AI stocks are in an ‘air pocket’ and Meta and Microsoft are being traded like ‘bear market names that cannot be owned,’ top analyst says

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On the last day of Q2, this is where the major stock indexes stand, year-to-date:

S&P 500 futures were flat this morning. The index rose 1.18% yesterday (it is up 8.69% year-to-date). 

In Europe, the Stoxx 600 was up 0.69% today in early trading ( 7.44% YTD) and the U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up 0.65% before lunch ( 6.04% YTD).

Asia: South Korea’s KOSPI was up 0.97% today ( 96.69% YTD). Japan’s Nikkei 225 was up 0.86% today ( 35.17% YTD). India’s Nifty 50 was flat today (-8.44% YTD). China’s CSI 300 was up 1.07% ( 5.55% YTD). 

Brent crude was $74 per barrel this morning, up from $72 yesterday.

Bitcoin was $59.3K (-32.24% YTD).

Stocks are in an “air pocket” before we find out whether all that AI capex actually pays off, Dan Ives says

We’re about to head into Q2 earnings season and—as the recent market jolt around Apple’s price increase announcement shows—investors are still nervous that this whole AI thing just isn't going to pan out. “Microsoft and Meta are being treated by investors like they are wearing winter jackets to the beach in the summer,” Wedbush’s Dan Ives pined in a recent email. Ives, a closely followed infamous tech stock bull, previously complained that traders are “treating Microsoft and Meta like they are bear market names that cannot be owned.”

His answer: We are in a six-to-12 month “air pocket” in which the hyperscalers are spending up to $700 billion on AI data center construction “but big tech stalwarts such as Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon/Alphabet to a lesser extent are in the waiting stage to see the growth/monetization boom.”

“To this point, the costs will start to slow down over the coming year and when the AI consumer hardware, physical AI deployments, and enterprise use cases explode at scale over the coming years this will all be a distant memory (like building the Las Vegas strip in the 1950's),” he says. 

“In the meantime, the bears will continue to yell fire in a........

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