Wall Street Panic: Howard Marks Warns of AI Bubble as Gold Hits Record High and Under-the-Radar Stocks Explode

Howard Marks’ famous memos have been required reading on Wall Street for decades – so much so that Buffett reportedly gave them to protégés. In reflecting on his career, Marks underscores that market psychology repeats. In a podcast and memo earlier this year he warned that the unbridled enthusiasm for AI – a “thing with no historical base” – is precisely the kind of “thrill of the new thing and fear of missing out” that often ends in a bubble benzinga.com. He emphasizes caution: today’s lofty tech valuations, mixed with geopolitical uncertainty, echo the dot-com era’s excesses. As Marks paraphrases JP Morgan research, today’s rich prices “often precede lackluster returns over the following decade.” Investors, he says, would be wise not to ignore those warning signs benzinga.com.

Vanguard’s Crypto U-Turn: $10T Giant Opens Doors to Bitcoin ETFs

Vanguard’s Crypto U-Turn: $10T Giant Opens Doors to Bitcoin ETFs

For years Vanguard famously shunned cryptocurrencies. Its founder, John Bogle, viewed Bitcoin as “speculative” and not fitting Vanguard’s long-term, value-focused philosophy cryptoslate.com coinlaw.io. Even after the first US spot Bitcoin ETFs launched in Jan 2024, Vanguard refused to list them on its brokerage platform coinlaw.io cryptoslate.com. By early 2024 it had removed even Bitcoin futures products from its offerings. In short, Vanguard had been a crypto outlier among big asset managers cryptoslate.com cryptoinamerica.com.