AI is Destroying the Market?

So recently, it's not just software as a service stocks going down, but everything related to software is going down. Even financial stocks, cyber security stocks, payment technology stocks, and even private credit is going down. So what's going on? Is the world as we know it coming to an end? Or is this another great investment opportunity? Let me break it down. Service Now, Salesforce, Palo Alto, Crowd Strike, Visa, Mastercard, S&P Global. These are some of the highest quality businesses in the world that have been compounding machines for decades. But recently, this year, they've been collapsing double digits. Why? Because there's now a widespread panic that Agentic AI could put all these great companies out of business. and change the world as we know it forever. So, is this fact or is this fantasy? Well, let's find out what this is all about. Now, all this started when Anthropic released Claude Co-work. In case you don't know, Antropic is the major competitor of OpenAI. Now, who owns Anthropic? Well, their major shareholders are actually Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. That's right. Microsoft is two timing. They own both Open AI and Anthropic. And Anthropic has a very powerful large language model called Claude, which I use by the way. I think they are very good for financial stuff, right? So, a couple of weeks ago, they launched Claude Cowwork, which is an agentic AI tool that allows the AI to read and write to your files in your computer. It autonomously breaks down complex work into smaller tasks and can generate Excel, spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations, and formatted documents autonomously. In fact, I'm using it a lot uh in my own work. But what spooked investors is that it also shipped pre-built plugins spanning HR, design, engineering, operations, and financial analysis. In other words, it's like an agent that can do all these things for you. For example, in the context of HR, Claude Co-work can autonomously uh screen resumeums. It can draft onboarding documents. It can organize employee records for financial analysis. It can pull data from all kinds of sources from fact set from S&P Global, from Bloomberg. It can synthesize reports and build Excel models in seconds. In terms of operations, co-work can organize files. They can generate status reports. They can process documents again in in minutes. Now, you saw how fast I was able to generate that Excel table from a clot. what would normally take many hours took less than 5 minutes. So the market is kind of like freaking out saying that if now people can generate so much productivity they can do so many things autonomously then they don't need all these software companies anymore. They don't need Salesforce. They don't need Service Now. They don't need Adobe. They don't need into it because we can do everything ourselves within minutes uh for like $50 a month or even less. Now to me that sounds really far-fetched. It sounds ridiculous. It's like saying that someone invented a microwave oven so I'm never going to a restaurant anymore. That all restaurants will be destroyed. No more restaurants in the world. It sounds ridiculous, right? But then it spread not just from software companies per se, but it spread to financial data companies where people are now saying that with Claude it can pull all this information, it can generate all this financial analysis. Why do I need Bloomberg? S&P Global? Why do I need Moody's? Why do I need Fax? And so all these companies are going down double digits as well. And then private credit companies, BDC's that lend money to these software companies, they're now saying that they're not going to get their money back, right? So all these private credit companies, even the good ones, the high quality ones like Apollo and Blue Owl and Aries, they all collapsing as well. And then recently this spread to cyber security companies. Why? Again, it's all Claude's fault because recently Claude released this thing called Claude Code Security that's able to scan databases, code databases and find bugs in the system and patch those bugs automatically. So now people are saying, "Oh, with that I can secure my own database. company with clawed security. Why do I need to pay money for Palo Alto or Crowd Strike or Forinet? They all going to die. All these companies are all dropping like they're worth nothing. And again, that sounds ridiculous. That's like saying that someone invented a home alarm system. So guess what? We don't need the police force anymore. Defund the police. Again, that sounds ridiculous because again, claw code security. Yes

