A Lesson in Patient Ownership
There is a meaningful difference between trading stocks and owning companies. When Intel dipped to $17 last April, and again during the major sell-off the previous July, the easy move was to walk away. Yet there were two enduring reasons to stay. First, Intel still effectively owned the data center and corporate compute market. While AMD has been chipping away at that dominance for years, Intel remained the default backbone of enterprise computing. Second, Intel's fabrication plants carried real intrinsic value — value that a $17 share price simply did not reflect.
That patience has been rewarded. Intel has climbed roughly 400% in a year, a result almost no one would have predicted at the start of the year. A new CEO — yet another in a long succession — appears to actually know how to unlock value from the company. Intel is improving its processes, and the fact that companies of Apple's stature are looking to Intel to manufacture their chips is among the strongest possible signals that the firm is doing something right. This is precisely the kind of outcome that justifies remaining in the stock market: the stars don't always align on cue, but when they do, only those still holding shares benefit.
Why AMD Belongs in the Conversation
AMD has spent decades as Intel's most credible second-place competitor and, perhaps oddly, has simultaneously held that same runner-up position against Nvidia. The chips AMD makes are genuinely excellent — historically a step behind the leaders in raw power and cost, but that lower-cost profile has turned into a strategic asset in the AI compute era. Cheaper, capable silicon is exactly what many AI workloads can absorb at scale.
AMD has also been steadily gaining share in the data center, encroaching on Intel's traditional stronghold. Lisa Su, who is arguably the best CEO the company has ever had, has positioned AMD in a way that demands Wall Street's attention. The next earnings update will be telling — both for what it reveals about data center share gains and for what AMD has to say about its competitive posture against Nvidia.
A Sector-Neutral, Tech-Heavy Reality
A sector-neutral approach that mirrors the S&P 500's weightings still ends up with more than 30% of the portfolio in technology. That isn't a stylistic choice — it's a reflection of where the market itself has concentrated. The deeper reason this concentration has grown, and continues to grow, is straightforward: technology is the one consistent source of productivity gains in the economy.
Artificial intelligence, while already useful and even fun to interact with today, has barely begun to spread into the niches and modalities where it will eventually live. We are at the beginning, not the end, of AI making a meaningful impact on daily life — and not necessarily a negative one. Crucially, today's winners are unlikely to be tomorrow's winners. AI will not stay confined to servers. It will be pervasive — embedded in the field, in devices, in environments — and that pervasiveness will require a wide variety of chip architectures. There will be winners and losers along the way, and the leaders of this moment may not survive the transitions ahead.
Beyond Chips: Other Pockets to Watch
Tech is not the whole story. Oil prices have been pressuring transport-heavy names like UPS, and there continues to be an interesting case for tower and satellite tower exposure. The most overlooked part of the market right now, however, may be the consumer. As retail earnings season unfolds, there's a real chance of upside surprises from retailers whose strength is currently being underestimated. Investors fixated on chips and AI risk missing it.
The Investor's Discipline
The throughline across all of this is a simple discipline: hold stocks loosely. Don't fall in love with them. Look at every position as a company and ask what it can actually do for you. That mindset is what allows an investor to sit through the painful years — the $17 prints, the sell-offs, the seemingly endless string of disappointing CEOs — long enough to be present when the stars finally align. It is also what allows an investor to let go when the next wave of pervasive computing inevitably reshuffles the leaderboard.