For more than four decades, the investing world operated on a foundational assumption: that a portfolio consisting of 60% stocks and 40% bonds would protect you when markets turned. For roughly the past 20 years, a second assumption took hold alongside it: that a handful of dominant tech companies would keep growing into whatever price investors were willing to pay. This has taken on several shapes, with the FAANG companies morphing into the “Magnificent Seven” during the pandemic, and the AI boom crowning a new group of “hyperscalers.”
But these assumptions are taking a hit from sources that rarely deliver bad news about the markets they cover.