it can scan for bugs in a database, but it can't protect your company in live environments the way that Crowd Strike or Palo Alto can where it can detect hackers uh in your computer system where it can stop ransomware in real time. And then to add to the fear, Citrini Research, they published this article that went viral. And the summary of the article is that we're all going to die, right? So what it's saying is that in the next two years AI agents are going to cause a massive displacement of white collar workers. Millions of people will lose their jobs. The unemployment rate will go to more than 10%. And with people having no jobs, they can't spend money. Consumption drops and so the economy will go into a severe depression and companies will not be able to make much money as well because they can't sell to anyone because no one's buying. And so they're going to lay off even more people. They're going to use even more AI to automate and it's going to be a vicious cycle that leads to the end of the economy as we know it, right? And the other thing that they said is that in a few years we are going to use AI agents to do all our buying and all our buying online autonomously. So imagine you and I we no longer go shopping. We no longer buy things online. We t our agents that will go out there. It will book hotels, book restaurants, it will go online shopping. It will pay our insurance autonomously without us intervening and it will always find the cheapest price. So companies will their margins will all collapse and these agents because they want to have the best deal, they will route all our payments through stable coins and bypass the traditional Visa Mastercard rails network. And in fact, people took it seriously. And that's why Visa, Mastercard, American Express crashed because of this article. So, is this fantasy or reality? I think it's all fantasy. For example, my wife loves the process of shopping. Do you think she's going to get an agent to go and buy the cheapest clothes for her? No way. Right? But all kidding aside, Visa and Mastercard, they don't just move money. I mean, there are many ways to move money, right? But the reason banks and merchants they use Visa and Mastercard is because of the trust factor 60 years of trust that's built into their payment technology that creates this compliance infrastructure. They are able to detect fraud in payments. There's dispute resolution and all these things that stable coins they don't provide. Remember there's always a big gap between narrative and actual real world deployment results. In fact, there was a study a rigorous randomized control trial by METR, the model evaluation and threat research, which is a nonprofit research institute based in Berkeley. They found that when 16 experienced open-source developers use used AI tools, they actually took 19% longer to complete the coding task. Why? Because yes, AI accelerates the code generation. AI can write code very fast. It can create Excel templates very fast like what I showed you. But code review capacity remains flat which means humans must still review the code. They results of the output and that creates a review bottleneck where cues will grow and deployment delays increase and productivity gains that were there initially actually evaporate. In fact, Google's own report found that every 25% increase in AI adoption showed a 1. 5% dip in delivery speed and a 7. 2% drop in system stability. So, you still need humans to review the data. And I showed you earlier how fast it was to create that Excel spreadsheet, but you can bet there'll be hallucinations. There'll be inaccuracies. I still have to manually review it, my team to review it, right? And if you don't know, a lot of companies are actually quietly rehiring the workers they fired because of the AI excuse. For example, Clarona replaced 700 employees with AI, but their quality of work declined. Customers complained and they had to rehire back the humans. IBM laid off 8,000 workers to implement autom automation, especially in their HR division, using an AI robot instead. But the bot was unable to perform task requiring empathy and subjectivity and eventually they rehired the HR workers back. Textport and Forester predicted that half of AI attributed layoffs will be quietly rehired finding that 55% of companies that executed AIdriven layoffs now regret it. And I actually asked my own staff this question. So I own several companies. the main companies

Adam Cool Learning Technologies Group, we've got Pyana Profits, we've got Activate Education, we've got growth catalyst. So I am a co-owner of all these companies and we've been doing this for over 20 years and I recently asked my group CEO and my managing director of Pirana Profits, I say, "Hey, we are using AI all the time. We use agentic AI. We use generative AI in our companies. do we foresee reducing our staff headcount over the next three to five years and they said Adam no in fact business is doing so well we're growing so much that we need to hire a lot more people right so I don't buy that narrative that AI will replace many workers because if the business does well that you still need workers because AI is there to complement and to augment our work so it's like the old saying AI to me AI will not replace may not replace you but someone who knows AI will replace you in your job okay but you can't dispute the fact that job growth has been anemic especially in the US so for example they just did the jobs revision and they found that the total new jobs last year in 2025 after revision was only 181,000 jobs created That's very low. Compared to 2024, there were 1. 4 million jobs created. So last year the job creation was the weakest job growth since co. Well, a spark of good news is that the latest report showed that in January this year 2026 uh job growth has jumped again 130,000. So what are the real culprits for the weak job growth? It is not actually AI. So what has been found is that companies that have been laying off workers and not hiring workers, they've used AI as an excuse, but it's not AI, at least not yet. But the three real reasons for weak job growth is trade policy uncertainty because of tariffs. Number two, immigration collapse, shrinking the labor supply in the US, and the Deutsch and federal government cuts. These are the three real reasons. There are no signs of largecale job displacement due to AI. Well, at least not yet or not for the foreseeable future. Although again, jobs with more AI exposure has seen slower job growth. So in a nutshell what I'm saying is that this panic selling of great companies like Microsoft, like Salesforce, like Service Now, like Palo Alto, like S&P Global. It's the same as past sell-offs. It is irrational. It doesn't really make sense, which is good for investors because like Charlie Manga said, the reason we are so rich is because people are so often wrong. The reason I've been able to make so much money over the years is because of the shortsightedness and the stupidity of the market. Now, not too long ago, if you remember, actually it was quite long ago. It's been seven years. COVID was seven years ago. My god, how time flies. If you recall, seven years ago, uh when COVID struck, the IMF chief said that the pandemic will unleash the worst recession since the Great Depression. And what did people do? a panic from the narrative. Oh my god, we're going to die. Sell, right? They dump all their stock and they thought the world as we knew it was going to come to an end. And if you recall, which were the stocks that were doing well? Zoom, right? Because they said, "Hey, no one's going to the office anymore. We're all going to to meet via Zoom and everyone's going to stay at home and they're going to exercise using Pelatin um the exercise equipment. " That was the narrative. But what has happened today? Oh, by the way, they said that commercial real estate will collapse. Banks will collapse, right? What happened? No, there was no depression. Banks have done very well. Real estate has recovered, especially REITs have recovered significantly. And Zoom and Pelatin have collapsed. So, the same thing is happening right now. It's the same fear, the same narrative. So, have I been buying recently? Yeah, you bet. Almost every single day, I've been buying stocks of great companies in the market. Now, as always, I can't always predict the exact bottom of a correction or of a pullback. And so, I buy slowly in trenches. And this is not a recommendation or advice for you to buy because we have got different financial objectives. We've got different time horizons. I've got a long-term time horizon. Even if it drops more in the short term, it doesn't bother me when I buy great companies because I know over time these companies will rebound back to new highs

