投资者权衡AI交易与日本初创生态

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Welcome to the Daybreak Asia podcast. I'm Doug Krizner. Today, the US equity markets love affair with tech seemed to cool again. We had the Philadelphia Semiconductor Index down by more than 6%, but on the other hand, economically sensitive stocks outperformed, especially the financials. The KBW Bank Index was up today by 1.8%. To be fair, volume was on the light side as we approach Friday's Independence Holiday. For a closer look at market action, I'm joined by Jeff Bookbinder.

He is the chief equity strategist at LPL Financial. Jeff, thank you for being here. In terms of the tech trade, how are you evaluating the current landscape right now?

Yeah, well, we're still constructive on tech, but did pair back our recommended exposure a little bit in early June. Uh, we spend a lot of time looking at positioning and sentiment. And certainly, the tech trade got a little bit overheated on a short-term basis in early June. So, we paired back our overweight to a neutral and are waiting for a more attractive opportunity. There is no doubt that the earning strength uh, is going to power this sector higher in the second half and into 2027 in our minds.

But, we're going to have more ups and downs as the market debates the profitability of the AI infrastructure buildout. We're going to get more scrutiny during this upcoming earning season. If these companies can't deliver the kind of returns uh, that investors want, we think we're in for a little bit more volatility. So, so that's something to watch, but the growth there is is really remarkable.

So, as we know, the ECB's annual forum in central Portugal wrapped up on Wednesday and there was one question that was particularly dominant. Is AI a boon or a threat to the global economy? Now, economists there laid out a number of reasons to be worried and I want to get your view. Two come to mind. One is rising debt issuance from hyperscalers and another, which may be a little bit more problematic for the market in the near term, is the increasing use of leverage by investors who are betting on AI.

Do those economists have a point and if they do, are you concerned at all by those issues?

Yeah, absolutely. In fact, the next correction in this market could very well be caused by the market pushing back on the hyperscaler investments. Right right now, the earnings are coming through. But if the cash flow gets increasingly strained and these companies have to raise more debt, the scrutiny on the returns on these investments will increase. And that is the formula for more volatility, certainly. So we're watching adoption of AI, we're watching the use cases for corporate America to see if they can drive the margin expansion that analysts want to see.

Certainly, that expansion is being factored into estimates. If companies start to deliver that margin expansion and validate the investment that these hyperscalers are making in AI, then we think the market will hold up just fine. Uh but that is absolutely something to be worried about. And then in terms of leverage, that is certainly something to pay attention to. It is likely to exaggerate volatility. And again, that volatility could come from this push and pull.

The market just doesn't know right now whether this spending is going to pay off. That may not be reconciled until 2027, But for now, we're likely to see uh some ups and downs for tech. And just like we saw here um over the last couple of weeks, probably going to see some rotation into the other areas of the market outside of tech.

So, the market for these leveraged ETFs has blossomed into a $270 billion business. And there is one leveraged ETF in particular that launched in Hong Kong. This is the C Sop SK Hynix leveraged ETF. It launched 9 months ago. It's now a $13 billion fund, the biggest of its kind anywhere. And this is the type of situation that I'm trying to tease out here where you could get some price action that moves against a name like SK Hynix that could create kind of a cascading effect when it comes to these ETFs.

And I'm trying to get a sense of what the risk is for the market in that type of situation.

Sure, that is going to exaggerate the moves in both directions. And so, what might be you know, a 10% pullback could end up being 15 or 20 once this cycle starts to show signs of turning south. We don't know when that will be, of course, but when we get it, the areas that have been strongest are probably going to see the biggest declines. And if you've got leverage in those areas, potentially the memory makers, that's where some of the biggest moves have been.

That's where you could see the biggest declines, but it's just really hard to say. The market is certainly pretty confident here that there'll be a shortage of memory through 2027. Market looks ahead. That means we certainly could see uh some of that leverage really come back to hurt investors and traders uh over the next 6 months.

And that shortage of memory, I think we can agree, is going to contribute to rising inflation. In the last week, we had both Apple and Microsoft talking about the fact that they have been forced to raise prices on some of their products in order to protect margin. So, I know we've been looking at what's been happening in terms of war with Iran as a primary driver of inflationary pressures as it relates to the energy complex, but I think now the market's really dealing with this fact that when you have a shortage, a global shortage of memory, this is producing inflationary pressure in and of itself.

100%. As you look to earning season starting here in just a couple of weeks, uh tech's going to have a little bit of a challenge there, right? We're still going to get probably 50-60% earnings growth out of the uh the AI names and the tech sector in particular. But, that doesn't mean that companies are going to be confident guiding to margin expansion because of the memory price issue uh alongside the other sticky inflation.

So, yes, that is absolutely a risk here and why we think it makes sense for investors to just factor in a little bit less uh of a rally here in the second half. So, maybe we'll get low to mid single-digit returns on top of where we are right now, but we don't think we're going to do quite as well in the second half as we did in the first, and that sticky inflation is one reason why.

Let's talk a little bit about the IPO market. Last week, there were reports that OpenAI was going to shelve its IPO and maybe push it off into the next year just because of what's been happening in the overall market. And today, we had indications that the Franco-German tank maker, KNDS, postponed its IPO. There's been a little bit of volatility in the market for European defense contractors. Give me your sense as what we're seeing play out in terms of some of these IPOs and the degree to which companies may be withholding uh initial public offerings right now just because of the volatility that's been happening in markets or the level of uncertainty that's there.

Well, we just have a lot of issuance coming all at one time. I mean, this this will be the biggest year ever almost certainly in terms of dollar issuance for IPOs. Uh of course, SpaceX was first and Anthropic and OpenAI coming likely uh either the second half or or uh potentially early 2027. Spreading that out is probably a good thing just so the market can digest it a little bit more easily. Uh but the numbers aren't going to be dramatically higher than what the market had to deal with in 2021.

And of course, the bear market in 2022 was really more about interest rates and inflation than IPO issuance. So, it it's um it's certainly something that could slow the market down just a bit because investors of course have to raise those funds uh if they want to participate in those deals, but at the same time we want to see a market that's conducive to uh bringing those de

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