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Since my last column Is there a stock market bubble? Here are the warning signs, which was on the topic of recognising bubbles, subtle shifts have been occurring in the risk postures of major global investors that suggest you now need to behave more cautiously than before.

Some of those behaviours have been reflected in the relative outperformance over the last month of defensive sectors such as healthcare and utilities, beating technology, artificial intelligence (AI) and defence. And some of the same behaviours also reflect the changing picture of liquidity, which, of course, is the fuel that inspires all thematically driven rallies.

This article was first published in The Australian on 30 October 2025. Continue…

by Roger Montgomery Posted in In the Press, Market commentary.

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This week, The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) lifted the lid on the internal financial projections of OpenAI and Anthropic – the companies at the centre of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. 

By way of background, Dario Amodei, once a senior leader at OpenAI, parted ways with Sam Altman in 2021 amid strategic and perhaps personal differences and launched Anthropic that same year, seeded it with a $124 million Series A. The debut of ChatGPT in late 2022 blindsided the Amodei and handed OpenAI 100 million users overnight, along with an 18-month revenue lead. Anthropic pivoted sharply to enterprise-grade deployments of its Claude models, a bet that has now propelled its private-market valuation to $183 billion – still trailing OpenAI’s $500 billion mark, but closing the gap through disciplined business to business (B2B) focus. Continue…

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Companies, Market commentary.

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As I delve a little deeper into the aggregate artificial intelligence (AI) capital expenditure (capex) numbers and the revenue and profits subsequently required to recoup them, one thing stands out: a world of AI forecasts that are universally optimistic.

That’s not usual in any hype-inspired boom, but these numbers are extraordinary. Continue…

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Market commentary, Technology & Telecommunications.

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On November 30, 2022, the world marvelled at the release and conversational prowess of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. What the world might have missed, however, was the subtle shift that began rippling through the U.S. economy.

What started as a viral tech demo – capable of drafting emails, coding snippets, and even poetry – escalated into a full-blown revolution in large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence, now described as the fourth industrial revolution. Continue…

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Technology & Telecommunications.

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Markets sit at elevated levels, fuelled by optimism around artificial intelligence and the promise of lasting productivity gains. Yet beneath the excitement lies a complex mix of valuations, momentum, and risk – raising important questions about how investors can stay positioned if sentiment shifts.

Markets are expensive – observations and implications

There is a conga line of analysts, fund managers and commentators pointing out the extremes many traditional or conventional measures of value have now reached.  From price-to-earnings, price-to-book, and market-cap-to-Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to earnings and dividend yields, the U.S. S&P 500 is in rarified air when it comes to the price investors are willing to pay for exposure to future growth. Continue…

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Aura Group, Digital Asset Funds Management, Market commentary, Market Valuation.

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I joined Jess Maguire on ABC Statewide Drive to discuss how scandals at Super Retail Group, Qantas, and Star Entertainment reveal a troubling pattern: CEOs behaving badly and boards failing to act. From cover-ups to ignored red flags, weak oversight has led to billions in fines, lost trust, and damaged valuations. I stressed that it’s often the cover-up that sinks a CEO – and that boards must demand transparency, independence, and stronger governance to protect investors.

Listen to the full interview from 1:46:00 here: Statewide Drive – when boards fail, investors will pay the price

by David Buckland Posted in Radio.

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In recessions, it is said, ‘cash is king’. We mustn’t be in a recession because the price of gold has trounced cash. 

In the last 10 U.S. trading sessions, six all-time highs have been registered in the gold price. And gold isn’t the only precious metal receiving a bid. Seven all-time highs have been registered in silver, six all-time highs in palladium, and three in platinum. As an aside, there have also been five new all-time highs in the S&P500 and one in Bitcoin. All have been on significant volume.

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by Roger Montgomery Posted in Investing Education, Market commentary.

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While bubble definitions abound, most fall into two camps: those that measure overvaluation and those that observe the behaviours and conditions that typically give rise to it.

The most straightforward definition of a bubble is asset prices climbing far above some measure of value, such as earnings, dividends, gross-value-added (GVA) or discounted cash flows. Robert Shiller’s famous CAPE ratio, which compares stock prices to long-term average earnings, and John Hussman’s market-cap-to-GVA, were designed to flag these distortions. Continue…

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Global markets, Insightful Insights, Investing Education, Market commentary.

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Anecdotal evidence. Dismissed as mostly irrelevant, anecdotal evidence becomes useful often only in hindsight. Until then, it’s a novelty, statistically unsound, unreliable, lacking objectivity and unverifiable.

But boy, it’s fun to inquire.

That was then

In the 1920s, the stock market was ‘roaring’, enjoying widespread optimism and even euphoria amid new innovations. On October 15, 1929, after the market had experienced a nine-year rise, the first celebrity Yale economist, Irving Fisher, gave a speech in New York City. Continue…

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Global markets, Market commentary.

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Wall Street’s S&P 500 dropped more than one per cent last week, and the tech-heavy Nasdaq fell three per cent. It’s really nothing in the scheme of things. That’s because the Nasdaq 100 is up more than 130 per cent in three years, and the S&P 500 is more than eighty-five per cent higher since October 2022. Nevertheless, last week’s turn-down was the worst week for the Nasdaq in seven months. What the index price declines perhaps don’t reflect, however, is a much sharper shift in the market’s risk appetite. Continue…

by Roger Montgomery Posted in Market commentary.

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