In early November, some of the biggest names in technology experienced sharp volatility, with the Nasdaq posting its steepest weekly drop since April. The correction was short-lived, and the warning headlines faded the following week.
But in my view, investors should not simply move on. There’s a lesson from the volatility that I think will help investors navigate the months and quarters ahead.
The lesson is this: when one sector dominates returns for as long and as strongly as technology has, investors should expect turbulence, even if the earnings and free cash flow remain positive.
I’m referring, of course, to the AI-related trade. The biggest names in technology have been the market’s clear leaders this year, but the rally has also produced the kind of concentrated leadership that tends to invite corrections. In many cases, the issue is not that the companies’ business models will eventually collapse. It’s that valuations eventually stretch faster than earnings can keep up. When enthusiasm clusters in a single theme, price moves can disconnect from fundamentals, and short-term volatility becomes inevitable.
In early November, some key industry executives made comments about intensifying competition and soaring capital costs, which may have incited some profit-taking after an extraordinary run. It leaves the door open for even the slightest disappointment to trigger an outsized drawdown.
We’ve seen this pattern before.
The late 1990s’ “Nifty Fifty,” the post-financial-crisis tech boom, and the pandemic-era rally all followed a similar script: rapid outperformance, stretched valuations, then a period of cooling or rotation. Importantly, those pauses did not signal the end of innovation or waning long-term opportunities. In my view, they simply reflected the markets’ way of redistributing excess. Corrections often unfold not through broad crashes, but through leadership shifts from one sector to another. This is how I’m increasingly viewing Tech dominance today.1
So, rather than viewing recent weakness as a warning to flee stocks, investors might see it as a reminder of why diversification is the real opportunity, and the hedge at hand. Concentration risk can quietly build up in bull markets, especially when a single narrative (AI) captures both headlines and capital flows. A diversified portfolio, spanning multiple sectors, market caps, and geographies, helps cushion against those inevitable air pockets.
History shows that investors who stayed balanced through tech-driven selloffs fared far better over time than those who chased performance or tried to time their exits.
I would also argue that it is worth acknowledging that parts of today’s AI boom carry a whiff of excess. The technology itself is transformative, but the financial structures supporting it are becoming increasingly creative, and in my view, potentially risky. Building out data centers, chips, and infrastructure powering AI requires extraordinary amounts of capital, and Wall Street has responded with equally extraordinary financing.
I’m going to mention specific companies below, but I want to be clear to readers that I do not make specific security recommendations in columns. My mention of companies here is only to highlight the aforementioned financing structures that I believe investors should be watching.
All the deals involve data centers. Meta’s Hyperion project in Louisiana and OpenAI’s Stargate data centers in Texas and Wisconsin both blend elements of private equity, project finance, and long-dated corporate debt. Some arrangements even promise equity-like returns on what are effectively fixed-income risks, with the companies selling equity in a data center and guaranteeing a payout if they want to exit a lease. This sort of financial ‘innovation’ evokes memories of past cycles when easy money and optimism blurred investors’ perception of risk.
I am not forecasting that the AI bubble is about to burst. But I do want investors to remember how much future growth is already being priced in and how leveraged some of those expectations have become. Even within tech, capital intensity is rising, competition is intensifying, and returns on incremental investment are likely to normalize. Markets will adjust accordingly, and those adjustments can feel abrupt after long periods of one-way momentum.
Bottom Line for Investors
Given what I’ve argued above, last week’s volatility should probably be viewed as healthy. It reminded investors that market leadership never lasts forever and that portfolio balance is the best safeguard against hype cycles. Diversification does not eliminate risk, but it does reduce the impact of any one theme’s unwinding, whether it’s AI today or some new innovation tomorrow.
1 Wall Street Journal. November 11, 2025. https://advisor.zacksim.com/e/376582/reet-896e0023-mod-hp-lead-pos1/5tt438/1380628309/h/kUo8x2x4lsl3zazuK6cQyXnggPjz2KiA42GT1XWYTIs
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