EVERY Wall Street era has its buzzwords.
The aughts had its “unicorns.” Y2K wanted to “monetize eyeballs.” The 1990’s had “web surfing” and the turning of nouns like “google” and “email” into verbs. The ‘80’s had “greed is good.” And even going back as far as the 1950’s and ‘60’s, the Street had its “nifty-fifty” and the “go-go” years.
Today we have something very different.
WE have for the first time in the evolution of Wall Street language the turning of verbs into nouns, and with it a kind of tech speak that excludes all but the most initiated from the land of the tech bro’s.
This language tsunami word salad that gives us phrases like “solving the velocity rail” for the simple concept of speeding something up, or “agentic preference elicitation” for what we “normies” would call choice, is crowned though by the use of a single word: “compute.”
As in, data centers are endlessly hungry for more “compute...”
Or the latest large language models (LLM’s) require massive amounts of “compute...”
Or in the mauling of both grammar and tense in the graphic at the top of our Letter here, from Oracle, one of the largest providers of “compute,” a seminal sentence in the “new” language, “Create an Compute instance.”
I SUPPOSE it all began with the Wall Street trope that I highlighted a couple of Letters back that claimed, “It’s Nvidia’s world and we’re all just living in it.”
Living in it indeed. And forced to comprehend a bastardized form of English being created by artificial intelligence (sic) and the tech bro culture raised on memes, misspelling, and lack of any and all punctuation, which encourages an endless hyped up spewing of words as if fired from machine guns of illiteracy.
What else can one expect from an executive in charge of “growth nodes” who comes up with sentences (thoughts…?) like this: “…when it comes to the build we’re looking and the spend necessary, the ask is for a solve that adds compute on a scale that never underestimates iterative demand.”
Say what…?
That’s a sentence with five instances of verbs turned into nouns: build, spend, ask, solve, and of course the big one… compute…
I guess this earns the “executive” a coveted spot at the ping pong table used for “hydration” in the company commissary…
I BRING all this up because like all instances of hype and mania on Wall Street, there is always a language spoken by the insiders and true believers that gives entrée to both media appearance and a place at the VC tables, which in the riffing 2020’s now assigns values calculated in trillions of ever depreciating dollars to companies fresh out of the starting gate which in many cases have yet to produce revenues even in the same ballpark as the ever ramping expenses of their “builds.”
Also at issue besides the matter of the fledgling companies is the outlay of capital by companies that actually have the cash to invest in the new AI revolution, some being members of the so called Magnificent Seven, which haven’t looked so magnificent in 2026, and in fact have led the downward pull in markets due to the sudden reversal in sentiment over how much they’re spending on all the monstrously large data centers that power AI.
Although I believe ttat these outlays of cash will eventually pay off for these tech behemoths when AI productivity does eventually transform much of the world’s economics, the issue for markets is, as always, the immediate present which, as Benjamin Graham put it, is more of a voting machine in the short term than a weighing machine.
SO, here in 2026, also aggravated by the popularity of the new so called “prediction markets,” which literally take the voting machine concept down to the minute in real time, and in sync with, shall we say, the “exaggerations” of our political “leader in chief,” we have reality starting to catch up with the (truly…) artificial intelligence of hype, causing the inevitable correction in both stocks and bonds, which has now leaked out from the world of Nvidia that we were “all just living in” to the broader indexes and individual stocks, some of which possess genuine value.
LASTLY, we would not be complete without some discussion of the world of crypto, which is once again experiencing what it has many times along the road to the huge profits many have already attained, particularly with Bitcoin, which has now attained mainstream adoption to the extent that it is even covered on television daily by the “financial news.”
There are both upsides and downsides to this new status. On the upside, being available to investors in their regular brokerage accounts via Exchange Traded Funds (ETF’s) allows for simple investment just as with any stock in a portfolio.
On the downside, this mainstream status has allowed Wall Street to lump crypto into what it calls its “macro” research and strategy, and this has allowed for sometimes absurd connections to economic “news” and “releases” that have in reality little or no actual connection to the world of crypto. The idea, for example, that Bitcoin cares even 1/60,000th of a coin about last month’s “unemployment numbers,” which will get “revised” three times anyway by the dismal scientists, stretches imagination not just to the moon, but perhaps to Mars and back…
NEVERTHELESS, the increased participation by the public has dictated to “the news” that it must “cover” and curve fit its “stories” to crypto prices just as it does with stocks, bonds, and fiat currencies.
Those currencies, by the way, continue to lose value at a truly alarming pace relative to anything, and this will ultimately add to Bitcoin rising to still higher heights that are once again being called “crazy,” just as has been the case for more than 15 years during which it has risen from 100 to 120,000 as recently as last Fall before the current correction began.
The corrections in crypto, as with regular stocks, have always been buying opportunities as long as risk is monitored, and as I have written about many times, even a small commitment in an overall portfolio has periodically produced outsized gains while actually not increasing volatility in a portfolio that is otherwise diversified.
SO as the current correction in just about everything plays out with Trumpian chaos as its background, we need to keep in mind that, unpleasant though it may be, wars are often a positive for stocks. It isn’t just that there is profit to be had from all that goes into war, but there is also the recurring cycle of sentiment that sinks quickly at the start of conflict, but then rises even more quickly with resolution.
In short, keep the faith. This too shall pass.
Richard Lees
President, Richard Lees Capital Management
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Richard Lees and clients of Richard Lees Capital Management may be long positions mentioned in this article. Clients invested in any of RLCM's digital portfolios have undergone thorough risk evaluation to deem these investments appropriate for them, as should anyone considering speculative investments.