People of Walmart Becomes Robots of Walmart

One of the hallmarks of the dot-com bubble over twenty-five years ago was seeing companies added ".com" to their names (or, perhaps, adding "e" prefixes to the name).

These announcements would typically lead to an instant spike in share prices, as the firms would signal, however superficially, that they were now part of the "in" group of hot stocks at the epicenter of the bubble. As wildly bullish as it seemed at the time, with firms popping ferociously the nanosecond they changed their names to ".com" or "e," in hindsight after March of 2000 it served as a blinking red light of an imminent, major top. 

Fast-forward to today, and we have an eerily similar phenomenon with AI stocks, particularly firms announcing OpenAI partnerships. 

Heck, even Walmart is getting in on the action, see you can see just below on this morning's headline. 

WMT's stock is spiking in kind today, as seen on the daily chart, below. 

Will this time be different?

Bulls claim free cash flow is much better these days with most of these firms compared to the dot-com bubble, but that assumes business will continue to go smoothy going forward, a dangerous assumption to make at these valuations and amidst this positioning and sentiment. 

Elsewhere, as Fed Chair Powell announces quantitive tightening (QT) is coming to an end we have gold making fresh highs. I strongly suspect the two are related, as the gold market is the first asset class to sniff out just how egregious these policy errors are given entrenched inflation. 

Thus, keep an eye on other precious metals like platinum and palladium for further upside given how under-the-radar they continue to be.