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AI’s Speed Crash: The Structural Bull Market Isn’t Over

Published on July 19, 2026

Jordi Visser

In this week’s video, I walk through a brutal week for AI stocks. Weeks ago, I talked about how AI was changing the human driven market structure in a rising world of AI agents. Markets have shifted from Kindleberger’s “manias, panics, and crashes” to bubbles, parabolas, and speed crashes, faster up, faster down, and structurally different, driven by momentum, agents, and leverage stacked on top. Like with gold and silver earlier in the year and Bitcoin back in October, we are witnessing the deleveraging of a trend.

The Morgan Stanley tech-momentum factor fell roughly 40% in 18 days, the worst unwind in data going back to 1998. Despite the extreme nature of this move, that’s the digestion phase I flagged in my June 4th paper, agentic AI moving from discovery to digestion after the Opus 4.5 run. The most levered funds are being eradicated, the odds on the tote board are finally “fair” for many names. Underneath the noise, the early earnings season is blowing the doors off again, the economy is strong, inflation is falling, and I think the next leg of beta lives in crypto.

Timestamps

(00:00–02:42) Setup & market structure: A rough week for AI, but the structural bull and insatiable compute demand are intact. Markets have shifted to bubbles, parabolas, and speed crashes, not a business-cycle problem.
(03:00–06:11) The megaphone unwind: MS tech-momentum factor down ~40% in 18 days, worst since 1998. The “firework show is over”, agentic AI moves from discovery to digestion; ~40% of the Opus 4.5 move retraced.
(06:11–07:50) Doing little buys: Adding back Micron on new news; even blowout growth (Micron, Samsung, ASML) can now disappoint. The 100-name thematic index held better than single names.
(08:14–11:11) Earnings blow the doors off: 43 S&P names in, sales surprise +4%, earnings +16%. JP Morgan +34% (stock +10% at highs), Goldman +45%. Dimon: “close to as good as it gets,” strength across the board.
(11:11–13:36) Ignore the debt scare: Hyperscaler debt-to-equity near zero, RPOs enormous, compute insatiable, leaders protected by government in the China race. Feels like ’07 but no widening spreads, no recession.
(13:36–18:35) Agents & the new vol regime: More agent-driven trading (Robinhood open to agents), record factor vol, a Bank of England warning. Gold, silver, and Bitcoin all saw violent momentum unwinds. Tech-momentum vol ~7x S&P vol makes re-entry hard for leveraged/vol-controlled funds.
(19:47–25:46) AI = memory, 200-day still up: 85% of portfolio names have a rising 200-day, unlike toast software (Adobe, Salesforce). Memory shortage, rising DRAM, Micron contracts a game-changer; Nvidia/Micron head-and-shoulders analogy, Micron ~6x cheaper.
(27:38–30:24) Recap = rotation, not systemic: S&P −1.5%, Nasdaq −4%, small caps flat. Industrials and tech momentum simply mean-reverting. Thematic portfolio ~40% correction (normal); Marvell −62%, still top semi after Nvidia; proceeds rotated into Bitcoin, Ethereum, silver.
(30:50–34:06) Strong economy, falling inflation, reformist Warsh: Philly Fed/Empire ~62 PMI; core CPI/PCE and sticky-core to new lows. Warsh is “reform, not hawkishness” — weight forward-looking data over one backward-looking print.
(34:06–37:47) Hassabis & the singularity: AGI “probably only a few short years away,” a shift on par with fire or electricity. Open source eventually dominates enterprises; AI-native companies win, incumbents lose.
(37:47–44:34) Vera Rubin step-up & the next beta: The 800V DC / Vera Rubin paper (~25 names) targets earnings step-up functions. Bitcoin still in a bear market; Ethereum the one to watch (best month, +17% MTD). Stripe’s PayPal bid, JPM/BlackRock/Goldman tokenizing, Japan and South Korea reclassifying crypto, crypto as the purest AI trade, with a Q4 breakout the signal.

Watch here

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