and continue compounding for decades to come. So, what are some of the companies I've added? Well, obviously the no-brainer is Microsoft. Duh. Okay. Now, there have been fears that uh Open AI that owns Chat GPT, they could be in trouble, right? They're trying to get an IPO to raise funds, but they're burning so much cash. So, is there a possibility that Open AI could go bust? Well, I think yes. In fact, I won't be surprised if Open AI doesn't really work out. But I don't think they're going to go bust. What's going to happen is they're probably going to be taken over by Microsoft where Microsoft will absorb all their intellectual property and so forth. And yes, Microsoft will take a hit. They will take a loss. And will there could there be a short-term drop in the share price if that happens? Yeah, possibly. But in the long run, they will benefit from it. And ultimately, if Anthropic, for example, you know, and Gemini kills open AI, which I think is possible, I don't really care. Why? Because I own Google that owns Gemini. I own Amazon. also owns Anthropic. So in other words, whoever wins, I win. Okay. But I think the company that could be the most affected if Open AI goes down is Oracle. Uh because they've got very high debt and a lot of exposure uh to OpenAI. Will Nvidia be hit? Yeah. But it won't be hit that hard, right? They may take a bit of a write off. Uh their investments are a few billion. Nothing to them, right? they can always sell the capacity elsewhere. But anyway, so that's another reason why Microsoft has been going down the fears that OpenAI are in trouble, which I don't dispute. I think they're in trouble because personally for me, I don't use Chat GPT anymore. No, I use Claw. I use Gemini. All right, because they are more powerful. So anyway, all right. But I I've been buying Microsoft because I think at this price it's a really good deal. But again, could it go even lower? Sure, it is possible. So I buy in trenches. I buy slowly and I've got a lot more that I could buy in the later part of the year. So, currently Microsoft's intrinsic value is $557, is selling at $400 and is currently uh under undervalued. And you can see that it's a great business, right? Extremely predictable, extremely profitable. You know, it's got one of the strongest modes in the world and financial strengths, right? I've also been buying Palo Alto which of course is the company that has got the strongest mode and leadership in the cyber security industry. So I asked myself this question over the long run is cyber security a growth industry? Does every company in the world big and small needs cyber security to prevent against hacking and ransomware? The answer is yes. Right? So I definitely want to have a big position in cyber security companies and I want to buy the strongest ones. What are the strongest ones? Palo Alto is one of them. Of course, Crowd Strike. You know, I would love to buy Crowdstrike because it's dropped quite a bit. But I haven't guessed why because it is still overvalued, right? Oh, it went slightly undervalued right now. Hey, sorry. This is Nvidia. What am I talking about? Crowd Strike. My bad. Oh, Nvidia just announced great results and uh the stock I think went up slightly right [snorts] now. Look at Crowdstrike. I love Crowd Strike. Great company. I do own shares in it. I want to buy more and it's dropped uh it's dropped quite a bit because of this narrative but not really enough because again the intrinsic value is 332 and right now it's the share price is still above the intrinsic value. Well, in a way, there's nothing to wrong to buy now because you're paying fair price. Uh, but you know, for me, I'm very conservative. I like to buy it if I get a bigger discount. So, I've been selling cash secured puts on Crowd Strike and hoping that Crowd Strike could go lower and then I get assigned the shares because I like this company. But currently, it's not that cheap even though it's dropped quite a bit. What are other companies have dropped a lot? Um, Amazon has dropped but that has rebounded a bit. Meta has dropped a lot. That's really undervalued as well. But more connected to this selloff, obviously it's a software companies like Service Now, which I've covered in my previous video. This is a great company. All right. And I think that ultimately they're going to be one of the biggest beneficiaries uh of AI. And look at it. It's now selling at freaking half price, right? It's 206 valuation. It's selling $104. It's got one of the strongest fundamentals out there. Again, this is not a recommendation for you to buy. This is sharing about my thought process of how I analyze businesses and my own investments, which again, I'm investing in these over the long run. It's not a short-term trade.

So, short-term, it could still go lower. That's why I dollar cost average. I hope this video has been useful to clarify and to bring some sanity to you in a time when it may not make sense. It's like, you know, all these are great companies. Why are they dropping? Doesn't make sense. Well, I hope that now you understand. So, stay safe and stay rational and may the markets be with you. If you want to catch my latest videos, click on the subscribe button right now. Click on the bell so you get instant notifications once I upload my latest video. If you want to check out my online courses, go on to piranhaprofits. com where you're going to learn how to invest and how to trade the financial markets and create an income from all around the world. If you want to join my live Wealth Academy program, go on to wealthacademy global. com and find out more about how you can learn investing and trading live online. This is Adam Coup and may the markets be with