone will agree with the move to abandon NVIDIA Corp. the other AI giants, Microsoft and Apple, are well positioned to benefit from the AI revolution and have made significant gains in the past few years.
So yeah, the day after earnings, initially it was up 7% from announcing earnings. When I looked after hours, it was down 15. when the market opened, it was down 45%. I had someone text me and say, "This seems like the kind of sell off you only see an accounting scandal." I said, "Yeah, it seems like exaggeration." They said, "I'm gonna buy."
While I continue to be a big fan of the mega-cap tech innovators, I also think some lesser-covered AI firms - at least relative to the likes of Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA) and the rest of the titans worth more than $1 trillion - are worth watching and even betting on, even if their narratives require more patience from investors. It's not just about the hyperscalers!
"So the way I like to think about it is: Is there going to be an AI wobble at some point? Are investors going to be concerned about how those CapEx dollars are being invested? Right now, he continued, alluding to a famous game theory scenario, "there's a little bit of a prisoner's dilemma, let's call it, among the larger firms. You have to invest in it because your peers are investing in it, and so if you're left behind you're not going to have the stronger competitive position to it."
2025 is three-fourths over. While that may be odd to say, the reality is that a new investing year is almost upon us. However, there are still plenty of stocks that are worth buying now, especially to capture an end-of-year rally that may occur as institutional investors reposition their portfolios to capture gains where they think the market will be heading in 2026.
Dividend-oriented strategies aren't just for traditional value investors anymore. Many investors want to capture artificial intelligence (AI) growth while still generating reliable income. That can be achieved by pairing income-focused ETFs with AI-heavy funds, creating a forward-looking portfolio that balances payouts with exposure to transformative technology. Why Combine Dividends With AI? Artificial intelligence is reshaping industries from healthcare and finance to entertainment and manufacturing. Companies such as Nvidia, Microsoft, Alphabet, and AMD are leading this shift.
When OpenAI launched its new GPT-5 model in August, the company bragged loud and hard about how GPT-5 is its "smartest, fastest, most useful model yet" and how interacting with it was like "chatting with a helpful friend with PhD‑level intelligence." When it comes to creative tasks like writing, GPT-5 immediately felt like a major step backward. But as I've tested the model more extensively, I've seen that it does excel at many pragmatic tasks like writing code and analyzing data.
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