A Market That Feels Like the 1990s
The major U.S. indices have just notched another record day, with the S&P 500, NASDAQ, and Russell all closing at new highs after five consecutive weeks of gains. The tone of the market right now is reminiscent of the late 1990s — not in a frothy, irrational sense, but in the way a powerful structural story is overwhelming the cautious models that traditional analysts rely on.
For months, technicians have been warning that the market is overbought. That argument has merit on the daily charts, but it falls apart when you zoom out. The weekly and monthly charts, particularly through the close of April, looked constructive rather than exhausted. Fundamentals tell an even more striking story. With roughly 80% of companies having reported for the most recent quarter, the average year-over-year earnings growth is running at 26%. Back in February, consensus expectations had been calling for just 10%. Analysts, in other words, have been dramatically behind the curve.
When Price Targets Cannot Keep Up
The disconnect between sell-side targets and reality has been most visible in the storage and semiconductor names. Consider SanDisk: as recently as May of last year, the consensus 12-month price target sat at roughly $58. The stock today trades around $1,450. Seagate offers an even more dramatic illustration — recommended at $119, it has since climbed to $792, and there is a credible case that it is heading meaningfully higher still.
These are not isolated outliers. They are evidence that the buildout underway is something genuinely new — an industrial revolution unlike anything markets have priced before. When the underlying demand curve is this steep, traditional valuation frameworks struggle to keep pace, and analysts are forced into a reactive posture, repeatedly chasing prices upward rather than anticipating them.
The Investing Lesson: Follow the Shortages
The single most useful framework in this environment is shortage-driven investing. The way to make money right now is to identify the companies that are direct beneficiaries of structural supply constraints, and the list is growing rather than shrinking.
After AMD's most recent earnings report, the long-anticipated rotation finally arrived: after three years of conversation focused almost exclusively on GPUs, CPUs are suddenly back in vogue, and the supply picture suggests there may now be a shortage there as well. This means shortages are no longer confined to one part of the semiconductor chain — they extend across manufacturing capacity for both GPUs and CPUs, into power generation and energy creation, and into the construction of data centers themselves.
AMD's own leadership has projected that the CPU market alone could exceed $120 billion by 2030, implying a compound annual growth rate of roughly 30 to 35%. That kind of trajectory helps explain why a once-stagnant name like Intel has now roughly doubled.
Storage: An Insatiable Demand
The storage story is particularly compelling because of how concentrated the industry has become. Thirty years ago, dozens of companies manufactured disc drives. Today only a handful remain, with Seagate leading and Western Digital still serving the market for traditional spinning-platter drives alongside their solid-state competitors.
The phrase "information superhighway" has fallen out of fashion since the 1990s, but the underlying demand it described has only intensified. Users — individuals, enterprises, and now AI systems — have an insatiable appetite for bandwidth and for storage. We want instantaneous downloads and uploads, and we want to keep everything we have ever generated. That cultural and technological reality, mapped onto a consolidated supplier base, is precisely the kind of setup that produces multi-bagger equity returns.
Looking Beyond U.S. Borders
The opportunity is not confined to American names. Two international markets in particular deserve serious attention: South Korea and Taiwan.
The South Korea ETF, EWY, offers exposure to SK Hynix, Samsung, and a deep bench of industrial companies, including Hyundai. Hyundai is a particularly interesting holding because it owns roughly 80% of Boston Dynamics — and as robotics moves from novelty to ubiquity, the underlying demand for sensors and semiconductors will surge along with it. EWY is up roughly 28% over the past year.
Taiwan is the other essential geography. Almost every server powering the AI buildout is, in some meaningful sense, built in Taiwan. The Taiwan ETF, EWT, has appreciated roughly 77% over the past year, reflecting just how central the island is to the global technology supply chain. Alongside these geographic plays, the U.S.-listed semiconductor leaders — Taiwan Semiconductor, Broadcom, Qualcomm, and AMD itself — continue to climb, with AMD up around 20% in a single recent session.
Geopolitics, Iran, and the Bigger Picture
A serious question hanging over markets is what an Iran deal might mean for risk assets. One credible scenario suggests that if such an agreement is finalized, the S&P could push toward 8,600 by year-end. Whether that exact target is reached on that timeline is debatable, but the directional case is sound.
The Iran situation will affect markets in the short term either way. Over the longer term, however, the most important takeaway is structural. American companies have demonstrated remarkable adaptability — the way they have managed supply chains under tariff pressure is a perfect case study. The world is going to learn the same lesson with respect to the Strait of Hormuz. It will not happen overnight, but global commerce will not tolerate that bottleneck indefinitely. Diversification away from chokepoints is coming, and that is unambiguously bullish for the global economy over the medium and long term.
The Bottom Line: Stay Invested
Putting all of this together, the message is straightforward. This is not the moment to pull capital off the table. The combination of record-setting earnings growth, persistent shortages across multiple links in the technology and energy supply chains, accelerating demand for storage and compute, the global rise of robotics, and the eventual easing of geopolitical bottlenecks all point in the same direction.
Price targets are difficult to assign with precision in an environment like this — Seagate and SanDisk make that abundantly clear. But difficulty in pinning down a number is not the same as uncertainty about direction. The direction is up, the structural drivers are intact, and the right posture for investors is to stay in the market rather than try to time their way around a once-in-a-generation industrial revolution.